Beards: coiled. Tusks: jutting. Sneers: contemptuous. These are the Helsmiths of Hashut, twisted duardin nursing a burning hatred for the Mortal Realms, their eyes glowing like cinders even as their bodies slowly turn to stone.
Wearing rich fabrics and gilded metals lit by the lurid daemonfire that crackles across their weapons, they attempt to harness the essence of Chaos itself, all for the glory of the Bullfather.
They’re coming to a Mortal Realm near you very soon, so it’s time to find out what they’re all about.
They refer to themselves as the Zharrdron – the “folk of the fire” – and can be summarised thus: take everything virtuous about the duardin, their stolidity, willpower, their kinship with the the earth and their artisanal prowess, and pervert it all through a magma-scorched lens of Chaos.
The courage of the Fyreslayers becomes contempt, the Kharadron Overlords’ pride in craft becomes obsessive perfectionism and bottomless greed. The innate respect for tradition is transformed into a stifling web of harsh debts and a hierarchy of tyrants battling for power.
The root of this perversion is the god Hashut, who revealed himself to beleaguered duardin during the Age of Chaos, claiming to be a long-forgotten ancestor god and offering salvation of a kind. He had spent many long years communicating with those trapped in their karak keeps by besieging daemons. There had already been attempts to tame daemonkind – furtive experiments conducted in the dark by desperate Runesmiths – but Hashut offered a more terrible solution to their never-ending war of attrition: the ability to turn such enemies into tools of war.
The Zharrdron now believe Hashut to have been the oldest and proudest of the ancestor gods. They speak of the jealousy held by his siblings, Grungni, Grimnir, Valaya, and even Gazul, after Hashut had proven himself to be the greatest of them all.
They claim he was deceived and betrayed, and that Valaya landed the final blow that sundered Hashut from his mortal form. Nevertheless, the Bullfather persisted, stealing fire from the Ruinous Powers and bringing it to his offspring in their time of need.
The means of his minions’ mastery over daemonkind lies in the Zharralid, an arcane cuneiform granted by Hashut. Only duardin, naturally resistant to magic, possess the endless reserves of patience and endurance required to carve the scripts of binding. Each task could take days, a single failure in the process invoking catastrophe.
The difficulty of the art and their skill in it, bred within the Helsmiths, stoked the fires of ambition. As they accelerated the harvest of daemons from the Realm of Chaos, their holds swelled with power. They set to rebuilding mountains around themselves, creating baleful new ziggurats.
They preyed upon the unaligned daemons of Chaos, the daemons’ lack of allegiance making them easier to shackle, and set their sights on the Mortal Realms at large. In true duardin fashion, they forged meticulous plans of conquest, and set to creating an army to level the lands around them.
Their society reflects this hellish desire for control, a rigid thing founded in oaths and debts. Quite unlike the honest pledges made by other duardin, these pacts are for material, time, services owed – combined they are known as the Wage of Toil. Every level of Zharrdron society is indebted to another in some way, chains of obligation linking despots to Daemonsmiths, clans of equal standing engaging in trading and rivalries. At the heart of it all lies rampant individualism, apprentices pledging untold hours to their cruel masters to glean but a kernel of knowledge, all the while plotting a route to the top enabled by bloody vengeance.
Hashutite society is therefore ruled by those who have fortified their positions of power over many centuries, extracting everything from those in their service just as they drain the Realm of Chaos of its daemonic resources. Their warriors are not a lowly militia, but proud Zharrdron striking out to claim what is rightfully theirs, draped in fine garments and laden with jewels, precious metals, and artisan weapons, their fulsome beards braided and coiled over broad chests. Only the hobgrot hordes who march alongside them are truly disposable – jeering mobs who enjoy a modicum of protection fighting in the shadow of the ziggurats.
Daemonsmiths maintain the dark sorceries that fuel the daemon-forges and fearsome war engines, which usually echo the bull-form of Hashut. Such craft takes its toll, and the claws and stone-flesh are every bit a symbol of their prestige as they are of unchecked corruption.
Bull Centaurs are worshipped as the true children of Hashut, their births accompanied by sacrificial rites. Stranger things still are whispered of in the shadows – transformations and mutations beyond those seen in the lower echelons, sorcerous beasts with the heads of duardin elders scheming in the shadows of Hashut’s temples.
There is a long history of trade with the legions of the Everchosen, who stomach the daemon-binding for the chance to purchase arcane weapons and helforged armour. Their plans, once measured in long centuries, have been accelerated by the idiotic actions of the Great Horned Rat, who has sundered the Mortal Realms and brought unwanted attention upon the ziggurats nestled therein.
The full story of the Zharrdron can be found in the upcoming Battletome: Helsmiths of Hashut. We’ll be back later to take a look at how the desire for domination and use of daemonic power fuels their armies in battle.
