The Necroquake

The Necroquake was less a battle than a wound torn in the fabric of reality: the moment Nagash completed the great working he had laboured over throughout the Time of Tribulations. At the heart of Shyish, within the vast spiral he had raised to draw all death toward himself, the Great Necromancer's ritual came to its terrible fruition.

The blast of amethyst magic that followed rolled outward across every realm at once. Wards failed, tombs cracked open, and the recently slain clawed their way back into unquiet motion. Spellcasters felt their magic turn treacherous; the ghosts of ages past were flung loose from their resting places in a single screaming instant. No corner of creation was spared the shock: even in distant Azyr the aetheric tides recoiled, and in the deep underworlds the dead stirred in numbers beyond any reckoning. In one stroke Nagash had made death a weapon aimed at all creation.

The tremor did not spare his enemies alone. It rattled the daemon-holds of Chaos, toppled monuments raised in the Age of Chaos, and sent every power in the realms scrambling to understand what had changed. Prophets who had glimpsed its coming were driven mad by the scale of it, and those who survived spoke only of a great bell tolling in a realm that had no bells. From Azyr, Sigmar and his war-councils read the omens with mounting dread.

Out of the Necroquake came the Soul Wars, the endless conflict between the Nighthaunt and the living. It marked the true beginning of the Age of Sigmar's darkest chapter: the day, in the truest sense, that death itself declared war upon life, and the point at which the realms learned Chaos was not the only power hungry enough to devour them whole.