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Hail Fraters! After a bit of a hiatus from the board I am back with what is my current project, my Skull Reavers, which as you may have guessed from the title, are a World Eater warband. A fledgling, stop/start side project so far, I am hoping to build a mighty Slaughterhost capable of bringing entire systems to its knees! First up, every army needs a leader, and the Skull Reavers are no different being led by a mighty ascended champion of Khorne; The Fell Reaver, anointed of the Blood God, Master of the Eight Plains, the Bloodied Wing, Despot of the mighty Skull Reavers - a beast of many names and titles but known much more simply to his allies and his foes as the War Bastard. Lord of the Skull Reavers; formerly Dhosun Ghôrne, a Centurion of the World Eaters 48th Company during the Horus Heresy now achieve apothesis climbing to the apex of the Dark Gods servants.

THE CRIMSON GRASP “War gives the right to the conquerors to impose any condition they please upon the vanquished.” -attributed to Shakespire, Terran dramaturge, M2 I The assault boat floated through the light debris field, ancient and seemingly forgotten, as the strike cruiser approached. Not a single light or control rune blinked to life across its surface, and its engines and weapons sat cold as the grave. It was a truly old vessel - a Trireme-class Assault Boat. Once a mainstay of the Saturnine fleets in the days before full Imperial unification of the Sol System, a handful of Trireme were used by the Legiones Astartes in a handful of their earliest battles, and yet even by the time that the last true rebellions and uprisings died away on Terra they had been almost entirely replaced; the Space Marines had quickly come to favour Dreadclaw and Caestus, whilst the early regiments of the Imperial Army were already beginning to move towards the easier to produce Shark and Condor pattern Assault Boats. The Trireme was quickly forgotten, and now it was rare for a ship in the Imperium’s fleets to even have a way to recognise the obsolete craft in its vast cogitator banks. And that was exactly what Saggar was counting on. Saggar stood in the cramped troop bay of the Trireme, his gaze seemingly locked on his squad’s helms. The light of their emerald lenses were amongst the only sources of light in the mostly powered-down assault craft, and that thin and sickly light caught the edges of the helmet crests of their kin, rendering the Sarum-forged shapes even more monstrous than normal. However, his attention was firmly within his own helm, focused utterly on the runes flickering over his display, showing the approach of the strike cruiser. The plan had seemed so very simple back in the launch bays of the Axeman’s Mercy. The strike cruiser that was approaching belonged to one of the thin-blood ‘Successor Chapters’ of the Imperium, and was unlikely to be able to tell the Trireme apart from the endless debris and flotsam of the void. Built for war in the densely populated Sol System, the Trireme was built to be far more resilient than the later generations of Imperial assault boats - in the battles over Saturn, there was a chance if you missed your target that a ship might actually be able to pick you up, and so the Trireme was able to maintain life support for incredible lengths of time. Especially when most of its occupants had the legendary constitutions of Space Marine Legionnaires. Now though, with the Butcher’s Nails biting hard into the back of his brain, and the vast form of a strike cruiser bearing down on him with no way of defending himself, Saggar was beginning to see all the ways this plan could go wrong. The runes displaying the status of the strike cruiser blinked bright, and Saggar held his breath. Even now, the hundreds of servitors linked to the strike cruiser’s defence turrets would be scanning the Trireme, trying to identify any threats. One long second passed. Then two. Three. Saggar was used to the lightning-grind of melee and the ground war, and each second sat in the dark, simply waiting, felt like a lifetime of agony. Eventually, after five more agonising seconds, a pinging green rune appeared imposed over the strike cruiser rune on his display. Saggar grinned, his tongue clicking off his iron teeth as he opened a vox-link to the hereteks and engine-cultists in the Trireme’s cockpit, Nails at once seeming to calm and tense further as the chance for violence approached. “Bring us in.” Slowly, achingly slowly, the Trireme began to move. It couldn’t ignite its main engines, not without becoming a blazing beacon on every sensor aboard the strike cruiser, and so it had to sputter and limp towards its prey on emergency micro-thrusters - drifting into the cruiser’s path more than actively closing the gap. In the troop bay, Saggar’s squad had begun to notice the movement. To an Astartes, well used to the feeling of an assault craft plying its trade, even these tiny movements spoke volumes. The Berzerkers began to twitch and fidget. The most controlled amongst them ran practised hands over their pistols and axes, performing weapons checks as a small ritual to try and appease and calm the pain engines singing in their skulls. The least controlled began to murmur and convulse, barely holding back their contempt and fury at not yet being in soothing battle. So began Saggar’s main task as a squad leader - trying to keep the World Eaters under his command dancing on the knife edge between mindless, frothing madmen barely useful as even the bluntest of weapons, and the long and painful failure that came from trying to deny the Nails. He laid a hand on the pauldron of one of the nearest struggling Berzerker, Kayst, the sudden and deliberate movement drawing the rest of the squad’s attention. That, at least, was a good sign; before some battles such small social queues had been completely beneath their notice. “Hold steady, brother. Soon, we will be ankle-deep in the blood of Imperials. The Blood God and the Nails will both have their fill and more, and our brothers will praise us as the heralds of yet another glorious victory. Is this not why we are the favoured of the Fell? Trusted above all others to be his preferred companions? We strike smart first, and it does not dull our fury. Blood for the Blood God!” “Blood for the Blood God!” The squad’s response shout was crisp and eager, and Saggar smiled again. Playing to their egos, and reminding them that the eye of one of Khorne’s favoured was on them in part because they could still be trusted to show at least a little restraint, had done its job, and Saggar felt some of his earlier confidence return. A different vox-link chimed, filling Saggar’s ear with the adrenaline-buzz of the Trireme’s heretek pilot-devotee, “Boarding proximity achieved, Lord Saggar. Bringing mag-clamps online.” The assault boat shuddered and hummed as, beyond the thick walls of the troop bay, it gently connected with the hull of the strike cruiser before locking itself into place with an array of esoteric mag-locks and proto-ursus harpoons, sharp as lamprey teeth. “Sealed and airtight, Lord Saggar. Melta-rams are now back online. We fire at your command.” Saggar slammed a fist into the release rune beside him, rising with the unlocked harness and forcing his way through his Berzerkers and the small knot of cultist and subhuman support they had brought with them until he stood at their fore, eyes almost boring a hole through the assault boat’s ramp. “Do it.” Saggar’s squad ran through the sparse outer corridors of the strike cruiser at a speed far beyond a jog. There was little restraint or control here, and even less attempt to move with any true silence or stealth. However, it had not yet devolved into a full and unrestrained charge, and even Kayst was still pausing and changing direction almost immediately after Saggar gave the order, and given how loud and insistent his own Nails were growing, that gave him no small amount of satisfaction. Besides, true stealth would barely have served them here. If the Astartes on this ship had not immediately noticed the assault boat breaching their hull, they would notice soon. Saggar simply had to complete his mission before the Imperials managed to stop him. They had yet to encounter any meaningful resistance. There had been a few knots of mortals here and there, most likely Chapter Serfs trying to eke out a handful of personal, human moments here, far enough from their duties, masters, and the ship’s key systems that the small sins of human inefficiency - love, tabac, and the other tiny excesses of dutiful slaves - were tolerated or ignored. None had survived contact with Saggar’s Berzerkers. He had let Kayst lead the way. The Berzerker had flung himself at each and every small mob of mortals, scattering them like a felinid coming down amidst song birds; with rent lines of blood and shrill cries of weakling panic cast all about him as his chainsword swung. The rest of the squad was barely a breath behind him, chainaxes and eviscerators lashing out at the mortals that tried to move away from Kayst’s frantic swordstrokes. In the wake of each cull (Saggar refused to insult Khorne or his own squad by calling the events ‘battles’, or even ‘skirmishes’) Rell had paused for a half moment to stoop amongst the corpses, the strange tools of his twin disciplines rattling at his waist as he bent to coat his fingers in the rapidly