Gorthor the Beastlord

Gorthor the Beastlord came closer than any of his kind to the beastmen's oldest and most terrible dream: the union of the fractious, feuding herds into one. Born under a black moon and marked from birth by omen and mutation, he was part warlord and part prophet, able to bind the brayherds to him not merely by strength, though he had that in abundance, but by a raw, howling charisma that the beasts took for the very voice of the gods.

Under his brass-shod hooves the herds of the Old World rose as one, boiling out of the forests in numbers not seen before or since, and for a brief and bloody season Gorthor's horde burned its way across the lands of men, throwing down towns and armies and driving the beasts to a frenzy of destruction. Only his death broke the tide, and the union died with him, for no beastman since has held the herds together by sheer force of will. The brayherds remember Gorthor still, in the guttural sagas howled at the herdstones, the prophet who proved, just once, that the forest could speak with a single voice, and very nearly drowned the world when it did.