"And yet, heroes have come from among the people, have they not? The man Konrad, of whom all the minstrels sing; is he not a peasant? And Sierck, who saved the emperor's life a few years ago, was a mere actor, I believe. Sigmar himself was hardly born to the green velvet, as it were. Many men of genius have risen through their own merits. Minister Tybalt is the son of a grocer, is he not? And the Cults of Sigmar and Ulric are well-remembered for the humble-born servants who performed such great feats. You yourself, I assume, have no especially notable antecedents."
- —Ambassador Dien Ch'ing[3]
Konrad is a citizen of the Empire of Man from Ostland, who, tempered by his hard life, became a skilled mercenary warrior in search of his lost past and his Sigmar-given destiny. He would go on to play a pivotal role in saving Emperor Karl Franz from an assassination plot enacted by the Skaven and was declared a hero of the Empire.[1a]
History[]
Konrad grew up without a name of his own in a village in the Forest of Shadows near Ferlangen in Ostland.[1c] He was raised by Adolf Brandenheimer, the local innkeeper who treated the boy worse than his dogs, forcing him to sleep in the stables and let him fight the animals for scraps.[1a] The child grew up without knowledge of the gods or even knowing the name of the nation he was part of. [1c]
One night, he saved Elyssa Kastring, the daughter of the most powerful man of the valley, from a Beastman. The girl took a liking to him, visiting him at night, bringing him gifts like a bow and even giving him a name -- Konrad. [1a] The pair became secret lovers, she revealing her blossoming magical talent to him and Konrad the special talent of his eye, which was mutated to allow him to see fractions of a second into the future, though at the cost of his regular sight in that eye.[1b]
One evening, Konrad glimpsed a knight clad in bronze plate armour riding through the village. The village was attacked on the day afterwards, during the celebrations of Sigmartag, by a Chaos host consisting of Beastmen, Skaven, the Warriors of Chaos and even Greenskins under the leadership of a skull-faced warrior. Konrad survived by slaying a Beastman and wearing his skin.[1d]
Managing to escape the carnage, Konrad was certain that Elyssa had died and fended for himself in the Forest of Shadow. He was then apprehended for poaching by Heinz and Carl, two inhabitants of Ferlangen, and sentenced to death by hanging by the local baron, Otto Kreishmier. The intervention of Wolfgang von Neuwald, a mercenary, saved him. Wolfgang took Konrad's place in the ensuing trial by combat and killed the baron.[1e]
Konrad joined Wolfgang, who he called "Wolf," as a squire for five years, learning about the Empire and its patron god Sigmar, travelling to Kislev, first to take part in the defence of Praag against the Chaos hordes, then to take up guardianship of a gold mine near the High Pass. Here, Konrad was tutored by various sellswords in the arts of battle.[1f]
Together with Wolf and a Dwarf named Anvila, he set out to discover an ancient Dwarf temple in the area. The group was assaulted by Goblins who had transformed the temple into their stronghold. Wolf was taken captive.[1g] Fighting in the temple to save his mentor from being sacrificed by a Goblin Shaman, Konrad slaughtered over two hundred Goblins, imagining himself to be Sigmar Heldenhammer.[1h] Afterwards, Konrad left to find the Bronze Horseman whose coming had destroyed his home villahe. [1i]
When Konrad left his companions, he found the mine razed, the inhabitants savagely slaughtered, including his Kislevite lover Krysten.[2a] With the sole survivor, a miner called Heinler, Konrad assaulted the camp of the survivors of the horde. Despite his valour, he was overpowered and taken captive. As he was about to be sacrificed to Khorne, he recognised the leader of the host as part of the noble Kastring family, which had once lorded over the village he grew up in. The Chaos Lord, interested in his tale and how he came to recognise him, spared Konrad so they could exchange words. It was revealed that the Chaos Lord had been one of Elyssa's brothers.[2b]
