Where most Ossiarch legions are the anvil, the Stalliarch Lords are the hammer's swing. Their ranks run thick with Kavalos Deathriders, and the souls poured into rider and steed alike are drawn from the great mounted peoples of Shyish's past — horse-lords, frontier outriders, the khans of vanished steppe kingdoms — distilled to a single instinct: the charge, and the pursuit that follows it. A Stalliarch host does not grind an enemy down so much as envelop it and run the survivors into the ground.
To the Stalliarch, the rout is not the end of a battle but its most important phase. Every soul that flees the field is stolen tithe, a debt escaping into the wilderness, and so their Deathriders hunt the broken across leagues of open country with a cold relentlessness no living cavalry could sustain, needing neither rest nor fodder nor mercy. Not one skeleton is permitted to slip the reckoning.
Some Mortisans claim the steppe-souls within the steeds still remember running beneath a living sun, and that the endless chase is the nearest thing to joy left to them. If so, it is a joy that serves the ledger perfectly — for among the Ossiarch Bonereapers, even a horse-lord's freedom has been recast as an instrument of collection.
Ossiarch Bonereapers
Order of battle
The Stalliarch Lords field the units of the Ossiarch Bonereapers — a detachment from the roster:
Kindred formations
Other Ossiarch Bonereapers formations
Ivory HostThe flawed legion, its soul-blends contaminated by the spirits of great beasts and the berserkers who hunted them, leaving a seam of fury through every warrior. In battle the Ivory Host's composure cracks into shocking savagery, and the other legions wield them the way a duelist draws a knife he does not quite trust.
Mortis PraetoriansThe first and greatest of the Ossiarch legions, crafted under Katakros's exacting eye from the souls of history's finest soldiers. The Mortis Praetorians garrison the heartlands of the Ossiarch Empire and guard the approaches to Nagashizzar, and their pale ranks are the standard against which every other legion is measured.
Petrifex EliteA legion obsessed with permanence, whose ossified bone turns blades like fortress stone. The Petrifex Elite treat war as a quarry treats a mountain — methodical, tireless extraction — and they strip conquered lands so thoroughly that even the enemy's graveyards march away with them.