Whatever the whims of the gods within the Warp, their Great Game is to mortal beings as a grain of sand is to a torrential flood. Mortals can but drift with the current, praying that the inscrutable divine will does not cast them into the abyss.
On the world of Bard, as the final sentries atop the spires piercing the stratosphere were put to the sword, the Skaven had established total dominion.
Countless Skaven clans fell upon the Hive City in a frenzy of looting. These treacherous vermin immediately descended into fratricide, leaving hundreds of rat-corpses in their wake as they fought over territory, a single warehouse, or even a handful of rotting grain. To the starving survivors, these corpses became the next meal.
Of course, these were merely the inconsequential squabbles of the lesser thrall-clans.
In the upper reaches of the Hive, the clans closest to Clan Skryre had gathered to deliberate on the division of the true spoils.
"The Attack Moon! We... we must have a share! Yes-yes! Slaves, machinery, we provide-give all!"
"The weapons of Clan Kairys are famous! Yes, famous!"
Dozens of Warlords and Chief Warlock Engineers from the major sub-clans under Skryre's hegemony crowded before Ikit Claw, their voices a cacophony of greed.
Inconceivable as it might seem, Clan Skryre and its subsidiary branches operate under a system of "patents." Though the Skaven are a race of backstabbing, duplicitous cowards, they adhere to these patent laws with surprising rigor.
The reason was simple: no Skaven wished to see their own interests undermined. No clan of the Skryre lineage wanted to see the value of their technology or weaponry devalued by unauthorized replication. Thus, Skryre enforced these "House Laws" with brutal efficiency.
Any clan that dared manufacture patented technology without permission faced severe sanctions; the individual rat responsible would suffer punishments beyond imagination.
To suppress upstarts, the Four Great Clans, particularly Skryre and Clan Moulder, had long maintained mutual defense pacts. However, unless Moulder enacted radical change, they were destined to be left in Skryre's warp-dust.
The prize they now contested was the rights to the innumerable patents integrated into the gargantuan, complex systems of the Attack Moon.
To secure a stake in this grand engine of destruction meant an inevitable surge in status and wealth. The weapon's power and potential were so vast that even the main branch of Clan Skryre could not monopolize the patents as they had with the Arks of Omen.
"Silence!" Ikit barked, slamming his Warp-halberd against the floor. He stood tall, his chest swelling with pride as his beady eyes scanned the gaggle of Warlock Engineers through his bulletproof lenses, noting their mixture of avarice and terror.
He relished this authority. In the absence of the Ruler of Skryre, Morskittar, Ikit was the absolute hand of power.
"I have made the allocations! Yes! You will do as commanded: provide your slaves, provide your tech! This great weapon shall be another stone in the foundation of Skryre's supremacy! Yes-yes!"
With a dismissive wave of Ikit's hand, dozens of "well-dressed" Skaven attendants distributed scrolls to the assembled leaders. They were filled with Ikit's specific demands for resources and the assigned roles for each clan.
Unsurprisingly, the Skryre main branch took the lion's share. Specifically regarding the critical planetary geo-engineering, the other clans were barred from the technology itself while being forced to "invest" their own slaves and Warlock Engineers as capital.
Many Skaven were dissatisfied, yet they could only offer subservient grins as they attempted to haggle with Ikit.
Soon, tens of billions of Skaven began burrowing deeper into the planet's crust, installing a bewildering array of erratic mechanical contraptions into the world's already ravaged core.
When the Skaven act, they do so with a desperate, short-sighted urgency. They cared nothing for casualties; the reliability of any system could always be tested with the lives of expendable kin.
While the lords within divided the spoils, the surface told a different story. Having only recently driven out the humans, the Skaven found the Orks returning in force.
After all, the world of Bard had only fallen to the Drukhari because they had exploited the chaos of an ongoing Ork invasion.
Countless Ork Drop-Roks descended from their ramshackle warships. From every trash-can-shaped pod, a tide of Gretchin, Boyz, and Squigs spilled out alongside their rusted vehicles.
In subterranean warfare, the Orks of the 41st Millennium lacked the innate tunneling instincts of their primitive ancestors from the World-That-Was. The high-speed vehicles of the Evil Sunz were ill-suited for the labyrinthine tunnels. On the surface, however, the Greenskins launched massive, thundering Speedwaagh! charges.
Any Skaven who poked their head above ground was annihilated in an instant.
More troublesome than the crimson bikes and Killa Kans were the ramshackle Deffkoptas and Ork Bommers ruling the skies.
It was a strange oversight: despite their technological prowess, even Clan Skryre had never bothered to invent conventional aircraft.
Skaven were creatures of the dark, preferring to lurk beneath the earth and slowly consume the world from within. For the surface, and especially the hated, bright sky, the Skaven had always harbored a deep disdain.
But today was different. Bard was being forged into a Skaven Attack Moon. Every enemy had to be purged; they could not allow Orks to frolic across the surface of a Skaven superweapon.
Yet the Greenskin aerial superiority was absolute. The Skaven were forced into a passive defense, relying on Warplock Jezzails and Ratling Guns for anti-air fire.
It was then that Clan Resilience, newly elevated by the Great Horned Rat as a vassal to the Grey Seer Clan, saw their opportunity to claim glory.
Slinking alongside the new Chief Grey Seer of Skryre, the rat-thing whispered to Wilke Deathmist, a former Archmagos of the Dark Mechanicum and current Warlord of Clan Resilience:
"Yes... now is the time to earn favor! The Skryre-things have no patents for the sky! None!"
The Dark Archmagos, an entity of flesh once human but now transformed into a Skaven, gave a stiff nod. His body was so heavily cybernetic that there was little visible difference between his current verminous form and his previous state.
"A simple... task."
Wilke beckoned his Tech-Priests forward. They would beat Skryre to the punch, inventing an entirely new class of aerial engines.
Weeks later, the Dark Mechanicum, true to their reckless nature and fueled by Skaven aggression, produced blueprints for several aircraft.
Wilke christened them: the Mad-rat Bomber, the Warp-claw Fighter, and the Snap-tail Chopper.
The core philosophy of these machines was: "Crude and Lethal." Aside from engines and ordnance, they possessed no protection whatsoever. The Mad-rat Bomber was little more than a massive rocket booster with wings and a payload of volatile explosives strapped to the exterior.
Whether the pilot survived the flight was never a factor in the design.
Upon seeing the designs, the other Skaven were unanimous in their approval. What the Skaven needed was mass-produced, high-impact violence. If the design had been sophisticated or safe, no clan would have bothered to buy it.
"Yes-yes! I shall market-sell them at once! Skryre has too much wealth, too much! It is our turn now-now!" The Grey Seer let out a greasy, high-pitched cackle.
This was the will of the Grey Seer Clan. Skryre's influence was expanding too rapidly; it was time to curb their arrogance.