Asavar Kul

Asavar Kul rose from the Kurgan of the high steppe, a zar among zars, and did what no warlord in living memory had done: he won the favour of all four Powers at once. Rage, design, endurance, and dark splendour were set upon him like seals upon a letter, and the shamans of a hundred tribes read the same message in them — the gods had chosen, and the north must follow. Norscan reaver-kings, Kurgan zars, and Hung war-chiefs whose feuds were older than the Empire's provinces knelt to the Anointed, and the greatest host the Wastes had ever disgorged began to move south.

The Great War Against Chaos began as a rumour of smoke on Kislev's borders and became the nearest the Old World has come to ending. Praag defied the Anointed for a year, and its reward was a fate worse than any sack: when the city finally fell, the raw stuff of Chaos poured through it, and stone, timber, and citizen ran together like tallow, leaving walls that screamed and streets that remembered. Kislev's capital was besieged in turn, ringed by tribes beyond counting, and for a season it seemed the gods' long patience was at last to be repaid in full.

It was not. The Empire, fractured and feuding for centuries, was shamed into unity by Magnus of Nuln, and the relief army he led to the Gates of Kislev broke the siege and the horde together. Asavar Kul died there — by Magnus's own hand, the Imperial chronicles insist, though the sagas of the north tell a dozen prouder versions — and the gods, who do not mourn, let their storm scatter. Yet Kul's failure built more than the Empire's victory did: he proved the tribes could be one, proved the south could be reached, and left behind a crown of legend that the gods have kept warm ever since. The north does not remember him as the Everchosen who lost. It remembers him as the one who showed the way.