The Soul Wars began when Nagash, Great Necromancer and betrayed god of the dead, enacted a ritual of such black ambition that it cracked the underworlds. The Necroquake rolled outward across every realm — a tidal wave of death-magic that shattered the veil between the living and the departed, and stirred every restless spirit to fury.
From the tempest of amethyst power came the Nighthaunt, legions of shrieking ghosts and gheists dragged screaming from their rest to serve Nagash's endless malice. Behind them marched a grimmer host still: the Ossiarch Bonereapers, constructs of harvested bone crafted by the Mortisan artisans, who levied the bone-tithe from every civilisation and stitched the dead into a perfect deathless army.
The living reeled beneath the assault. Cities that had stood since the storm's first dawning were overrun by phantom legions; realmgates choked with the wailing dead; and Sigmar's Stormhosts found their reforging poisoned by Nagash's grasp upon the souls of the slain. For the first time the God-King's immortals feared the loss of their very essence.
The Soul Wars remade the strategic map of the realms, turning death itself into the paramount power of the age. Nagash's ambition to rule all souls, living and dead, transformed the reconquest into a three-cornered war — Order, Chaos, and Death — with the fragile living caught forever between the storm and the tomb.