A standalone Age of Sigmar short story, Gav Thorpe’s Blood Gold features the Zharrthagi fyreslayers, an unusual clan who can trace their lineage back to before the Age of Chaos. With their mountain lodge besieged by Chaos worshippers, the Zarrthagi march out to confront their enemies. At the behest of one of his warriors, runefather Ungrimmsson Drakkazak looks back to the clan’s earliest days as he tells the tale of the Zarrthagi curse, relating the actions of the clan’s original runefather and the events that led to where and what they are now.
Fyreslayers are a mercenary bunch, but up until now their axes-for-hire nature perhaps hasn’t been fully explored. Gav has a well-established history of writing about Warhammer dwarfs, and he taps into that innate understanding of dwarf/duardin nature to tell a tale that could only have been told in the Age of Sigmar. It’s less visceral and immediate than many Black Library stories, largely because of its story-within-a-story structure, but it offers an interesting examination of what drives the fyreslayers as well as – basically – just being a really cool idea. If you’re interested in Age of Sigmar characters who don’t quite fit the binary good/bad scale, this is worth investigating.
This was released as part of the 2018 Black Library Advent Calendar – click here to see the main page for the Advent Calendar, with links to all of the reviews.
Check out the main Age of Sigmar reviews page on Track of Words.
