Sons of Behemat

In the gargants' own telling, the realms were made for walking, and everything in them is either food, loot, or in the way. They are the Sons of Behemat: the vast, quarrelsome offspring of the World Titan, mightiest of the godbeasts, who strode the Mortal Realms when the gods themselves were young. Their myth-keepers trade garbled tales of Grandfather Ymnog and Father Behemat that change with every telling, but every version agrees on the important part — gargants were here first, gargants are biggest, and the littl'uns have been building things on gargant land ever since.

Behemat slept through most of history, and his children wandered the realms as walking calamities — feared, hunted, and occasionally hired. Then, in the wars that followed Sigmar's return, the World Titan was goaded from his slumber by skaven trickery and driven rampaging into the path of the God-King's tempest, where he died beneath a sky's worth of lightning. Every gargant in every realm felt it. But death is a strange thing for a godbeast: Behemat's power flowed out into his scattered sons, and the greatest of them began to grow. Thus came the mega-gargants — creatures on the old scale, tyrant-sized, with tyrant ambitions to match.

A mega-gargant does not rule so much as loom. Each one gathers the smaller Mancrusher tribes into rowdy processions called Stomps and puts them to work on whatever its own obsession demands. Taker Tribes squeeze tribute out of anyone with a coastline and something shiny; Stomper Tribes wander from war to war like connoisseurs of a good scrap; Breaker Tribes have decided that civilization itself is a personal insult, and pull down its walls and towers with a craftsman's dedication. Gargant wants are simple — meat, ale, glittery things, a decent nap — but simplicity at that scale is indistinguishable from catastrophe.

What sets the Sons of Behemat apart among the powers of Destruction is that everyone hires them. Free cities pay them in cattle and ale to break sieges; Chaos warlords buy their anger by the day; even the dead have found currencies a gargant will accept. A mega-gargant fights for whoever fills its bag and feels no contradiction in flattening last season's employer. Yet something is changing in the tribes. King Brodd, mightiest of the World Titan's sons, preaches that gargants have spent too long as other people's muscle — that the realms owe a debt for their murdered father, and that when every Stomp finally walks in the same direction, the gods themselves will learn what the littl'uns have always known: nothing you build matters when the horizon stands up and starts walking toward you.