 What makes us good? What sets the hero apart from the villain? Even then, what does it mean to be a hero? Is it someone fulfilling an ambition at great personal and physical struggle, or is it someone doing something for the good of mankind? It could be that heroes have more compassion or empathy. Maybe there's a hero gene, a fundamental part of someone that drives them towards selfless acts, to the defense of those who need it most, or the sacrifice of their very selves for a greater moral purpose or cause. We do not know for sure, but it is not for want of trying. For millennia uncounted, humanity has asked ourselves these questions, even as we see heroes rise and fall, and new ones rise in their stead, or to fulfill their legacy. It is one of the fundamental philosophical questions, and one that, I believe, points to the inherent goodness contained within us all, that each of us share a spark of the heroic ideal to use our own gifts to help out others who may need it. A romantic notion, to be sure, in these darkest of times, yet one that has ever been on my mind since the nights of days past. During the sojourning hours I dreamed, once more, dreamed again of those mortal realms, of the age of the being known as Sigmar, and who they were most vivid. I beheld golden-clad demigods striding forth against the most hideous monstrosities in all creation, to lay down their lives so that all that is good in the world may flourish. To that end, and to perhaps banish these glowing nightmares from my mind, I have penned the following. Though then, this is a record of the auric heroes of these realms, the warriors who arrive upon the tempests themselves, the Stormcast Eternals. The Stormcast Eternals are the mightiest human warriors of the mortal realms, peerless heroes forged by magic into living paragons of the God-King Sigmar's wrath. Each one is the epitome of all that is noble, true, and just in a soldier, for each one has been plucked from their mortal existences right at the very moment of their death, their souls saved from the afterlife by Sigmar's will, to be transported to his heavenly realm of Azir. There, their cast anew, their essence reforged into the immortal weapons of the God-King, clad in shining Sigmarite and bearing the hammer weapons redolent of their gods own, they are cast into the mortal realms upon columns of lightning to smite all those that would stand in opposition to the destiny of order. To be a Stormcast Eternal is to know a life of constant, endless conflict, to take the righteous fury of Sigmar to countless battlefields and crash his judgment upon the heads of those deserving. They are the hammers of order, cast unto the anvil of eternal war, and each does so with hearts heavy with duty yet steeled against doubt, for they know within their truest selves that they are one of the last hopes the mortal realms have against the corrupt, the ravenous, and the destructive. They are the shield by which the realms of the living, of man, Dwarden, and elf and beast, are protected. The Stormcast are quite literally the last and greatest hope for Sigmar in his quest to bring order to the mortal realms, and to protect them against the depredations of the dark gods of chaos. Deep in the past, in the Halcyon days of the Age of Myth following the destruction of the world that was, Sigmar, found in the void by the great star Drake Dracotheon, toured the eight new planes of existence that made up the realms, defeating great monsters, resurrecting long-lost gods, and protecting the nascent mortal tribes from harm. Before long, Sigmar's pantheon of order, an alliance of divine beings as different from each other as night is today, was working towards a common goal, the nurturing of mortal civilization. The achievements of the pantheon and their realms were beyond imagination, although one has tried to account for them in a previous record upon these dreams. Works of magic, scholarship, engineering, and science never thought possible were completed daily, and it is said a traveller could spend an eternity wandering the eight realms and not see one tenth of their glories. Would this tale be able to end thus, but alas, it was not to be. In the depths of the void, the gods of chaos had aspired the mortal realms, and having glutted themselves upon the souls of those lost in their destruction of the world that was, saw a whole new plane upon which to feast yet further. Through means subtle, they inveigled their way from their hell dimension into the world of mortals, corrupting slowly and patiently, planting the seeds of dread events to come as Sigmar's gods bickered and feuded petally. The pantheon of order was not to last, and cracked under the weight of so many clashing divine ambitions. The age of myth was to come to a catastrophic conclusion when Archeon, the ever-chosen of the pantheon, warrior peerless and dubbed the grand marshal of the apocalypse, broke apart reality itself to lead a seemingly infinite horde of demonic creatures and chaos worshipping mortals into the realms, annihilating and conquering all in their path. The pantheon of order did what they could to stymie this invasion, but one by one by one they fell, retreated or disappeared, seeking to protect their own realms and abandoning their erstwhile allies in the process. Despite winning a string of victories against the hordes of chaos, Sigmar was thwarted by Archeon at the battle of the burning skies, where the ever-chosen's trickery left him bereft of his mighty hammer Gal Maraz, unable to stem the tide any further. Sigmar fled, retreating with the last of his mortal subjects to the realm of celestial magic, Azir, forever shutting it off from the other southern realms by sealing its great magical gates. The dark gods were ascendant, and the mortal realms