The 100 Year War For Cripple Peak! Nagash And The Skaven Go To War! Warhammer Fantasy Lore

nagashizar the greatest fortress to ever blight the face of the warhammer world and all built by a single man though man might not be an entirely fitting term for the shambling corpse-like creature that stumbled onto the shores of the sour sea over a thousand six hundred years before the rise of sigma man was a sorry site indeed and if any of the local tribes people who eked out a humble living amongst the mountain foothills surrounding the sour sea had witnessed his arrival they would have seen nothing more than a man on the brink of death or a man that looked like he'd already crossed that particular threshold already they would have sat by and waited for him to finally expire before checking his corpse for any valuables he might have happened to carry with him unfortunately there were none there to witness his arrival if there had been perhaps they had stopped him from sipping from the poisonous waters of the sour sea half out of mercy a half out of a sense of impatience to see him draw his last breath but free from such intervention the man who had come a long way indeed dragged himself to the shore meet her by excruciating meter until he could dip his head into the waters and drink deep the lethality of the waters of the sour sea had been common knowledge for a thousand years before this again and the man currently drinking would probably have known this as well as in his people's mythology the nearby tall mountain called [ __ ] peak had been shattered by an evil gin a spirit that had crushed the mountain with its fists and then buried deep beneath the ground and subsequently been entombed by the mountain collapsing on top of him the jinn's corpse was even now trapped within the mountain and rotting away its blood pus and bile flowing out in underground streams into the sour sea poisoning killing or otherwise changing the local wildlife but to a man dying of thirst any water no matter how polluted remains water and as i'm sure many of you have already guessed this was no average wanderer his home was far far to the south in the lands of nehekhara and more specifically the enormous and prosperous city of kemri this had once been the jewel in setra's clown the capital of his vast empire of nehekara and the undisputed ruler of the many city-states that lay within the desert until it had been taken over by the man now drinking greedly from the waters of the sour sea a man that had been driven away from the hekara and from camry by his enemies who took a very dim view of his experimentation with the limits between life and death the priest king of kimray nagash had fallen a long long way his allies his lieutenants and his generals had all been hunted down ritualistically decapitated and burned so as to prevent them from rising ever again because despite his current destitution nagash had succeeded in his experimentation at the very least partially his elixir of life had apparently allowed him to conquer death but walking now across endless salt plains desert landscapes and across mountain peaks nagash began to feel once again things he had almost forgotten hunger cold and thirst amongst the more unwelcome of these feelings nagash himself would later write in his nine books of nagash of these days and of his eventual death somewhere on his journey but rather than passing on into the abyss nagash's spirit somehow remained he had of course in life been a tremendously powerful wielder of magic and this was perhaps what allowed him to re-animate his own corpse he forced his own deadened flesh to move and continued to march ever onward as he was somehow drawn further and further up into the mountains and eventually to the sour sea and to nagashi's great fortune the ancient prophecies about the jinn smashing apart the mountain contained a grain of truth granted it was no celestial spirit that had smashed apart the mountain and given it its name of [ __ ] peak but it was something from the high heavens an enormous meteorite and struck the mountain and buried itself deep within its core a warp stone meteor that was the reason the animals were either dying or changing into horrific forms until eventually it became too much for them and they would pass away as well it was a reason why any human who drank from the water would die or grow deathly ill but to nagash on quite the contrary the waters proved innovating and energizing he had been struggling ever since he had reanimated his body to keep the perfect balance if he poured too much magic into his form he felt his soul slip away into the ether not enough and his corpse would collapse to the ground once more leaving him slowly dissipating in the wind but with the warp stone laced water cursing through his veins he had fully inhabited his body once again and considering the size of the sour sea he wasn't going to be running out anytime soon nagash had found his second lease on life but he still didn't know why clearly there was something special with the waters of the sour sea that much was obvious and he also records the ancient legends suggesting that whatever made the water so special must be inside of [ __ ] peak so he started exploring making sure to stay close to the water and far away from the settlements of humans nearby they may have been but simple brutish barbarians but nagash was in no shape to have a fight with even such lowly members of the human species right now he soon began coming across caves and cracks in the mountain surface into which he could delve and explore it took him a very long time but as he now only required the water to sustain himself his de facto