From the highest and most savage of High Commorragh's spires, a needle of black adamant crowned with docks and grav-moorings beyond counting, the Kabal of the Flayed Skull rules the skies of the Dark City. This is the Poisoned Crown, and about its jagged summit hangs a perpetual, shifting haze of attack craft: Razorwing Jetfighters and Voidraven Bombers wheeling in their thousands, ready to fall upon realspace like a plague of steel. Reckoned the second most powerful war-kabal in all Commorragh, the Flayed Skull has raised the art of airborne murder to a pitch no rival can equal.
Its warriors are known at a glance by the stylised streaks of blood daubed across their snarling faces, a mirror of the flayed and screaming visage that serves as the kabal's sigil. They march to war beneath their archon, Vraesque Malidrach, the self-styled Murderprince of the Poisoned Crown, who clads himself in bone-white war-plate the better to display the gore of those he has slain. So complete is the kabal's mastery of the air that its histories boast of the conquest of Thrandium, a whole world enslaved without a single Kabalite Warrior ever setting boot upon its soil.
To sustain such campaigns the Flayed Skull draws mercenaries into its orbit as a flame draws moths. Flocks of winged Scourges, the fickle sky-killers of Commorragh, sell their loyalty and their firepower to Vraesque, while creeping bands of Mandrakes lend their shadow-craft to his raids. Those gladiators who fight their way free of the arenas and win an attack craft of their own gravitate eagerly to the kabal's banner, for beneath the Poisoned Crown there is always another sky to darken and another world to drown in fire.
Drukhari
Order of battle
The Kabal of the Flayed Skull field the units of the Drukhari — a detachment from the roster:
Kindred formations
Other Drukhari formations
Cult of StrifeThe most celebrated of all Wych Cults, the Cult of Strife rules the great arenas of Commorragh where captives are butchered for the roaring delight of the Drukhari elite. Its warriors are peerless gladiators, and its supreme mistress is the deadliest blade-dancer the Dark City has ever produced. The Cult of Strife supplies the spectacle that Commorragh craves, and its favour is courted by Archons who wish to lend their raids the glamour and lethality of the arena.
Cult of the Cursed BladeA treacherous Wych Cult that prizes betrayal above every virtue, arming its gladiator-killers with deceiving weapons; to welcome them into one's court is to invite one's own murder.
Kabal of the Black HeartThe oldest and most powerful Kabal in Commorragh, the Black Heart has dominated the Dark City through the millennia-long reign of its Supreme Overlord. Its endless coffers, sprawling armada, and web of spies make it the pre-eminent force among the corsair nobility. Where other Kabals rise and fall in a single lifetime of scheming, the Black Heart has endured for aeons, absorbing rivals and dictating the fate of Commorragh from behind a veil of paranoid secrecy and calculated terror.
Kabal of the Poisoned TongueA kabal of venomous intriguers ruled by the Mazeweaver, Lady Malys, who weakens every foe with toxin and treachery long before a single blade is drawn.
Prophets of FleshThe Prophets of Flesh are the most feared of the Haemonculus Covens, ancient flesh-sculptors who regard the mortal body as raw material to be perfected through agony. Preservers of the deepest secrets of resurrection, they hold sway over life and death itself in Commorragh, and even the proudest Archons must bargain with them. Their creations — grotesque, immortal, and endlessly refined — are among the most horrifying weapons in the Drukhari arsenal.