cooling blood of their victims, using it to daub crude runes on the walls and on his own armour even as he rose and moved to catch up with his fellow World Eaters. After the fourth such small ritual, Saggar spared Rell a nod, trusting the old Berzerker to read the implicit question in the gesture. Rell did, but his answer was full of his usual vagaries. “Too soon to tell, Saggar. It’ll all depend on how many thinbloods are on this ship once we are through proper.” Saggar grunted, annoyed but not surprised, before turning back to run with Kayst at the head of the squad. They were coming up on the objective, and there was precious little time to waste. There would be time enough to wrench answers out of Rell later. A few corridors more, and another mob of serfs, and something in the air changed. The keening pitch of the Nails sang higher in Saggar’s skull, and the faint scent of sanctified Mechanicus oils and the burnt residue of gun lubricant began to filter through his helmet. “Kayst, blade up and faster - I taste Imperial corpse-machines on the wind.” Kayst snarled, and Saggar braced himself for a backhand from the Berzerker’s sword, worried for a moment that the bite of the Nails would cause him to lash out at the implicit chains of authority in Saggar’s words. Then the snarl continued, morphing into something akin to a laugh, and Kayst broke into a full-tilt charge, bringing his chainsword up from the lazy and vaguely ready position it had lived in since they had deployed to a proper guard, from where it could be deployed against an actual opponent. Saggar lengthened his own stride, rushing to keep up with Kayst, and as the pair rounded a sharp bend in the corridor, they were met by a hail of solid slugs. A trio of heavy servitors - semi-living and lobotomised human bodies, filled up with simple aggressor machines, targeting matrices, and massive slabs of armour, and literally armed with some form of primitive rotary cannons - had locked their feet against the deck, choking the air down the long corridor with blazing hot ammunition. It was a kill-zone that few forces in the galaxy would be able to push through with ease. The World Eaters had never been a typical force. A veteran of the Long War in the truest sense, Kayst had served in the XII Legion’s Destroyer cadres, even earning the Blood Hand and fighting in the elite Red Hand Squads when Horus’ doomed rebellion had reached Terra. His place had always been in the teeth of the enemy, screaming back in the face of firepower that should have been overwhelming. He had survived the heavy weapons of Dorn’s precious Imperial Fists, the massed fire of entire Aeldari corsair bands, his own lethal and sickening wargear, and even, at the height of the Legion Wars, a full salvo of lascannon beams from the Sun Killer elite of the III Legion. These servitors were nothing in the face of such a legacy. The Destroyer lowered his shoulders, turning as he ran so that most of the howling slugs struck the already scarred Legion badge on his heavy pauldron. The weight of fire seemed to barely slow Kayst, and he howled as he continued to put one foot in front of the other, closing the gap between the squad and the servitors with the unnerving speed of a true Astartes. The bullets could do little against the ceramite of power armour, and where they found the soft armour of joints and armour seals, the sting of pain simply caused Kayst to howl louder and run faster, fury burning his blood as he sought to avenge himself upon the machine-men. As Kayst reached the servitors, he laid into them with his chainsword, crashing into the Imperial cyborgs with a series of heavy, two-handed swings. The first few blows struck at the weapon limbs of the servitors, although Saggar was unwilling to assign that to a desire to help cover the advance of the rest of the squad, or to any sense of strategy or tactics, rather than the blind and mad luck of a warrior lost to the Butcher’s Nails. Regardless of why he had done it, Kayst’s first flurry of blows had nonetheless knocked their heavy guns out of their pre-sighted alignments, and the rest of the Berzerkers were left unopposed as they ran the last stretch of the corridor, their own howls joining Kayst as they joined the fray. There was more of a fight here than there had been with the Chapter serfs. The blade-limbs of the servitors were just fast enough to parry one or two of the World Eaters’ swings, and a desperate close-range salvo from one of their cannons brought Badis crashing to a knee, a string of impact craters running down his breastplate. However, they were just three simple machines, and in the face of ten of the most powerful assault specialists the Imperium and the Eye