immortal body had all the time in the world and the more he drank the more the water seemed to resonate with him he began finding new paths new caves and new entrances he began to understand part of the reason why the water was changing him both in mind and in body his flesh grew tougher harder more resilient his fingernails longer and sharper until delving through the rock itself he came across a vast dark underground sea buried deep beneath the mountain this then was the source of nagashi's miraculous water and submerged presumably somewhere deep beneath it the true source lay so far nagash had only been able to come across tiny slivers or fragments of solidified warp stone enough for him to identify the substance for what it was solidified magic pure warping essence of chaos he had taken to picking out the pieces from the wall from the shallow streams running through the rocks etc and powdering it up lacing the water he drank with extra warp stone or even ingesting and sniffing it directly with each dose his understanding of the mysteries grew more profound he would spend nearly a hundred years inside of the mountain documenting his slow change both to his mind and body until he grew confident that he had fully mastered his spirits grasp on his own flesh and when he was convinced that there was no way his soul could flee anymore he turned his mind towards consolidating his powers for surely if he could control his own spirit within his own body that opened up all kinds of interesting implications but to test out his theories nagash would need bodies a lot of bodies luckily the local human populace had been living in this harsh area for quite some time and they had built up a significant number of dearly departed less fortunately was the fact that land infused as this was with warp zone was not the most relaxing of resting places for those who have passed beyond the veil and so the locals had taken to burying their bodies very deep or weighing them down with heavy stones or entombing them within cans which were then closed and covered with massive boulders heavy duty security for a seminary and had nagash still remain but a mortal man he would have found it extremely difficult if not downright impossible to break in but after a century or so of eating warp stone for breakfast lunch and dinner the security measures proved woefully inadequate and the local tribes soon began finding the tombs of their venerated ancestors destroyed torn open and massive boulders tossed aside casually laying dozens of feet away you can imagine their terror especially considering the nature of again the local wildlife's addiction to warp stone i imagine the bears in the area must have been fascinating but it turned out that a massive mutated bear that ate bones would have been preferable to reality and tribesmen started spotting a wraith-like figure sneaking into the tombs and carrying out this desecration frightened obviously they called for local magicians shamans religious leaders and tribal heroes to hunt down and destroy this monster that was desecrating their ancestors and many tried but none even so much as annoyed nagash he had been the priest king of khemri and had now grown into a monster of near pure dark magic and now a bunch of tribal shamans and barbarian heroes all with sticks and stones were coming to hunt him down like a parkinson's infected baby duck against godzilla but nagash did not have it all his own way either nagash had been used to resurrecting the freshly dead of kamri and nehekara with ancient rituals preparation and embalming techniques this was something entirely different the arts of the mortuary cult and those priests relied on a great deal of rituals of preparations whilst what nagash was trying to do now was formulate a simple spell not only to reanimate old dusty decaying bones but bind vast hordes of these freshly animated remains to his will he was trying to on a lesser scale replicate the phenomenon of him controlling his own body and it was not easy to begin with he needed to suffuse a skeleton with enormous amounts of his own magic only to see it take a handful of steps before collapsing in a clattering pile of useless bones it would take him countless attempts countless open cairns and countless slain local heroes before he finally managed to reanimate at first a small number of permanent servants with them came the ability to try experimentation on a greater scale he had more corpses brought to him and he carried out larger rituals he experimented on animals remains and slowly but surely grew so expert at his new art that what had once been excruciatingly exhausting became completely effortless imbuing a body with life was now second nature to nagash he did not strain him in the slightest and he could maintain their forms indefinitely finally in possession of the workforce he had been wanting nagash then began reshaping his new home [ __ ] peak would be turned in to an enormous fortress into the glory of nagash naga but the work was not proceeding as swiftly as he would have wanted the local populace had been around for a while and had buried hundreds if not thousands of their kin but nagash's plans were far grander than so he began dispatching raiding parties in part as an experiment of his own control how far away could the skeleton soldiers travel would he lose control over them how would their ability to fight remain how much of their old personality remained was a king a better servant than a farmer etc etc the subjects for his experiments the local tribes were not particularly overjoyed by their new neighbor and many again tried to resist on a larger scale tried to fight back