Bones clacked like gruesome castanets. Fleshless feet tramped flagstones slick with old blood, bits of rotted sinew sloughing off with each jerky step.

Thousands of skeletal soldiers stood in silent ranks, a forest of bleached spines and wind-scoured rib cages. Their empty eye sockets stared ahead, dark and pitiless as the void. Rusted scraps of armor clung to their desiccated frames, pitted swords and notched battle-axes gripped in bony hands.

The air stank of ancient death and the sour tang of dark sorcery, the reek hanging like a miasma over the assembled horde. No breath stirred those hollow chests, no hearts beat within those cage-like ribs - yet still they stood, poised and ready, an army of the restless dead awaiting their master's command with the patience of eternity. In their deathless stillness was a terrible promise of violence to come, a hunger for the wailing of the soon-to-be-slain that transcended mere life or mortality.

They were the War-Dead, Dark Legion, and their hour was fast approaching.

Gribble stalked before his Dark Legion. His eyes swept over the gathered dead. Row upon row of bony figures, some still clad in rusted scraps of armor. Notched blades and spear-hafts clutched in fleshless hands.

Gribble's lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage grin. With the dwarf kingdom he toppled, his legion swelled, Hundreds more added with the fall of the dwarf keep.

Hundreds were not enough. He needed thousands. Tens of thousands. An unending tide of bone and steel to crush all who stood against him.

Gribble's gaze caught on a handful of skeletons standing apart. Thicker-limbed than their fellows. Ropy strands of tendon and muscle still clinging to their frames.

He prowled closer. Something about the dense lattice of their bones. The way the grave-light smoldered in their empty sockets.

These had been strong in life, powerful. The sinew still threading their limbs spoke of their vitality only partially leeched by death.

Gribble ran a black nail along an exposed femur, tracing patterns in the dust and grave-soil. Perhaps a tenth, maybe less, of his legion carried such marks of power.

An elite cadre, standing tall among the fodder. But still too few.

Gribble paced. His mind raced. The dwarf cairns had yielded their treasures of flesh, but such pitiful stock couldn't feed his ambitions. He needed more. More bodies, more bones.

A memory niggled, a scrap map glimpsed in the dwarf king's chamber before blood painted the stone. Parchment dark with age and secrets.

Kingdoms scribed in fading ink. Man, beast, troll, goblin. Their borders drawn in spidery lies. All ripe for harvest, if he had but the scythe.

Gribble's feet beat a path across flagstones as his thoughts whirred. Those foreign lands with their teeming multitudes. Graveyards waiting to birth his soldiers.

But which to reap first? The arid wastes where troll-bones baked beneath ungentle suns? The shadowed bowers of the goblins, choked with leaves and treachery?

Or perhaps...the vaunted halls of men, with their gleaming marble and reeking hypocrisy. So many, men. Living their mayfly lives heedless of the dark. Practically inviting his cleansing fire...

But no. Not men. Not yet. Their time would come, but first an older hate must be quenched.

Cloven hooves and muzzles matted with grave-loam filled Gribble's thoughts. The beastmen. Furred abominations rutting in their filthy sties.

Strong, though. Fearsome. Their warriors' sinews ran red with valor and vigor.

What better fodder for his legion than those battle-hardened physiques? Those snarling muzzles and knotted arms gifted a second-life in his service?

Mind awhirl with visions of beastmen arrayed in ranks of bone and steel, Gribble turned once more to the map seared in memory.

Yes, there...scribed in mocking neatness upon fading parchment. But to reach it...

Gribble scowled, verdant face twisting. The Whispering Woods. That choked tangle of secrets and sorrow standing between him and his quarry.

Other warlords, paltry, mewling creatures, might balk at such a barrier. Turn aside in search of paths less perilous. But not Gribble.

No trees, no matter how old or fey, would deny him his destiny. What were wailing boughs and haunted groves to one such as he? Things to burn and break.

Resolve hardening as his Dark Legion looked on in silent vigil, Gribble schemed.

Magics could be woven, wards erected against the forest's seeping malevolence. Perhaps a levy of goblins, lashed and cowed, could be driven ahead to bear the brunt...

But no...no half-measures would suffice. Not here, not with so much at stake. This war would require a blade of singular sharpness.

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He must turn the Whispering Woods' own power against it, suborn its nightshades and moss-choked pools to his will. Fight ancient sorcery with older blasphemies.

Long-moldered tomes and forbidden rituals surfaced from memory, rising through the charnel depths of Gribble's mind.

Lores scribed in blood and bile, etched upon pages of tanned flesh. Secrets pried from the screaming shade-forms of liches and arch-daemons. All could now be turned to his purpose.

Gribble smiled, a death's-head rictus. His skeletal minions shuffled in their ranks, as if tasting his black joy.

Yes...with such nightmares yoked to his banner, what chance did mere trees and flowers have? He would march beneath a canopy of screaming faces and tortured bodies, while unearthly fires licked at his heels.

And when the beastmen saw him come, riding upon a road of wailing wood and roiling shadow...ah, then the yielding of new soldiers would begin.

Gribble pictured the halls of the beastmen choked with harvestable forms. Fallen warriors, rent and tattered, piled high as cordwood for his arts.

Each shattered rib-cage another sword for his ranks. Each cracked skull a sightless new sentry for his battlements of bone.