despaired under their vilest tyranny. The age of chaos was a time of direst grief for the citizens of the planes left to the domination of the pantheon, their armies rampaged across the lands, burning even the mightiest of civilizations to ash, or laying them low with the vilest of plagues from without or the most sinister of corruption from within. More and more of the mortal herd turned to the worship of the dark gods, either out of their own greed for power, or simple desperation and desire to survive the apocalypse. The very land itself warped under the foul influences of these extra-dimensional evils, scoured of all that was good and pure, and twisted into corrupted mirrors of past glories. Before long, the dark pantheon began to feud internally, manufacturing vendettas and plots, moving their mortal pawns against those of their kin, each vying to control a greater slice of reality than the others. Korn, Nurgle, Zeech, and the great horned rat all clashed upon battlefields uncountable, each seeking to supplant the other. Only Slaanesh, imprisoned by the elf gods long ago, was absent, but their followers yet fought on in their name. Ultimately, it was a blood god Korn, lord of skulls that would wax the highest, for was he not the final resting place upon all blood that was spilt, and was battle not the sole currency of this darkest of ages. Everywhere his hordes marched, and where they did, the slaughter of purest insanity went with it. The very passage left the land a choked ruin, weeping with rivers of vitae, stained a red so deep none knew if it would ever be whole again. It seemed that the dominion of the dark gods would never end, it seemed for all the world that light would never return to the mortal realms, but return it would, and did, on pinions of brightest lightning. In the halls of his ear, realm of the celestial, Sigmar, the god king, had not been idle. In alliance with the smith lord Grungi of the Dwarden, he had, in this time of isolation, worked feverishly to rebuild, forging in spaces occluded from the dark pantheon an army to shake the heavens themselves. Combining all he and his remaining allies knew of soul magic, Sigmar plucked the spirits of the mightiest heroes of the age of myth from the pheromint, and bent forces of time and space through gold-forged mangy technology in order to recast them. Upon the anvil of apotheosis are their new forms wrought, filled with a vim and vigor of the mightiest of mortal champions. They come from all walks of life, with the noblest of knights standing shoulder to shoulder with the most lowborn of priests, yet both, and all, are selected for their desire to see justice done, an order triumph over evil. Their new bodies are filled to the brim with the very magic of his ear, and they stride forth clad in gleaming sigmarite armor, wielding weapons that channel the power of storm magic itself, strong enough to split an armored warrior of the dark gods in twain with a single blow. Sigmar's storm cast, and spent the age of chaos drilling, preparing and itching for their return to the realms. When God King knew that his reforging was not perfect, that though his warriors of the storm would be caught at the moment of their deaths and reborn again anew, his process was not complete, and there may yet exist a flaw within it. But he also knew his time was out, and he had no tools but those which he had crafted himself. He resolved to no longer see the pantheon despoil his precious mortal realms, so he sent forth his tempest, and it was a storm to shake the fabric of creation. The arrival of the storm cast eternals to the mortal realms was nothing short of a divine catatlysm, a sundering of the heavens from whence forth burst avatars of retribution. The first of these battles at the igneous delta in the realm of fire saw the hammers of sigmar reap bloody vengeance from the forces of the gore tied, but this was but the first of countless engagements in a series of conflicts that would later become known as the realm gate wars. Across the entire span of the world's spheres, the storm cast and their resurgent allies sallied forth from sigmar's celestial kingdom to reclaim precious realm gates from the forces of the dark gods. The hallowed knights chamber liberated the realm of life, gairan, and its ever queen from the corruption of nergal. In chamon, realm of metal, twelve whole storm hosts united to retrieve gal maraths from the eldritch fortress. The wars brought to the field the awesome power of the god beasts, divine zodiacal monsters whose unleashed power devastated whole armies and reshaped the very lands of the realms. Ultimately, sigmar's attempt to recapture the all points, the dimensional nexus from where all realm gate travel is possible, failed. The forces of his resurgent grand alliance of order were able to recover two vital portals, the genesis gate in gairan and the brimfire gate of akshi. With this, the age of sigmar had truly begun, and the god king's storm cast were its most prominent champions. When the storm cast enter the fray of a battle, they do so upon the lightning itself, a living storm that leaves behind after each thunderbolt an armoured warrior set with purest righteousness in their hearts. From out of these tempests the god of kings forces crash into their foes, falling upon them like the mighty gal maraths itself. This method of deployment was one specifically wrought by sigmar to not only demonstrate the sheer power of his storm cast and to strike the most awestruck of terrors into their enemies' hearts, but to serve a very real military function, as the magic storms upon which the warriors of azir are transported allows them to strike at any point in the realms almost at a whim. It is not for naught that to the mortals of the realms a sudden