The Thondia Campaign

There is a land in Ghur so alive that it swallows the unwary whole, and the long war to settle it is remembered as The Thondia Campaign. Thondia does not merely host its predators — it is one, a continent whose valleys close like jaws and whose rivers run with digestive bile, and to conquer it was to wrestle a living thing that wished the conquerors dead.

The crusading columns of the Cities of Sigmar came in their thousands, dragging the seed-stones of new settlements behind ranks of pikes and cannon. They raised walls only to watch the ground beneath them stir and buck; they dug foundations and struck the roots of a slumbering giant. And always the Orruk Warclans waited in the brush, for the greenskins loved this savage land as a home and fell upon the settlers with gleeful violence wherever a wall showed weakness.

Every mile of Thondia was bought thrice over — once against the beasts, once against the orruks, and once against the land itself. Pioneers were devoured in their sleep by the very fields they had cleared; whole convoys vanished into sudden chasms that closed and healed like wounds. Yet the crusaders pressed on, for Sigmar had decreed that the realms must be reclaimed, and behind every fallen column another marched from the gates of Azyr.

The Thondia Campaign yielded no clean victory, only a scattering of walled settlements clinging to a hostile giant's hide. Each was a wager against the land, and each dawn brought fresh word of one more that the continent had, in the night, quietly eaten.