The End Times: The Death of a World

Every story the Old World ever told was built, in the end, to be undone. The End Times is the name of that undoing — the sprawling, apocalyptic saga that brought the classic Warhammer Fantasy world to a close after decades of tales, killing gods and heroes, drowning kingdoms, and finally shattering the world itself. It is grim even by the standards of a setting that prides itself on grimness, and it is essential, because everything before it was prologue and everything after it is consequence. This is how a world ends.

The Gathering Dark

For all its constant wars, the Old World had always survived. What made the End Times different was that every doom arrived at once. The winds of magic blew wilder than ever recorded; a twin-tailed comet burned in the sky; and in the far north the servants of the Dark Gods gathered in numbers no earlier incursion had ever mustered. Portents piled upon portents. The wise saw the pattern and despaired, for they recognised it: this was not another invasion to be endured but the final reckoning the prophets had always feared, the end toward which the whole history of the world had been quietly sliding.

The North Comes South

The blow fell first and hardest from the Wastes. A champion arose who gathered the favour of all four Dark Gods and was crowned the Everchosen, and behind him marched the greatest host the Warriors of Chaos had ever assembled. From the forests the Beastmen Brayherds rose in answer, and plague and daemon and traitor came with them. Fortress after fortress fell. The northern provinces of the Empire of Man were overrun, its cities burned, its armies ground down in battles that no courage could win. This was Chaos triumphant at last — no longer merely testing the walls but tearing them down.

Nagash Returns

As the living reeled, the dead rose to their own dark purpose. The great necromancer Nagash, architect of all undeath, was restored to the world, and he bent the powers of death toward his own vision of dominion. The rival masters of the grave were forced to his banner: the aristocrats of the Vampire Counts and even the proud dynasties of the Tomb Kings of Khemri were drawn, willingly or not, into his design. For a moment it seemed the undead might be the world's grim salvation against Chaos. But Nagash served only Nagash, and his rise proved to be less a rescue than one more catastrophe layered upon the rest.

The Elves and the Vortex

The elves faced their own ending. The great vortex of Ulthuan — the engine of the High Elf Realms that had drained the world's excess magic for five thousand years — began to fail as Chaos clawed at reality. In desperation the surviving elves, high, wood, and dark alike, were driven together at last, their ancient sundering rendered meaningless by the scale of the disaster. Old enemies fought side by side, betrayals were made and answered, and the greatest heroes of the elven race spent themselves trying to hold back an end that would not be held. Even their incomparable magic was not enough. Nothing was going to be enough.

The Last Stand

Through it all, the mortal realms fought on with a defiance that is the whole tragic point of the Old World. The Empire, the dwarfs of the Dwarfen Mountain Holds, and the knights of Bretonnia made stand after doomed stand, buying hours with lives, holding bridges and passes and city walls against odds that mounted with every hour. Heroes performed feats that in any other age would have turned the war. Here they only delayed it. One by one the great powers of the world were overwhelmed, their leaders slain and their peoples scattered, until at the last only a handful of defenders remained to witness the end they could not prevent.

The World Ends

And then the world simply died. The final defences failed, the sky broke, and the physical world of the Old World was consumed — its continents drowned, its heavens swallowed, its long history brought to a total and deliberate stop. This was no cliffhanger and no reprieve. The setting that generations had marched their regiments across was, completely and on purpose, destroyed. For longtime fans it was a genuine ending, mourned as such, and the sheer audacity of it — a game company unmaking its own world entire — is argued over to this day.

From Ashes, New Realms

But in Warhammer, endings are seldom quite final. From the death of the world, its scattered magic drifted through the void and gathered into new shapes, and from those shapes rose the Mortal Realms of Age of Sigmar, where Sigmar himself — carried out of the dying world — would begin the tale anew as a god-king. The setting we now return to in Warhammer: The Old World is placed generations before all this, in the bright, doomed centuries when the apocalypse was still only a rumour. Knowing how it ends is precisely what lends those earlier days their poignancy. To see the world reborn from these ashes, read our guide to what Age of Sigmar is; to return to the world before its fall, begin with what Warhammer: The Old World is.