The Skaven Under-Empire

The men of the Old World will tell you there is no such thing as ratmen. It is a comforting lie, and the Skaven do everything in their power to preserve it. For beneath the cobbles of every great city, below the mines and the sewers and the deep places of the earth, sprawls a second civilisation of horned, chittering vermin: vast, ancient, and utterly malevolent. They call their hidden realm the Under-Empire, and it is larger than every human kingdom combined. That the surface world has not already been overrun is due to a single grim mercy: the skaven cannot stop betraying one another for long enough to finish the job.

The Under-Empire

The skaven do not build cities so much as gnaw them: endless warrens tunnelled through the bones of the world, lit by the sickly glow of refined warpstone and packed with more bodies than any human census could imagine. Their nightmarish capital, Skavenblight, festers in a great southern marsh, and from it their tunnels reach beneath mountains and oceans alike, surfacing wherever there is prey to take or a rival to undermine. A skaven army can appear beneath a city with no warning at all, boiling up out of the ground in numbers that beggar belief, and vanish again just as swiftly. To wage war on the skaven is to fight the very foundations of the world itself, for they are always beneath you, always digging, and always more numerous than the last fearful reckoning claimed.

Children of the Horned Rat

Every skaven serves one god: the Great Horned Rat, a Dark Power of ruin, pestilence, and endless multiplication, reckoned by some to be a thirteenth face of Chaos itself. He rewards cunning, cruelty, and success by any means, and punishes only failure, for in skaven theology, to be caught is the sole true sin. This creed shapes their entire race. A skaven will scheme, flatter, and grovel before a stronger rival, then sink a blade into his back the instant his strength wavers. Loyalty is a currency spent purely to buy opportunity, and treachery is not a vice but a sacrament. It is this bottomless appetite for betrayal, more than any army of men, that has kept the Under-Empire from swallowing the world.

The Council of Thirteen

At the summit of skaven power sits the Council of Thirteen, the Lords of Decay who rule the whole race, or pretend to. Twelve seats are held by the mightiest lords of the great clans, forever plotting against one another; the thirteenth is left empty, reserved for the Horned Rat himself. No decree of the Council is ever truly final, for every Lord of Decay schemes to unseat his rivals and claim their power, and the politics of the race are conducted as much by assassination as by decree. Yet when the Council does, rarely, agree upon a common purpose, the resulting tide of vermin can drown entire nations.

The Great Clans

Skaven society fractures into a thousand clans, but a handful of Great Clans tower above the rest, each a monstrous parody of some human institution. Clan Skryre are the warlock-engineers, whose insane machines harness warpstone into crackling weapons of lightning and poisoned gas. Clan Pestilens are the plague monks, diseased zealots who worship pestilence as a holy sacrament and brew contagions to unleash upon the surface. Clan Moulder are the flesh-shapers, breeding rat ogres and worse abominations in their reeking flesh-pits. Clan Eshin are the assassins and spies, gutter-runners and shadowy killers who gather secrets and sell murder across the whole Under-Empire. Above and between them all jostle the warlord clans, the teeming soldiery of the race, forever fighting to expand their warrens at the expense of any weaker neighbour.

The Wages of Warpstone

Every corner of skaven civilisation runs on warpstone: solid, refined Chaos, the black-green rock into which raw magic congeals. It is their fuel, their currency, their medicine, and their drug; it powers Skryre's engines, mutates Moulder's monsters, and drives the warlock-priests to ever greater and more unstable feats of sorcery. Warpstone is also poison, twisting the flesh of any creature exposed to it, and the skaven are riddled with mutation and madness because of their ceaseless craving for it. Their whole ravenous appetite for it makes them, in a sense, agents of Chaos gnawing at the world from within: a hidden echo of the ruin described in our account of the Realm of Chaos and the Wastes.

A History Written in Betrayal

The skaven have shaped the Old World more than its scholars will ever admit. They gnawed at the Dwarfen Mountain Holds during the dwarfs' long age of decline, overrunning ancient strongholds from below in wars the dwarfs still record among their bitterest grudges. They have loosed plagues upon the Empire of Man that emptied whole cities, and their fingerprints lie upon more than one catastrophe blamed on ill fortune or the wrath of the gods. They have collapsed mines, fouled wells, and toppled towers whose fall was later blamed on earthquake or simple ill luck. Time and again the ratmen have stood upon the very brink of total victory, and time and again their own scheming lords have turned upon one another at the decisive hour, each so desperate to deny a rival the glory of the kill that together they snatch ruin from the very jaws of conquest.

The Enemy Below

That, in the end, is the terror and the strange reassurance of the skaven. They are more numerous than every surface race together, endlessly cunning, and utterly without mercy. And they are held back chiefly by the poison in their own nature. But nature can be overcome, if only for a day, and a race this vast needs to win only once. The men of the Old World go on denying that ratmen exist, sleeping soundly above a civilisation that dreams every night of devouring them. It is, perhaps, the only way they could sleep at all.