Gotrek Gurnisson

Gotrek Gurnisson comes from a world that no longer exists. In that lost age he took the Slayer's oath — to atone for a shame he never names by seeking death against ever-greater monsters — and then failed at it more spectacularly than any duardin in history. Trolls, dragons, daemons, and worse fell to his axe while his promised doom kept its distance, and when the End Times devoured his world, the ending that claimed gods somehow missed him. He walked out of one apocalypse and into the Mortal Realms carrying his axe, his crest, and memories no one else shares — above all of Felix Jaeger, the poet who chronicled his deeds and whose absence Gotrek carries like an unhealed wound.

To the Fyreslayers, Gotrek is a heresy and a hope walking on the same short legs. He despises the lodges' mercenary trade — to Gotrek the Slayer oath was penance, and selling it for gold is blasphemy against a god he actually met. Yet when a master rune of ur-gold, the mightiest ever forged, was hammered into his chest, it did not master him: the power meant to make a duardin briefly divine simply fell in line behind Gotrek's own bottomless fury. There are runemasters who whisper that Grimnir is not scattered at all — that the god's rage found its way home into one scarred, one-eyed body that refuses, on principle, to be worshipped.

Now he wanders the realms as their most dangerous vagrant, taking whatever work interests him, insulting gods to their faces, and measuring the Age of Sigmar against the world he lost — it keeps coming up short. Stormcast who have fought beside him file reports their superiors decline to believe. His doom still eludes him, and the realms have quietly begun to hope it always will; whatever Gotrek Gurnisson is becoming, everything that meets his axe stays dead, and he keeps saving a world he insists he does not care for.