Character Description Compendium: The Cohors Nausicae/ The Faultless

[MolotovKraken]

With the members of the Third legion and their allies spread through out swathes of books it can at times be quite a task to hunt down the descriptions of them, be it for art, conversions/kitbashes, lore discussions or any number of things. As such my hope with this thread is to make things a bit easier for fellow fans of the legion looking for such details.

To start things off I shall begin with the Cohors Nausicae / The Faultless warband of Lucius the Eternal in their 40k iteration.


Sword slave-
The slave made a simpering, choked sound, its lips quivering around the hilt of the sword sheathed in its throat. Its master took the blade’s grip in his clawed gauntlet, sparing its bearer the briefest of glances, which drew a gasp of elation from its bleeding lips. Without the daemonic essence locked within the weapon to sustain it, the vassal’s abused flesh withered. It grew pale and ashen, and webs of dark veins branched out across its trembling face. The figure flicked his wrist in irritation and severed the slave’s head.

Summoned marines-
The severed limbs and corpses trembled, riming with frost as they quivered and shook in the freezing air. Boils bloomed from the stump of an arm, swelling and expanding like cancerous tumours. They continued to grow, darkening to the colour of spoiled meat. Each section of corpse reacted the same, budding and growing. Torsos sprouted new arms and legs. Heads grew bodies, and orphaned limbs generated new flesh sheathed in frozen brackish slime. Blood and mucus wept from the walls, and the flames within the coal pits undulated in the full spectrum of unnatural colours. Lucius smiled, his serpent’s tongue tasting the blood running from his nose as the ritual continued. The emergent forms coalesced. Armour of sable and mauve hardened like carapace. Weapons materialized, clenched in mailed fists, and screams tore from the grilles of daemonic helms from the agony of the summoning. With a howling gale, the fires in the feasting hall were extinguished. Twelve Chaos Space Marines, fallen angels of the Emperor’s Children bound in service to Lucius the Eternal, rose to stand around their lord.

Lieutenant Karonatius-
Karonatius bore twisted armour of jagged violet teeth that wept molten gold. Karonatius slammed a fist against the defiled imperial eagle on his breastplate, its skeletal wings seeming to twitch with anguished life. He wielded a scimitar, its blade screaming as a power field enveloped it in killing light.

Krysithius-
His face was painted in lilac and gold leaf. He wielded a sword. His teeth were filed and silver.

Krysithius sighed as broken flesh tore and squelched beneath the claws of his boots. Twisting his painted features of gold and indigo in a snarl, Krysithius cast aside his melancholy thoughts. The crystal claws of his gauntlets clicked against the hilt of his sword in anticipation. The swordsman grinned with pink teeth.

His sword was gone. He reached down to draw the gladius he carried from the scabbard strapped to his thigh, only to find it lost as well, torn free in the crash. With a grimace he drew his bolt pistol, a weapon he found infinitely distasteful in comparison to the purity of a blade, and racked its slide. he moved to kneel beside Ajennion’s body, reaching for the elegant sabre still clutched in the fallen legionary’s fist. He was slowly peeling his brother’s fingers back, prising the sword from his death grip, when the fallen warrior’s other hand seized his wrist in a clash of ceramite. Krysithius finally pulled the sabre from Ajennion’s grasp. This cannot go on. The thought rang in Krysithius’ mind as he dragged a hand through his hair. His fingers grew slick with blood and oil, catching on shards of bone and ceramite that matted his locks. Not all of which had belonged to the World Eaters. He picked a sliver of purple and gold from his scalp, peering down to see the symbol of the III Legion in the palm of his hand, shattered and charred. Without conscious thought, his gauntlet curled into a fist, crushing the shard. The icy light of a power field bathed Krysithius in an instant of stark light, his face hard and set. Krysithius’ other hand shot out, flinging a fist-sized sphere at Lucius. The sphere exploded in a burst of sound and blinding light. Lucius grinned as the blind grenade’s detonation tore at his face. Krysithius did not hesitate, drawing the gladius sheathed at his shin.

Cadarn-
The renegade Executioner stood bareheaded, leaning upon the haft of his axe, his patchwork face of burned flesh and scars set in a look of amused detachment. Lucius to glimpse his hulking comrade through the tumult. The purple-and-blue lacquer of the warrior’s shoulder pauldron was gouged and stripped away, laid bare to unrepentant gold and the twin axe icon that betrayed his former heraldry.

Cadarn had resorted to tearing the limb from a beast covered in gnarled exoskeleton, and had wielded it like a bludgeon against the past three waves that had been set loose against them.

Olivaw, hierarch of the Diadem’s delegation from the Dark Mechanicum-
Present aboard since the days of the Legion.

Olivaw’s creations-
Direnc stood in the aisle of a cramped, tubular chamber. Flanking him to either side were the silent forms of machine men, locked in restraint thrones. Their bodies were horrific amalgamations of flesh and silver, beyond the clumsy crudeness of combat servitors. These were lithe, contoured creations of smooth, flexible design. The lascarbines, segmented whips and blades that replaced their arms at the elbow appeared as though they had been born to them. Each was different, an individual rendition of the same vision to inseparably meld the organic with the mechanical. Direnc could not see where their bodies of blood and bone ended, and where the machine began.

He shrank down, pressing himself against the shins of a mechanical simulacrum of a perfect human female, as the heavy tread of ceramite boots passed by him. The soft scrape of fingertips trailed behind the softly clanging footfalls, from the fringes of a cloak fashioned of sensory organs. Noses gathered Direnc’s scent, while bloodshot eyes stared upon him in twitching unison.

From the other attack pods came boarding parties of sleek semi-organic automatons, the heretek Olivaw’s fusions of warp-blessed flesh and tainted machinery. They flowed into the veins of the Elypsis like poison. The directives and primal impulses buzzing within them guided them through the ship, leading unerringly to positions that cut off every passage leading to and from the command deck and bridge.

Cultists-
The frenzied cultists, their abused faces swathed in kaleidoscopic silks or flayed of skin, broke their twisted bodies the space wolf wielding rusted knives and gnashing teeth. What was recognizable as having ever been human was covered in blasphemies and entreaties to the fell entities of the warp whose province was pleasure and pain beyond reality’s remit.

Young maiden-
He looked to the next one. She was young, a maiden not long beyond childhood. The musk. Its ecstasy promised to envelop him, and take him far away from here. Shaking, he sucked it into his lungs. The world went away, and Direnc began dancing. The girl at his feet rose to meet him, her chains melting into an exquisite dress of silk and flowers. Direnc felt the softness of his frock’s material as it brushed against his skin. A curl of auburn hair tumbled between the girl’s eyes as they twirled, belying the illusion cast by her powdered wig.

Illusion woman-
A group of slender figures danced and frolicked through the meadow, the silver silk of their robes flowing behind them like shimmering angels’ wings. One of their number was running and skipping to join them, sparing Direnc a glance over her shoulder with bright green eyes. The finger, slender and pale as milk, withdrew its touch. The only thing in existence was he, and the pair of green eyes that swallowed his mind. They were flawless, hypnotic and the most purely beautiful things he had ever seen. The girl turned, her auburn hair dancing a gentle orbit around her blushing face, and she darted forwards up the hillside.

His eyes caught the wan impression of rows of amniotic tanks lining the walls. Foetal forms filled their sloshing insides, connected to horrid machines that pumped and harvested pale fluids from their bodies and brains, feeding them into containers of vivid, rose-coloured liquid. The slave’s eyes settled over one of the tanks, just before the servitor pulled him from the chamber. The bony husk of a woman floated limply in a wash of chemicals, her limbs curled to her body in uselessness. Her eyes were half open, their once vibrant colour drained away by the machines along with the rest of her as they stared into nothing. They were green.

Vaust the Bull-

Sylsa-

Janus-

Chosen of Lucius-


Terminators-

 

[MolotovKraken]

Cesare-
The corridor was empty, save for a lone warrior in armour of silvered pearl veined with lilac who stood waiting for him on the other side. The warrior reached up, his gauntlets bulky with drills, probes and bladed instruments designed to accelerate both the mending and rending of flesh. The pop of gorget seals went unheard in the clamour, as did the serpentine hiss of equalising air pressure as he lifted his helmet free. Cesare’s face was flawless, devoid of the scars that his brothers had earned in battle or inflicted by their own hands. He swept back a shock of dark hair from eyes of deep amber, his pale features set as always in a cold and morose stare. The Apothecary appeared impossibly youthful for one who could claim the truest extent of their former Legion’s namesake. The children of the last noble families of Europa were laid at the Emperor’s feet, Cesare was one of those children. He had watched the Legion fall, rise and fall again. He had fought against the Laer, and taken part in the purges upon the killing fields of Isstvan. He had elicited the screams of the Throneworld as the other Legions hurled themselves against the walls of a cause that had been lost long before the siege had ever begun. He bore witness to what the Emperor’s Children had once been, and what they had now become. A low sound issued from the Apothecary’s vox-grille, not quite a snarl, not quite a sigh. He reached down to his webbing, producing a handful of thin vials from a bandolier across his chest. The Palatine Blades leaned forwards at the sight of the pale violet fluid within them, their restraint harnesses creaking as they snapped taut. He had been losing it since Skalathrax, since Harmony, perhaps even since Terra. A solemn act even in the shining days of the Legion’s height, now the most sacred of the Apothecary’s duties to the fallen, had degraded from reverent ritual to nightmare. Another needless nail hammered into the coffin of the Emperor’s Children. The narthecium gauntlet on Cesare’s arm shivered, emitting a chittering insectile click from its integrated auspex. To the Apothecary’s disgust, the gauntlet had long since ceased to be a purely mechanical thing. The saws and vibro-scalpels of his narthecium whined and scraped against the charred ceramite. He turned his head, seeing a giant clad in war-plate of shining pearl webbed with veins of deep purple standing over him. One of the giant’s hands was a gigantic gauntlet of drills and cutting tools. The other held a boxy silver pistol that was bigger than Direnc’s head. The Apothecary had arrived armed. His bolt pistol filled his fist, loaded and primed to fire. the Apothecary relented as well, mag-locking the pistol to his thigh. The demigod’s snarling helm was staring directly at him. Crystal-blue eye lenses flashed as they studied Direnc. The immense legionary rose in a waspish purr of armour servos, leaving the frail man to blubber and sob in his chains. A pale face looked down at Direnc as the Space Marine pulled his helmet free. It was somehow even more cold and inhuman than the ceramite mask had been. Eyes of amber shone in the dark, a predator’s eyes, dissecting the bound slave like any other laboratory specimen.

