In the fire-realm of Aqshy, where war is as common as sunrise, one name came to eclipse all others in dread — the Skintaker, whose blood-drenched march is remembered as The Skintaker Campaign. A champion of the Blood God, he sought neither land nor plunder but only skulls, and he took them by the mountain-load across a season of unending massacre.
The Blades of Khorne followed him because he never ceased to kill, flaying the skins of the fallen into grisly banners and heaping their skulls into pyramids that marked each battle won. Where his warhost passed, the very rivers ran red and clotted, and the valleys of Aqshy filled with a copper stink that carried for leagues. Prisoners were not taken; the wounded were finished; even his own faltering warriors were offered up, for the Blood God cares nothing from whom the blood flows.
The free peoples of the region met him too late and too scattered. Warriors of the Cities of Sigmar held their walls while duardin of the Kharadron Overlords rained fire from their skyvessels, buying time in blood for the greater host that gathered beyond the mountains. Each engagement only fed the Skintaker's tally, and the pyramids of skulls grew until they could be seen from the clouds.
The Skintaker Campaign was at last checked not by any single victory but by the sheer exhaustion of a land that had nothing left to bleed. Yet the pyramids remain, and pilgrims of Khorne still journey to Aqshy to add to them, so that the campaign in a sense has never truly ended.
The chronicle continues
