I wasn’t lying when I said I had almost no knowledge of aos
or are they praying to the one 3DO made for Heroes of Might and Magic and Plagiarism
This is the Infinite Money Nagash. Reblog him and you will receive 350 gold a day in perpetuity. If you ignore this post an ex marine will threaten to have your dev team flayed alive
Had a fucked up body horror idea today involving some alt heresey/nightmare whatever scenario and "what happended to the imperial fists?"
Warnings: Completely different from the wholesome stuff on this blog. Nurgle/tyranid tier body horror. "baby factory" esque body horror, and permanent disfigurement and being stuck in one place.
Corrupted imperial fists having an ant like theme/aesthetic playing off their obsession with obedience and building and staying behind their fortifications. Whoever walks in on this/gains access to the "hive"/etc wondering why the primarch himself has not come to defend against this invasion. With the twist that the primarch himself has been reduced to some bloated monstrosity functioning like an ant queen. Entire body morphed and now dedicated solely to producing more geneseed (or otherwise fulfilling his duty/continuing the fight/producing soldiers). He was once stated to have been torn apart after his death, perhaps this is what happened to his torso after he was. It would be in line for Dorn, whose armor someone pointed out looked like he was litterally carrying the palace on his shoulders, to ltterally fuse with his fortress.
It's also a nice gender reversal of the scifi trope of a woman being turned into a grotesque baby factory. In warhammer fantasy female skavens are this, in warhammer 40k we have this being done to women in the Daemonculaba. So why not a primarch obsessed with his buildings and defense being turned into an immobile geneseed factory?
For anyone like me reading stuff like this and then feeling like it ruins the fluff: Don't worry, it doesn’t happen. It's just a fucked up dream someone had.
That or one of the lost primarchs had a similar builder/duty theme and this is what happened to them.
Book Review - Dark Harvest (Warhammer Horror) by Joshua Reynolds
Harran Blackwood was a Warrior-Priest of ruthless virtue. Now he's a man with a scorched reputation, prowling the back alleys of Greywater Fastness, content to fight the petty wars of racketeers for survival. But when a desperate message arrives from an old friend, Blackwood is forced to confront a past he thought long buried.
Summoned to the isolated village of Wald, Blackwood sets off on a perilous trek to ensure the sins of his former life remain forgotten. He soon discovers that Wald is a hostile, secretive place with sins of its own. Deep in the murky marshes, where the cruel chants of village folk echo and the stink of death hovers low, Blackwood must channel his bitterness and rage to defy the ancient darkness that now hunts him before he is devoured, body and soul.
2 stars: ⭐⭐
Well, I’ll start by saying I came into this knowing very little about the Warhammer universe, though I had a vague idea of it. However, prior knowledge doesn’t seem necessary to follow the story. The atmosphere is strong, though it isn’t particularly scary—at least, not for me, as it didn’t give me goosebumps or make me look over my shoulder. The pacing felt slow, and Harran Blackwood, the protagonist, doesn’t help. If anything, the story drags even more because I find him so bland. Occasionally, the secondary characters provide some interest, but I still felt somewhat disappointed by the end.
cw: gore, torture, emeto, cannibalism, mild body horror
Soundtrack: Diary of Dreams - Daemon
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Aboard the Infidel-class raider Infernal Omen…
“And you are certain of this, brother?”
The former Sororitas, her cursed warplate of arterial red and blackened gunmetal draped in ragged funerary cloth, looked to the Diabolist beside her. Incense smoke rose in snakelike clouds from the jaws of the Word Bearer’s gilded goat skull helm.
“There is no certainty in the Eye, Sashka,” said Serkan, turning over the scintillating ritual athame in his gauntleted hand, “only lore and consequence.”
Candles lit the chamber in a flickering glow, the heady smell of incense hanging in the air and mingling with the chemical stench of machine lubricant. Three bodies of disparate sizes laid at the center of a great circle of salt, their forms cloaked in rich red cloth embroidered with golden Colchisian glyphs. The Diabolist, the Lord of the Lost, knew what he must do. He had known for years what forbidden knowledge would sate his feverish hunger, and the path that led to it.
“The hour is upon us,” he said, stepping inside the circle. Sashka followed hesitantly as the Astartes knelt and removed the cloth, revealing the bound figures beneath. Two men, one corpse.