Lab creature-
It was inhumanly tall and thin, a hairless androgynous thing sheathed in a body glove of shining black rubber. It peered down at him, smiling a smile that was too wide with a mouth that had too many teeth. The figure raised a hand up to Direnc, its soft flesh pale as milk. Its palm was open, holding a small mound of pinkish powder.

Prisoner in lab-
His pearl armour buzzed and snarled as he worked, crouched over an emaciated man locked into the same bondage as Direnc. The top of the man’s crown was cut open, the flesh pinned back and skull cut away to reveal the glistening red lump of his brain. The demigod loomed over it, sinking into the pulsing mass of flesh with savage implements and narrow silver probes. The man was laughing. Strings of thick drool spun from his desiccated lips as he doubled over with ecstatic joy. The demigod adjusted the probes slightly. The man’s laughter ceased, his head sinking as sobs of absolute despair racked his bony spine. Tears streamed down his consumptive cheeks, dripping from toothless lips as he moaned in utter, fathomless sadness. Direnc could not tear his horrified gaze from the man, until another flash of pain burst from his wrist.

Clarion, lost one-
The child stared down at the daemon world, eyes of black and gold narrowed in a porcelain angel’s face. She sat upon a throne of onyx and silver built to accommodate a legionary’s dimensions in the cool expanse of the Diadem’s bridge, glaring at the curdled sphere that dominated the oculus viewscreen. The child sighed softly. The light of tactical hololiths reflected like moonlight from skin the colour of fresh snow. Only the barest hints of violet were visible branching underneath it, and they twisted as her face stiffened in an expression of refined irritation. Clarion turned, her gold eyes flicking back in a sidelong glance. Clarion ran a dark tongue across her teeth. He froze, convulsing, a thin trickle of blood and brain matter sliding from the centre of his left eye where a slender talon of purple bone had punched in clear through his skull. With a flick of her wrist, Clarion withdrew the talon just as quickly, the claw melting back into the soft ivory of her finger.


Clarion writhed on the seat, the soft violet tint of her flesh soured into jaundiced amber. It appeared as though the child were drowning in thin air. Clarion stood upright on her throne, the flaring discharges of weapons fire drawing out the violet branches of the veins in her too-pale cheeks.

Incitatus-
A lithe serpentine creature caressed the arm of her throne, rising from avian back-jointed legs and tasting the fragrant air with flicks of a dark tongue from its long tapered snout. The daemonic creature cooed in subservience, its sealskin flesh rippling in swirling waves of purple and blue. It circled for a moment, its snout bobbing from side to side, before it lowered itself down to rest beneath her feet. The bipedal daemon at Clarion’s feet hissed, jabbing at the towering figure with its barbed tongue. It gave out a shriek as the figure crushed it to pulp beneath a silver-shod hoof.

Muffled snaps and slick gushes issued as the remains shuddered and drew together. They swelled, severed arteries reconnecting, contused flesh being drained of haemorrhages. Once a crushed ruin, within moments Incitatus returned to resplendent form. The daemonic creature trilled.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Luminous, Keeper of secrets-
The massive cowled figure that stood beside the child’s throne. A rustling of dark robes drew her attention to beside her throne as the towering figure moved. A sinewy arm of deep violet, bulging with bands of iron-hard muscle, raised a silver blade from behind the mantle. The bridge rang with the pure, almost musical clang of steel as it embedded into the deck, directly in front of Clarion’s throne. The robed figure moved to loom over the child, the barest hints of a twisted face staring down from the depths of the cowl. The bipedal daemon at Clarion’s feet hissed, jabbing at the towering figure with its barbed tongue. It gave out a shriek as the figure crushed it to pulp beneath a silver-shod hoof. Four arms appeared, sheathed in bulging veins. They ended in claws, barbed talons and wriggling tentacle-like whips. The fourth bore a hand that was frighteningly human, wrapped about the haft of the sword it had plunged into the deck before Clarion. It crouched on back-jointed legs, hooves grinding against the ground in painful shrieks of scraping steel, as it stared down with a hideous bovine face crowned by a nest of spiralling horns. Luminous raised its tentacles like a cluster of snakes, their barbed tips drawing close to caressing Clarion’s face but holding just shy of touching. Luminous leaned down, drawing eyes like black diamonds level with the sharp gold of Clarion’s. The daemon reared back, standing to its full towering height. Iron screamed as Luminous ripped its sword free, the silver blade throbbing with squirming multicoloured runes. The shells blew fist-sized craters in its pale silken flesh, spraying gouts of sickly-sweet foulness over the bridge.


Diadem daemons-
Every one of the twelve hundred and ninety-six statues, their gaze eternally locked upon the Diadem’s bridge, was gone. The entire passageway was filled with repulsive, sensual figures. The instant of light glistened from silky, lithe flesh, from seductively inviting grins, and from the gnarled surfaces of monstrously jagged claws. They were things of glass, silver and stone no longer. Events had drawn them down from their vigil upon the battlements of the Diadem. Now they were in the corridor, standing between the raiders and the bridge. Its grinning form was given frightful animation as it gestured invitingly with a clawed pincer. Fear radiated from their stick-thin forms, carrying over the air like perfume for the smiling things watching them. He looked up at the leering daemonettes, silver witchfire boiling from his azure eye-lenses.

Talon Queen-
Her warlike, avian form split the sky in a scream of ramjet fury. Her hull of coral and shining platinum shimmered in the warp light, glistening like the scales of a fish leaping from the surface of the deep ocean. Across her nose, carved and tapered to the razor sharpness of a raptor’s beak, a hundred lifetimes of victories were inscribed over her skin in elegant Chemosian script. A sonnet of worlds put to the flame, Legions shattered and glories won within the material universe and beyond. One name stood out amongst the ledgers of mythic triumphs and vanquished foes, one name repeated again and again in shining gold. Talon Queen. Her spinal battle cannon roared. . Crackling spears of energy snapped out from the tips of her wings, fusing the daemonic soil into iridescent slicks, crystallising over dying warriors as though they were insects preserved within amber. , the occupants of the Talon Queen had crawled out from her crew bay to hang from beneath her downswept wings. The venerable Thunderhawk swung wide overhead, bleeding her forward momentum with hissing thrusters in her nose, while servitor-manned ventral turrets spat bursts of fire into the World Eaters from the barrels of heavy bolters. Piercing stablights sliced through the gale.

Talon Queen was controlled by a writhing mass of flesh conjoined with esoteric machines. The bodies, minds and souls of twenty of the III Legion’s finest mortal pilots were fused together into a quivering lump of twitching meat, thrumming clockwork and jerking limbs, combining their skill and the ferocity of their spirits to control the ancient gunship through air and void. The pilots had duelled in sweeping aerial tournaments for such an honour, their apotheosis a gift from Olivaw. Lucius placed a clawed hand upon the oily flesh of the Talon Queen’s pilot, stroking along a marbled seam where one body ended and another began. It shivered at his touch, rippling with uneven gooseflesh as he withdrew his hand with a smile. The Talon Queen pointed her razor beak towards it, and advanced to land.

Direnc-
Direnc clutched the length of rusted iron pipe to his barrel chest, His large, muscular frame ensured that he could keep himself alive as well as haul the fuel lines and ammunition hoppers used to rearm and refuel the masters’ war machines housed in the primary landing bay. He stood a head taller than most of the other men and women around him, but he was still a child in comparison to one of the legionaries. Direnc smashed into the overseer with a brutal headbutt. He felt his nose break, mashing flat to his face in a starburst of black, He looked down at his left hand. There was nothing there, nothing but a knob of gnarled flesh at his wrist, encrusted in a thick black film of dried blood and ash. The humanity he had been born into was a crude, unwashed thing, swollen into brutishness by alchemical muscle enhancers and starved of natural light and warmth. His hand had not been restored as it appeared in the garden. Yet something had indeed taken its place. A writhing cluster of glistening tentacles sprouted from his wrist, slapping and coiling against the arm of his restraint harness. Each was studded with hardened warts and sucking lamprey mouths filled with rings of translucent teeth.

The bulkhead parted, framing the cowering figure of a slave at the threshold. The man’s eyes, visible behind the thick goggles of his environmental suit, were wide in horror. Those who now carried Direnc’s chains denied him all but the thinnest gasps of the divine musk fed into his respirator. He produced a simple machete the length of Direnc’s arm, a hacking blade that would not have appeared out of place in the grip of a death world jungle primitive. Deep blue fire burned from his eyes, spilling out from his screaming mouth to envelop him. What had once been a man was scoured away, reduced to a vessel of bone and meat for an ancient intelligence born from aeons of mortal suffering. The daemon hung suspended above the Composer. Its limbs spread out until they were cruciform, locking beneath invisible chains as the sorcerer bound it to his will. It made no effort to resist his mastery. The feast of Direnc’s anguish wholly occupied its attentions.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Diadem crew-
The deck officer cleared his throat, involuntarily smoothing the faded white of his uniform.