And how fitting, to flay the skins and work them still bloody into new banners. Gribble's imagination soared, running rich with images of beast-leather fluttering in a fetid wind. The standards of his new army, forged from the flesh of fallen foes.

Why stop at banners? The beastmen's hides could be cured and hammered into armor, their hooves boiled down to make crude glues and ground to powder for alchemical tinctures...

Gribble trembled as dark bliss coursed through his veins like ichor, a pleasure both intellectual and visceral.

Every death would feed his Legion. Every new skeleton would in turn take its own harvest from the living. An unending cycle of slaughter and replenishment.

He saw his horde swelling with each victory, growing from thousands to hundreds of thousands. An endless sea of clattering bone, gleaming steel, and cold black fire.

All would fall before his pitiless onslaught. Beastman, troll, goblin, man. He would tear the flesh from their bones and scour the world clean.

The thrill of this vision coursed through Gribble, bringing with it a clarity colder than midwinter iron.

He knew now, with a certainty that blazed through his sinews, that taking the Beastmen Kingdom was no mere stepping stone to greater conquest.

It was a beginning, yes - the first pebble in an avalanche that would bury all the world beneath clattering bone. But it was also a pivot point, a moment when a petty necromancer playing with dead scraps would be transformed into something far greater.

A Dark King astride a nightmare. The Devouring Shadow. He Who Waits at the End of All.

The annihilation of the beastmen would elevate him from mere warlord to sovereign of death itself. Their still-warm corpses his coronation shroud, their shattered weapons his scepter and sword.

He would wade through their entrails to his final throne upon a mountain of skulls, and he would watch the world perish at his feet.

Gribble bellowed sudden, savage laughter to the vaulted sky, and his minions echoed with their own clacking, sepulchral madness.

The Beastman Kingdom would fall, and in its death throes give agonized birth to a new and terrible epoch.

An age of bone and ashes, with Gribble as its dark sovereign. All would be subsumed into the Eternal Necropolis of his nightmares, with not even distant memory left to whisper of when life and light held fleeting sway.

Only dead stars and withered stone would chronicle the march of his legions. And that, Gribble knew as his laughter twisted into a rictus of unholy joy, was the only legacy of true worth.

What need had an architect of oblivion for gaudy trappings of state? The screams of the dying would be his fanfares and the wails of the bereaved his accolades. All else was meaningless dust.

Drawing in a deep breath through flared nostrils, Gribble savored the iron and rot stink of his horde.

Their fetor was the incense of his ascendance, their blind obedience the only worship he craved. In them was the kernel of his dark design.

He paced once more through their ranks, letting fleshless fingers scrabble at his robes. Bone digits clattered against scavenged armor and notched swords. Silently pleading for the boon of his regard.

With each stride, Gribble felt himself grow in stature. General to King. King to Necromancer. Necromancer to Lich-God. All would fall before his glory, their blood and marrow mere mortar for the Black Cathedral of his reign.

The Whispering Woods with its petty tricks? The beastmen with their musk and primal savagery? Mere chaff before a holocaust.

The forest would blacken and curl into ash at his tread. The beastmen's vaunted strength would wither, their fur slough away to scabrous ruin.

Their souls would serve just as well as their bodies - chained eternally to his legion, serf-shades in his shadow demesne.

Gribble was destruction unchained, death ascendant. A blight upon creation, unfurling like a pustule-soaked banner above all things fair or foul.

All would stumble into his bony embrace in time, eyes clouded by putrefaction. Every grave would yawn wide to be glutted anew at his behest.

The dry ligaments of his own physique trembled exultant at the prospect. The moldering pulp in his skull throbbed with ambition's fever dream.

Soon...soon he would advance. The Whispering Woods were already as good as kindling for his pyres. The beastmen just offal for his abattoir.

Nothing could halt his inexorable tread. He was the Worm that Gnaws in the Night, the Last Sigh of a Dying Star. All would hear his tread and despair.

Gribble quelled the surge of black ecstasy in his desiccated sinews. He would need that fire banked for now, a coldly smoldering ember to stoke his minions to greater slaughter.

There was preparation yet to be done. Rituals to invoke, sacrifices to spill upon the clotted earth. He would need the very winds to scream his exultation and the trees to weep blood at his coming.

One last tour of his assembled forces, then, before he retired to his charnel sanctum.

Surveying his skeletal horde, Gribble nodded in grim satisfaction. They would serve. They would reap.

Those still joined by withered muscle would be his fists, hammering at the gates of the living until they cracked asunder. Those spare and bleached by long inhumation would be his scythes, culling chaff until only a bare stubble remained for the burning.

And he, Gribble, the Horned Necromancer, the Dark King, would be the single will animating that unholy flood. Guiding it over every sill and threshold until nothing remained un-drowned.

He would look upon a world of sepulchers and smile, alone and deathless in the ruin of his own design.

The wailing winds would keen the only threnody fit for his ascendance. The crunch of bone and the slip of worm-riddled flesh the only applause he required.

A universe of graves, a cosmos of rot. That was his only desire, and the beastmen of their paltry kingdom would be the next to feel his liberating caress.

Gribble spat once upon the ground and turned his back on his assembled forces. It was time to retire and prepare himself for the beautiful slaughter to come.

There was a Whispering Wood to blaze, a kingdom to crack asunder, and a black eternity of despair to birth.

Gribble, Lord of the Dark, was now poised to ascend. And all the world would sing a funeral dirge at his coming.