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1 / 4 · Click to enlargeLore & origins
Wracks are the handiwork of the Haemonculi, the fleshcrafters of Commorragh. Each is a Drukhari who has been dissected and rebuilt as a living instrument of torture, an example of their master's surgical artistry. Some circles call them "Haemacolytes". They serve as assistants, servants and bodyguards. They tend the laboratories, hold down and cut open the subjects on the slab, and in battle defend their creators with their lives. Haemonculi lean towards megalomania and even delusions of godhood, and most think themselves polluted by physical labour of any kind. So the Wracks do the dirty work. A typical scene in a Haemonculus's oubliette is one figure looming over a half-dissected victim while hunched Wracks scrabble to obey every disturbing command.
The most sickening thing about a Wrack is not its appearance or its simmering bloodlust but that it chose this fate. After a few centuries of life in the Dark City, many Drukhari ask to be remade into a form other than the one they were born with. Voluntary surgery staves off the ennui that gnaws at their kind and opens up whole new realms of experience and debauchery. A Drukhari with nothing left to lose may give themselves to the Haemonculi and emerge as something far more frightening. Once remade, a Wrack will endure almost any degradation in the hope of one day ascending to the ranks of the Coven lords themselves.
Within their surgically enhanced frames lies shocking strength, pumped further by steroids and drugs. Beyond their menial duties, the Covens use them as frontline shock troops in realspace raids. They pillage communities for fresh specimens to stock the laboratories and fight with sickled blades, corrosive whips, stun-rods and silvered hooks.
Appearance & wargear
Inscrutable metal masks cover Wracks' faces, because individual identity has no place in their existence. Day to day they wear little more than stained butcher's aprons and tabards, with a bewildering array of torturer's tools hanging from their belts. Their finger- and toenails are cut away and replaced with razor talons that skitter on the cold stone floors of their needle-lairs. Many have heavy metal gauntlets grafted in place of hands, which inject or draw fluids with the flex of a wire-taut tendon and can be coated in searing venom for a raid. Spinal grafts and rampant bone growth form baroque external racks and hooks from which they hang samples and serums, ready for their master's use.
Weapons & Vehicles
The nerve-shredding neural whips and moisture-vaporising Huskblades of Drukhari Archons and Succubi, turning close combat into an arena…
The cruel crystal-toxin firearms of the Drukhari Kabals, firing storms of venomous shards designed to kill targets in maximum, soul-nou…
The corroded, pus-dripping combat blades of the Death Guard Plague Marines, so saturated with Nurgle's supernatural contagions that a s…
Explore all 48 entries in the Weapons & Vehicles armoury.
Battlefield role & tactics
Wracks are tough, pain-hardened infantry who guard Haemonculi and hold ground for the Covens. A squad of four Wracks is led by an Acothyst, a rank that seems to work like a junior officer's and is rewarded with exotic weapons. These include the hexrifle, whose crystal cylinders hold the Glass Plague that turns flesh to glass, the flesh gauntlet and the scissorhand. For every five Wracks, one may carry a liquifier gun or an ossefactor, a fleshcrafting device turned weapon that makes a victim's bones grow uncontrollably.
Notable battles & users
- Acothyst Mydilian: a named Acothyst recorded among the Covens.
- Haemoxytes: the title given to the most favoured Wracks.
- The ossefactor: built for shaping bone and fashioning spinal sumps, and now pressed into military service.
- Mindphase gauntlet: an Acothyst weapon said to be able to stop even a Tyranid Carnifex by sapping its will.
Related
Characters (1)
Urien Rakarth · Master Haemonculus of the Prophets of Flesh