against the armies of the dead but every time they did so nagash would simply resurrect his full soldiers and see them join ranks with the dead of the tribes now nagash wasn't trying to eradicate them he had other things on his mind further experiments figuring out the limits of his power and building his great fortress the raids was merely a way to gather resources to gather fresh corpses and to test various hypotheses this meant that the extermination was proceeding at a very leisurely pace giving some of the locals the opportunity to develop a strategy for survival if they couldn't fight the dead they would try to join them preferably not as dead themselves they wouldn't have a whole lot of choice in that case but rather to appease the monster that now lay deep within [ __ ] peak tribes began sending offerings sacrifices young maidens and boys to the creature and apparently nakash was quite pleased by all of this his ego remained intact then and the tribes who sent him sacrifices were simply ignored by his undead hordes his armies marching straight past them to raid the nearby settlements and their neighbors causing yet further tribes to take up the cause and get the hint rather quickly soon nagash had an empire that reminds us a little bit of current day nehekara in some of the more blessed cities where the dead and the living walk serve and live quote quote side by side and nagash proved to be a relatively beneficent master not because he was trying to be good or anything but because he frankly just didn't care what the tribes did so long as they kept up their sacrifices and offered their dead to him well as far as he was concerned humans then were simply just a renewable source of skeletons it would take a while for them to mature sure but again my gosh had all the time in the world and the tribesmen could be used to bolster his armies as well now isn't that a great benefit they could fight for him as armies of the living and then march for him as armies of the dead when they eventually fell it was all absolutely perfect and nagash was well on his way to amassing an army which he could then use to bring his vengeance to the upstart curse of nehekara those kings and queens and petty lords who had betrayed and destroyed his beautiful kingdom but before nagash could finish his preparations about thousand three hundred years before the start of the imperial calendar a new faction entered the arena an enormous largest ever seen warp stone meteorite buried deep beneath the earth oh you can guess who's about to arrive can't you the beautiful handsome and fluffy-faced skaven race was in a period of great prosperity after a small clan squire mishap that almost wiped out the entire species the skaven had been spreading across the face of the warhammer world for a few hundred years now and their numbers were exploding the weight of their breeding was already bearing down heavily on the sorry remnants of the once incredibly mighty dwarven empire with many a carrack under near constant attack from hordes of skaven the applications of new tunnel fighting tactics and clan scribe weaponry even saw many a dwarf hauled and hall completely overrun and turned into enormous underground skaven warren and yet further fresh breeding pits the skaven war was going well and dozens hundreds of new clans were formed to carry out the quite recently formed council's business abroad skavendam had faced extermination twice already at their own hands and they were set on not repeating the problem with the good old-fashioned application of central bureaucracy but the council as ever was more interested in pursuing its own goals rather than the larger aims of scavengem as a race this meant that the various clans were more or less allowed to expand on their own terms eventually rumors began to reach many of the furthest flung clans of a strange emaciated human who were apparently taken up refuge in a mountain chained part of the south near a strangely glowing water he'd subjugated the nearby humans who told all kinds of weird and scary spooky tales about him but most interestingly was that he apparently drew a great deal of his power from a seemingly limitless source of small green glowing rocks oh now those were interesting rumors and countless clans dispatched spies and infiltrators to ascertain the truth of the matter and reality superseded their wildest dreams as they could soon reveal that a hitherto unmatched quantity of warp stone was lodged deep beneath [ __ ] peak a veritable feeding frenzy ensued as the clans hurried to claim this vast treasure trove warpstone is used as a hard currency in scavenged society it is used to fuel magic and mysterious invention plenty its use is near universal and its value impossible to overstate they figured as well that a few mangy emaciated humans would prove absolutely no challenge to the horde of skavendom if anything the greatest competition would come from other clans trying to beat them to it undoubtedly thousands of skavens died in constant interclan conflict as they all sought the best paths and the best route through the underway towards [ __ ] peak unfortunately nagashi's underlings proved far stiffer resistance than the skaven had anticipated and huge underground wars began to break out on the edges of nagash's territory unaware of the true nature of his opposition the ancient necromancer sent forth new hordes of skeletons zombies and undead monstrosities to defeat these bestial interlopers in return the skaven did what the skaven do and increased their own numbers committed to the fight as tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of skaven flooded down countless passageways of