They would pause briefly to eviscerate the huddled forms of mortals they found, encased in bulky environment suits to resist the madness of their surroundings. The raiders detested the shells of dense rubber worn by the mon-keigh immensely. The muzzled helms that covered their faces muffled their screams away almost to nothing.

A shoal of boarding torpedoes embedded themselves along the superstructure of the crimson frigate, disgorging their cargo into its sparking, flame-ridden innards. Mutants, scoured from the warring clans that populated the Diadem’s lower decks, charged aboard in crude armour of mail and cracked leather, bearing crooked axes and beaten heirloom autoguns in their claws. They brayed and stomped with iron-shod hooves, killing the few souls who sought to oppose them and herding the rest into bondage.

Clarions servants-
The child plucked a translucent sliver of candied fruit from a gilded dish offered by another prostrated servant.

The harpists surrounding Clarion’s throne froze, their gazes locked inrapturous horror at the grand daemon looming over them. Their fingers hung over the hair strings of their instruments, as if they had been cast into stone by the thing’s presence.

The Diadem, The huntress-
She was an elegant spear of platinum and bleached mauve, a cityscape of fluted towers and cathedrals sculpted into a knife’s edge. Her hull was pockmarked and blackened by ceaseless war stretching back to the killing grounds of Isstvan, yet these scars did nothing to diminish the beauty of her sublimely regal form. The huntress angled her bladed prow, adorned with the anguished effigy of a crucified eagle rendered in blemished gold, towards the Pit Cur, and leapt forwards on swift engines into attack range. while point-defence batteries along the hull of the purple-and-silver ship lit the void with streams of tracer fire. ancient strike cruiser. the heliotrope strike cruiser. The muscles of his face twitched from the vibrations, and his eyes watered as they adjusted to the blinding barrage of multicoloured light stabbing out across the corridor. Dreadclaw aboard. The view ground downwards, and she watched the spine of the Diadem stretch out ahead of her in all of its gothic, crenellated glory. Adorning the tip of every spire, every tower and minaret stood an army of statues waiting in a silent, airless vigil. They were all of roughly the same shape, sinuous creatures of slender and seductive lines, while at the very same moment horrifying, pregnant with the promise of untold suffering delivered by oversized claws and barbed talons. Some reflected the unholy light of the Eye with sheens of bright silver, while others offered a dim mirror from bodies of smoked glass or creamy marble. Many crouched like perched gargoyles, most stood to their full, spindly height, but every one of the nearly thirteen hundred statues stared unblinking at the Diadem’s bridge. At Clarion. Just long enough for him to glimpse the sight of a massive bladed prow forged of bleached mauve and pearlescent silver in the instant before it struck his ship. The men, women and mutants who populated the command deck of the Diadem were the absolute cream of former III Legion officers and highly specialised slaves taken in raids by the Cohors Nasicae. Those who were found to be incapable of performing their duties to her standards did not live long enough to experience the extent of her displeasure, being either killed on sight or discarded below to be used as raw materials for the fanatical tortures of the Composer or the Apothecary Cesare’s experiments. Every one of the twelve hundred and ninetysix statues, their gaze eternally locked upon the Diadem’s bridge, was gone. There was no room for pleasure in the cold sea of Clarion’s dread. The Diadem was a bladed city in space, a vessel more than thrice the scale of the Elypsis. The outcome of a warship of her size descending upon a frigate was a foregone conclusion.

It's hull of bleached purple and pearlesent silver. 1296 statues stand in silent repose, the lithe musculatures and savage claws of their inert forms shine in the light. Eyes of platinum, flawless marble and smoked glass stare unblinking.

 

[Firebrand]

This is amazing, well done!

I definitely need a Vaust The Bull.

 

[MolotovKraken]

The Composer-
Psyker of the warband that carried a staff. The derision in his tone at odds with the beatific faceplate of his silver helm.


A figure appeared, his form lithe and svelte in spite of the bulk of his Legiones Astartes power armour. Robes of cream and iridescent silver hung over the suit of curved ceramite, its hue continuously shifting between bleached lilac to rose to deep, fathomless black. He was bareheaded, a horned helm resting in the crook of one arm, its mask a flawless face frozen in a gasp of beatific joy rendered in shining platinum. A staff of horn and black crystal filled his other hand, topped with a cluster of skulls dissected and exploded only to be reknit into a single, horrific whole of mismatched eyes and gaping jaws. , his pale features adopting the very image of conciliatory contrition. The sorcerer looked away for a moment, his shining eyes suddenly hooded and tired, thoughtful in contemplation. His smile bloomed further, the guttering torchlight glittering from his diamond teeth. The sorcerer of the Emperor’s Children vomited a stream of viscous sludge onto his boot, before keying the vox-bead in his gorget’s armoured collar. The light of torches revealed him as another of the demigods, although this one wore the trappings of sorcery upon his ancient war-plate. A dark staff clicked as he stepped down each stair, and the sorcerer smiled at Direnc with a face that was sickening in its bizarre, androgynous beauty. The Composer lowered his crested helm into place, his mask reflecting the eternal darkness of the void. His cloak stirred as he clasped it around his shoulders with silver chains. The material twitched with the movement, stitched together from the palms, eyes, lips, ears and noses of a hundred men and women. A tapestry of merged fingertips brushed across the floor from its hem as the raiment of senses fed pure stimuli into the sorcerer’s mind. Starbursts of cold agony ripped across Afilai as both he and the daemon were engulfed in a gale of silver lightning.

Blood spilled out from the bottom of the mask, where it had flowed in a steady torrent from the Composer’s eyes, ears, nose and mouth to pool around his collar seal. It pattered down his breastplate, staining his robes and triggering whorls of esoteric colour across the fabric. The cloak of senses around his shoulders twitched, its fringes scorched and blackened. The sorcerer chuckled, a frightful noise from behind his shining mask. With a sigh, the Composer produced a vial from a leather pouch on his belt. He opened the vial, emptying a measure of fine, violet-pink powder into his palm. Bolts of coruscating green energy smashed against the kine shield the Composer summoned around himself in shimmering thunderclaps. The dome sprang into being at less than a thought. It required the effort anyone else would have required to blink their eyes. He let his consciousness wash over the newfound knowledge he had torn from Hakith’s psyche and etched onto his own. The Composer sank down into a crouch with a snarl of ancient armour. He drew his joyful silver mask level with Direnc.

The Composer nodded. He stroked a flask hanging from his belt, where the bound essence of what had once been a tortured slave was held.

The composer’s room-
The august circular chamber had been designed to accommodate the Diadem’s delegate from the Navis Nobilite, and indeed it had acted as the home for a scion of Terra’s great Navigator houses for the first several centuries she had sailed the void. Lucius came to a halt before an ornate gateway. Stretching to twice a Space Marine’s height, its surface of intricately engraved platinum had long lost its lustre. Blooms of soft corrosion teased over etchings of great birds of prey, their intertwined wings of lightning and balefire now dulled by a sheen of ashen grey. Despite the assault of time and ill-maintenance, the exquisite craftsmanship of the artisans in depicting the noble creatures was still starkly present in the flickering light of ensconced torches set into the wall on either side. Men and women lined the walls, clutched in the grip of horrid, spider-like constructs of crystal and tarnished silver. Their limbs, hair and, in some cases, their skin had all been removed, leaving them as little more than twitching husks of abused meat and terrified, pleading eyes that shone wetly in the rose-hued light of torches. Worms of jade energy stitched over their raw flesh, provoking screams of pain that impossibly grew louder and more agonised as their suffering was continually eclipsed by fresh torment. The constructs moved to different sockets across the walls in a chilling dance, arraying their captives’ howling bodies in shifting sickening patterns. They formed disorienting runes that itched at Lucius’ flesh and brought stinging black tears welling in his eyes. The mouths of the victims, pinned back and stretched open by the machines’ dagger claws, bled frost and corposant as they fed their ceaseless cries into the staring faces of elaborate masks of porcelain and tarnished gold. Conduits of tubing trailed from the painted grins of the masks, glittering with warp frost as they linked and intertwined like a spider’s web around the spiralling tower at the centre of the chamber. The teeth-aching thrum of standard Legiones Astartes power armour was a whisper in comparison to the massive suit, enough to send ripples through the pinkish flames of the torches and rattle the skulls above its shoulders. The helm ground up on snarling fibre bundles, its eyes flashing a brilliant ice blue as they settled upon Lucius. The staff clicked against the polished stone steps as the figure made his way down the staircase that wound around the edge of the tower. In his wake, the heavy blast shutters on the outside of the chamber peeled back into their housings, revealing the poison currents of Eyespace through a dome of crystalflex. The wailing spiked as the raw empyrean washed over the wretches covering the walls, dragging their torture to new heights and flaying away whatever pittances of sanity they still clung to as they screamed. He danced lightly down the steps of the tower, gently placing his helm upon a silver pulpit that stood halfway down its length. He gestured up towards the crystal dome that was all that separated them from the roiling currents of the warp storm’s fury.

