"They were here before the Hive. They will be here after."

No one leads The Scratching. No Word-Keeper stands above another, no Firebrand claims the right of interpretation. They follow only the scripture, scratched into salvaged bone, pressed into rusted scrap-plate, carried by every member of the congregation. To hold a piece of it is to hold the truth entire.

That truth, as The Scratching read it long before the tremors came, was always this: beneath the lowest levels of Hive Primus, behind the landslides and the sealed walls and the centuries of debris, there is a place the Great Hive Spirit made before it made anything else. The Belly. The Gnaw-ground. The first and final holy place.

When the tremors shook the Palatine Cluster and the walls cracked open, The Scratching did not scramble to reach The Rustyards. They walked. Calmly. They had known this was coming.

They are not what most would recognise as Cawdor, nor as Ratskin.... they are the thing that existed before that distinction was drawn. Feral in aspect, totemic in ritual, their robes are layered with hive-beast pelts and bone, their prayers are spoken in the clicking, sibilant tongue of the deep underhive. They bear scavenged weapons etched with the same script as the scripture itself.

As for the Ratskin Renegades also drawn to The Rustyards. The Scratching regards them with cold pity. These are cousins who forgot. Who let the true scripture erode into oral tradition, into rumour, into primitive superstition. The Belly belongs to those who kept the words whole. That is not the Renegades. Not anymore.

Alliances: None sought. The scripture permits no compromise on holy ground.

Dislikes: The Ratskin Renegades, heretics who abandoned the written word. House gangs who treat sacred ground as a salvage run. 

Motive: To hold The Rustyards, The Holy Land!