The two men faced each other across the sand, gusts of wind blowing fine dust past their feet. Neither moved nor spoke, content to enjoy this rare moment of peace before conflict, the delicate fabric of the desert wrapped around them like a soft silk. The warmth of the sun was almost violent as it reached its apex. Lizards and scorpions had long since ventured to their tiny dens beneath the sands, but neither man was worried about the heat. The sun could act as witness to the violence to come.
They had long grown used to the weight of it from their time in the deep deserts, and if there was one commonality between both these warriors, it was that they enjoyed watching lesser men falter under the things they could endure. One of them would falter today. Such was the way of things.
One was dressed in the flowing, colourful robes of the Sultanate, the delicate fabrics and weaves hiding the armour beneath, a great curved sword upon his back. The other wore black robes with red trim, and the strange, featureless mask of the Demons of Apollyon, a heretic band that had raided and tormented the villages in the nearby hills and valleys for nearly half a year.
The man in black spoke first, arrogance dripping from his voice, “You have one chance to walk away, my friend. I feel no need for bloodshed this day.” He was tall, but whip lean, not a spare ounce of flesh on his body, and even standing still, he gave off an air of potential violence.
The other, known by some as Isma’il Al-Aziz, made no move as he replied, “Perhaps the last village you slaughtered was finally enough to sate your thirst then, eh? Or I turn to leave and feel your dagger in my back? Perhaps I let you walk from here, and you will become a monk and live a pious life. Or, maybe my steel will meet your flesh. Our fate, after all, is not our own.”
The man in black laughed, impressed by the lack of fear in the stranger's voice. He saw in the other man an odd mirror of himself, the confidence that bordered on arrogance, a lack of fear despite seeming to know what he faced, “Or, perhaps, you join us. Why would a wolf choose the side of sheep?”
Isma’il slowly took his curved sword from his back, enjoying the comfortable weight of it in his hand, the gleam of sunlight across the brutally sharp blade. He stared across the sand into the vicious, baleful eyes of his enemy. “Because I have witnessed firsthand the mercy of wolves.”
The man in black drew his short sword in one hand and a dagger in the other, the common two-handed dueling style of much of Europe. Isma’il noticed his exquisite posture and balance, feet planted perfectly, both blades held expertly. The man was arrogant, yes, but everything about him indicated a highly skilled swordsman—a surgeon hiding among the butchers of the Demons of Apollyon.
“Then come, and witness it again.”
The heretic darted forward, sword blade lashing out like a viper, designed to drive Isma’il to the right, and into a vicious cut from the dagger, but Isma’il had no intention of taking the bait. In fact, he had no intention of giving this man the swordfight he so clearly desired.
Instead, he ducked low., The heretic's commitment to pressing the attack, his arrogance that he would win any duel between the two, forming his undoing before they ever drew blades. Isma’il swung low, a vicious cut with the curved blade designed to shear through his opponent's ankle, but the heretic was quick to see it coming, as Isma’il knew he would.
The heretic jumped over the swinging blade, sure that Isma’il would have no choice but to turn and spin away with the blow, resetting range and the fight, due to his need to control the sword. Instead, Isma’il let go of the blade, surrendering it to the desert sands, keeping his momentum moving forward and barreling full force into the heretic, grabbing him around the waist and dragging him to the ground.
The heretic landed with the full weight of Isma’il on his chest, driving the air from him, sending his sword flying from his hand. Isma’il began landing brutal blows to the man's face, breaking his eye socket and nose with an animal-like fury.
The heretic was undoubtedly skilled, and could likely duel any swordsman the faithful forces could offer, or he could butcher helpless innocents, but Isma’il’s instincts had told him he would be lost in the deep waters of brutality that kept men alive in trenches when the walls seemed to shake with the wails of the dying and the sky above burned with hellfire.
He closed his calloused hands around the heretic's throat, squeezing as hard as he could, enjoying the look of surprise on the man's face as his desperate stab with the dagger found only the thick, tough armour beneath the loose, flowing robes. He squeezed until he saw the blood vessels in his enemy's eyes start to burst, then let go, keeping one hand on his throat while the other grabbed an ear, tearing it from the man’s head as he screamed in pain.
