Editing Warhammer: Age of Sigmar (section)

== Malign Portents ==
Now, it seems that Nagash has been very busy behind the scenes and is making a power play that could massively expand the influence of Death. The other factions are trying to stop it, and so far it's not going well for them. Each Grand Alliance get themselves a new champion of sorts: Death gets a ghost one-handing a bastard sword, Order gets a Sigmarine who's job it is to rebuild the stuff that the rest of his Brotherhood just ruined, Destruction gets a really, ''really'' fucking high Grot and Chaos gets an axe wielding marauder queen sporting an awesome rack. As in, her helmet has two gigantic sets of horns. What'd you think I meant?

Malign portents is intended to mark the "end of the age of Hope" and bring the [[grimdark]] back, as well as expand on how the Realms work and how the fuck normal human beings can live in a place that's [[Forge World|all made of metal]]. The short stories released with Malign Portents certainly cash in the grimdark people wanted—Stormcasts killing innocents, vampires coaxing humans to the side of death to save them from Nurgle’s plagues (which are lovingly detailed, with exploding maggot-filled pustules and weeping sores), humans being dragged down under the earth by skeletons to suffocate after they just managed to survive the razing of their village...

The only Chaos faction making gains are a group of Slaanesh worshipers under command of the warqueen teaming up with the mortal followers of the Chaos gods to find Slaanesh (they're headed in the right direction, but reaching Slaanesh is the problem). The Destruction champion's plan so far seems to be to just throw armies of Orruks and Grots into Shyish and hope everything works out. The Order champion is trying to figure out what is going wrong and recently halted his attempts at rebuilding to take the fight to the undead.

Nagash's plans are gaining ground and showing no signs of stopping. He has Arkhan and the Black Disciples making a series of inverted versions of the Black Pyramid. These have been drawing magical energy and acting as lodestones and power amplifiers (they float in the air and there's more than one, so no Skaven tunneling trickery will work this time). Mannfred's going around doing a series of terrorist attacks against particularly powerful enemies of Nagash in the realms. Neferata is using her cults to manipulate society and turn high-ranking people into vampires (and seems to be focused on subverting Azyr). The habits of the various other factions are poised to come back to haunt them (no pun intended): e.g., among Order, all the corpses of innocent people sacrificed by the Daughters of Khaine (who are designated Good Guys by Sigmar despite being mass murdering, hyper-violent cultists only distinguishable from Chaos worshippers by a lack of fun mutations) become skeletons in the armies of Death. One particularly grimdark story (involving the last survivors of a town suffering a zombie apocalypse with the Death champion leading the zombies) has confirmed a horrifying fact: Nagash has found a way to indefinitely contain the souls of Stormcast Eternals (previously, the only other way to contain them was to chuck them into the Realm of Chaos, but they could walk right back out if they survived long enough to find a portal). Although while Nagash can contain them if he kills them personally, if he gets distracted they just go straight back to Sigmar. Still, at this rate, the only beings that seem able to resist the clutches of undeath are Chaos Daemons and Seraphon (Sylvaneth can resist it unless their [[Spirit stone|soul pods]] are destroyed, in which case it's game over).

The whole thing culminates in something only known as the "Necroquake": after Nagash builds the Great Black Pyramid, which this time flies and is upside down, the Skaven STILL manage to ruin Nagash's master plan to raise the dead from all over the Mortal Realms, and fundamentally alter the nature of magic in the process due to the arcane backlash. Now the realm of Shyish has been fundamentally altered. Before, the various after-life areas in the realm would move towards the edge of it as they lost relevance to the mortal populations, until eventually being destroyed. Now, the flow of magic and the irrelevant after-life areas move toward the centre of the realm until they fall into a giant vortex of death magic called the Shyish Nadir, making it an inversion of all the other realms. This is a corruption of Nagash's original plan for all the souls in the cosmos to automatically go to him, and now even he can't handle the insanity at the centre of the realm indefinitely or fully access the souls or magic in the vortex. He can only access the magic in the Nadir for brief periods, otherwise even he risks being ripped apart by it (at least partly because the Nadir itself has been tainted by Chaos thanks to the Skaven, so the magic within it isn’t actually compatible with him despite it being from his own realm). While Nagash hasn't become all-powerful as he had hoped (due to the rats fucking him over ''yet again''), he's still gotten much stronger than before and now has a massive army of angry ghosts at his command.

Yeah, the [[grimdark]] is certainly back.