Death is in the ascendency, with the rattling skeletal warriors of the Barrow Kingdoms marching at the behest of their Soulblight Gravelord masters, while the shrieking gheists of the Nighthaunt and deluded cannibal nobles of the Flesh-eater Courts sow terror and chaos…
While waiting for the most martial of the Mortarchs to create a flawless new battleplan, we celebrate this most cold and morbid of Grand Alliances with the incredible Revenant Draconith. It roosts with the Soulblight Gravelords, but the Beast of Castle Sternieste Regiment of Renown grants any aspiring Mortarch the perfect excuse to field one for themselves. Three intrepid hobbyists from the wider Warhammer Community team went and found out what Draconith would look like for the other members of the alliance.
Laura – Ossiarch Bonereapers
As it appears the Revenant Draconith is a fleshier creature than you’d traditionally find within the bony ranks of the Ossiarch, I had the opportunity to show a union between the two aesthetics. I imagine this Draconith has been accompanying an Ossiarch legion for some time, and the more it fights with them, the more parts of its body are replaced with ensorcelled ivory. I imagine this process is an extremely bloody one.
Building this amalgam was a lot of fun. I wanted to capture the visceral gore of the Stalliarch Lords – along with their sculpted grace and culture. I took the wings and tail from a Necrolith Bone Dragon, and found that positioning them further back gave the model a leering, perched shape, like an enormous, unholy gargoyle. I extended the neck using parts from the same kit, and while initially I was going to use the Bone Dragon’s head, I’ve had Celennar’s mask (from Archmage Teclis) sat on my desk for a while and this seemed a great excuse to use it! Giving this horrible mess of a creature an impassive, cold visage taps into that Bonereaper sophistication I wanted to emulate.
The base was a very fun challenge, being placed on a monstrous 160mm base gave me a very large canvas to make something extravagant! I broke up a Bone-tithe Nexus and attached the ruined arch from the Draconith to its summit, which obviously gives the miniature a great deal of height, but also adds more to its leering posture as it creeps forward over its horde of bones.
Laura’s Ossiarch Bonereapers are a little unconventional, and you might recognise them from the pages of White Dwarf.
Emma – Nighthaunt
Making a Revenant Draconith fit in with the Nighthaunt was a bit of a task – how do you make something that is solid, fleshy, and meaty look more spectral? By slamming lots of bits into it from a Nighthaunt Spearhead I handily have just lying around! I cut some Spirit Hosts up and took a few bits from the sprues, like gravestones, and made them look like they were passing through the wings or the body of the Draconith, imagining them as one spooky entity.
When I was planning out painting my Nighthauntified Draconith, I looked at what colours I normally pick for any undead army I paint – I’ve done a Soulblight Gravelords army in purple and green, and it’s a lovely combination.
For a model and base this large, I decided that Contrast was going to be the ideal way forward, followed by lots of drybrushing, then picking out certain details with some highlighting. For the greens, I used a combination of Karandras Green and Aeldari Emerald for a two-tone look, followed by a drybrush of Sybarite Green and then White Scar for the more raised areas. For some of the darker patches, I used Incubi Darkness for a contrasting tone. For the purple areas, Luxion Purple all over is a brilliant way to start, which I followed with drybrushes of Kakophoni Purple and Dechala Lilac to create a ghostly purple vibe. I have no idea why I love to use purple on undead bases; I think it looks otherworldly and spooky.
Luke – Flesh-eater Courts
The Flesh-eater Courts are a deluded bunch of rotting cannibals, gore-slicked and twisted by an all-consuming mania. The Revenant Draconith is slightly askew from this, a dead thing brought into unlife – so how to make it fit an army focusing on warmer, gorier colours and imagery? I slathered myself in entrails and stuck a freshly flayed thinking cap on my head to get into the abhorrant mindset.
One of my favourite parts of the Flesh-eaters range is that we never see the delusion from their perspective, and instead we have to imagine it: intestines as a judge’s wig, a broken and rusted sword now an ornate armament, charnel house scrawlings as intricate heraldry. Taking this line of thinking further, I felt that these noble knights would adorn such a mighty and regal creature in embroidered cloth and heraldry, ensuring it soared into battle flying their colours. In short, I wanted to create an awful parody of the pristine pegasus or horse ridden by a noble lord.
I sculpted sections of torn and ragged skin from modelling putty and draped them over the creature’s neck and shoulders to create a disgusting caparison. I was careful to avoid hindering the movement of the wings, and to leave as much of the gory innards visible as I could. It was my first time using putty in well over a decade and I didn’t quite achieve the smoothness and detail I wanted, which was a little disheartening. Thankfully, painting the skin and covering it with bloody symbols rescued a lot of the naive work I’d done, the shields added at the end and the banner it has been lovingly skewered with sealing the deal.
Painting presented a unique challenge, as Shordemaire and the Revenant Draconith feel like definitive examples of this creature, and finding an angle for the Flesh-eaters was tough. I decided on purple as my core colour, with a heavy focus on burgundy shading, and wounds that looked warm, fresh, and extremely sore to sell my vision of an atrocious parody. As I was nearing the end a friend told me it looked particularly “meaty”, which confirmed I‘d made the right choice. I can’t wait for my Ushoran to take to the table alongside this grizzly specimen, fresh from the filth-smeared stables of New Summercourt.
Battletomes for both Flesh-eater Courts and Nighthaunt are available to pre-order tomorrow. Getting a single word from the Ossiarch Bonereapers on their movements is like getting blood from a stone, but if you sign up to the Warhammer Age of Sigmar newsletter you'll get news as soon as we do. You’ll even have a chance of winning a Helsmiths of Hashut army set and Spearhead box of your choice if you sign up before 1st September.
