Spear of Shadows

Spear of Shadows, published in 2017, launches Josh Reynolds' Eight Lamentations sequence and stands among the most inventive prose to come out of early Age of Sigmar. Its premise reaches back into the setting's mythology: during the Age of Myth, the ancestor smith-god Grungni forged eight terrible weapons capable of slaying gods themselves. Scattered and lost across the Mortal Realms in the ages of ruin that followed, these Eight Lamentations have become the most dangerous artefacts in existence, and the forces of Chaos are hunting them.

The novel follows the search for one such weapon, the Spear of Shadows, a relic that always finds its mark and cannot be denied its prey. To recover it before the enemy does, Grungni assembles a fellowship as unlikely as anything in the Mortal Realms: a Freeguild gunmaster, a hard-bitten sellsword, a fire-obsessed Fyreslayer, and even a vampire whose motives are entirely her own. Reynolds delights in the friction between them, and much of the book's pleasure lies in watching mismatched, self-interested people forced into a common cause none of them entirely trusts.

What sets the story apart is its embrace of the setting's stranger textures. Rather than a clash of massed armies, Spear of Shadows is a quest narrative, a chase across bizarre and beautiful realmscapes, through sky-ports and haunted ruins and the lairs of things older than the current age. Reynolds populates it with the kind of weird, characterful detail that made him one of the range's defining early voices: talking artefacts, scheming minor powers, and the sense of a vast, half-remembered history pressing in at the edges of every scene.

The antagonists give the hunt its urgency. The servants of Chaos pursue the same prize, and Reynolds writes them not as a faceless horde but as distinct, dreadful personalities with their own rivalries and appetites, so that the race for the Spear becomes a contest of characters rather than factions. The result is a story with genuine tension and a real sense that any of the hunters, on either side, might not survive it.

For readers wondering what Age of Sigmar looks like beyond its Stormcast demigods and edition-launching battles, Spear of Shadows is a compelling answer. It is adventure fantasy in the classic mould, a fellowship, a quest, a cursed object, and a villain always one step ahead, transplanted into the endlessly strange geography of the Realms. As the opening of the Eight Lamentations, it promises a saga about weapons that should never be used and the mortals foolish or brave enough to wield them, and it remains one of the most purely enjoyable places to sample Reynolds' distinctive voice.