He landed three more heavy, bone-breaking blows to the heretic's face before getting up and walking toward his sword, leaving the man to spit out his broken teeth into the sands as he desperately tried to get air into his lungs.
Isma’il closed his hand around the hilt of his sword, whispering. “I’m sorry, Sirr al-Saif, you deserve more respect than I could show you in this fight.”
As he walked back to where the heretic struggled on the ground, the heretic managed to compose himself enough to speak.
“You are a coward, afraid to fight me.” He spat blood at Isma’il, but it landed uselessly at his feet, the man lacking the strength even for effective theatrics.
Isma’il looked down at him, his expressionless face as implacable and uncaring as the very desert itself.
“I have many scars on my body, infidel. Scars given to me by men and creatures who were likely far less skilled than you. Had I given you a chance to scar me, too, then perhaps you may have killed me.”
Isma’il laughed, but the heretic’s eyes burned only with hatred, and behind it all, the rage, the arrogance, the disdain, now there was fear, too.
“I will tell you where the rest of the Demons of Apollyon hide. I can take you there.”
As the heretic attempted to barter for his life, Isma’il grinned at him, once again allowing himself to enjoy the heat, the soft breeze, the scents of the small wildflowers that, even here, poked their way through the soil and turned their faces toward Jannah.
“Allah shall deliver them to me, as he delivered you to me, for you forget, our fate is not our own.”
Before the heretic could respond, the curved sword flashed through the air, a bolt of lightning in the dry, desert heat, slicing clean through the man’s neck.
Isma’il turned and walked away as blood arched out into the sands behind him. It wasn’t long to the foot of the hills where the Demons of Apollyon would be gathering, if the rumours of the villagers were to be believed.
He would leave those hills with the Demons dead behind him, or he would not leave them at all. Such was the way of things, for Isma’il Al-Aziz knew that his fate was not his own.
---
“A banner can burn. A throne can fall. A blade in your hand, and the man beside you — that is truth. That is worth killing for.”
— Isma’il Al-Aziz
The scattered Mamluks are an echo of a bygone age - last survivors of the warrior-elite who once ruled a vast empire in Northern Africa. They have no kingdom now, no fortress walls to call their own. They fight wherever they find the servants of Shaytan, serving alongside any of the Peoples of the Book who will raise steel against the Heretics and the Legions. It is among these scattered knights that the name Isma’il Al-Aziz has risen to both fear and fame - a hero to some, a hired sword to others, and to his enemies, a shadow in the dust before the slaughter begins.
Isma’il’s earliest memory was fire - his village was razed to embers in a dawn raid by a roving heretic warband. The black-helmed butchers took what they wanted from the ruins: weapons, grain, women, and the strongest of the surviving children. He was dragged in chains into the wastes, bartered to a roving warband as chattel.
For years he lived as one of the Wretched, half-slave and half-soldier, enduring the heretics’ beatings, their poisons, and their blasphemous catechisms. They taught him to strip a corpse for armour and weapons, to slit throats without hesitation, and to harden his heart to the screams of those begging for mercy. Their priests filled his mind with the promise of the Hellgate - the yawning wound in the earth from which their power spilled. A day would come where he would walk the Valley of Tears to be anointed in its fire. The pilgrimage was not a rite of passage but an unmaking: a march to the Lake of Eternal Flame, where flesh was seared to armour and soul to darkness.
When the time came, Isma’il was bound to others destined for damnation and driven toward the Gate beneath banners painted with the marks of the Host, but fate intervened in a dust-wracked canyon. A patrol of Mamluk Faris, swept down upon the warband in a sudden, thundering charge. The fight was swift and decisive.
Their officer, a veteran with eyes like a hawk’s, found the boy kneeling in his chains. Another might have seen only a heretic’s whelp and put him to the blade, but the aging Mamluk saw a soul worth saving. He cut Isma’il’s bonds, gave him water, and set him upon a spare horse. In the weeks that followed, he offered something rarer still: kindness.
