++Community DIY chapter - the Sons of Sköll++

[Olis]

Greetings one and all - yes, we have finally got a complete article for the chapter dreamed up in the 2013/14 Community DIY Project!

This is, without doubt, a Community Chapter and as such will be stickied for the time being so that the community can enjoy it. As an exercise in creating a chapter from the two main taboos - Space Wolf successors and Cursed Founding chapters - I do believe that this article provides a good example of how to produce a plausible successor while still maintaining overall universal canon.

Because this is a community project, no individual author will be ascribed to this work - many people have contributed ideas and concepts, providing the meat for the article's write-up. It is you, the Liber, that this chapter belongs to. Enjoy.

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CHAPTER DATAFILE: SONS OF SKÖLL

CHAPTER NAME..................................SONS OF SKÖLL [FORMERLY THE VOID JACKALS]
FOUNDING: .........................................21^ST [M.36]
CHAPTER WORLD: ..............................NONE [CRUSADING CHAPTER]
FLAGSHIP: ..........................................SIGHT UNSEEN [FORMERLY THE PAX NONBELLI]
GENE-SEED (PREDECESSOR): ...............ULTRAMARINES[CLAIMED] SPACE WOLVES [REDACTED]
KNOWN DESCENDANTS:........................NONE
STATUS................................................EXCOMMUNICATUS TRAITORIS

[basicheaderhalf'ORIGINS']ORIGINS[/basicheaderhalf]

Brother Kasimar, Second Company, 201.M38

B

orn from the clandestine experimentation of the 21st ‘Cursed’ Founding, the Sons of Sköll were originally christened as the Void Jackals by their creators. The High Lords of Terra and Adeptus Mechanicus sought to harness the legendary brutality and gifts of the sons of Russ, freed of the wild spirit which often put them at odds with the central authority of the Imperium. Though these forces believed millennia of Chapter tradition and the influence of Fenris bred much of the Wolves rebellious nature, the High Lords deemed much of Russ’ gene-seed itself to be a detrimental influence.

The Magos Biologis sought first and foremost to eradicate the mutation responsible for the Wolves potential for degeneration into the feral Wulfen. Even the subtler mutations of the Canis Helix - the growth of fangs, the yellowing of eye pigment were deemed aberrations and thoroughly peeled away from the new gene-seed stock. The other unique traits of Russ’s gene-seed were carefully prized from the chaff, blessing the Jackals with all the heightened senses and ferocity of their forebears.

Even beyond the laboratory, every effort was made to bring the new Chapter into what the High Lords deemed adequate obeisance. The Wolves were left uninformed of their stocked gene-seed’s use in a new successor, ensuring a separation of the Jackals from their cultural roots and lineage. Rather, a cadre of White Consuls – deemed appropriate by virtue of their zealous nature and rigid adherence to the templates of the Codex Astartes - was assigned the task of leading the Void Jackals through their first battlefields, while secretly reporting on the new Astartes’ idiosyncrasies and genetic purity.

The Jackals developed several curious characteristics early on. Physically, the new Astartes displayed all the acute senses and ferocity their creators wished

Chapter Heraldry – the Jackal’s Head

to reap from the modified gene-seed. A notable chemical imbalance presented itself as well, one prone to increasing the Jackals’ metabolisms to a degree which, left untreated, could gradually damage organs and muscle tissues. It was a mutation of some concern to the Consuls and their masters, but treated easily enough. Subtle modifications to the chemical treatments common in all Astartes’ lives addressed the most acute risks, but even so, the Jackals became prone to eating in abundance, and immense feasts of enriched meats and drink fast became a common custom between battles.

The more subtle deviation was in the Jackals’ behavior. The Consuls noticed early on that their charges were filled with a restless aggression when they didn't have an enemy to kill. Although they absorbed the hierarchic structures of the Codex with all the zeal demanded of their de facto veteran cadre, maintaining a seat of authority required constant proof of a brother’s superiority, whether as a Sergeant, Captain, or the Chapter Master himself. Even among brothers of equal rank, the Jackals were prone to establishing a feral sort of pecking order by strength. While unsettling, the challenges were only ever followed with honorable, non-lethal duels, and so the Consuls and the faceless powers that sent them deemed the divergences acceptable.