Intrigued by Konrad's strength, the Chaos Lord invited him to join his army. When Konrad refused, he was forced by one of Kastring's attendants to serve as a slave. Kastring hoped to convert Konrad into worshipping Khorne in exchange for freedom, but the Ostlander held true to Sigmar. When offered to prove his allegiance to the Blood God by slaying an innocent, Konrad instead put the blade into Kastring's throat, which failed to kill the Chaos Lord but enabled him to flee.[2c]
Pursued by the Chaos horde, Konrad donned the Chaos Armour of the Bronze Knight, whose arrival had heralded the end of his village, which seemingly lay abandoned in the forest with his steed nearby. Newly empowered, he turned back to destroy Kastring and his warband. Slaughtering his foes without mercy, Konrad defeated the Champion of Khorne, but found that he could neither dismount nor remove the armour.[2d]
Under the sway of the Chaos Armour, Konrad travelled through the border regions of the Empire, killing those who crossed his path to stave off the blood hunger of the cursed armour, which increasingly consumed him. This ended when he was captured by the wizard Litzenreich and his Dwarf aides. While the Dwarfs wanted to destroy Konrad since they believed him to be a worshipper of Chaos, the wizard relished the challenge of freeing Konrad from the spell of the armour. Smuggling him to Middenheim during Carnival, Litzenreich used prodigious amounts of illegally harvested warpstone to break the Chaos Armour's spell over Konrad.[2e]
The experience nearly killed Konrad, during which he saw glimpses of Sigmar's past and the death of Sigmar's lover at the hands of Goblins. Awakening in the subterranean laboratory of Litzenreich within the Fauschlag, the wizard sought to enlist Konrad's aid. Giving him books to read throughout the time of his recuperation, Konrad learned within their pages about the legend of Sigmar and saw many of his own hardships and trials mirrored in the life of the Heldenhammer. When interrogated by his saviour, who questioned Konrad about how he had ended up in the suit of Chaos Armour, the wizard asked Konrad to replace the warpstone he had used to break the Chaos Armour's curse by infiltrating a Skaven nest below Middenheim to steal more.[2f]
Konrad entered the tunnels of the Fauschlag along with several Dwarfs, where he fought Dopplegangers apparently bred by the Skaven. Overwhelmed, Konrad was captured and taken before Grey Seer Gaxar. Smelling the warpstone from the removal of the Chaos Armour still embedded in his flesh, the Skaven kept him alive for further study. Then news arrived that several warpstone deposits had been stolen. Apparently, Litzenreich had used Konrad only as a diversion to steal from the Skaven. The Grey Seer kept Konrad prisoner until a raid by Litzenreich's Dwarfs on the Skaven warrens managed to free him.[2g]
Taking from the wizard what he felt was owed, Konrad attempted to leave for the surface, from where the City Watch of Middenheim raided Litzenreich's residence to capture the wizard and put him on trial for his abuse of the Articles of Imperial Magic. Caught between two enemies, the Skaven below and the Watch above, Konrad lured the Watch into combat with the ratmen and then offered them a truce to make his escape.[2g]
Fighting his way below along with Litzenreich, the Dwarfs and the watchmen, the group fought against Gaxar's dopplegangers, but the Grey Seer managed to escape, along with a particular doppleganger in the form of Emperor Karl Franz. Together with Litzenreich and his lackey Ustnar, the trio decided to travel to Altdorf to stop whatever plan the Skaven had hatched against the Empire.[2h] Upon arrival, the trio found themselves incarcerated and imprisoned -- Litzenreich and Ustnar for dealing with warpstone, Konrad for theft. Konrad was offered a way out by joining the Altdrof City Watch, thanks to a connection he had to a veteran from the siege of Praag who served in the force.[2i]
As part of the Altdorf City Watch, Konrad attempted to free his companions, entering the barracks of the Altdorf State Troops and from there the subterranean prison where Litzenreich and Ustnar were held. They discovered that the prison had been breached, the guards slain and the prisoners had apparently escape downward, to a subterranean river that joined with the city's sewers. Below, Konrad found that Litzenreich and his Dwarf accomplice had been captured and tortured by the Skaven, who were accompanied by mutated slave creatures and led by Gaxar. The group managed to escape down the sewers into the subterranean stream, pursued by two enemies Konrad recognised as the leader of the raid on his village, and, to his horror, Elyssa, who he had believed dead.[5a] Believing the girl to be the prisoner of Skullface, Konrad resolved to return to the capital. Removed from the River Reik by Rivermen, he rejoined his position in the City Watch.[5b]