had ever produced, they had never stood a chance, and by the time Badis had heaved himself back up with his eviscerator, the fight was over. It took Saggar long seconds to silence his own Nails enough to look to his squad after the last of the servitors fell, and even more valuable moments were lost as Saggar and his Brothers pulled the worst of their members back from the abyss. Even once calmed, Kayst paced like a caged predator as he waited for the squad to advance again, and Badis had been lost for a while, furiously tearing into the collapsed servitor that had shot him. However, eventually Saggar was able to drag his squad back from the fog of the Butcher’s Nails enough that he could stand and take stock, grinning as he saw what the servitors had been guarding: an interior bulkhead door, marked with an eyeless skull emblem - the same heraldry that had been emblazoned across the side of the strike cruiser. Another iron-toothed smile broke behind his helmet. Saggar turned, barking at Rell to get to the door. He paused, his eye lenses rising up to meet Saggar’s. He had taken advantage of the squad’s brief halt, daubing a dozen crude runes in the thick blood of the squad and the vital almost-oil of the servitors, and all but covering both of his vambraces in the strange half-script. The lifeblood was stark and bright against the death-grey of his armour, and as he moved past Saggar to investigate the door, it seemed to move slower than the rest of him, lingering like the afterthought of ritual in his wake. “Can you get it open, Rell?” Rell’s first response was little more than a grunt; a distracted half-snarl of Nail-bite and focus that made it very clear he would answer when he was good and ready, and not when Saggar asked. Saggar felt his anger rise in response to the implied disrespect, and forced his ire back down as Rell set to work, pulling a series of dataspikes and grav-drivers from his belt in order to assault the command console next to the bulkhead door. Long ago, Rell had been an initiate of the XII Legion’s Forge. Having shown a natural aptitude for machinery and mechanisms, he had been pulled from the line and named a Techmarine Initiate. However, Rell had never been sent to Sacred Mars to learn the great mysteries of the Machine Cult; just as his aptitude had been discovered, Angron and his sons had been called to Istvann by the Warmaster Horus, and would soon be embroiled in the all-consuming chaos of Horus’ Rebellion. With the World Eaters dispatched to Ultramar for Lorgar’s Shadow Crusade, and Mars besieged by those still loyal to the Throne, Rell had been taught his trade not in the Forge-Shrine, but in the crucible of war. As a result, Rell had never learned the higher mysteries of the Cult Mechanicus, but he had learned a brutal practicality that appealed to Angron’s Legion. No deep studies of the ancient Cybernetica or the lore-matrices of the great cogitators for Rell, instead he learned to repair a tank whilst under attack by Guilliman’s precious Locutarus Squads. No chance to ever learn the nuances of voltike production or how to set a voxgheist upon an entire world, instead Rell had learned the art of forging weapons from the broken machines of the XIII Legion. Rell might never have been considered a ‘true’ Techmarine, and even now boasted little of the true heretek mastery of the Warpsmiths of other warbands, and yet his ability to function as a rough mechanist under fire and through the howling of his Nails was an asset Saggar had long-since come to rely on. It had left its mark on Rell, though. There was a petty spitefulness that ran through the very core of Rell’s psyche; the old wound of never being allowed to study and master the great war-arts of the Mechanicum had never healed. Saggar had once heard that during the Shadow Crusade, Rell had made it his personal mission to kill as many of the Ultramarines’ Techmarines as he could, robbing the enemy of the knowledge and expertise he would never have the chance to obtain. Those same rumours had claimed that each of the tools of the Techpriest that Rell carried had been taken from those same murdered foes - each dataspike and wrench and plasma-cutter a trophy of a foe slain and a blow delivered to the accumulated wisdom of the enemy. Saggar had no idea if such tales were true, but having seen Rell’s fury in the face of Imperial Techmarines in the long years since Skalathrax, he could well believe it. “Saggar, it’s as we feared,” there was a rumble beneath Rell’s voice, an anger borne of having to admit defeat - admit weakness - for even a moment, “Whoever these thinbloods are, they actually put some thought into defending themselves. The inner bulkheads have a kinlock