[basicheaderhalf'EARLY HISTORY']EARLY HISTORY[/basicheaderhalf]

S

everal generations of the Void Jackals fought and died, their original cadre of veterans along with them, before true concerns arose within the Chapter. Both the gifts and troubles of the gene-seed began to grow more acute in the oldest brothers - officers and warriors both. The honed senses heightened further still while steadily greater doses of chemicals and portions of enriched meats were required to sate their increasingly demanding metabolic disorders. After a point, the effects spiraled exponentially out of control.

Apothecaries struggled to halt the assault of maladies on the Chapter’s senior brothers. Symptoms of muscular dystrophy brought on by the hyper-accelerated metabolisms rapidly ate away at muscle tissues with horrendous burning pain. Debilitating audio- and photophobia grew until the afflicted suffered agony from the sound of their own breath and the slightest glimmers of light. The victims died in agony, locked in seizures and wailing in pain as massive organ failure sucked the life from their shrivelled bodies. The apothecaries named the disease Lupésis. Among their battle-brothers, the wretched fate became known as the Wither.

The Wither began to slowly rob the Chapter of its oldest and wisest warriors. The first to succumb were consigned to a slow, ignominious death as the Apothecaries desperately tried to counteract the degeneration. Worse still, within only a few generations, isolated incidents grew into a pandemic, until hardly any Jackals living longer than a century were unaffected, and scant few could still function as warriors beyond their second. The eldest Jackals died as shrivelled husks in fiery agony, their hypersensitive ears aching from the sounds of their own heartbeats and noses tormented by the stink of their own decaying flesh, locked away in pitch dark cells far away from the glory of the battlefield, and with their gene-seeds purged for fear of contamination. Such a prospect drove most of the Wither’s victims to seek the dignity of death in war as the disease became more common. The few others faced the blight with meditation, prayer, and occasionally more drastic, even insane attempts at a solution.

With the wisest leaders of the Chapter losing their bodies and minds to the Wither, the younger, brasher Jackals began to rise to authority. The plague robbed the eldest brothers of the strength needed to put down challenges to their authority, and so bit by bit the Jackals’ leadership traded wisdom, tradition and experience for the untempered aggression of youth. Even then, the veterans stricken by the Wither were pushed farther from authority. Where once their wisdom would have been recognized and sought by their usurpers, and their voices respected regardless of their lost titles, now the eldest were all but pariahs in their own brotherhood. Although some accredited this to the typical brash arrogance of youth, the truth was far more painful: the Wither was becoming a source of true fear within the Jackals, so much so that even being in the presence of the afflicted was too unsettling for most.

The once stringently Codex adherent fraternity began to fracture as more and more young warlords rose to rival one another, drawing the disparate remains of Companies and squads to their banners. The crusading fleet fractured along with them, breaking the armada into little more than raiding parties directed by the strongest warriors for as long as they could hold power. In war, the Jackals became all the more aggressive, driven as much by the foolhardy tactics of inexperienced pack leaders as by the knowledge of the crippling disease waiting to take them.

The more prudent brothers began to seek aid from outside the Chapter. Some turned to the Adeptus Mechanicus for insight into the tainted gene-seed, but the passage of centuries and clandestine nature of the Jackals’ creation had done their part to sabotage any hopes for wisdom or sympathy. Others turned to the Ultramarines, suffering under the delusion that they shared the same primogenitor as their White Consuls forebears. This was to be denied and refuted in detail. The confession of their genetic instability only brought the Imperium’s scrutiny down onto the Jackals, and with it Inquisitorial investigation and spurning suspicion. The appallingly brutal and recklessly suicidal tactics young pack leaders employed drove allies even further away, until they were practically driven off from ongoing campaigns by would-be allies aware of the Jackals’ reputation.

Without hope for a cure, shunned by the Imperium, their heritage exposed as a lie and consigned to an unbearable fate should war not claim them, the Jackals began to accept the inevitable truth. The Chapter was destined to die out. Grim fatalism stopped some of the splintered fleets’ recruitments altogether.

