Drowned Chorister

“Envy is an abyss in which even the virtuous may drown.”

— Invidian Canticle, 41:3, Book of Leviathan

Many are history’s holy figures who have felt the red twist of injustice in their gut. They behold the seemingly endless blessings bestowed upon the unworthy, while their own righteous ambitions are denied to them. They ask, in the still and secret night, “Why them and not I?” No answer comes from their God; instead the only sound is the echo of their petition, ringing out in that cavernous abdominal knot as if in torturous mockery. Such is the insidious and self-perpetuating nature of Envy, an ugly feeling that bloats bitterly until it can no longer be contained, forcing those who submit to its acidic call to cast aside their faith with an explosive, spittle-strewn snarl. Many go on to join the many murderous Legions that serve at the behest of the Serpent Head of Envy, the Infanticide King and Thief of Babes, Moloch. After all, it was Cain’s jealousy that saw him bring his brother low in a moment of cold fury. Beyond the slaying of others, so caustic is resentment’s poison that those afflicted by it often turn their wrath upon themselves, compelled to hide the vastness of their insufficiency beneath the black depths of the ocean. Those that follow this urge do not attain the annihilating seclusion they crave, but instead find perverse absolution. Like much of what humanity considers “free will”, this drowning desire is by the design of a far older and more terrible power.

As the sea fills their bodies, the echo of want in their stomachs is obscured by a new sound, a call so loud that the faultiness of their soul is dwarfed by its harrowing cacophony. This is no trick of the dying mind, but the Song of Leviathan, said to be one of God’s first creations that lays hidden, chained in the deepest oceanic void. This ancient, enormous demon yearns to supplant Moloch as Invidia’s champion, and those that hear its keening voice are reborn as its heraldic choir. Until the water rots their lungs or their master consumes their undying flesh, they cry hymns of Leviathan’s inevitable assent to the Black Klismos of Envy. When this phenomenon was discovered by the first Heretic submarines, these hellish geists were soon taken aboard and deployed within their raiding parties, equipped with diving bells full of abyssal waters and fielded as terror troops in the same manner as the terrestrial Heretic Choristers. 

Dubbed “Drowned Choristers”, they sway eerily atop the earth as if caught in ghostly currents, held down only by the weights and chains they used to take their own lives. Their song, though but a fraction of the unholy horror which “saved” them, creeps over the trenches like a thick fog, driving those Faithful that hear it into the ravenous, maddening maw of comparison.

Some Choristers wield wicked sacrificial knives with which to slaughter those they feed to the aquatic predators caught in their unearthly tide. Others bear rusted swords and shields, offering to duel their opponents until they are too rapt by floods of doubt to be able to continue fighting. When the killing is done, aboard the Heretic submarines Drowned Choristers are found in the close council of their Infernal captains, gurgling in discordant falsettos of the secret power to be found in the endless black. 

To their dismay, in recent years the war-scholars of the Faithful have noticed an increase in reports of those who have survived near-death experiences by drowning becoming obsessed with a terrifying and beautiful song. Despite clerical and military intervention, many are driven to madness and eventual suicide as they attempt to feel its revelatory immensity once more. These reports coincide with a rapid generation of new Drowned Choristers leading Heretic Naval Raiding Parties across the area of the Levant known as the Carcass Front.

Perhaps even more worrisome are Drowned Choirs, seemingly spontaneous occurrences of Drowned Choristers who do not find raiding parties, but more of their own kin. Where Heretic Naval Raider attacks unfurl with unholy horror and brutality, the Drowned Choirs begin their assaults in the assumed comfort of sleep. Their pitiful harmonies resound through the dreams of those near the shore, providing orchestral counterpoint to visceral nightmares of their grandest fears and insecurities. In mere days, entire settlements descend into homicidal jealousy until their populace either lays slain by each other’s hands or, more commonly, cast themselves into the briny depths to serve forever with the Choir. The Drowned Choirs drift waywardly with the tide, every fishing village and coastal hamlet within earshot adding to their number. Over time, the Choristers themselves can end up conjoining in flesh, mangled and mingled into something more resembling a siphonophore than anything human. This entity, known as a Leviathal Chorus, represents a deeper facet of Envy: it is malicious, indiscriminate and all-consuming, a rotting beast of narcissistic woe and obsessive spiritual violence. As Drowned Choirs have begun emerging in greater numbers, the Ministry of the Propagation of Virtue have spent countless ducats entreating all to study Proverbs 27:4 in their Mandatory Propaganda:

“Wrath is cruel and anger a torrent, but who is able to stand before jealousy?”