on them. I could force this one open, but all the others would stay locked shut. My dataspikes and petty scrapcode will never convince the door we are supposed to be here.” Saggar nodded, slapping a hand against Rell’s power pack, hoping that the gesture of camaraderie would reach through the Nails and the Berzerker’s wounded pride. They had always known there was a chance Rell would be unable to breach these sorts of defences - the soft work of corrupting and deceiving augury and identification systems had never been his great strength - and so they had come prepared. Saggar shouted an order back down the corridor, to where a small knot of cultists and mutants were slowly making their way through the strike cruiser in the Berzerkers’ wake. Several bestial mutants lumbered forwards, braying and bellowing in something between brash posturing challenges and pious prayers to their Astartes masters. Two were pure brutes, towering over the mortal cultists and blessed with spiralling crowns of horns atop their elongated heads, and swung their heavy chainswords with the righteous arrogance of bodyguards, but it was the third beastman that Saggar had called forward. Smaller than its kin, the third beast was hooded in the ragged approximation of robes, and carried a long stave - a cobbled-together badge of office made from broken icons, glyph-stained bones, and a twisted skull. The beastherds that dwelt in the depths of the Axeman’s Mercy called creatures such as these “shamans” - petty witches and pseudo-psykers whose extensive mutations had given it some deeper connection to the Warp. As the shaman approached, Saggar felt the edges of a Nails headache press at his mind. It was nothing compared to a purer human psyker or true Astartes Librarian, though - Saggar had often wondered if the beastmen’s sheer Warp pollution registered differently to the pain engines in some way, although whenever he had attempted to discuss it with his brothers they had laughed at his interest. However, the ‘softer’ impact of the mutant witches made it easier for the Berzerkers to stomach their presence, which is why they had been picked for this mission. “Burn their pathetic machines awake, witchblood. Open this ship to the Crimson Grasp.” The shaman brayed a response and lumbered forward, beginning to gesture and murmur in a language uncomfortably close to High Gothic for something with such bovine features. Where Saggar and his kin worshipped Khorne above the other gods, and as a grand warrior and pillar of fury and sacred rage, the beastherds worshipped Chaos as a single, primordial whole - an antithesis to order and civilisation. Whatever magic the shaman had taught itself to call upon was clearly borne from this idea of a Primordial Annihilator; it was the magic of disorder, the sorcery of lies and deception, the song of the twisting of bonds and proper function and loyalty. And it was exactly what the squad needed. The Nails buzzed louder in Saggar’s skull as writhing shadows began to dance between the shaman’s staff and the console, and he bit down hard on the urge to cut the beastman down, casting an eye over his squad to make sure that they were doing the same. The shaman’s dark magic poured through the bulkhead door’s sensor-arrays and gene-protocols, myriad illusions confounding it and overwhelming the simple machine spirit. The sensors scanned and scanned again, and a donut emerged in its protocols. There were Astartes in front of it, and surely they were its masters? What other Astartes could be on the ship? It served the Astartes. It served these Astartes? “Rell, now.” Saggar’s command cut through Rell’s battle with his own Nails, and he pushed his way back towards the console, grunting in disgust as the tendrils of the shaman’s magic caressed his armour. A dataspike slammed roughly into the console, and with that the machine spirit’s defences were finally completely overwhelmed. Rell grinned, feral delight overwhelming him despite the proximity of the mutant’s foul sorcery as he punched in a command. Emergency Protocol Exile Extremis Initiated. Unsealing all inner bulkhead chambers. Ave Imperator. The bulkhead door began to scream and screech as it slowly unlocked and rolled open, revealing the dimly lit corridor beyond. For a second, nothing beyond the bulkhead changed. Then, as the rest of the strike cruiser began to realise what was befalling it, the corridor beyond was lit by the flashing strobe of warning crimson, and the screaming of the door was joined by the wailing of klaxons. Saggar began to laugh, and punched through a vox command to the waiting Trireme. “Pilot, relay the following back to Axeman’s Mercy: Mission accomplished, Lord. We have our way in.”