The Great Horned Rat is the singular god of the Skaven, the monstrous deity in whose image the ratmen believe themselves made and whose insatiable hunger drives their whole race. Depicted as a colossal rat with thirteen-branched horns and a coiling tail, he embodies the skaven virtues of ruthless cunning, boundless multiplication, decay, and the will to devour all the world.
Unlike the four great powers of Chaos, the Great Horned Rat is worshipped by one race alone, yet his followers are so numberless that he has grown into a true god of the Realm of Chaos in his own right. His will is interpreted by the Grey Seers, horned sorcerer-prophets who gnaw warpstone to fuel their spells and speak with the authority of the god himself, and his empty throne is honoured as the thirteenth seat of the Council of Thirteen.
The Horned Rat promises his children dominion over all things — a world gnawed hollow and remade in the skaven image, teeming with rats beneath a broken sky. He rewards success and punishes failure with equal, arbitrary cruelty, for the skaven believe he favours only the strong and the sly, and that the weak deserve to be eaten. To worship him is to embrace treachery as a sacrament and survival as the only law. He is, in the end, the perfect god for his people: a devourer without limit, promising everything and demanding, in return, that his children betray one another all the way to the end of the world.