From a throne at the tip of his spire, surrounded by the writhing forms of his supplicants, the Composer stared into the tempest. Blind hooded acolytes stood upon the spiral stairs, waving incense orbs and droning out sonorous chants from augmetic throats. Waves of brutal psychic energy lashed at the Diadem’s hull, peeling around her Geller field, which just about encapsulated the high spinal tower the sorcerer sat within. The crystal dome was bared to the madness, its shields retracted. Tortured things of prismatic fire clawed at the Composer from beyond the Geller field, the maddening shrieks they emitted jarring and clashing with the chilling screams of his slaves. To him, it was music. The notes of the Great Song guided the Composer, a lullaby and triumphant call as transcendent as the very heartbeat of Slaanesh Himself. Consoles exploded behind the Composer. Jets of sparks immolated the servitors socketed into them in fountains of neon rain. Klaxons began caterwauling, joining their mechanical screams to those of flesh. The Geller field was seconds from overloading. The capsule of protective light sparked and buckled around the Composer, straining to hold back the surging miasma.

From a throne at the tip of his spire, surrounded by the writhing forms of his supplicants, the Composer stared into the tempest. Blind hooded acolytes stood upon the spiral stairs, waving incense orbs and droning out sonorous chants from augmetic throats. The crystal dome was bared to the madness, its shields retracted. Tortured things of prismatic fire clawed at the Composer from beyond the Geller field, the maddening shrieks they emitted jarring and clashing with the chilling screams of his slaves.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Message holder-
A buzzing chitter arose from the top of the crystal dome. An insectoid construct emerged, not unlike the mechanisms clutching the wailing slaves who lined the walls. It stuttered down to the pulpit on chattering suspension orbs, clutching the frail body of an elderly man in its pincers of smoked glass. The man was frozen in the midst of a terrible scream, his worn and lined features locked in an image of pure terror. Silver thread was pulled taut across eye sockets made vacant when he had been ritually blinded as a child. The stitching gleamed in the torchlight, glittering behind a field of sorcerous energy like diseased smoke, caging the man within a moment in time. The Composer nodded once, and the construct lowered down before Lucius and Cesare. Its pincers spread wide with a sibilant rush, dispelling the field of psychic energy and dropping the man to the deck with a dull crash of bony limbs. He lay there, shivering, drawing shallow, rasping breaths through blackened teeth. Lucius stared down at the stricken astropath sprawled at his feet. He pinched his nose with a sigh of impatience. The strands of his lash uncoiled from one another, questing the barbed hooks at their tips over the psyker’s prone form of their own accord. The astropath shot into the air, his lungs straining with a rattling wheeze. His back arched, breath feathering out in freezing puffs as he began to levitate. The misty clouds of breath darkened into ribbons of oil-black smoke, sinking and coiling around his body like a nest of waking serpents. His voice began to break, stuttering as his vocal cords tore. An incomprehensible torrent of babbling gibberish poured from the bleeding lips of the astropath. Broken teeth tumbled to clatter against the deck, rimed in blood-ice and scraps of crumbled gum. His body alternated between thrashing and locking in place, his limbs bending in obscenely unnatural directions as the bones snapped and stabbed through his waxen flesh. With a great heave of his emaciated frame, the astropath vomited a cloud of hissing black ooze into the air. The tar-like substance boiled and spun, compacting into a sphere. Lucius tore his gaze from the ghastly scene for a moment, seeing the rapt joy writ upon the Composer’s face as he watched the act unfold. The sphere of bubbling filth stretched and flattened into a disc, hanging in the air by a trickle of the vile fluid that sprouted from the astropath’s rambling lips. Its surface grew flat and still, like the face of a black mirror, before gaunt, unpleasant features started to protrude from it. After a handful of heartbeats, a haggard countenance had fully emerged from the disc of fizzing midnight. It was human, but only in the broadest and most generous of terms. It clashed with impressions of the god-like power of one elevated to the ranks of the Legiones Astartes, while simultaneously bearing the sallow, malnourished aspect of a skull dipped in clotted wax. Even in the warped simulacrum of dark sludge, though, one feature was undeniable. His eyes. Twin orbs set into sunken sockets stared unblinking from a hatchet-faced brow. They glittered with dark amusement, an insatiable hunger for knowledge, and something more. More than anything, they displayed cruelty. An endless capacity to inflict unimaginable suffering smouldered in the depths of those eyes, a willingness to sacrifice any and all necessary to achieve his own ends. When the face spoke, it spoke through the astropath’s lips, though its own voice was heard as surely as if the man stood before Lucius in the Composer’s sanctum himself. The face shuddered, losing its shape as it sank back into the churning sludge. Filthy water began to trickle and stream from the astropath’s body as the psychically charged ice caking it thawed. With a gurgling hiss, the face melted away into the dripping glob of blackness, leaving nothing behind but the lingering impression of relentless, unkind eyes boring into space. The blackness vanished in an instant, collapsing into a gust of sparking ozone and foul-smelling smoke. Untethered from the unnatural energies keeping him aloft, the astropath collapsed. The body of the tortured psyker exploded as it struck the deck. The flesh boiled away to ash, stuck fast in filthy patches to a shattered skeleton. His scream lingered on the air for several moments after he died, before crumbling away into the others.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Afilai-
Taller and broader than the composer. The bulky servos of his cobbled-together Terminator armour clanked as he brought his storm bolter to bear. Dirty light drooled from the bloodied talons of his lightning claw.

A monolith of purple ceramite war-plate stood in silence at the foot of the twisting tower. The deep royal lacquer was edged in shining gold that had become darkened to bronze by patina. Racks of sharpened lances rose from its shoulders, heaped with impaled skulls. The shattered helm of a First Legion champion held pride of place, the scorched green trophy still bearing half of its ornamental crest, a single wing of blackened ivory that curved elegantly from its temple. The wargear was asymmetrical and mismatched, the tell-tale of the scavenger. Each individual plate bore a different name in golden Chemosian, revealing the identities of the III Legion elite who had been the original bearers of the immense pieces of Tactical Dreadnought armour. They had been heroes of the Emperor’s Children all, murdered by the greed of the one who now wore it as his own. The Terminator’s great tusked helm was bowed, the crystal-blue eyelenses dark and cast down at the floor. A chuckle like tank treads crunching over gravel issued from the tusked helm of the Terminator. The Terminator spread his arms wide, the lightning talons tipping the fingers of his left hand bathing in a flash of azure lightning. The golden serrated blade slung beneath the twin-linked barrels of the Terminator’s combi-bolter swung down and away from Lucius, the loose belt of mass-reactive shells hanging beneath its ammunition box clattering against the dense plate of the hunched behemoth’s thigh. Afilai gave another rumbling chuckle from behind his tusked helm. A monster stood over him, clad in a mismatched suit of purple ceramite. The thing was massive, even larger than the demigod Apothecary. He carried a gigantic double-barrelled firearm in one fist, the other ending in a series of electrified talons that hissed and spat lightning as they scraped against each other. Skulls and the helms of demigods from armies Direnc had never seen rattled from the spiked golden trophy racks that rose from his shoulders. The slave recognised the armour. He had seen a small number of the priceless suits in his service to the Eaters of Worlds. A pair of crackling sapphire eye-lenses stared down at Direnc from the monstrous Terminator’s tusked helm, the same eye-aching blue of the energy that webbed his lightning claw. The bulkhead rumbled open, framing a hulking, hunched figure that stood in the frenzied light of the corridor beyond like some mechanical primate god. The immense suit of ancient Terminator armour he wore growled like a tank’s engine, snarling with every movement. A pair of eye-lenses flashed in blistering blue, shining in the dark.

Afilai had never worn Terminator armour in the days of the Crusade, nor had he during the bloody years of the Cthonian Failure. He had never ascended to the hallowed ranks of the Phoenix Guard, the primarch’s own huscarls, and been bestowed with the priceless war-plate reserved only for the Legion’s elite. All this was denied to him, though he coveted it above all else. Afilai would come to the armour in his own way, through murder. As the Legion fled from the failed siege, pursued and hounded into the Eye of Terror by a vengeful Imperium, Afilai watched with patience for his opportunities, and took them as they came. One by one he killed his brothers, building his armour of betrayal piece by piece. Their names still proudly adorned the plates they had contributed to his desire. Bands of fibre bundle musculature thick as a man’s arm caught and locked around his limbs, restricting his movements. Afilai snorted. The armour was fighting him again. The merging of so many different suits had produced a uniquely feral abomination of a machine-spirit within the war-plate’s core. It knew what Afilai had done to create it, and it hated him for it. The ecstasy of the violet-and-golden war-plate, the unbelievable power it granted him. Pieces of another hung from the serrated golden blade mounted beneath the weapon. The hexagrammic wards etched into his armour by the Composer and his acolytes glowed in shifting hues of fuchsia, azure and emerald. The Neverborn were suffering just by being near him as the runes boiled away at the mundane forms that anchored the hideous creatures beyond the warp. The curving plates of Afilai’s Terminator armour were slathered in ectoplasm and crisping scraps of daemon flesh, a match for the walls and floor. Purple lacquer and gold trim smouldered, and sparks shot from gouged couplings and shorn fibre bundle cables. The elbow joint of his left arm locked, and his fist was so caked with gore he had to slam it twice against the corridor wall to shake enough of it loose to move the talons individually again. The ectoplasm fizzed and popped as it burned away from the pulsing warding runes that covered the armour’s plates. Afilai’s war-plate blazed with the light of his etched runes of warding, curdling daemonic flesh before his weapons had even made contact.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Cohors Pit Cur boarding team-
A thick, rolling mist billowed down, a deep rose in colour. Slowly it filled the corridor, curling towards them in soft pink tendrils. The slaves began to see shapes form in the depths of the mist. Large things clad in spiked armour. Legionaries. Kindred sons of the perfect Legion followed behind Krysithius, filling the lightless corridor with the glow of crystal-blue helmet lenses. They strode into the passages of the XII Legion vessel encased in war-plate as shattered as their brotherhood. Gone was the clean, regal purple and precious metals they had worn when they conquered the galaxy. Those whose armour was not entirely covered in the stretched skins of their victims displayed a riotous variance of mark and colour. Some wore black, platinum and rose, while others were clad in iridescent plate that settled on any single hue for little more than a heart’s beat. There were a diminished few among them who still made war in armour of purple, though it was anything but royal, now the darkly organic swirl of deeply bruised flesh.