“And here I thought the Ascension Blacklist was a myth,” said the fallen Sister, bringing the yellowed scroll in her hand up to eye level, her steely gaze wandering over the lines of Dark Tongue scrawled across its surface.
“To the Imperium, my father is a myth,” said Serkan, grasping the face of the bound and trembling Ministorum priest, turning the mortal’s head and inspecting its structure, “and yet I had the honor to walk beside him.”
“I still don’t understand why this list is of such great importance to you, let alone why acquiring it is so convoluted,” said Sashka.
“Because,” said Serkan, turning his attention to the Dark Apostle beside the priest, stripped bare of his warplate and subdued by daemonic sorceries, “I have to know who, Sashka. I have to know who will never have their greatest desire. I have to know if the false brother who betrayed the Faustian Lords is on that list, and if not what I must do to put him there.”
“Why not just kill him?” asked Sashka, setting down the scroll and crouching at Serkan’s side, “is that not enough?”
“No,” said Serkan, his hulking form tensing as he pried open the Dark Apostle’s eyelids, leaning over him and inspecting the eye as it danced wildly in its socket, incense smoke slithering around his golden helm with every breath, “to live is to suffer when you have been scorned by the Gods. It is all Dismas deserves, to walk in the shadow of Gods and never feel the embrace of their light on his rotting flesh again.”
Sashka nodded, silent and solemn. She knew the depths of Serkan’s pain, how the loss of his brothers had broken him in ways thought impossible for an Astartes, and how dearly he had once loved Dismas. He was a wound in the Diabolist’s soul.
“Damnatio memoriae,” she thought, “he wants to deface his memories of him.”
“I will not wait any longer,” said Serkan, rising to his full height once more, his gaze shifting to the stasis-preserved corpse of a member of the Gal Vorbak, recovered from the aftermath of Isstvan V and rendered nameless by time. A massive claw wound laid the possessed marine’s torso wide open; the obvious work of Corvus Corax. Not allowed to decay for millennia, his organs glistened in the candlelight, wet and with a strange oily sheen upon them. Serkan reached for his belt, where eight corked flasks of cursed glass dangled from a chain like exotic baubles, and one by one he opened them. Coruscating clouds of daemonic essence swam around his form like vibrant eels, each coalescing into the shape of one of his bound Neverborn familiars.
The twisted seraph Wormwood sauntered to his side, tongues of flame licking around its slender caprine hooves, many wings twitching and many eyes gazing curiously at the bound figures. The pitch-dark shadow Liftoach sailed overhead, its manta ray form coming to settle on Sashka’s arm. The six that remained clung to the shadows, waiting and observing their lord in silence. Athame in hand, Serkan removed the gauntlet from his left hand with a hiss of releasing seals, then drew the rippled blade across his palm. Scarlet transhuman blood blossomed from the wound, running in rivulets down his hand and dripping onto the deck, where it coalesced into jagged red crystals; one of the Warp’s many ‘gifts’ bestowed upon him. He knelt once more, sheathing the athame and dipping an armored finger into the open wound before starting to trace sigils onto the foreheads of each of the three. The principle alchemical elements of salt, sulphur, and mercury; body, soul, and mind. The young priest squirmed as Serkan smeared the salt sigil on his forehead, whining through the cloth gag in his mouth, robes stained with sweat.
Serkan rose, sliding his gauntlet back in place, the rapidly crusting scab on his palm flaking and cracking with the movement. The psychoactive crystals set into his vambraces flared with witchfire as he raised his hands over the now sobbing priest. The eight daemons fanned out around the circle of salt, each a point of the great Star of Chaos, watching with eyes of primordial fire. Through his psychic might, Serkan bid the priest rise into the air, reaching out his hand and grasping the man’s face, armored fingers digging into flesh like talons and eliciting muffled, desperate cries. Something broke in his head, rivulets of pinkish fluid running from his nose, his eyes melting into slop and dripping onto Serkan’s gauntlet as the energies of the Empyrean scoured the inside of his skull. The burning away of the mind and ego.
Serkan beckoned forth one of the eight with his free hand. Satony sauntered forward, vulpine and skull-faced, jaws dripping magma that hissed and cooled on the decking. Snakes writhed beneath its fur, peeking out from the perpetual wound in its stomach. The Diabolist released his grip on the priest, dropping him with a heavy thump.