oncoming storm is seen as the greatest of blessings or the direst of omens, depending on whom you pledge your allegiance. The god king dispatches his storm hosts to wherever they are needed, and though their numbers are few, their impact is perennially felt wherever their tempests ultimately land. Faster, stronger and more resilient than a mortal human, even the lowliest of storm cast is a veritable demigod of war, and the oldest and most experienced amongst them are more akin to forces of nature unleashed than mere warriors. To live long they shall, but the storm cast are, after their first reforging, functionally immortal. When a warrior of the host dies, they do not pass into the afterlife as mortals do. Instead, the magic imbued into them at the moment of their first death whisks away their souls from their now deceased body back to the halls of Sigmaron in high azir to undergo the reforging all over again. This is not to say that there are not means through which this can be undone. A sufficiently wicked or eldritch weapon has known to claim the true life of many a storm cast, and great wars are often fought to possess such power. But in high azir they are recast once more, reincarnated again into the mortal realms to go forth and enact the god king's will. Though their conduct have been exemplary, they may even be granted a new role within their storm hosts, for those who fall in Sigmar's service, selling their lives for the cause of order, are treated with a due reverence, or at least, such was once the case. The realm gate wars, the malign portents, the soul wars. As the conflicts of the realms grow in intensity and more and more of Sigmar's warriors fall and are reforged, it has begun to become dreadfully clear that the flow of the god king feared in his desperate gambit of ages past does indeed exist. Each time a storm cast eternal falls in battle, and each time they are recast upon the anvil of apotheosis, they lose a part of themselves. The celestial magic imbued in them in their first death is of the wildest and most powerful sort, and it is incapable of rendering them as complete as they once were. What a storm cast may lose is unique to they themselves. It may be the scent of the village they were born onto. It may be the name of a loved one, a partner, or a parent or sibling perhaps. It may even be their true name. Whatever they lose, it is often deeply personal, and should it not be, it is still seen by the storm cast themselves as a fragment of their truest humanity they will now never recover. The indefinable aspects of their human souls are, over the years, gradually being eroded by the eternal cycle of war they now find themselves in, and it is a source of no small terror to these heroes that they are, effectively losing their precious humanity. This is not to say they are becoming great out-idolons like the spirits of those who serve Nagash are, far from it, but they are changed, and changed profoundly by this process. In place of a treasured memory, those reforged may experience all manner of strange and eldritch phenomena. Some have voices that rumble with far-off thunder, others eyes of sparking magical lightning. Some have awoken with tattooed lines across their body that glow with corpus hunt, while others trail a sinister magical wind, seeming to blow from cold far-off realms. These traits can even become dictated by the storm host a warrior may hail from. The oldest of the Knights Excelsior leaves smoking footprints wherever they tread, while those of the Knights of the Aurora truly embody their name by trailing ethereal light behind them as they charge into battle. The more sanguine of the Stormcast accept these as blessings of both the God-King and of Azir, whereas the more morose push these thoughts of lost humanity from their minds, focusing on their training and duties to better distract them from impending loss. The God-King himself is not unaware of this, and as each of his warriors become less and less human, he despairs that his duty to the realms forced his hand and caused him to inflict such a terrible fate upon the heroes of the world spheres. To that end, he created the sacrosanct chamber of the Eternals, those of the Stormcast more attuned to the magic of Azir than others, to tend to the reforging process and to study all aspects of it. In this way, it is hoped, the sacrosanct may discover the root of the Great Flaw, and if at all possible, mend it. And during the Age of Chaos, but the rest of their brethren, the sacrosanct chambers are filled with the reforged souls of the mightiest warriors and mystics of the Age of Myth, but were not unleashed upon the battlefield when the hosts of the God-King first took to the realms. Instead, they formed a guardian core around the Anvil of Apotheosis, studying every aspect of it as more and more Stormcast fell in the era defining conflict of the Realmgate Wars. The yet labor to this end, bending their efforts to curing the curse that afflicts their brethren. But their great works have recently been interrupted by the machinations of the Great Necromancer. That story, however, must wait for another time. The warriors of the Stormcast Eternals are organized and divided according to Stormhosts, each a legion of the God-King, each with a history and honor that now stretches through the ages. Some hosts represent all aspects of the Grand Alliance of Order and all shades of humanity that may walk the realms. And though all are united by their service to the God-King, they often are as different from each other as night is today. The Hammers of Sigmar, the most iconic golden warriors of the hosts, are often held as exemplars of all Stormcasts for their rigid dedication to military order, whereas the Knights Excelsior are Sigmar's total annihilators, leaving