‘Twenty,’ answered Cesare. ‘Ajennion, Lubalia and Krennance’s squads boarded it with him.’

His eyes narrowed as he looked over a panel of amber and hollow runes that informed him that more than half of the brothers who had boarded the Pit Cur with him were dead. Ajennion lay a few metres ahead of him, impaled through the chest by a jagged length of shattered hull plating. Yintilas was slumped to his right, his charred corpse still bathed in chemical fire. Legion kindred who had raced laughing with him through the burning streets of the Throneworld, who had shared in tasting the glory of a thousand victories, lay twisted and still, their lifeblood soaking into the writhing sand of a daemonic backwater. Lost. Forgotten.

He moved to kneel beside Ajennion’s body, reaching for the elegant sabre still clutched in the fallen legionary’s fist. He was slowly peeling his brother’s fingers back, prising the sword from his death grip, when the fallen warrior’s other hand seized his wrist in a clash of ceramite. Ajennion choked, his voice choppy and laden with static. His scorched and ruined helm lolled as he struggled to raise his head. Cobwebs of sickly yellow and green wormed out across the sand beneath his pinned form. He released Krysithius’ gauntlet, fumbling weakly for his collar seals with the heat-fused claw his gauntlet had become. Batting Ajennion’s hand aside, Krysithius tore the seals loose from his brother’s gorget and wrenched his helm free. He heard a soft, wet tear as much of Ajennion’s face came away with it. Ajennion coughed, spattering the raw and burned flesh of his face with blood. Black fluid oozed from countless rents and wounds across his skull, and his left eye, liquefied by intense heat, ran down his cheek in a pale gelatinous slick. Krysithius lowered the bolt pistol. They had long served together, having both been brothers of the same company in the days of the Legion. His right eye, milky and riven with blood, stared ahead as his head sagged back.

Krysithius had survived this debacle after all. His brother always had proven himself hard to kill. He and six others were all that was left of the Cohors Nasicae he had taken with him to raid for the World Eaters’ slaves – nearly half the warband. World Eaters scrambled over their own fallen, giving five of their own number to pull down a single one of the Cohors Nasicae. The thrashing swordsman disappeared beneath the sea of blackened horn and crimson ceramite, and another rune blinked out on Lucius’ visor as the XII Legion used their bare hands to tear him limb from limb.

Two of his brothers were left beside him at the hill of the dead’s summit. Gundleon sank to a knee, bleeding badly from an axe blow that had stripped away most of the left side of his face. Even his transhuman physiology, and the unnatural resiliency gifted to those subservient to the primordial powers of the warp, had failed to staunch the sheets of dark crimson pouring down his war-plate. The surface of this daemon world would likely be the last thing Gundleon would ever see. The other, Andaroth, bore as deep and comprehensive ruin to his armour as Krysithius, but remained unbowed. The Eye had touched him deeply, and the jagged rents in his plate quickly began to fill with a silvery, bone-like substance, joining the other ridged scars that crisscrossed his armour like lightning. Andaroth grinned at Krysithius with needle teeth framed by a hairless face of slick, purple-tinted skin. He reached up, slathering his face with spilled blood, and released a shuddering breath as its metallic bouquet filled his nostrils.

The sound of cracking and crashing rang behind them as Gundleon thudded to the ground on Krysithius’ left. He did not rise. Andaroth approached Gundleon, nudging his prone form with the tip of his boot. He turned and shrugged at Krysithius with an uncaring smile before gesturing to the battle with his envenomed blade. ‘Shall we?’ Krysithius spared a look at Gundleon. The sand beneath him was ashen. The swordsman could not hear his brother breathing or the beating of his hearts. He flexed his sword arm again. Gundleon’s armour was in even worse condition than his own. There was nothing of value remaining on his corpse, even for scavengers. Looking back up, Krysithius watched Andaroth lope towards the battle alone, blade raised high and a song on his stained lips. All of the Cohors Nasicae had embraced the touch of the Dark Prince, but Andaroth had dived deeper than most, discarding almost everything he had once been as one of the III Legion’s finest Palatine Blades in order to become something most of them considered greater. There were some who clung to the old ways, like their melancholy Apothecary, but they resigned themselves to living in the past, morose and alone. Warriors like Andaroth, like Krysithius, saw only the future, and how they might better serve their own pleasures. Because when one serves himself, he serves Slaanesh.
Four Palatine Blades-
Lucius’ kindred went forth to battle in the mismatched armour of scavengers, one of many cold realities for those who waged the endless Legion Wars within the Eye. Despite their suits being of several marks and patterns, his brothers had made the plundered wargear their own, the ceramite lacquered in each warrior’s vision of the royal purple and gold of the old Legion. Some, Lucius noted, had even managed to impart the patchwork and asymmetric armour with a measure of elegance. A few of their number still bore the burnished Palatine eagle across their breastplates, lovingly defiled and ritually scarred. They looked sluggishly from one of their kindred to the next, raking across the dark interior with the electric blue of their helmet lenses. Rubitaille’s harness groaned as he thrashed, flailing his arms and clawing at the floor. Lucius heard a soft scraping from the inside of the legionary’s helm. He was trying to lap up the stimulant through his mask. So desperate was he for the clarity, the warming of numbed senses granted by the narcotic, that he did not realise how he debased himself.

Cohors nausica members- Two members of Lucius’ warband, one bearing a pair of glittering sabres while the second was a Havoc that bore a heavy bolter. Both died to skitarii assassins.

The Cohors Nasicae brought up their own weapons, gripping swords and crunching bolters and needle rifles to shoulder guards.

Garishly painted faces twist in anger and low snarls hiss from elaborate visors carved to resemble lions and screaming eagles.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Vyspirtilo, Lord of the Rypax-
Raptor chieftain whose claws could defile the skitarii. Equipped with a spear.

He pulled up the sleeve of his jacket, and gagged as he saw the dark lines of his veins threading through flesh that had gone deathly pale.

Lucius looks up into the leering mask of the raptor chieftain. The rapotor gives a shrill response rom the grill of his fanged warhelm.

In the days of the Legion, the Emperor’s Children were the only of the eighteen gifted with the Palatine aquila, the personal heraldry of the Emperor Himself. The Master of Mankind had bestowed the honour of His golden eagle upon them, and the Legion treated it with the reverence reserved for a gift only the truly perfect could ever hope to possess. None revered it more than the Wings of the Phoenician, the elite assault companies of the Emperor’s Children. As the first sparks of the Cthonian Failure were lit, the fanatical devotion of the Wings of the Phoenician for the nascent Imperium of Man was met with the sword, as their ranks were purged nearly to extinction upon the virus-soaked killing grounds of Isstvan III. Those few who remained carried the same obsession and fanaticism as their butchered brethren, yet they had turned it inwards towards themselves. As the Legion changed, they too changed with it, becoming a bestial and insular brotherhood who isolated themselves from their other kin, called into battle to terrorise populations and crack only the most formidable bastions. The touch of the Youngest God, and the purgation of the Eye, would only advance their transformation. Savagery and cruelty saw their ranks planed away to the blades of foes and each other, until only a handful remained. Yet even in such a small number, they were no less devastating to behold. Hurtling from the heavens to the crush of the battle, at the centre of the tempest bearing down towards their waiting blades, was the final master of the Wings of the Phoenician. His Legion name had been forgotten, cast aside when he had torn the mantle of leadership from his predecessor, whose blood stained his face and claws, and drew it about his shoulders. He was Vispyrtilo, the last of the Eagle Kings, and chieftain of the Rypax.

Vispyrtilo hurled his golden spear down ahead of his dive, impaling a World Eater through the throat. The Rypax chieftain slammed into the legionary with the talons of his boots while wrenching his spear free, the relic weapon clattering from a silver chain that bound it to his forearm. His free hand ended in crackling lightning claws, darting forth to pull out eyes and entrails. A cloak of human flesh, cut and shaped to resemble a mantle of feathers, whirled around his jump pack as he took to the sky once more.

Strained snaps and popping couplings wove between the tolls as the warrior pulled his armour from his body before dropping it to the deck. Irreplaceable pieces of artificer-crafted war-plate, forged upon Mars in a time now relegated to myth and reforged in the bathing madness of the Eye, left indents in the steel mesh deck as they slipped forgotten from his fingers and thudded to rest. Interface needles caught and held for long seconds before tearing free, leaving his flesh raw and bleeding in the frigid air. He could not feel it. The warrior pulled the ridged cowter, lacquered in violet and gold, free from its place anchored over his left elbow. The armour was of such exquisite craftsmanship that this piece alone was worth more than the tithes of some Imperial worlds. He did not look down as he discarded it behind him. His hand reached up to the wall, stroking its pitted surface through the clawed gauntlet he wore. Stripping away the form-fitting body glove beneath his armour, the warrior strode to the end of the corridor. He walked bereft of any wargear, but for the clawed boots and greaves on his legs, and the spear he bore at his side in a tight grip. It was a relic among relics, the symbol of the chieftain of the warrior cult he led. The cult he had watched be destroyed.