the under empire to flood onto the battlefield in ever increasing numbers ground was gained here and there but entire warrants were eradicated with death magic others were overrun by equally numerous hordes of skeletal warriors months of pointless desperate and inconclusive fighting would wash back and forth back and forth until the rumors began to siphon back to skaven blight through the under empire that the war was not going well at all seeing an opportunity to flex their muscles the council intervened and began organizing the war efforts undoubtedly many of the members of a council back then saw an opportunity to claim a great deal of the riches for themselves or at the very least make sure that their favorite clans got away with a nice big slice of the reward now under unified leadership the clans could also pool their resources and bought up massive amounts of clan scribe war gear weaponry and war machines they intended for one final massive offensive to sweep aside the undead defenders of nagajizar and break into the enormous fortress on the surface from the ground upwards as they had done to crack so many dwarven cracks in the past surely the under could not stand better than the dwarves could but just as nagash was unaware of the true nature of his enemy so were the skaven unaware of nagashi's truth nagash had been experimenting and working with warp stone now for a hundred years it literally fueled him he was more magic now than man and the skaven weapons were fueled by the very substance that had turned him into what he now was as they marched their warp fire throwers towards the front they incinerated hundreds maybe even thousands of nagashi's servants but as soon as the great necromancer was made aware a flick of his wrist saw all the fire be snuffed out and the warp fire throwers reduced to nothing more than cumbersome heavy pieces of scrap many of the wonder weapons that had brought the dwarven holds to their knees were suddenly rendered useless and those who still worked had a very hard time turning back ever increasing hordes in their desperation the skaven increased their numbers yet further never before had the skaven committed such vast resources to a single warfront they began attacking nagashi from the surface as well but nagash had made good on his plans of turning [ __ ] peak into an enormous fortification one of the largest most complex and heavily defended in the entirety of the warhammer world's history carved directly from the rock nagasizar was now literally a fortress mountain to imposing an obstacle to take on directly the scavenge figured first to increase the pressure against the lower reaches surely now that they were pushing from both directions nagash would have to redirect his strengths somewhere else on the surface countless warbands were burning down villages and slaughtering the human population laying waste to everything they could but the undead defenders seemed to not care at all whilst the living populace were fighting desperately none fled and none sought refuge within the walls of nagajizar itself too afraid of what dwelled in there to dare flee the skaven was suffering heavy casualties again above as well as below and gaining nothing in the doing of it eventually having eradicated most of nagashi's outside human followers they gave up on the attrition tactic and began attempting to besiege nagasizar directly they would collapse a section of curtain wall and flood in only to be washed right back out again by a tide of skeletal bones simultaneously beneath the ground resistance never slackened an inch as the grinding warfare continued for nearly a hundred years millions possibly billions of skaven died in that underground war and heaven alone knows how many skeletons were crushed broken and ground to pieces as well but after a century even gushers reserves of undead servants were beginning to run mighty low fortunately for him as were the reserves of skavendam as well nagash saw an opportunity he could turn his enemies into allies treacherous though they might be untrustworthy though they might be he had something they desperately wanted desperately enough to sustain a hundred years war and they would seemingly do anything for it and so envoys were dispatched to skavendam to skaven blight and the council of 13 offering a pact a negotiated truth and an alliance nagash was more than willing to be generous extraordinarily so in return for the skaven's aid he wanted slaves he wanted humans huge quantities tens of thousands of them he also wanted to purchase the skaven services in the carrying out of certain missions far far from the borders of skavendam it would not affect them in the slightest and he was willing to pay with a literal mountain of warpstone the council of course was very dubious to this why now why out of nowhere after a hundred years is this monster offering us peace and what is he hiding how much more of warpstone could be beneath that mountain but at the same time a century of attrition maybe some warp stone was better than no warp stone and besides it wasn't like the necromancer was asking for much humans they breed almost as quick as the skaven and are remarkably submissive once dragged off into the darkness for a little period they would be easy enough to round up in sufficient numbers and the necromancer was willing to pay an extortionate summer for them as for the other missions they too seemed entirely harmless poisoning some rivers here and there pouring some weird substances into reservoirs of far distant other human cities far to the south none of this affected the council in the slightest whilst the warp stone flowed in rivers to the