only scorched earth in the aftermath of their passing. The Hallowed Knights are crusaders, Templars of Azir, that are without doubt the most zealously faithful of Sigmar's followers, perennially attracting pilgrim crowds to worship at the foot of their Stormkeeps. By contrast, the Astral Templars are Wildkin, formed from the heroes of Gur, the Realm of Beasts, known to favor quests that involve the hunting of monsters. The Sigmarite Brotherhood of Chamon, Realm of Metal, fight side by side in interlocking shield walls, while the Daur Black Armored Anvils of Heldenhammer evoke the sinister shadows of Shaish, the Realm of Death. For every realm, there is a dozen more Stormhosts, each with traditions, styles and forms of war-making of their own. For the enemies of order are yet more numerous and even more varied, and the God-King must be ready to call upon warriors who specialize in combating every foe imaginable. At the conclusion of the Realmgate Wars, these Stormhosts set about founding their Stormkeeps, mighty fastnesses from whence the hosts may strike out against the enemies of order, but are also in a very real way, the Earthly Projection and Foundation of Sigmar's Earthly Power. Keenly does the God-King feel the pain of the long epoch spent locked in his ear, keeping it hidden and occluded from the rest of the realms and seeing the Chaos Gods run rampant. Stormkeeps of his legions can be seen in this way as a promise to never let such an age return. No Stormkeep is the same. Some appear as castles of ages past, while others are more akin to cities of light and cloud. Some are built to top the highest peaks of the realm they inhabit, while others burrow into the Stygian Underworlds below. All, however, have one thing in common. At their centre lies a Realmgate, those portals through which any may access the different planes of the mortal realms. Stormkeeps are fortifications of these nexae, control over travel between different realms. They are vital beyond price for this, and by their very presence form loci of resistance against all those who mean the mortals of the realm's harm. At first they were simple walled keeps, but over time and under the eyes of the Lord Castellans of the Stormcast, they grew, adding concentric rings of mighty fortifications expanding ever-outwards. Weapon batteries, siege-resistant walls, and all manner of arcane defences wait to greet the enemies that may assail them, often bolstered by others from the forces of order in a myriad of ways. The Stormkeeps of Gairan are often protected by forests enchanted by the Sylvaneth, with walls strengthened by living vines. Elsewhere, fortresses may find their walls adorned with the black powder cannon of the iron-weld arsenal, or protected against the corrupting magics of chaos or Nagash by the eldritch wards of the collegiate arcane. Regardless of where, each Stormcast is as much a center of learning as a military establishment. In the Age of Myth, Sigmar was a god who strove to enlighten and bring civilization, to batter the lives of all those living in the realms, and his Stormcast continued this mission to this day. His warriors study within these archives, for it is not just upon the field of battle that chaos must be fought, but in the realm of the metaphorical too, for what are the dark gods but ideas and emotion made into corruptive universal forces? Each of the greatest cities of Sigmar has at its core one of the greatest Stormkeeps, the two forming a symbiotic relationship in the God-King's quest to bring his order to fruition. To this day, the Stormcast remain in battle to cross thousands of fronts in all manner of campaigns in every corner of the mortal realms. The Age of Sigmar has been defined by them in many ways, not least for their unearing defiance against all those who would do the weak harm. For all they have lost to the Great Flaw, for all their comrades who have seen true death against wicked sorceries, for all they may no longer be able to relate to those they may shield. They forever strive to embody Sigmar's ideals of truth and justice, to be the Paragons the realms need to resist the depredations of the destructive, the dreadful and the dead. They are in many ways the ideal of the tragic hero, the noble sacrifice, for in their everlasting quest for righteousness they lose more and more of themselves to each death, becoming better and stronger warriors, yes, but also less human, more and more removed from the mortal they once were and more and more akin to an avatar of the God-King's arcane lightning than anything else. Is that not truly the most noble embodiment of the heroic ideal? To sacrifice all that you are and were, piece by piece, so that those less fortunate may have a life safer and more whole than they possibly could have, for your actions, to sell your life as coin, to buy those who cannot more time. My mind aches now, these have been the most vivid of my dreams of these fantastical realms, yes, and I fear I must rest even longer if I am to recover my grasp upon tenuous reality, until then I sleep. Ave Imperator, Gloria in Excelsis Terra. This video and this channel is made possible through the incredibly kind support of my Patreon subscribers. If you'd like to help support the channel, head on over to patreon.com forward slash Oculus Imperia if you want to kick me a buck or two to help keep the lights running and the scripts flowing. You can keep up to date with channel news if you follow me on Twitter, at butstuffkaiju, no not changing that name anytime soon, and new this month if you'd like to support the channel with some merchandise my very first t-shirts are up for sale on teespring.com forward slash Oculus Imperia. Join the channel on Discord as well, a link to all of this will be in the description below.