Julden the Pierced

Julden perpetrated unto himself the most deranged attempt to counter the Wither the Jackals had ever known. As the burning sapped the muscles from his body and shrivelled his limbs, Julden speared metal rods though his armor and the emaciated flesh beneath. He regularly submerged his permanently armored limbs in vats of dry ice, so the rods could conduct the freezing cold down directly into his bones and meat to sooth the fire. When his senses grew to unbearable acuteness, he replaced his eyes with tuned down bionics, and sewed his ears shut. This was the last act of mutilation before his brothers executed Julden, as much out of pity as of disgust.

The last handful to face the Wither head on were spread across the shattered fleet, though all began to hear the same promises during their forlorn meditations and prayers in a hauntingly familiar voice, spoken from fleeting shadows in the shape of wolves. It offered the strength to overcome their wasted flesh, to grow strong again and rise to lead their brotherhood to salvation. The agony of the softest light, the faintest sound, and the incessant, wretched fire in their shrivelling bodies would cripple them no longer. The price was as simple as it was cruel. To earn redemption and freedom, the promising whispers demanded they endure. The few chosen to hear the offer were told that should they survive the crucible, should they accept the pain of their flesh, then they would be saved at the brink of death.

‘I am Sköll,’ it whispered with curious amusement, ‘and you are my children. You always have been. You simply have to claim your birthright.’

All but one accepted the pact, and damned their kin for eternity.


[basicheaderhalf'THE FALL']THE FALL[/basicheaderhalf]

T

he elders would find that Sköll would keep its promise, if in a way far from their reckoning. They emerged from their seclusion not cured from the Wither, but fuelled by it. Wasted limbs, looking little more than the desiccated anatomy of mummies, held a strength greater than the changed Jackals knew in their primes. The agony of their hypersensitive hearing, sight, and smell seemed meek; every bit as strong as before yet somehow invigorating, even thrilling.

Blessed as they were, these ascended Withered challenged the young pack leaders for dominance, and won handily, while taking the honor duels to lethal extremes for the first time in the history of the dying Chapter. Beaten into obeisance by demonstration of strength and awed by the conquering of the Wither, the Chapter embraced the emergent Cult of Sköll with little resistance. The Wither became a goal, an opportunity for ascension, rather than a horrific sentence of isolated, dishonored death. The chemical enrichment of the great feasts was forgotten, and the chemical treatments to hold off the degeneration’s earliest stages were abandoned.

The first chosen of Sköll brought the splintered fleet slowly back together, reforming it as a single crusading force. Recruitment was not only recommenced, but increased dramatically, that more of this new superior breed of Astartes could be brought into service of the Golden Throne. Sköll, for its part, seemed content to leave the Jackals to their own whims, focused solely on striking compacts with new ascending members of the fraternity. With little else forthcoming from the mysterious force, most came to believe it a facet of their unknown Primarch or the Emperor Himself, reaching out to expose the Wither for what it was: an opportunity to surpass any Astartes before them, even the legendary Chapter they once believed to be their ancestral origins, the Ultramarines.

Returned to operable numbers, if still below the Codex standard strength, the Jackals campaigned in earnest once again. The fleet struck out for the nearest Imperial war-zone, out toward the Eastern Fringe. Vansetis, their destination, was the scene of a system-spanning suppression of a Tyranid splinter-fleet incursion. Although wary of their reputation, Imperial forces found little choice but to accept any aid offered in the face of such a threat, bringing them into tenuous alliance with Imperial Guard, and contingents of the Doom Eagles, Mortifactors, and the Ultramarines. But when these armies saw the Jackals in war, the monstrous husks of unnatural strength and barbarous energy, they were finally and truly denounced as heretics.

Yeolk the Wretch

Kept as a secret from the Chapter, Yeolk was the only elder to deny Sköll’s first offer of reprieve. Even so, the angry god’s touch on the gene-seed was strong enough by then to punish Yeolk’s ingratitude. The veteran was struck deaf, blind, and numb, casting him into a world of emptiness that was all but unbearable after so many years of inhumanly sharp sensation. In desperation, Yeolk took to mutilating himself, clawing out chunks of his ravaged body, clawing, cutting, and biting in vain hope of feeling something. The first followers of Sköll kept him alive out of pity, hoping their Primarch’s phantom would forgive the poor wretch. Now, he is a prized plaything of the Sons’ greatest torturers, whom aspire to refine their art to such heights as to make even the Wretch wince in pain.