“Take him,” he commanded.
Satony circled, sniffing at the priest’s robes with its fleshless snout, and in an instant dissolved its form into a torrent of liquid flesh, surging into the priest’s nose and empty, weeping eye sockets. At once, the man’s whimpering ceased, body jerking violently upward, convulsing and contorting as the daemon made itself at home in its new flesh. The rope bonds snapped under its infernal strength, freed hands ripping the cloth gag from its mouth, jaw distending and flesh of the cheeks ripping like wet paper with the overextension. It briefly locked its gaze on Sashka, cocking its ravaged head. The burning coals that were Satony’s eyes glowed from within the possessed’s melted sockets. Sashka approached, waving the creature over to where the remains of the Gal Vorbak leaked shimmering fluids onto the deck.
“Satony,” she said, recalling the lines Serkan had taught her, “we bid you consume. Purify this soul within your being so that we may learn its secrets.”
Its face still running with putrid fluids, the daemonhost’s head snapped in the direction of the corpse, a low growl leaving its mutilated mouth, teeth strung with bloody saliva. Serkan clasped his gauntleted hands, the crystals along his vambraces glowing softly as he bowed his head and muttered in Colchisian. The daemonhost crouched, sinking to its knees over the stiff body, sniffing at it and continuing to growl. Its hands began to pry at the warped ceramite fused to the Blessed Son’s flesh like a crustacean’s shell, its fingernails starting to bleed with the force at which it dug at it. It acted without care for the damage it caused its vessel. Chunks of armor peeled away with a hideous wet sound, exposing the meat underneath, which Satony lapped at greedily. Serkan’s prayers grew in feverous intensity as the daemonhost’s teeth began to rip away at the body, pulling strips of tissue off and gnawing at bone. The priest’s mortal teeth cracked against the Astartes bone, but Satony carried on regardless. Facial cartilage crunched and popped between its molars, eyes gushed under its broken teeth. Soon the brain was visible, and the daemonhost chewed and slurped hungrily at the fatty tissue.
“How much must it eat?” whispered Sashka.
Serkan looked up from his clasped hands.
“It will eat until it has what it needs,” he said.
Face. Eyes. Brain. Teeth. Windpipe. The mutant skull of the Gal Vorbak now resembled a ceramic bowl more than anything else, open and empty of its contents, licked clean and broken at the edges. The daemonhost moved downward to the gaping wound in the torso, digging its fingers into the sides of the opening and pulling it wider, pushing its head into the wound and beginning to feast on the organs. Pulped viscera dribbled down its chin as it snarled and snorted. Its seven fellows watched it work, inhuman faces serene and muttering amongst themselves. Wormwood’s many pinions twitched; the flame knight Murmur flickered and spewed sparks from the eye slit of its soot-blackened helm. One by one each mutated organ disappeared down Satony’s throat, its host’s gut distended under the gore stained priest’s robes from the sheer amount of consumed flesh. Satisfied, it stood, looking at Serkan and Sashka with strings of bloody drool hanging from its jaws.
Serkan walked over to the final body, the bound Dark Apostle, and crouched beside him. The other Word Bearer squirmed, eyes wide and furious, struggling against the thick rope between his teeth and the sorceries that bid his limbs not to obey him. Serkan took the athame in hand and used it to slice the gag free, the remains of it dripping with acid from the marine’s Betcher’s gland. The Diabolist chuckled, tossing it aside. His chorus of daemons chuckled with him.
“Treated sinews of a Guardian of Contradiction,” he said, looking into the eyes of the coughing and sputtering Astartes, “you would never have escaped it that way.”
“TRAITOR!” spat the Dark Apostle, flecks of acid splattering Serkan’s warplate and hissing where they landed. The Diabolist grabbed the other Word Bearer’s face, clamping his hand over his mouth and leaning in close.
“A traitor, am I Orontes?” he hissed, vox full of static, “I who was once beloved of your dear brother Dismas, abandoned by him to be consumed by the Neverborn in a pile of our brothers’ carcasses? Know this in your last moments, fool, that you are to me just the same as you have been to him; only a means to an end.”
He stood, ignoring the Colchisian curses Orontes spat at him, and turned to look at the panting daemonhost.
“Satony,” he said, reaching out a fluid-soaked hand to the creature, “commit thy black arts to the work of revelation.”
