"Never forget the path I have set you upon! If anything stands across it, bleed it, burn it, break it!"
- —A Bloodspeaker.[1]
Bloodspeakers as rendered for Total War: Warhammer III.
Bloodspeakers are fierce, Khorne-worshipping demagogues and unholy priests and zealots of the Skaramor tribes of the Warriors of Chaos. Cruel instigators, they drive others to extreme efforts and acts of frenzied Khornate worship in their quest to become more "Khorne-worthy", promising glory, demanding obedience, and threatening punishment for weakness or failure.[1][2]
Bloodspeakers are unusually verbose and not as mindlessly voluble as most other followers of Khorne, for the rigour of their mission and its devastating outcome mandate it. What truly gives them their name and their place of high reverence in their tribe is their ability to call up otherworldly Daemonic horrors within the pool of blood of the Khornate shrine in the Chaos Wastes known as the Brazen Cage. Such is the final step of a "Pilgrimage of Skulls" and the ascendance of Skaramor tribesmen to the status of Wrathmongers, the lunatic murdersmiths of Khorne.[1][2]
Role[]
Concept art for Bloodspeakers created for Total War: Warhammer III.
As skilled Chaos Marauders or Chaos Warriors, Bloodspeakers are savage and bloodthirsty in battle and relentless in their devotion to combat. They are fiercely loyal to Khorne, worshipping him with religious zeal and never allowing rest or respite in their service to him. Furthermore, they are evangelists of Khorne, and excel at enhancing those around them with the gifts of the Blood God, especially when afforded the greater mobility of a mount like Chaos Steeds or a Chaos Warshrine.[2]
Set upon the Pilgrimage of Skulls, the followers of the Bloodspeakers can be sent into states of unbreakable determination and filled with new vigour. Bloodspeakers can even restore their followers' wounds by offering their own blood as sacrifice. Bloodspeakers can ask the outright impossible of their followers, and they will do it. Many of them will die afterwards, but before that, in a state of wild abandon, they kill.[1][2][3a]
Assisting Bloodspeakers in controlling the forces of Khorne is that they speak the first language one learns, the one that most forget but they remember: the murmur of one's own blood. Through these private conversations, these meditations for carnage, Bloodspeakers yield a public spectacle to behold, deepening Khorne's hold on the mortal world.[1]
But it is their ability to summon the Daemons of the Khornate Brazen Cage shrine in the Chaos Wastes that give Bloodspeakers their name. Their murderous exhortations can give the enemy just a small taste of what awaits the aspirants in the Brazen Cage, and this alone can undo the minds and bodies of anyone else. Furthermore, such power is not limited to that shrine. When a Bloodspeaker opens his mouth, Daemons take note, and in the mortal realm such attentions are no mere curiosity, but a grasping and seizing, for they may provide a chance for the Daemons to enter the physical world.[1]
Yet even the ability to open gates to the Realm of Chaos is not the extent of a Bloodspeaker's power. Wrathmongers walk upon the very cusp of reality, the Daemon subjugated within providing a conduit to the Realm of Chaos that causes reality to flicker and fracture around them. And Wrathmonger or not, all the warriors who fight under the command of a Bloodspeaker may have their gait Daemonically-driven, which has a peculiar effect on the battlefield. The air twists, the earth bubbles, and foes die before they realise what happened.[1][2][3a]
Bloodspeakers are known to carry with them severed heads. A Khornate warrior carrying a severed head is a horror to be expected, but it is said a Bloodspeaker's trophy exhibits a different, and quite personal, horror to those who behold it. It is a uniquely gruesome display, for it could be any head, or could, indeed, be every head. This is why its eyes open such a wide vista of horrors to anyone who sees it.[1]
Pilgrimage of Skulls[]
As the Chaos Warrior tribesmen of the Skaramor tribe begin their fated journey to become Wrathmongers, they surrender themselves to the tutelage of the tribe's Bloodspeakers, who chart their journey step by bloody step. The aspirants are subjected to a punishing regime of conditioning and worship, goaded by the Bloodspeaker into fighting amongst each other day and night and feeding on the fallen. They are also never allowed to rest for long before the Bloodspeaker hurls them back into the fighting pits before their baying kinsmen.[1][3a]
Those under the tutelage of the Bloodspeaker begin their path as equals, but in time, some will prove more equal than others. One by one the aspirants are slain by their fellows, until finally only the most murderous and determined of their number remain. Only when this winnowing has taken place will the Bloodspeakers lead the worthy upon the "Pilgrimage of Skulls". Such a pilgrimage requires singular purpose, one which the Bloodspeakers are there to provide and bolster. This purpose is quite apart from being willing to murder all in your path -- though this is undoubtedly a requirement one absolutely cannot skirt.[1][3a]
Setting out from their tribal lands, the aspirants strike north. Forging on through myriad dangers, they battle all that cross their path (potentially including other aspirants), leaving the fallen to rot in their wake. Bloodspeakers do not consider the fatigue or losses of their followers when choosing the next battle for the ardent pilgrimage, only whether the next foe is within reach. In any case, once an aspirant has begun to walk the path of a Wrathmonger, there is no going back. To fall yet not die in the Bloodspeaker's service is an ignominy that marks such warriors as warriors no longer, but skull-carriers to haul the bounty of battle.[1][3a]
Eventually, the aspirants reach the Brazen Cage, where awaits their final trial. This sacred Khornate shrine in the Chaos Wastes stands atop a vast mountain of skulls, on the very edge of the Realm of Chaos. At the mountain's peak, the aspirants discover that the Brazen Cage is aptly named. Bursting from the osseous ground, thick brass bars rise up to form a prison within which a lake of blood bubbles and steams. A crown of spikes juts from the cage's crest, cradling a vast, jagged crystal of blood-red sanguinite.[1][3a]
Ushered into the cage, the aspirants wade waist-deep into the bloody lake. Then, at the bellowed exhortations of the Bloodspeakers, fiery lights blossom amid the haze that marks the Realm of Chaos. In answer, the mountain of bones rumbles like an angry volcano, skulls tumbling and rattling down its flanks as the crystal above blazes. Drawn from the beyond by the call of the Bloodspeakers, Daemons of Khorne flow from the sanguinite stone and fall upon the aspirants.[1][3a]
Each aspirant is now plunged into a battle for control of his very soul against the Daemons, but this a challenge that the aspirants must answer in a battle of a different kind. It is a war fought at the core of their very being. Rapacious and full of fury, in some cases the Daemons win the fight, snuffing out the raging soul of the mortal before tearing his living flesh apart. In many others however, the mortal warriors emerge victorious; having been honed and hardened, they force the Daemons down, subjugating them to their will.[1][3a]
The warriors who exit from the shrine of the Brazen Cage emerge stronger than when they entered. They are now Wrathmongers, warriors whose mortal flesh is infused with the unnatural energies of a Daemon and twisted into a form more pleasing to mighty Khorne. And before they leave the mountain to return to their tribes, the Bloodspeakers bestow them with Khorne's gifts, placing mighty hammer-flails in their hands, and granting them Daemon-wrought Chaos Armour to gird their bodies.[3a]
Sources[]
- 1: Total War: Warhammer III (PC Game)
- 2: Creative Assembly Blog - Omens of Destruction: Introducing Skulltaker
- 3: The End Times Vol V: Archaon Book 2 (8th Edition)
- 3a: pp. 28-29
Gallery[]