Even embattled as they were, the loyalist forces mustered just enough strength to chase the Jackals from the system but not enough to pursue them unto destruction. With this final act of betrayal, Sköll offered a pact to all the Chapter. Forsaken and deceived time and again by those they sought to serve, cursed for enduring the crucible of their mutation, there was nothing left for the Jackals to grasp onto beyond Sköll and so they pledged fealty to their one final friend and ally. The Jackals spat on their oaths of loyalty to the Throne, purged its symbols from their ships and armor and gave themselves wholly to the power that blessed them. Sköll, the Dark Prince, the King-Queen, Slaanesh.

After that, the Wither was encouraged chemically. The husk-marines took to increasingly perverse measures to magnify the pain that energized them, defiling their bodies with blades, poisons, and sorceries. Sköll itself manifested his blessing in its entirety, favoring his strongest champions with all manner of blasphemous mutations.

Now the Jackals no longer, the Sons of Sköll campaign ceaselessly against their former masters and kinsmen, sharing all their most exquisite pains as punishment, or as promise, to those with the strength to hear Sköll’s offers.


[basicheaderhalf'HOME WORLD']HOME WORLD[/basicheaderhalf]

A

s the Void Jackals, the Chapter never held claim to a home world. However, even as a Crusade Fleet Chapter, the Jackals gravitated towards recruitment from a specific sort of world, favoring cultures with strong emphasis on hunting and war. As if by instinct of their perverted gene-seed, the Jackals respected and revered the way of the hunt. They also venerated fierce predators and so those worlds with similar beliefs were natural sources of recruits, sometimes discovered when the Jackals themselves hunted the strongest beasts they could find.

After becoming the Sons of Sköll, recruitment no longer followed any such direction. Recruits are seized typically on whims of amusement from worlds they wage war on. Other children are selected when they show a response to the toxins, chemicals and drugs the Sons coat their weapons in and deploy as gases in war. Recruitment rates are typically low, though, as the intense demands of gene-seed implantation, monitoring, and training of new Astartes does not typically appeal to the short attention span of the thrill hunting hedonists the Jackals have become. As such, many chosen for recruitment end up as little more than playthings.


[basicheaderhalf'BELIEFS']BELIEFS[/basicheaderhalf]

T

he Void Jackals inherited the nearly fanatical disposition of their White Consul caretakers, creating a fierce adherence to the ways set out by Roboute Guilliman and his holy text. Beyond this, the belief structure of the Jackals evolved to eerily mirror much of their true primogenitors, the Space Wolves. Hunting, the veneration of predatory beasts and the great feasts they held to stave off the Wither all carried hallmarks of their ancestral home of Fenris.

Above all, the Jackals believed in the right by might to rule. Although Codex adherent to a fault, the actual occupants of command positions were in constant flux. Challengers would arise whenever they thought themselves better suited for the role of their superiors, which simply meant they felt they were stronger. All the same, the eldest of the Chapter inhabited command positions often, blessed as they were not just in the strength of their headstrong juniors but the experience to meet most challenges and prevail. Even when stripped of command position by younger usurpers, the eldest always held great political sway by virtue of earned respect. But the Wither turned the eldest Jackals into objects of feared revulsion - it was only with the acceleration of the Wither that the eldest lost control of the Jackals altogether, dooming it to the fractious infighting that lasted until the coming of Sköll.

Afterwards, the Jackals came to believe in the Wither as a birthright by Sköll, believed in turn to be an aspect of the unknown Primarch whom bestowed it through his gene-seed. Turned as it was into a source of strength, the Wither became a route to a new, superior form of Astartes. It was an ascension earned only through the most steadfast endurance of their suffering and faith in the beneficent pacts of the Primarch. The Wither became a reward for centuries of unbearable suffering and so Sköll was embraced all too eagerly by those fearing the same fate of agonizing deaths far from the glory of righteous war.

