Hell Knight
The silent battalions of Hell, summoned when the Court of the Seven-Headed Serpent seeks sport, are composed of Hell Knights. Their ever-burning banners stream as they march to war, carrying out the bidding of their masters. They are the bannerets of the high lords of the Court, and champions who respond to foolish mortals daring to challenge the hunting parties of the Serpent’s nobility.
Heretic Priests whisper that these Infernal warriors were once lesser fallen angels or mighty mortal champions raised into devilhood, only to be cursed by their liege lords for some slight, real or imagined. Cast out from the burning palaces of the Pit, the alabaster architecture of their bodies has been twisted, folded upon itself a thousand times, entombed within their once-splendid armour which is now an eternal prison.
To glimpse the body inside is to gaze upon the sheer horror of divine flesh warped beyond reason. Glaring eyes of light, mouths uttering blasphemies, and pulsating inner organs that gibber and shriek, all crushed into a space barely a tenth of their original form. Despite their reduction in stature, their inordinate pride remains unbroken, and they brook no insolence from the wretched mortals that serve them.
Once privy to the secrets of Creation, their minds are now clotted with endless blood-red waking dreams. Their thoughts are crushed to a singular, jagged prism of murderous obsession. Their form is tormented by the cold of the earthly realm, which they are forced to endure just as humans suffer in the flames of Hell. They are mighty still, yet mere shadows of their once exalted glory. Even so, they are terrifying and implacable foes to a mortal soldier.
They wield ancient and wicked weapons. Greatswords, battleaxes, and arquebuses, forged by the household smiths deep in the bowels of their demon lord’s keep. Though the appearance of such armaments is archaic to mortals, they are more than a match for even the most advanced weapons from the foundries of New Antioch or laboratories of the House of Wisdom.
Upon their helmets, they bear the seal of the great demonic spirit they serve, and eerie corpse candles float about them, acting as conduits for Goetic magic.
“Your heart became proud
on account of your beauty,
and you corrupted your wisdom
because of your splendour.
So I threw you to the earth;
’I made a spectacle of you before kings.’”— Book of Ezekiel