In the smoke-choked reaches of Aqshy grows the emberdusk, a tree that does not die when it catches light but burns on for centuries, its heartwood turning to living coal. The Staff of Emberdusk was cut from the oldest of these, a rod of wood that is at once charred and eternally aflame, warm to the touch even in the deepest cold.
Battlemages of the Cities of Sigmar covet it, for the staff does not merely conjure fire but commands the moment fire becomes ash — the guttering, killing dusk of a flame. In a mage's grip it can smother a raging pyre to cold cinders, or fan a single spark into a firestorm that walks like a living thing across the battlefield.
Yet the staff hungers, as all fire hungers. Left unattended it draws warmth from those near it, and mages who bear it too long find their hands forever chilled, their breath fogging even before a hearth. The magisters of the free cities pass it between them in careful rotation, for it is whispered that the emberdusk waits, patient as a banked coal, to burn its bearer down to the same grey ash it has made of a thousand foes.
The reliquary continues
