The Time of Tribulations

Before the dead ever marched, the realms were troubled by portents: a lengthening season of dread that the prophets named The Time of Tribulations. Across every land the dying refused to stay dead, magic soured, and the amethyst light of Shyish crept into skies where it did not belong. Something vast was gathering in the realm of death.

That something was the design of Nagash. From his black pyramid the Great Necromancer had raised a colossal spiral across Shyish, an engine to draw every soul in creation toward a single point and bind it to his rule. As his work neared completion its tremors were felt everywhere: astromancers charted stars that seemed to weep, and in a hundred cities the same nightmare visited sleeping thousands: a black spiral turning slowly in a violet sky. Death-cults rose in secret even within the Cities of Sigmar to hasten his coming.

The other powers of the Mortal Realms read the signs and did not understand them in time. Sigmar's storm, the war-hordes of Chaos and the wild tribes of Destruction all sensed a change in the weather of magic, yet none could name the doom taking shape beneath their feet. Some rulers armed for a war they could not describe; others denied the omens until the ground itself grew cold beneath their feet, and prophecy tangled with prophecy until the wise despaired.

The Time of Tribulations was the long indrawn breath before catastrophe: the quiet, mounting horror that broke at last in the Necroquake and plunged the realms into the Soul Wars. It stands as a lesson written across the Age of Sigmar: that the deadliest wars announce themselves long before the first blow ever falls.