"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!

No one knows his name before the scripture found him. He does not preach, he makes. Every piece of scripture carried by the congregation was etched by his hand, into salvaged bone and scrap-plate, with a tool he never sets down. In the Rustyards he moves unhurried, even under fire. He believes his destination is already written in the text. He just hasn't found the passage yet.

Fighting Knife is called 'the Carver'

Nobody in The Scratching remembers him speaking. He communicates in movement, the tilt of a head, the slow raising of the chain glaive, a chittering sound from somewhere behind his wrappings that might be teeth. The scripture he carries is carved into his own skin rather than bone or metal. In battle he is the first in and the last to stop.

The Still Snout is patience. He finds his position early, stays there, and watches everything through small dark eyes that miss nothing. His polearm has seventeen notches carved into the haft, one for each time something got close enough to need it. The congregation trust him to tell them when to move. He has never been wrong.

1x zombie kill

1x zombie kill

1x zombie kill

1x zombie kill

Little Bobby Blastwhisker - eaten by a croc