council's coffers nevertheless this was all mighty suspicious some spying was required thousands of infiltrators and agents were dispatched to get an idea of the necromancer's grand plans many died most probably partially due to the land growing ever more hostile and toxic this was the first indication that something major was a fart nagash was mining warpstone at a never-before-seen rate and not just to pay his new skaven allies in fact the extraction of the green rock had grown so ferocious that the land itself was almost covered in a perceptible shine of green dust what little animal and wildlife had remained was now all but extinct even the human population was on the verge before nagash saved them by introducing cannibalistic rituals where they ate their friends and families being driven insane and into the half-dead state of a ghoul which did to be fair prove far more resistant to the warping effect of warp stone meanwhile nagash was actually engaged in a campaign against nehekara he had not forgotten those who had wronged him in the distant past but that war is a different topic one we might cover some other time suffice to say despite recovering some of his lieutenants and generals and resurrecting them nagash's armies were defeated and he was also betrayed by the vampires as well with these undead armies destroyed again by the forces of nehekhara nagash turned to more drastic measures if he could not inhabit his throne by right then no one would in fact he would go one step further this world did not need the annoying light of life the living had done nothing but disobey him nothing but betray him and nothing but fail him undead servants were clearly the future and with the aid of the skaven he launched a campaign of corruption against nehekara he had familiars fly in various magical tokens and talismans through which he could focus his strengths into the neha karen lands skaven warbands were sent deep into the country on infiltration missions to introduce yet further spells and to pour vast containers filled with lethal looking black liquids directly into every waterway and major river the skaven also was sent to wage war on many of the green tribes surrounding hakara driving vast migrations of these bestial brutes into their lands the nehacaran city-states armies were first decimated by putting down hordes of green skins and then as they were traveling through the landscape drawing water from the usual sources the armies quickly began to grow ill and die in enormous numbers as when the army so did the country and the villagers as well the civilian population were falling like flies until soon the dead outnumbered the living if nagash had simply waited a few more months or maybe a year nehakara would probably have been completely depopulated by plague alone but that would of course not be anywhere near as fun now would it and so nagash wove his grandest spell ever in a cataclysmic gathering and release of magical energies he awoken nearly the entire freshly dead population of nehekara and bound them all to his service his armies swept the land of nehakara nearly clean of life the few remaining emaciated diseased armies of the city-states were swept aside with contemptuous ease and those who had insulted nagash the most by their mere existence suffered drawn out an unimaginably painful deaths but even that was a little bit too good for the man who had thwarted him al khadizaar the hero king of nehekhara was captured and brought to nagajizar when nagash intended to use him as both entertainment and fuel for an even greater spell the necromancer was exhausted from his previous ritual and needed a lengthy period of rest and recuperation before he could dream of continuing his grand plan which he told of course to al-qaeda so that he could rot in the knowledge that he would be the final ingredient in the death of life itself and powerless to do anything about it al-qaeda was left to rot in his cell in hopelessness and despair when a sound from the other side of his dark cell claws on rocks a large stone moved aside and hooded cowled figures emerged weirdly disjointed from a hole in the wall they presented al-kharizad with a cloth wrapped bundle inside of a leaden case the weird hooded figures refused to show their face but pushed the case towards the hero king who opened the case to find inside an enormous two-handed sword that glowed with a weak green sheen in the darkness his hooded saviors unlocked his cell and informed him where the necromancer could be found they also told him that he would be weakened after his excessive efforts and that if the hero king went now he could slay the monster once and for all a saint a man might question the nature of his saviors as well as the strange sword that tingled oddly to the touch but al-qarisar had bigger fish to fry as they say and as he made his way up to nagashi's ritual chamber all he could think of was to hack the necromancer to pieces and avenge himself his nation his kingdom and his millions of now dead subjects but the necromancer was not quite so gone as to be unable to defend himself when al-qarisad arrived the withered wrest spun around and unleashed blasts of withering magical energy against al-qarizar the hero king expected to be dead on the spot but somehow mysterious energy surrounding his sword leapt into being and protected him from the vile necromancer's magic advancing step by inexorable step he came closer and closer to the now increasingly desperate nagash feeding more and more power into his magic and yet seeing it peel off and scatter like water against the hero king who raised his sword and brought it crashing down on the decrepit bones of