The face of the Rypax chieftain shone, glittering brightly in the unholy light. On the night he had usurped the mantle of Eagle King, Vispyrtilo had taken the platinum circlet worn by his former master to the forge refineries deep within the heart of his warship. In the searing fires of its cauldrons, he melted the symbol of command that had existed since the dawn of the Wings of the Phoenician, rendering it down into a pool of molten silver liquid. Standing before the assembled might of his warriors, Vispyrtilo poured the liquefied platinum, drop by drop, over his face. He had revelled in the agonising bursts of pain that exploded over him as the metal ate into his flesh, filling the air with the scent of charred meat. His skin puckered and pinched around the platinum tears as they cooled and hardened. After a handful of moments, Vispyrtilo looked down across the gathered legionaries from a face pitted with gleaming stars. His message that night had been clear for all to see. The mantle that he had stolen could never be taken away from him. When he died, so too would the Wings of the Phoenician. He would be the last Eagle King. The Raptor’s pallid flesh took on an ashen grey tint, gradually freezing solid. The muscles and tendons of his limbs started to tighten and shrink in the airless cold, restricting his movements to a stunted shuffle. . He raised his spear, knowing that the movement tore nearly every muscle and tendon in his arm though he could not feel the pain of their rending. He placed the weapon’s golden tip against his chest, and slowly drew it from his right shoulder to his left. Lucius heard the soft rustle of a cloak of human flesh, cut to resemble feathers. He was an artist in the truest sense, while bearing all of the noblest and most ferocious traits of an apex predator conquering those who dared to challenge his supremacy over them. Never once did he stop moving, his spear a whirling blur around him, his claws drowning in wash after wash of Commorrite blood. Vispyrtilo screamed, a concentrated blast of killing sound that reduced a trio of Kabalite warriors to clouds of mist. Vispyrtilo saw the danger at the last instant. He twisted in mid-air, swinging his lightning claw around the lip of the gash in reality as though it were the edge of a precipice.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Rypax Raptor Cult-
Whereas the bulk of the Cohors Nasicae warband was, with a few exceptions, still comprised largely of Emperor’s Children legionaries, the Rypax Raptor cult was a multifaceted riot of Legions, renegades and traitors of all kinds. Fulgrim’s sons flew down beside Night Lords, Word Bearers and Iron Warriors, their original Legion colours perverted in garish excess or cast aside altogether in favour of the warband’s. Their ranks were swelled with Raptors of the Flawless Host, Violators and Angels of Ecstasy renegades. Even fallen Space Marines of the White Scars and Brazen Claws Chapters were among their number, their oaths to the Imperium forsaken as they embraced Slaanesh and became members of the Rypax cult. Twenty metres from the surface, they released a sonic scream of such ear-splitting volume that the force of it arrested their own freefall. The unnaturally amplified wall of bladed noise smashed down into the battle. Armour split. Blood was whipped into mist. Legionaries were hurled indiscriminately from their feet. Bruise-coloured sand whipped up in a spreading crown beneath them as the announcement of their arrival punched craters into the earth, before they angled down to dive. The Rypax struck like meteors. Lightning talons and powerblades slashed World Eaters apart. Meltaguns blasted at point-blank range, and jets of warpfire shrieked from twisted flamers. All the while the blaring screams tore from their warped armour and from the grilles of their fanged helms, howling a single name. The name of their king.

A Raptor whose armour was wrought in a perversely twisted parody of the White Scars’ heraldry crouched onto the World Eater’s back. Stinging hawkish laughter hissed from the Raptor’s vox-grille as he slowly tore the legionary’s head from his shoulders before firing his jump pack to return to the air.

Lucius ignored an explosion as one of the Rypax’s jump packs overloaded, showering him with shrapnel and gore.

The Rypax was devastated. From a force of close to two dozen Raptors, now they were six. The latest battle against the XII Legion had bled the cult of irreplaceable individuals, Raptors the warrior had reaved the stars with for centuries. These deaths, galling as they were, the warrior could accept. The brothers stolen by the daemon world itself, he could not. Half of their number had fallen in the flight from the battle, swallowed up by the roiling earth beneath or incinerated in the burning skies above.

The warrior could not hear the wail of warning sirens as the inner airlock ground open, the slab doors peeling aside on ancient tracks. He did not feel the depthless sting of the vacuum as he stepped into the airless industrial lift that led to the warship’s skin. He could not feel the blood begin to freeze in his veins. Vispyrtilo’s sins had rendered him and his cult barren to such sensations. The five Raptors crouched, armed with bolt pistols, blackened power swords and cracked power talons. Three squatted upon the deck, while the other two leered like gargoyles, hanging from the ceiling by their hooked boot talons. Since their return to the Diadem none of them had removed or seen to their armour, which still showed the thorough ruination the battle upon the daemon world had inflicted on them. The contoured panels of the ancient ceramite suits sparked and groaned with abused servos as they stood sentinel over the doorway.

One of the Raptors. The warrior’s head, encased in a mask wrought into the visage of a screaming daemon, inclined slightly with a scrape of chipped ceramite. another continued, his broken armour webbed in violet lightning in deference to his past among the VIII Legion. The only other inkling of his Nostraman origins was the Raptor’s gauntlets, still stained in sinner’s red. third from his hawkish helm. The name Zhousu adorned one shoulder pauldron in worn Khorchin script, etched deep into war-plate scorched down to the ivory borne by the sons of the Khan. Their voices were shrill and grating, issuing from ruined helm vocabulators and throats abused by centuries of unnatural screams. admitted Kyoras, one of the last three Rypax to have come from the Emperor’s Children, from his place on the ceiling. The Rypax hissed, lightning webbing their talons.

He spotted Andaroth, Krennance and Cadarn, Vispyrtilo and the rest of the Rypax. Hexegys, once of the VIII, now of the Rypax, flew just over the aliens’ advance, stealing heads and spitting them upon his lightning-soaked talons. Zhousu breathed out roaring streams of liquid fire from the flamers housed in the palms of his gauntlets, laughing as he bathed the eldar in immolation. Kyoras and Melinias smashed down into knots of Commorites, scattering them to the dust and ripping apart any within reach with the screaming teeth of their chainswords.

The Rypax charged the greater daemon as one. They leapt into the air, a chevron of violet ceramite soaring on wings of fire with Vispyrtilo at their tip. Seeing them, the Bloodthirster turned, squaring its scalding bulk up with the Raptors. Vispyrtilo readied his spear. He drew it back, to hurl into the throat of the beast.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Lucius’ daemon world force-
The other two drop pods launched from the Diadem hammered down on either side, disgorging their cargos of Cohors Nasicae, who flowed into step with their warlord. They numbered less than twenty, but fewer Legion warriors than that had exterminated entire civilisations and drowned star systems in pain and ruin. The former Emperor’s Children were peerless in the art of bladework, and while they disdained it they lacked nothing in the skill of marksmanship. Bolt-rounds found the rubberised collars of gorgets and the gaps between armour plates, severing heads and sending orphaned limbs spinning into the air. Gales of poisoned crystal darts lashed out from the fluted barrels of needle rifles. Lucius felt the abrupt slap of fresh blood against his mask as the warrior next to him took a bolt through the eye, blowing out the back of his helm in a shower of gore and spinning skull fragments.

Krysithius caught a brother who had begun to fall beside him, his legs savaged by bolter fire. He seized his kinsman by his armoured collar, hauling him along as he stomped up the ramp.

Krysithius released his brother at the top of the assault ramp, pale sparks weeping from his elbow joint, and sank into a restraint throne as the other warrior dragged himself the rest of the way, trailing blood and machine oil from his shattered armour. He looked down the aisle of the Talon Queen’s crew bay, at the ragged collection of warriors that was all that remained of the Cohors Nasicae. Far more than half their number was gone. Such catastrophic losses would threaten the continued survival of any warband within the Eye, where threats abounded in every storm and dark corner of the semi-immaterial realm. Sinking from the fighting strength of nearly sixty legionaries to barely above twenty was a blow few forces could recover from, and nothing less than a total disaster.

Two more warriors, the Brazen Claws turncoat of the Rypax and Rubitaille, one of the foremost of the Palatine Blades in the halcyon days of the Legion, died on the way to the strike cruiser. Opportunists had stripped the armour from Rubitaille’s flesh while it still bore warmth, before Cesare had clambered up from the lower deck and driven the scavengers away so that he could extract his gene-seed. The surviving Rypax crouched in a protective circle around the dead Brazen Claw in the rear of the crew bay, hissing and brandishing blade and claw at any who dared draw near. They would remain as such until landing, safeguarding the corpse for their own death rituals conducted back in the shadows of their roost. Krysithius stared at the plundered corpse of Rubitaille as the dour Apothecary did his work. His eyes fell over the dead warrior’s greaves, the armour broken and smeared with blood and oil. He realised that it had been Rubitaille whom he had helped to board the Talon Queen in the moments before their flight. He considered for a moment whether the fate of being abandoned on the surface would have been preferable to the defilement that had been so callously visited upon a sworn battle-brother and veteran of the Siege of Terra.

Lubalia-
For a moment he could not recognise who it was, the armour and the body within had been burned so thoroughly, but at last it came to him. Cesare squatted down beside the corpse of a legionary. The armour was scorched black, but had retained enough of its original barbed shape, along with a few small scraps of garish colour, to confirm that the warrior had been of the Cohors Nasicae. He rolled the body onto its back. It moved as a single, fused thing, thudding heavily to the dust.