Konrad's involvement in the prison break was suspected by Rolf Taungar, his sergeant, in whom Konrad confided his own suspicions that the creatures of Chaos plotted against the emperor. To his surprise, Taungar confirmed it and told Konrad not to waste his life pursuing it, but instead join him and see the truth. [5c] Taungar led Konrad to the house of Werner Zuntermein, who was revealed as the Cult Magus of a local Chaos Cult, a cell of the Jade Sceptre. Sensing the still-lingering magical taint of the bronze Chaos Armour on Konrad, Zuntermein invited him to join the cult, in exchange for the location of Elyssa. Seeing no other choice, Konrad accepted, despite his misgivings.[5c]
The cult worshipped Slaanesh, the Chaos God of pleasure and pain, and Konrad recognised many troops from the Imperial Guard among the revellers. When a girl that Konrad recognised to be his lover Krysten from Kislev was to be sacrificed and Konrad refused to go along with the cult's demands, the girl revealed herself as a cultist of Khorne.[5d] Drawing Konrad's blood, Krysten called upon the Lord of Skulls to destroy the Slaaneshi cultists, but Zuntermein managed to overpower her. Before he could unleash another spell, Konrad killed him, causing the rest of the cult to hunt him. Burning Zuntermein's mansion down, he escaped with Krysten, who perished a short time afterwards.[5e]
Konrad fled Altdorf, seeking shelter in The Grey Stoat, a roadside inn in the Reikwald Forest, where he became a tavern guard until the Slaanesh-corrupted guardsmen still in thrall to the cult tracked him down. Among them was Rolf Taungar, now transformed into a hideous, bull-headed Beastman. Konrad was saved by his old friend, the mercenary Wolfgang von Neuwald.[5f]
The pair travelled to the Wasteland, where they visited Wolfgang's mentor Galea. Galea told Konrad of the history of the Known World, the coming of Chaos in the Great Catastrophe and the rise of Sigmar, and how a part of Sigmar rested in every citizen of the Empire. She also told him that Sigmar had a plan for him and that he should do what he must.[5g]
The pair then made their way to the great commercial city of Marienburg, where they intended to raise a mercenary army from the rejects and outlaws who resented the rule of Altdorf to assault the city as a diversion, while Konrad would destroy the Chaos conspirators. They gained aid from Litzenreich and Ustnar, who had fled Imperial justice to Marienburg as well.[5h] Konrad was forged a new sword by Barra, a Dwarf smith from far Albion who lived in Marienburg. Duelling another Dwarf for the honour of gaining a sword from Barra, Konrad made such an impression on the smith that the Dwarf decided to forge him a blade infused with warpstone dust and quenched in mutant blood.[5i]
When their group set forth, accompanied by two ships full with pirates, Konrad and his allies left the pirates to fend for themselves. While the pirates engaged in vicious battles on the river against the Imperial Navy and bombarded the city, they slipped in, fighting through rats, ghosts of the departed and corrupted members of the Imperial Guard. Entering the inner sanctum of the Imperial Palace, one of Konrad's companions, the Estalian pirate Guido, revealed himself to be a magically disguised Skaven. Assaulted by phantom images of past enemies, Konrad used a reliquary, a dagger rumoured to once have belonged to Sigmar, to defend himself, opening himself to become a conduit for Sigmar's fury.[5j]
