Ivory Host

The Ivory Host is the legion the Mortisans got wrong. When its constructs were poured, the soul-stock had been fouled, threaded through with the raw spirits of great predatory beasts and the berserkers who hunted them, and no refinement could strain the contamination out. The result keeps the flawless discipline of its kin only until the fighting turns desperate, at which point the composure splits and something snarling comes through.

In the field this makes the Ivory Host magnificent and appalling by turns. They advance in the same silent, ordered ranks as any Ossiarch legion, and then, at the smell of ruin, break into a savagery no phalanx was meant to contain, tearing into the enemy with a fury that belongs to the hunting-ground, not the parade square. It wins battles, and it unsettles the very commanders who deploy them, for a weapon that turns feral in the hand is only ever half-trusted.

The other legions of the Ossiarch Bonereapers draw upon the Ivory Host the way a duellist draws a blade he suspects of a hidden flaw: useful, even decisive, but gripped a little too carefully. Nagash tolerates the imperfection because it kills, and because a legion that knows itself despised fights all the harder to prove the verdict wrong.