From the first, Isma’il fought like a man looking for death. He learned to wield the long, heavy jezzail before he could write his name, and to strike with the forward-curving greatsword before his chin sprouted its first hairs. The Faris taught him the code of Furūsiyya - skill at arms, honour to one’s allies, and merciless war upon the servants of Shaytan. Yet Isma’il’s hunger was not for rank or coin, but for survival - and for vengeance that burned low and hot within him.
His name first spread during the Campaign of Iron and Ash, when the Mamluks rode with allied forces to reclaim the passes of the Akzir Plateau. Among the black cliffs and dust storms, his unit was ambushed by twice their number of heretic raiders. By the end, only Isma’il stood - armour dented, bleeding from half a dozen wounds, and his greatsword chipped and blackened. His jezzail had fired its last round hours earlier, yet he pressed on, cutting down foe after foe with a relentlessness that unsettled even hardened veterans.
It was said that when the warband’s chieftain finally faced him, mounted and armoured, Isma’il’s blade sheared through steel, bone, and saddle in one brutal stroke. The heretics fled, leaving him alone among the dead, resting on his sword as the dust swirled. That image - a lone, blood-drenched Faris in the storm - passed into legend.
Years later, during the war against the Demonic Host at Xathar’s Crown, Isma’il fought alongside the armies of New Antioch. The Mamluks had allied with New Antioch before, but never with such desperation - the infernal tide threatened to swallow both armies whole.
In the chaos of the siege, Isma’il’s squad was cut off, trapped between collapsing walls and the relentless advance of the enemy. New Antioch’s vanguard, led by Knight-Marshal Joseph Whatley, smashed through to relieve them. Side by side, mamluk and knight fought in the rubble, each guarding the other’s back. It was there that Isma’il understood the truth: a warrior’s oath was not to a banner, but to the brothers and sisters who bled beside him.
From that day, he took contracts from New Antioch as readily as from the Sultanate, riding wherever the fighting was fiercest. To his own, he was a comrade-in-arms lending his sword to allies. To New Antioch, he was a champion whose presence could turn the tide.
His body is a map of his life: deep gouges along his ribs from a warwolf’s claws, a puckered burn on his shoulder from a faulty alchemical round, the jagged line down his temple where a yoke fiend’s axe found him, but the most grievous of his injuries is unseen - the knowledge that no war is ever truly won while the Hellgates stand.
Isma’il’s greatword, Sirr al-Saif, is forged of blackened steel, its forward-weighted curve shearing through armour like cloth. His jezzail, long and ornately inlaid, fires alchemical rounds that can punch through the thickest plate or erupt into burning vapour. His fighting is a rhythm of death - the crack of the rifle, the silent charge, and the silver arc of blooded steel.
Outside of war, Isma’il is solitary. In the camps, he sits apart; in the cities, he drinks in the shadows. He refuses politics, caring only for the fight and for those who stand beside him in it.
To the young who idolise him, he offers no praise and no scorn. He takes no students, leaves no written doctrine, and speaks no grand truths. The story of his life, he believes, is warning enough for those who would follow in his footsteps.
Isma’il Al-Aziz rides still, answering the call of both the Sultanate and New Antioch. Some call him a mercenary without loyalty; others, the purest kind of soldier - one who fights only for those at his side. In the coffee houses of the desert, poets sing of the Falcon of Two Thrones. In the barracks of New Antioch, recruits whisper of the man who fills Hell’s halls with the damned.
He has no wife, no children, no estate. His only inheritance will be the stories told after he is gone - and perhaps, if fate is kind, the memory of a man who stood when others fled.
(Writing by Taylor Holloway and Aiden O'Brien)
This miniature includes three variants of Isma'il Al-Aziz The Iron Blade, in both supported and unsupported formats (LYS and STL), and a premium 32mm base. There are several variations of the same model in this kit, including a Great Sword, a Jezzail, and Halbert/Shield.
