Where other skaven scheme for power in the here and now, Clan Pestilens labours toward an ending. Its plague-priests venerate the Great Horned Rat under his oldest and most patient aspect — the Great Corruptor — and hold as holy writ that every realm is destined to dissolve into a single warm and teeming rot, from which only the faithful vermin shall crawl. To hasten that consummation they brew the Great Plagues in reeking laboratory-abbeys, distilling pestilence with a devotion that borders, disturbingly, on the sincere.
Their armies march as congregations. Ranks of frothing plague monks swing filth-caked blades and haul smoking censers whose fumes wither lung and crop alike, chanting liturgies of decay until the very air seems to sweat. To such a monk, disease is weapon, sacrament, and prayer in one indivisible act; a suppurating wound is a blessing, and to die mid-slaughter among the freshly infected is the finest end a rat may earn. This zealotry makes Pestilens an uneasy neighbour even among the Skaven, for a clan that genuinely welcomes death cannot be threatened with it. Yet none is more feared once loosed — while a warlord covets a city, the plague-priests covet only the end of all clean things, and they will wait out the world to have it.
Skaven
Order of battle
The Clan Pestilens field the units of the Skaven — a detachment from the roster:
Kindred formations
Other Skaven formations
Clan EshinThe clan of shadows — assassins, spies, and gutter runners schooled in silent murder and hired out to the highest bidder. Eshin's killers answer only to their own inscrutable masters, and the mere rumor of their involvement has ended Council feuds before they began.
Clan MoulderThe flesh-shapers of skavendom, whose packmasters and master moulders knead muscle, warpstone, and screaming vermin into living weapons. From their flesh-pit laboratories come giant rats, rat ogors, and stranger things, sold by the cage-load to the rest of the under-empire.
Clan SkryreThe warlock engineers of the under-empire, fusing dark sorcery with warpstone-fueled machinery into weapons that obliterate the enemy almost as often as the operator. Skryre workshops sell lightning cannons, poisoned-wind devices, and doomsday engines to every clan wealthy enough to pay — and keep the true horrors for themselves.