In today’s Lost, Damned, & Salvation update, we’re doing another lore spotlight on one of the three full armies you'll be printing by the end of this month!
And remember, followers get a free limited edition variant of Eilish Garrity, The Occultist (which we painted on stream last week!), straight away, just for following.
Just as we did with the Infernals lore article, we're handing over to Loremaster Sherwin Matthews to take us through the origin story of these fey nightmares...
The Defiers
Once, the Maker of Man, Menoth, stalked Caen in an endless hunt. His towering figure cast a shadow on the still-forming world, and after his blazing footsteps, the first men and women crawled out of the frothing waters seeking refuge in lands that were new and wild. Humanity watched as their Creator abandoned them to the hungry, thorny world, in pursuit of his prey.
The wild folk learned to live without their Maker, forging their own path. Each day brought new opportunities to explore and learn. They tested their strength and cunning, forging resolute spirits in the face of the world’s harsh tests. They savoured what they gained, their songs echoing beneath the moons and stars.
Eventually, the shimmering of these untethered spirits caught the Maker's attention. Already, many of these mortals had begun worshiping Menoth’s greatest enemy. He watched this with envy as the hunters praised not his name, but that of the Devourer Wurm, knowing the serpent would not hesitate to claim their souls when they left the world of the living for the land of the dead.
Fearful, Menoth devised a clever plan to persuade humankind to serve him willingly—a series of gifts to draw his abandoned children away from their untamed and primitive ways and back to him. With each he aimed to instill a fear in humanity. Fear not only of the land and its beasts, but a fear rooted in their own nature.
Thus, the Flame came to instill fear of the night. The Wall was a cage. The Sheaf made humanity fat and lazy. And the greatest Gift, Law, made Menoth’s children surrender the need and the right to think for themselves.
But not all those offered the Gifts were eager to hand over their freedom, understanding what Menoth offered was poison. And so these few brave men and women spurned the gifts of their Creator, and became known as the Defiers. These rebellious souls enraged Menoth. His plan had been so clever and his gifts devised so cunningly, but these petulant humans had tossed them aside without a thought. He resolved to end their lives in a way so terrible that it would serve as a curse and warning to any others with the temerity to refuse him.
By the power of the Maker of Man, the Defiers were cast into the void, a world where the hungry beasts of the Devourer Wurm would torment them with tooth and claw. There, the Defiers would not age or die. Their tortured bodies would endure suffering beyond comprehension across an eternal cycle with no day and night to mark time’s passage. But the last of the Defiers to plummet into the chasm spat a proclamation as he fell, a prophecy set against the rotten fruits of Menoth’s work, a curse from the accursed.
At the end of your days, you shall reap what you sow.
The Grymkin
When the Defiers first arrived in the infinite expanse of the spirit world, they were tiny, vulnerable things, unable to defend themselves against the hungry roaming spirits of that place. They tried to fight against the beasts of Urcaen, but even with the talents they had honed in life, they could not hold back the agonies of hell.
Their fears were given life anew to chew at their flesh, slowly taking on new and stranger bestial forms.
Torment was the Defiers’ crucible, burning away weakness and fear and replacing it with toughened scar tissue. Through this process of spiritual destruction and rebirth, the Defiers learned to further harness and shape their unique powers. They learned to control the spirit world around them, treating the landscape of hell as a canvas for their dreams to work upon, shackling even their own nightmares. They were no longer condemned to hell; as they embraced their diverse powers, they became hell’s masters.
In the mortal realm, the Defiers’ acts of rebellion were not forgotten. Their legends were retold as cautionary tales to their children. Grandmothers’ stories and fathers’ warnings came down through the generations like the white tendrils of a weed, taking firm root in the fertile soil of imagination. Generation after generation spun these tales, wheedling out fireside epics in hushed words. Though told as warnings, in many of these tales was a hint of admiration for those who rebelled, drawn from long-buried dreams of lost freedom.
The Defiers supped on those fables and mopped up each honeyed word, rejoicing in the sweet flavor and holding it tight, basking in the comforting warmth it spread in their aching bodies and frozen bones. In turn, they passed their own stories back to those able to hear them through dreams and visions; and so, the stories came to magnify their legends.
As years went by the Defiers caught sight of impious souls passing through the veil that separates the world of the living from the world of the dead, unfortunates doomed to wander the trackless wilds. By their very nature, these forsaken souls felt inexorably drawn to the Defiers. They were sinful and wicked individuals who had committed sins and feared facing the Defiers after death, and in turn that fear had had paved unseen roads to the Defier’s realm in hell, and their inevitable punishments.
