The warehouse basement was saturated with the undead, a pocket of cancerous heresy growing straight out of the Empire’s vital heart. W’soran’s own necromancers, culled from the most skilled of Mannfred’s ranks, sequestered themselves in a corner after paying token homage to Vlad Von Carstein, the legend himself, since they had been loaned to him to aid in his claim. W’soran’s colleagues each pursued his own agenda, and the necromancer paid them little heed. Increasingly his mind felt detached from this world and its impending doom. His exiled humanity drifted toward the horizon of his thoughts.
In its place he had mentally allocated his waking moments to the accomplishing of tasks and the weavings of arcane webs. Just as one plan, laid down so long ago with a trivial girl’s finger in a nameless alley, had come to fruition with none other than Vlad Von Carstein setting foot in the Empire’s Capitol, so did many more spiral and knit together in his mind from the disparate resources at his immense disposal. Tomes, rituals, ancient beings of unimaginable power, entire planes of existence, who could know where his thoughts lay at any moment.
From the basement window he could only watch the lengthening shadows of the denizens of Altdorf’s lower legs as they grew fewer and fewer with the descending night. A messenger would return soon with the reply of The Knives. Business as usual. Even with the demonic horde of Nurgle a mere few days from their walls, the apocalypse meant nothing to these people. They would drink their swill, laugh at their inanity, work and toil for the scraps which would carry them to their next dawn. To them, to these people, existence was a plodding, muddy crawl through a soupy fog from which glimpses of eternity were as rare as hope. They were less than pawns, barely faces in a crowd, and their stories were as uninspiring and insipid as their lives. Their incessantly beating hearts were a reminder to W’soran of the futility of this world.
They would meet soon with the Knives and W’soran planed to lay out precisely what he thought of these people and their chances. He would do his best to mask his utter contempt for Vlad’s pyrrhic quest for a meaningless throne atop rubble. Something in this city could be worth keeping. Something in the College. He could only leave it to Fate to take him to it, and perhaps that is what grated upon him most of all. Whatever it was, it had better be good.