Konrad finally confronted Gaxar, yet the Grey Seer held two identical figures that could be Karl Franz captive, demanding that Konrad slay one of them. Using magic to force him to act, Konrad called out to Sigmar, upon which a lightning strike struck the replica of Sigmar's warhammer Ghal Maraz on top of the Imperial Palace, causing it to crash through the ceiling and smash the doppleganger to pieces. When the corrupted members of the Imperial Guard tried to finish the task, Konrad, Litzenreich and Wolfgang von Neuwald defended the weakened emperor from them. Konrad slew Gaxar and then entered the subterranean tunnels through which the Skaven had entered the palace, leaving Karl Franz in the care of the Templars of Sigmar.[5k]
Below Altdorf, Konrad and his companions fought through the Skaven horde. Litzenreich and Wolfgang both sacrificed themselves to allow Konrad to go deeper into the catacombs, to search for Elyssa. In the lowest levels, he found himself trapped an illusion of his old village, where he was fin ally greeted by the skull-faced warrior, who was revealed by have been Elyssa's father, Wilhelm Kastring. The Chaos Champion revealed to him that his plans had always been intended to either turn Konrad to the service of the Dark Gods or destroy him, as his true divine master Tzeentch had foretold that Konrad carried a great destiny within him.[5l]
When the image of Kastring transformed into Elyssa herself, Konrad stabbed her with his sword, preferring to believe that the real Elyssa had died and what stood before him was no better than the dopplegangers he had faced before. Konrad fought his way through the warrens back into the light, having avoided the fate that the servants of Chaos had planned for him, and now he sought to discover who he truly was.[5l]
The Konrad Oath of Devotion Society in Altdorf is dedicated to protecting the good name of Konrad, defending his person against the slander of being a mutant and a criminal.[4a] The emperor declared him to be a hero of the Empire in the wake of his actions, but many among the Imperial nobility and the Cult of Sigmar believe that his methods were no better than those of a servant of the Ruinous Powers.[4a]
Martial Education[]
Konrad was educated in the art of battle by the members of a mercenary army. Each was an expert in killing, and Konrad learned from them all.[1b]
A deposed prince from one of the Tilean city-states taught Konrad how to fence. Swordplay was more than mere strength, it was skill and speed and cunning. Konrad could fight a duel like a gentleman and knew all the rules of chivalry which must always be obeyed in an affair of honour.[1b]
And a street brawler from Bretonnia who had never heard the word "honour" showed Konrad how to fight dirty, how to use anything available as a weapon, how to scratch and gouge and maim and murder with his bare hands if he had nothing else. Konrad's techniques became more refined when a slim fellow who claimed to come from Nippon also demonstrated how to kill with just his hands -- or his feet. Konrad learned to fight without a weapon against an armed opponent, and how to win. This was an ancient art from the Far East, where every land seemed to have its own variety of weaponless combat.[1b]
Another mercenary from the Estalian kingdoms educated Konrad on the use of the crossbow; and a warrior from Araby sharpened Konrad's knife skills, introducing him to a variety of throwing blades; a giant of a man from Norsca taught him how to use a spear and throw a javelin; a knight from Albion taught him how to ride; and there were more, so many more.[1b]
Mutation[]
Konrad had heterochromia -- one of his eyes was green, the other golden. The golden eye was blind, but able to see things that would happen in the future, usually by a fraction of a second. The gift, however, was fickle and tended to betray him at inopportune moments or showed him contradicting futures.[1b] After being freed from the spell of the bronze Chaos Armour, Konrad's golden eye also lost its ability.[2f]
Canon Conflict[]
In White Dwarf 140, a timeline for the Warhammer novels published up to that point (1991) was released, according to which Konrad was born in 2478 IC, saved Elyssa in 2490 IC, the destruction of his village took place in 2496 IC, his meeting with Litzenreich took place in 2501 IC and the battle in Altdorf in 2502 IC.[7] As the White Dwarf timeline also contains numerous discrepancies to later lore, like dating the coronation of Emperor Karl Franz in 2491 IC instead of 2502 IC, its exact canonicity is unknown. No specific dates are mentioned in the Konrad trilogy, only that it takes place when Karl Franz was emperor.