These wayward souls belonged to drunkards, cowards, liars, cheats, and the vain and jealous, twisted by their shallow existence into wretched beings that had lived their lives at the expense of others. In the plight of their victims, the Defiers saw a reflection of their own unjust suffering at Menoth’s hands; righteous anger took hold and judgement was passed. The essence of each wayward soul was reshaped to better match the sins within.
Hearkening to the old stories that cautioned against the very sins for which they had been judged, and guided by the Defiers’ mad dreams, these souls took on wholly new forms. Each was bound within the pages of myth, folktale, or child’s rhyme, their grotesque bodies and minds utterly removed from their past lives.
They had become grymkin.
The grymkin were not as firmly bound to Urcaen as the Defiers. Each time a new soul crossed from the land of the living into the realm of the dead, its passage left a temporary pinprick in the barrier between these worlds. These small gateways were too small to allow the passage of the powerful Defiers, whose magnificence betrayed them — yet grymkin, with their peculiar and chimerical forms, could slip through with ease.
Over long years, numerous grymkin crossed over from Urcaen. Each was filled with a desire to bring mischief and danger to the world of the living, to invoke fear and nightmares, and to punish the wicked. Each kind of grymkin hungered for a certain flavor of sin, compelled by their very natures to seek those whose souls had been marked by the same corruption that defined their own shaping. Murderers sought out murderers and thieves sought out thieves. Some grymkin even possessed the power to transform others into their likeness, spreading their nature like an infection.
Those who witnessed the grymkin claiming their victims would share their tales, delighting in the madness and the macabre, savoring these dark parables of morality and punishment. As cities rose and grew, pushing back the dark forests and hidden places where the grymkin lurked, the truth behind these tales was slowly forgotten. But hidden within most nursery rhymes and bedtime stories were hints of truths about the grymkin, though not their origins or deeper purpose.
The Old Witch
The key that would unlock the Defiers’ eternal prison first began to take form long, long ago. The Old Witch of Khador had seen the Defiers stand against Menoth all those centuries ago, and had listened to their pronouncement as they were thrown into the void. The unmistakable ring of prophecy prickled at her ears, and so she stowed away the memory in her vast library of thoughts and dreams and left it there until a need for it arose in the world.
That need came with the creatures of the outer darkness, things neither of the physical world nor of Urcaen, but from a lightless abyss beyond them both. Greedy for the power of human souls, these Infernals had long probed their fingers into the lands of the living, offering promises and power in return for that which they covet the most.
Over the centuries, the number of those willing to pledge their souls to the dark masters swelled. Hiding in the fringes of settled places, these occultists worked in shadow toward their own ends, all the while preparing for the arrival of their unholy masters.
The Old Witch foresaw the darkness to come and knew she alone could not stop it. As the number of its agents piercing the barrier between worlds grew, she knew she faced an apocalypse. The armies of humankind had grown vast, and they commanded weapons built of technology married to magic. Still, even the greatest mechanika and the mightiest of mortal champions would be inadequate to face the horrors shaped by the outer darkness.
Instead, the Old Witch turned to the Defiers. The wicked humans that accepted the contracts offered by the Infernals were living testaments to the warning the Defiers had uttered. Proof in the flesh of the flawed fruit Menoth’s gifts had wrought. If she opened the door of their eternal cage, whatever emerged into the physical world once more would tear at the roots of the Iron Kingdoms to find the corruption within — and in doing so, the Defiers and their grymkin were certain to hunt down and claim those who were the greatest allies the Infernal masters had on Caen.
The Old Witch knew the futility of her actions. There would always be corruption in the hearts of humans, and an abundance of foolish mortals seeking power. But the Defiers and their motley throng of monsters could slow the encroaching calamity, and provide her more time to prepare. Having weighed the benefit of having such potent allies to fight the darkness against the grief the Defiers would inflict, the Old Witch made her choice.
When the time was right, an opening was made in the veil between worlds, and out of that portal stepped the Defiers. They emerged with a deep and primal hunger that reached up from their very souls, a burning need to fulfil the promise they had made so long ago to reap their due from the debased hearts of civilised men.
The Defiers had much work to do, but they would not be alone. The moment the five emerged from hell, every grymkin in the world felt an irresistible tug. They abandoned their mischief, leaving cruel tricks half-finished and clever traps unsprung, and journeyed to meet their makers.
The Wicked Harvest had begun.
