Mandrakes

Mandrakes are a breed apart, feared even by the merciless Drukhari who nominally share their city. They dwell in Aelindrach, the shadow-realm that festers within Commorragh, a district that has literally fallen into darkness and exists in more than one dimension at once, where shadows thicken into living things that drag the unwary down into nothing. Out of that lightless country the Mandrakes come, cannibal and wild and wholly estranged from their kin.

Their origins are a matter of dread speculation. Some hold that they are Aeldari who bargained with the daemonic powers of the warp at the height of the old empire's decadence; others whisper that they are a cult that slipped into a dimension of shadow to escape the birth-scream of She Who Thirsts, and returned as something no longer alive in any sense a sane mind would accept. Their skins are black and cold as the void, crawling with blasphemous runes, and their faces flow like oil, one moment a smooth mask, the next splitting wide upon a maw of needle teeth.

In battle a Mandrake needs no doorway but a shadow, and there is always a shadow. It pulls itself through the darkness cast by its own victim to erupt into being at that victim's back, sinking frozen claws into flesh before any alarm can be raised. From their fingertips they conjure baleblast, gouts of spectral fire fuelled by stolen life-force that sear through body and soul alike. Their war-bands answer to a Nightfiend whose mere presence curdles the blood, and to the Abyssals, living conduits through which the malignant power of Aelindrach pours into the world of light.