- "How do we kill it?'
"Vakaan's voice shuddered and cracked. 'I don't think it can die,' he whispered..."- —A pair of Tzeentchian intruders encounter Kaarn.[1]
Kaarn the Vanquisher.[2]
Kaarn the Vanquisher was a mighty Daemon Prince of Khorne who guarded the Steps of Ruin within the Bastion Stair.
History
Kaarn was once a warlord so bloodthirsty that he massacred his own army with his own hand. For such carnage, the Blood God exalted him, transforming him into one of his Daemon Princes.[1]
Tasked with guarding the upper reaches of the Bastion Stair, the Vanquisher could be summoned from the spilt blood of his enemies, appearing as a cloud of crimson mist. Eventually, the cloud would assume a vaguely Human shape, but one of gigantic proportions...[1]
Twenty-feet tall, Kaarn's hunched shoulders were impossibly broad, his limbs thick with muscle. His brutish head was a bald, hound-like countenance with jutting fangs and burning eyes, a hoop of steel piercing his snout-like nose. From each side of his head, drooping down to curl across his chest, stabbing forward like the tusks of a Mastodon, were two enormous horns capped in steel. Armour of blackened steel and burnished brass covered his huge, crimson-skinned body, each vambrace and sabaton sporting the leering visage of a skull. Upon the blackened cuirass were the arrows of Chaos and the skull-rune of Khorne, each picked out in bronze. Iron chains dripped from his monstrous arms, brass hooks securing them into his daemonic flesh.[1]
In battle, Kaarn wielded a pair of immense axes forged from bronze and steel. With every hellish blow that struck his enemies, the blood that exploded from their destruction would fly through the air, swirling like a ribbon of gore to gather about his body to be absorbed into his crimson flesh. Thus, with each stomp of his mighty hooves, Kaarn's wounds would close a little tighter, regenerating through the lifeforce of his slain foes.[1]
Sources
