Imperial Hive Preacher With Retinue

A hive is not a city. A city has an end.

The spires climb until the sky gives up. The under-tiers sink until the maps stop being honest. Between the two live the numbers nobody has ever finished counting - workers, gangers, scrap-breathers, mutants who were never entered into any register, things born in the sump that have never been named by anyone who could read. They all breathe the same recycled air. They all carry the same debt.

The Preacher comes to collect it.

He arrives sealed behind a grille, because the lower hive is not fit to be breathed by a man who must speak for six hours without pause. He does not debate. He recites. The sermon was printed once and has never been revised, never softened, never shortened for a district that claimed it was busy. By the third hour the crowd has stopped listening and started repeating.

He does not carry his own church. That is what the servitors are for.

The first bears the standard: a spiked halo with the bones of a martyr set inside it, and beneath it the sermon itself, hanging in cloth so that even the illiterate understand they are being addressed. The second bears the cathedra. It unfolds wherever he stops - a transit platform, a slag yard, the flooded step of a habitation block - and the moment it locks into place, that spot becomes a cathedral, and everyone standing on it becomes a congregation.

Neither of them was asked. Both were volunteers once, in the sense the Empire uses the word.

The sermon has a second half, and the second half is louder. Between them the servitors carry enough guns to level the front rank of any crowd that decides it would rather not repent, along with blades for the tunnels where a gun is too generous. The Preacher never gives the order. He simply reaches the passage about the unrepentant, and the machines that carry his church have heard it enough times to know their cue.

Confession, repentance, atonement. Recorded, witnessed, filed. The debt is paid or it is collected. The hive keeps buzzing either way, and the procession climbs to the next tier.

Three models: the Preacher and his two servitors, 64 mm, 42 mm and 40 mm on 32 mm round bases.

This one comes back to you from the Old but Gold line - a Grim Skull sculpt out of the back catalogue, returned for everyone who missed it the first time. A voice, a church and a firing line: enough character for a warband, enough presence for a command group, and exactly the sort of procession a grim gothic army looks incomplete without.

You can buy printed models here:

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