Now finally seeing both the Imperium and Sköll for what they really are, the Sons wage war for their own pleasure, vicariously sharing the ecstasy of agony, bliss, and vindication with their new liege lord. Although many slaughter Imperial loyalists as much for revenge as for the thrill of sensation, the most devout followers of Sköll do it to expand his blessing, sharing their greatest excesses that their victims might know the same freedom.


[basicheaderhalf'ORGANIZATION']ORGANIZATION[/basicheaderhalf]

T

he Void Jackals were obsessively dedicated to the Codex Astartes, as much in a role as a treatise of war as in a paragon of military structure. Aside from the frequency of honor duels and unofficial pack orders established by peers, the Jackals stuck to the letter of the Codex until the Wither drove them to splinter into independent war bands. The war bands held little in terms of official structures, due to the separation from tradition caused when the eldest brothers were drawn into seclusion or early graves. Even when the first heralds of Sköll reunited the Chapter, little of the traditional Codex adherence remained, lost forever after centuries of the Wither’s purging.

The Sons of Sköll maintain the right by might to rule, with little in the way of formal structure. So long as a Son has the strength to put down challengers in lethal duels and leads his followers to rich hunting grounds, he will continue to lead. Squad structure became a matter of individuals’ dedication to aspects of Sköll, drawn together most often by their particular obsessions to form teams of Noise Marines, chemical addicts, flayers and the like.


[basicheaderhalf'GENE-SEED']GENE-SEED[/basicheaderhalf]

I

t is unclear whether the Wither was a result of failed tinkering by the Jackals’ creators. Many have come to believe that Sköll created the first flaws, and grew in influence as the Wither grew in intensity. As the Sons of Sköll, the gene-seed has become perverted beyond recognition by the abuse of chemicals intended to accelerate the Wither and the extremes pursued to heighten the pain-pleasure of their existence. Even between two different Sons there can be great differences in the gene-seed, as each pursues custom debaucheries and develops mutations of their own. As such, the success or failure of gene-seed implantation is as good as random chance.


[basicheaderhalf'COMBAT DOCTRINE']COMBAT DOCTRINE[/basicheaderhalf]

T

aking their method of war from the White Consuls, the Void Jackals employed the Codex Astartes as the treatise on all methods of warfare, but specialized in Drop Pod assaults and Rapid Deployment operations. Scouts were rarely assigned assault duties, however, forcing them into the role of Snipers and fire support that they would learn to control their restless aggression.

As the Wither became endemic and the Chapter broke into packs, the Jackals took to a suicidal lust for close combat, forcing short range fire-fights and hurling themselves at their enemies in hopes for a violent, glorious death. Even as they became the Sons of Sköll, the up close and personal predisposition has remained, that they may better experience the violence of war and the exhilarating pain of injuries they may receive in the process.


[basicheaderhalf'BATTLE CRY']BATTLE CRY[/basicheaderhalf]

O

riginally, the Void Jackals favored the simplicity of “For the Emperor!” as their battle cry, though took to the fatalistic “Death or death!” when the Wither took hold. The Sons of Sköll, when not screaming in rapturous agony, howl praises to their god in war.

[TDF]

A thoroughly good read - congratulations to everyone involved.

 

Some typos:

eye pigment- --> pigment - (leaving a space between the word and the hyphen for consistency)

heightened senses and ferociousness --> ferocity

The Wolves’ were left uninformed --> Wolves

[Olis]

Much appreciated, TDF. And I'm sure our ghost writer/community will be pleased to hear approval.

[Jape]

Really excellent fluff, great elements followed through to a hideous conclusion. Would fit in perfectly alongside the rest of the canon Cursed Founding.

[Firepower]

"The Magos Biologis sought first and foremost to eradicate the mutation responsible for the Wolves potential for degeneration into the feral Wulfen." Apostrophe needed.

There's a good deal of clumsy punctuation, mostly in abusing hyphens and colons, but there'd be a lot of editing and rearranging required to fix them. It's probably better just to be happy that there's actually a finished product

Good work to all involved