The creature sauntered over to Orontes, cocking its ragged head and burbling, drool continuing to drip from its broken teeth. It dropped to its hands and knees, joints bending at unnatural angles as it crawled to the Dark Apostle, climbing atop him as he struggled and shouted.
“I know what you seek, bastard,” he snarled, desperately turning his head away from the daemonhost, its corpse-reeking breath hot on his tattooed cheek, “you would damn us all for your petty revenge!”
Serkan’s crystal blue eye lenses flared with witchfire.
“Then you shall all be damned with me. Whatever the Four will, so it shall be.”
The daemonhost unhinged its jaw and clamped it over the Dark Apostle’s mouth. Its back and shoulders shuddered beneath its stained robes as it began to regurgitate its stomach contents. Orontes squirmed and writhed, shimmering black fluid that danced with all the colors of the Warp spilling down his throat and dribbling out the sides of his mouth.
Serkan smiled beneath his helm. He placed a hand on Sashka’s armored shoulder.
“Watch,” he said, “the signs will reveal themselves now.”
“There,” said Sashka, pointing, “I think I see it.”
The skin of Orontes’s torso twitched and rippled as his eyes glazed over and grew empty, not dead but paralyzed by shock. Dark subcutaneous patterning blossomed like bruises across the Dark Apostle’s chest and flanks.
“There it is,” said Serkan, his voice shuddering with enraptured glee, “there it is!”
The candles flickered as he approached, his daemonic familiars chittering.
“Come and see!” called the root-like creature Mandragora.
“Come and see!” echoed the dove-winged and serpent-scaled lupine Marchosias.
“Signs and wonders,” murmured the cloaked and skull-headed Bifrons.
“Praises be!” wailed the horned and blue-skinned Erlkönig.
The daemonhost hacked the last of the black fluid into Orontes’s mouth before crawling off of him and slumping in a heap. The mangled body of the priest twitched and writhed for a moment before Satony burst free from its fleshy confines, emerging in a spray of blood and fluids and a flash of vibrant Warp energies, trotting back to its place at the edge of the salt circle. Serkan knelt, athame in hand, tracing the gleaming golden lion’s claws of his gauntlets over the Dark Apostle’s bared chest until he found what he was looking for.
“Sashka,” he said, “hold him still for me.”
The fallen Sororitas sank to the floor, placing an armored knee on the marine’s shoulder, clamping her hands around his throat. He gurgled, eyes unfocused and glazed, muscles in his neck twitching. She could feel his twinned pulses thudding in the meat of his throat, fast and hard. To think how easily she could kill him this way, to take the life of a creature she had been raised to believe was an angel of death, even one so blessed by the Powers.
Serkan found the beginning of the marks, just below Orontes’s collarbones, and pressed the tip of the athame into the skin, sliding the blade carefully through each layer of tissue and under the hypodermis, slowly prying the skin free of the muscle beneath with a sound like tearing silk. The delirious Astartes whined in pain, prompting Sashka to slam her armored fist into his mouth, breaking his teeth as she shoved her hand into his throat, snarling in contempt. He coughed and choked as Serkan slowly and meticulously flayed the entirety of his torso, black tears leaking down his face. The Diabolist pulled back the skin in a floppy sheet, the bared muscle leaking myoglobin and blood in a growing pool on the deck below. Seared black into the subcutaneous tissue, lines of Dark Tongue stood stark against the yellowish adipose -- names of the living and the dead, denied the grace of the gods. Behind his goat-skull helm, Serkan’s four eyes scanned the Ascension Blacklist, searching…
Sashka looked at him. Beside her, the Lord of the Lost’s eight familiars tore into the ravaged corpse of the priest, devouring vacant flesh by handful and mouthful, splattering the circle of salt with even more viscera.
“Brother… is it him? Is he there?”
Over the sound of tearing meat and snapping, slavering jaws, Serkan Tetrax laughed.
Spoiler for The Watcher in the Rain WH40k Audio Drama
I like to think my farm in Stardew is on an agriworld and I’m Doing My Part™️ for the Imperium. But if one of the towns people is mean about my crops I pretend I’m that lady in The Watcher in the Rain and send out bad resources as an act of revenge. Oops now your cannibals cause you said my eggplants were trash and I sabotaged to supply lines to you
The God Emperor shines down on us all! Truly blessed!