nagash's body the sword rose and fell again and again and again in a brutish maddened frenzy and beneath every blow nagash's steel hard ancient withered skin parted like parchment the necromancer was immune to blades he had cut rocks with his very claws and yet they provided no protection at all against the blade after minutes of hacking at the corpse at the tiny blood-slickened pieces the king wandered from the room unsteadily on his feet and disappeared from the pages of history but he had succeeded it killed the monster he had revenged his people and he had saved the world with the aid of the small furry fuzzered forms that now swarmed into nagashi's throne room gathered up every sliver every skin cell every piece of the necromancer and threw them into the enormous warp stone furnace in the middle of the room and so humanity civilization and the world as a whole were saved by the skaven as they were already paranoid about what nagash was up to their agents had been swift to report that the weird lands to the south had been covered in absolutely billions of undead marching stent fastly towards nagajizar and as the skaven had been fighting against the undead for the last hundred odd years the council of thirteen swiftly and collectively shat their pants and began looking around for some way of dealing with this pretty clear and evident problem if this army arrived he would sweep the world clean and that was before the great necromancer carried out another spell of the same magnitude but this time aimed in the skaven's direction however even threatened with the eradication of all life on the planet the steven couldn't find anyone willing to actually go and try assassinating nagash as he was a little bit too scary but then they received reports of a beaten and bloodied human being dragged into nagashi's prison now here was an individual with every motivation to commit bloody murder on that lying cheating nagash bastard that oath and contract breaker of the worst kind now yes he'd taken a bit of a beating he hadn't been treated particularly well but given a enormous two-handed magical sword crafted from nearly pure warp stone and covered in protective runes well he didn't need to live long to carry out his objective even so it required all of the council members full and undivided magical attention to channel their powers in to al-qaeda the hero king to protect him not just from nagash's magic but from the blade itself which was so lethal that merely touching it would normally have reduced any human or skaven to a withering slithering chaos spawn two members of the council would end up heroically selflessly in fact giving their lives to protect al-qarizar from nagashi's magic buying the king enough time to dispatch the evil oath-breaking necromancer and now that they had saved the world from destruction the skaven could take satisfaction in a job well done they could also occupy [ __ ] peak and mine it for every speck of warpstone that remained and so they did with clan rickcach taking over primary possession over the next centuries they would strip a mine [ __ ] peeked to the core making clan deck one of the richest most powerful and influential clans in the entire under empire and occupying as they did the unassailable fortress of nagarizar they were growing almost a little bit too powerful really but you know what they say the horned wrapped favors those he arbitrarily favors and in this case it was the council of thirteen as around a hundred years into the imperial calendar all contact was suddenly and immediately overnight lost with clan rick now that was odd that was very odd convenient but very odd skaven agents dispatched ran into the undead that had seemingly occupied the fortress of nagazar once again in tremendous numbers the immediate reaction was to try and launch some sort of invasion but soon thereafter escaping them as a whole realized hold on we've already mined out all the warp stone and getting rid of clan ricket was if anything a bonus maybe it is best to leave sleeping dogs to lie we do not know precisely what happened that one night that saw the entire clan rick wiped out from skaven history but we do know that during it nagash returned and apparently the entirety of nagashi zal the fortress itself rose up to welcome its master every defense every door every hardpoint blew open in welcome allowing the necromancer in and i'm sure he must have been thrilled to finally be home again as it had taken him 1 300 years to reform all right so the skaven didn't quite manage to finish the job but putting nagash out of commission for a thousand three hundred years is better than anyone else has managed so i'd consider that to be a solid win nevertheless and ever since nagashi the great fortress the mind out crippled peak has remained his seat of power and his base for future operations and there was definitely not a major cataclysmic series of events that turned him into an undead god and sent him flinging into some stupid-ass alternative universe with space marines in it that definitely didn't happen until next time i've been arch thank you all very much for listening and i hope to see you all again soon till then have a good day [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Arch

Views: 134,402

Keywords: arch, skaven, undead, warhammer fantasy, nagash, cripple peak, nagashizzar, fantasy, warhammer, warhammer fantasy lore, lore, warhammer fantasy battle, warhammer lore, tomb kings, skaven lore, warhammer 3, nagash saga, total war warhammer 3, warhammer old world, warhammer the old world

Id: s8g5Cs5JelM

Length: 52min 20sec (3140 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 25 2022