The Siege of Praag

Of all the horrors of the Great War Against Chaos, none burned itself deeper into the memory of the north than The Siege of Praag. When the Everchosen Asavar Kul led his host into Kislev, the proud city of Praag stood in his path, and its people chose to hold rather than flee.

They endured the unendurable. For a year the Chaos horde ringed the city, and the prolonged nearness of so much daemonic power began to warp reality itself. Stone flowed like wax, the slain walked, and the very walls grew faces that screamed; men fused with the rock they defended, and the boundary between flesh and nightmare dissolved. Defenders went to sleep as men and woke as things that had to be put down by their own comrades, and sanity proved as much a casualty as flesh. It is remembered as the moment Chaos showed what it truly meant.

Praag fell at last, its defenders consumed, but the delay had bought the free peoples precious time. By the time relief columns fought their way through, there was little left to save but the memory of what the city had been. When Magnus the Pious marched north in the great war against Chaos, it was toward a Kislev bloodied but still fighting, and the liberation of the region became the turning point of the whole campaign.

The Siege of Praag stands as the setting's starkest lesson in what Chaos does to those it touches. The rebuilt city was never wholly cleansed of that taint, and its haunted, half-mutated stones remained a warning to the Empire and all the lands of men of the price of standing in the storm's path.