With a moist pop, a lump of pinkish-grey flesh shot into a glass cylinder upon the narthecium. Cesare inspected the organ, before his eyes shot wide. He tore the cylinder free from his gauntlet, hurling it away to shatter on the ground. The earth glowed beneath Lubalia’s discarded progenoid. A puckered lamprey mouth snapped from the glistening flesh of the organ, emitting a shrill, breathless shriek. Thin fronds slithered from the mass, slowly thickening into tendrils. The organ trilled, beginning to pull itself across the ground. Cesare stomped down, crushing his brother’s gene-seed to pulp. The lambent pulse beneath his boot ebbed as he ground Lubalia’s legacy to the Legion into a ruined smear of softly hissing corposant. The Apothecary snarled. Another brother tainted with corrupted geneseed. Another warrior who could never be replaced. This was the true cost of the Cthonian Failure. The Warmaster, a thousand curses upon his name, had borne the lightest burden for the disaster he had orchestrated, as had the throngs of his bastard sons purged by the III and the other Legions on the path to imprisonment within the Eye. The punishment for the Sons of Horus was light compared to those who survived, as Cesare had. To watch as his Legion, and the dregs that now remained of it, withered away into decayed, twisted shadows of the perfection they had once achieved.

 

[MolotovKraken]

The Lurid Circle-
The dark current receded from the hulking figure that had stood imprisoned within its depths. It ran from ornate war-plate of mauve and precious metals, from jewelled horns sculpted into the mouths of screaming angels. The warrior took a ponderous step, his armour squealing from the motion after so long spent locked in stillness. The second step displayed a quickly recovered grace. His war-plate thrummed like an insect hive. Lucius stood his ground as the legionary swung the sonic amplifier cannon bolted to his forearm up, levelling it at the Eternal’s chest. Raw noise itched from the fluted barrel of the cannon, primed to be released with the force to shatter ceramite and liquefy flesh. It held for a handful of heartbeats, before the warrior lowered it. A low intake of breath caused Lucius to brace for what he knew was coming. The Kakophoni screamed. Weaponised sound blasted from every horn and speaker-grille on his armour, ripping out from him in a sphere of discordance. Every cell shattered. Black water and shattered crystal flooded the corridor in a gushing tide. Eleven other Noise Marines stepped out from their prisons. Slowly, they looked to their brother, and then their gaze settled over Lucius. Feedback crackled from the vox-grilles that studded every surface of their armour like gilded barnacles. They pulsed, glowing sharply with an arrhythmic violet light. The same light came from their eyes. The twelve Kakophoni formed a circle around Lucius.

Kathodos had been Captain of the 318th Company in the days of the Legion, imbued by the primarch with power and command over hundreds of Space Marines. Despite the additions to and transformations of their war-plate, none of the insignia markings upon the armour of the other Kakophoni indicated any of them being above the rank of sergeant. And Kathodos was the least of them. It brought a smile to Lucius’ face. How time changes all things.

‘I know not that either. As within the Afterbirth, I measure it in the deaths of brothers, and by that metric we have endured here for the time to shed the lives of eight.’

Kathodos, Captain of the 318th Company-
‘’I am Kathodos. Of the Circle, I have felt the least of the Youngest God’s holy voice, and so I am permitted to speak. The others speak only in war, and their voices are those that shatter mountains.’

Commoragh Emperors Children-
There were more legionaries hanging beyond Lucius’ warband, stretching out into the distance. They spanned more than a dozen separate warbands and raiding cults, but all of them bore the same garish and twisted colourings upon their armour, and every suit displayed, in varying degrees across the spectrum of reverence and devotion, the mark of the Youngest God. Every one of them was a warrior of the Emperor’s Children, or a renegade in league with them.

A series of cells lined the walls, filled with thick, oily fluid. Lucius could just barely make out the shapes hanging immobile within the cells. Their forms were occluded, but no one born of the Legions could fail to recognise the silhouette of Space Marine power armour, even if in this case it was twisted, bulky and overly elaborate.

Legionaries fell down from the sky, thudding into view from every direction. Garishly lacquered and overly elaborate power armour snarled and ground as warriors of the forgotten III Legion came together, killing the forces of eldar that sought to prevent their escape. Amidst the colours of distant warbands, Lucius noted those of the Cohors Nasicae at the centre of the carnage.

He had subjected himself to this humiliation, degrading himself by languishing under alien chains, for a little over two hundred Traitor Space Marines. The Children of the Emperor descended upon the Khornate horde from all sides. Garish hues of purple-and-blue power armour shot through the crimson in a thunder of ceramite boots and crashing bolters.

Unknown legionary-
His hooves clawed shallow pits into the dry earth as he powered forwards, a second legionary of an unknown warband charging just behind him. the warrior running with him gripped a Legion power sword in his fist. Lucius did not know how long the warrior had been fighting in the arena, but based upon the ruinous state of his armour, he guessed he had managed to survive for quite some time. The sword was most likely the sole reason for that. The Space Marine’s body was gone from the waist down. A slurry of bleeding chunks trailed out behind him as he vainly clawed his way forwards with his hands. The air between two of the stone spikes where the warrior had fallen glistened with a hanging constellation of blood.

 

[Sea Dragon]

Glorious work! You are certainly doing Slaanesh' biding, thank you!

 

[Sea Dragon]

This is amazing, well done!

I definitely need a Vaust The Bull.

It would be so sweet if we got a new, plastic official mini with the upcoming release.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Lucius’ room/armour creation- He slouched in the darkness upon a throne of oiled silver and skinless meat. Dozens of undulating faces covered the walls, shrieking a ululating lament of ceaseless torment. They were the shackled essences of men and women, kings and slaves, champions, aliens and those touched by the Dark Gods themselves. All were murderers. All shared in the same perdition. They thrashed, rolling and pressing in vain attempts to win their freedom like creatures eternally drowning within tar pits. The captive souls screamed in an endless choir of the damned, each wailing the dirge of their own individual torment to meld into a discordant song of anguish. Glistening creatures writhed upon the floor before the throne. Some were human, some were not, and then there were others who had once been born as men and women, but had renounced the boundaries of their race to become something more. They moaned and hissed, clawing and cutting and coupling, their every action perpetrated to satisfy the desire of drawing the ecstasy of sensation from flesh. Their softer, warmer cries melted into the howls from the walls. Their song was mellifluous to him, beautiful. The faces shrieked all the louder, spiking in a hopeless crescendo as they melted from the walls, exposing the bloody frescos and sweat-soaked tapestries beneath as they slid down with a sickening slowness to the floor. They were dragged towards the enthroned figure, captives in an angler’s net being hauled in for harvest. For a moment they pooled quivering beneath him, before slipping upwards, wrapping themselves around muscular limbs and a torso rapidly resolving into form and definition. A hiss of pleasure-pain passed from the figure as the jelly of bound souls hardened into segmented plates of baroque armour, continuously emitting a cracking, splitting noise as the faces upon its surface bobbed and wailed their futile cries. The figure braced himself internally as the calm solitude of his mind was shattered. Dozens of voices cried out behind his eyes. Pain, despair, pleading and rage all mingled and overlapped inside his skull as the stolen howled their torment within his mind. They begged him for deliverance, swore vindication or taunted him in their despair, scratching and needling and ringing in a never-ending discordance of the damned. He stepped down from the dais and passed from the chamber, his boots – clawed ceramite layered over cloven hooves of midnight-black horn – squelching as they strode across overlapping sheets of thick carpet, soaked through with blood and other, more vile fluids

Lucius, moments prior to the mine incident- Scars covered his face and his green eyes were bloodshot. He wielded a barbed tentacle lash with bladed tails. His legs ended in cloven hooves. He bore purplish-pink armour. His head was hairless and his grin was full of needle teeth with his reptilian tongue.

Lucius the Eternal, Fulgrim’s Champion, Soulthief, Champion of the Fell Powers. In Wolves Clothing – Equipped with a silver blade and daemon possessed lash. He howled in joyful pain, the contorting faces that covered his blasphemous armour moaning in concert with their gaoler. The warrior of the Emperor’s Children grinned, revealing needlesharp teeth.

The force of the strike tore the traitor swordsman’s sneering head from his shoulders in a fountain of blood as dark as midnight. The trembling faces pressing against the surface of Lucius’ armour shrieked, babbling incoherencies with dozens of overlapping voices. The ancient war-plate shivered, draining of its violet colour and fragmenting like shattered glass. Hrothgir reached down, then snatched his hand back as the headless body disintegrated into a heap of boiling ash. The detritus leapt upon the wind, corkscrewing in whorls that sparked and dispersed into smoke and nothing. All that remained of Lucius the Eternal was the silver blade he had carried, scarlet with the blood of Hrothgir’s kin. Taking the sword from the ground, Hrothgir, Stone Among the Troubled Sky, felt something quiver within him, straining against the barricades of his resolve.

Reborn- Lucius flexed his right arm. With a wet snap of tearing sinew, a rope of barbed meat slithered down to the floor, coiling around the Chaos champion’s forearm. The lash chittered and hissed, the daemon caged within it starving for blood. The lash closed around its head, venomous barbs sinking into flesh. The lash drank deep of the blood and spinal fluid pulsing from the severed head, casting aside a shrivelled, shrunken lump of flesh and skull to the floor when it had had its fill. The Space Wolf slashed at Lucius, its claws tearing deep gouges into his armour. It drew back to strike again, but faltered as it met the visage of Hrothgir screaming from beneath the plate. It hesitated for a heartbeat; all the opening Lucius required.. Lucius brought his scarred head down in a savage headbutt, smashing the creature’s head against the stone floor. It roared from frothing jaws, freeing an arm to rake its claws across Lucius’ face. Viscous black fluid burst in gouts from the champion’s rent flesh as his head snapped back. Lucius leaned closer, grinning as his serpentine tongue slithered between his pointed teeth. Lucius stood in the feasting hall, alone but for the crackle of fires and the whispers within his mind. The trapped souls of his armour moaned, each shackled to the Chaos Space Marine as the price for defeating him in battle. Each surrendering their flesh upon the altar of the Eternal’s rebirth.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Lucius, Fulgrim’s Champion. The Faultless Blade - His body was a muddled, insubstantial thing, like a figure cast from wax that a flame’s kiss had long since melted away to shapelessness. Every part of him was formless in this way, save for his face. It was a consumptive pink mask of intricate, lovingly self-inflicted wounds pulled tightly over a narrow, patrician skull. Eyes of stark green muddied with bloodshot jet stared unfocused out into the wan light of the chamber, while a black, serpentine tongue ran idly over teeth filed down into needlesharp points. The swollen pits that had once been ears did not react to the pittance of his own bloodshed, as they strained to enthral his mind with symphony. The third call triggered a twitch of irritation at the corner of his raw-lipped maw. Filed teeth glittered as the lips peeled back from them in a savage grin. . Ropes of muscle the red of raw meat unspooled from his right arm. Spines and hooked barbs burst forth along the twitching mass, drooling sickly venom that sizzled as it pattered to the floor. The glistening lash stretched across the ground for a moment, before drawing back and coiling around the right forearm of the figure. He reached out with his left arm, and an attendant wretch waddled to his side on its knees. The slave made a simpering, choked sound, its lips quivering around the hilt of the sword sheathed in its throat. Its master took the blade’s grip in his clawed gauntlet, sparing its bearer the briefest of glances, which drew a gasp of elation from its bleeding lips. With a single smooth motion, he drew the sword. Without the daemonic essence locked within the weapon to sustain it, the vassal’s abused flesh withered. It was a scimitar of brilliantly shining silver, far older than the dead Legion of the warrior who now wielded it. It had been given life in the forges of a breed of depraved xenos the Emperor’s Children had rendered extinct during its early conquests, but despite this it was a blade of rapturously exquisite craftsmanship, and a Legion relic beyond all compare. Religions and cults had arisen and spread across entire worlds, and even amongst the figure’s own warriors, in worship of the sword. his boots – clawed ceramite layered over cloven hooves of midnight-black horn – squelching.

Lucius flicked his gaze over his brethren from behind his mask of porcelain and platinum, blinking away targeting reticules as he studied each in the wan light. Leaning back, he slotted the vial into an interface port on his gauntlet, and injected its contents into his bloodstream. He hated the command as he drew his own bolt pistol, the clawed fingertips of his gauntlet clacking against its ivory-and-silver grip. The few remaining artificers and weaponsmiths aboard the Diadem had modified the warband’s firearms into spectacular implements of war. They were enhanced to be louder, more powerful, and to provide drastically increased recoil to the shooter, but even so, to Lucius there was barely any satisfaction to be had in the act of killing from afar. Such tactics were the actions of cowards and rubes who lacked the elegance for bladecraft, Lucius stabbed through ceramite and muscle, the power field of his sword shining. Its disruptor field clapped as it carved through sinew and gristle. He wound his lash around his forearm, making a spiked cudgel of his gauntlet as he punched the World Eater down to his knees.


Pressing the blade against the flexible armour that would fail to protect the Red Centurion’s throat. Ribbons of multicolour curled around the silver edge amid the howling storms, never touching its pearlescent surface.

 

[MolotovKraken]

Lucius staggered back, his arm still locked stiffly out in front of him. The exterior of the Pit Cur began to rattle and shake beneath his boots. The twisted faces pressing up from the surface of his armour shrieked in a horrid chorus of disunity, filling his ears to join his mind with their overlapping syncopated screams. The fury of the storms corkscrewed around Lucius and blasted outwards, ripping across the surface of the daemon world. Tectonic tremors threw the embattled warbands from their feet. Rents across the earth split open like gaping fanged mouths, swallowing warriors into depthless chasms. The Eternal’s eyes of bloodshot green never left Krysithius, just as the cruel smile never left his lips. The claws of his boots scraped gouges into the deck plate as he skidded around a corridor junction. Lucius arched the pink flesh where an eyebrow would have once been.

The swordsman asked, tapping a maddened tattoo with a claw to his temple hard enough to draw a thin trickle of blood. Lucius made to have his brother holster the weapon, before remembering his own blade was still bare to the freezing air. Pushing a breath through his teeth, he sheathed it.

Pallid grey flesh was all that remained, as brutal and slab-like as any of the Legions. Tracing over it was a cartograph of ruination in thousands of scars, many intertwined and conglomerated in order to be wrought into the sigil of the Youngest God in glistening purple contusions. The interface ports that had studded his limbs and spinal column were gone, and in their place were clenching lamprey mouths and bleeding eyes. His legs were blackened below the knees, ending in cloven hooves of bare auburn horn. More than ten millennia had passed in the mundane universe, and fathomless epochs within the Eye, since Lucius had been without his warplate. It was as much a part of him as his twin hearts or his iron-hard bones. Treachery and the touch of the divine had merged it with his flesh, forged and reforged from the imprisonment of the souls that screamed into his mind every moment.

It was a hooked blade, not unlike the ceremonial khopesh swords favoured by the erudite pseudo-warrior sons of Magnus the Red. Its haft was more than twice as long as those he was accustomed to wielding. Its edge was chipped and pitted from use against heavy armour, the steel brittle from the onset of the corrosion that comes from being bathed in blood time and time again. Simply put, it was an ugly, rusted piece of scrap. Lucius could hardly bring himself to call it a weapon at all, and on any other day, in any other circumstance, he would not have insulted his gauntlets by forcing them to feel its weight. But needs must. He stooped down and pried the power sword from the warrior’s grasp. Worms of killing light crackled and danced along its length, bathing Lucius’ face in a shimmering blue hue.

‘This is a stimulant mixture classified as serpentin. You may be pleased to note that its principle components were derived from the cadavers of the very sort of eldar wyches you now find yourself engaged with.’ The stimm rack on Lucius’ back thrummed. A brass plunger depressed in the first canister, sending a measure of oily ochre fluid through the tubes of the synthetic vein network implanted in Lucius’ chest and into his primary heart. He felt a dull sting as the chemical leapt out into his bloodstream. Lucius’ pulse quickened. His skin felt hot and damp. Sounds became clearer, and his vision sharper. The world around him seemed to slow. The almond eyes of the eldar took an extra moment to blink, before going wide in anticipation. He saw the bands of iron-hard muscle bunching in the legs of the aliens as they prepared to strike. And so the rampage of the Raptor cult and their warrior chieftain fuelled Lucius as he constructed his own masterpiece in broken alien flesh. A stolen eldar longsword was his instrument, and though a tiny thing in his hand, he used it to accomplish wonders.

His mind wandered to the second of the chemical cocktails the Primogenitor had given to him. Fabius had told Lucius that it had been derived from the adrenal glands of a xenos breed bioform that had only just appeared in the outermost reaches of the galaxy. It has yet to make its presence fully known, but when it does… Bile had said with a rasping laugh …that will be a singularly fascinating time. The Primogenitor had called the serum ‘tyrphous’. A press of the pad sent the oily claret compound into the injection system, and then into Lucius. He did not feel it enter his blood, as he had with the serpentin. In fact, he did not feel anything different at all. The tyrphous came on hard enough to make Lucius gasp. His flesh came alive. The pupils of his eyes dilated to glistening pools of oil ringed by the thinnest circle of bloodshot green. The entirety of Lucius’ mind was bent around a single impulse, a hunger the likes of which he had never known. He needed to kill more eldar. He needed to kill them all. Lucius ceased to think. He just reacted, killing again and again as if in a trance. Eldar Hellions fell in screaming agony, to his blade, his lash, his bare hands and teeth. The stimulant drove him on, faster and sharper, compelling him with a yawning void in his core that would destroy him if he did not fill it with a legion of butchered eldar.

‘It is bylestim. The dust of an extinct and forgotten eldar craftworld, laced into the blood of the things you insist on calling daemon. There has not been a single test of its component elements that did not result in the death of the subject, and it has never been tested after full synthesis. It is a substance of a power even I do not fully understand. Should you survive its use, I would be quite keen to learn of its properties.’ The brass plunger sank down into the third canister of the stimm rack mounted behind his head. The first and only dose of pure bylestim ever synthesised, thin and hued the deepest green, joined with his blood in freezing sparks. The furnace heat engulfing Lucius vanished. Frost rimed his armour, flaking and steaming away from proximity to the monster of Khorne’s blood-soaked choirs. Sensation came flooding back into his body, invigorating his flesh. More than ever he felt transcendent. He felt divine. He had never felt faster, sharper, more in control. The battlefield revolved around him, waiting to be remade as he saw fit.

Eyes once the stark green of humanities ancestral forests now threaded with blackened blood vessels now set into a raw mask of ritual scars.

 

[MolotovKraken]

 

[She Who Thirsts]

This, and the next in the series, are absolutely fantastic. One of the items on the Lore articles lists was a rundown of the known EC warbands along with colours and characters but this covers and that and, in far more depth and from far more sources! (i was looking forward to trying to run down where which WD the Vaust rules were in) Absolutely brilliant resource.

If you are planning a series of these I may collate them into a single thread (sticky thread in the Lore section most likely, linking to it) and link that through to the planned linked and resourced section of the site, under lore.

As the site was pushed out a bit early I still haven't fully fleshed out how curating the resources will work, no the links between 9ior duplication between) the forums and the site. That's an aside though, content itself is king and there's a bevvy of that here!

I'll also likely switch these over from attachments to the media Gallery from some point as well (would mean editing the posts, but just changing the source of the image, nothing else).