Nihilators throwing themselves to the carnage of the battlefied
Nihilators are fanatical and savage skorne that are obsessed with gaining a glorious death to achieve exaltation and seek out the most violent deaths against the most impossible odds in order to gain the attention of the extollers. The nihilator cult originates from Xaavaax the Flayed, who was the foremost disciple of the great ancestor Morkaash, the revered philosopher who founded the paingiver caste. After Morkaash’s death, Xaavaax and a small group of dedicated adherents ventured deep into the Shroudfall Mountains to test the limits of self-inflicted pain. Several of his followers died over the weeks that followed, but those who survived returned with a frightening new zeal. Thereafter the cult grew steadily on the fringes of skorne civilization.[1]
This cult enacts rituals that radically reinterpret Morkaash’s teachings about enlightenment through suffering and incorporate the codes of honor in battle as passed down by Voskune. Nihilators start down their all-consuming path with an initiation rite requiring the ritual scarring of their flesh. They use these self-inflicted agonies to achieve a waking meditative state that allows them to ignore even the most crippling injuries in battle. Akin to the berserkers of the west, they can enter a blood frenzy that makes them exceptionally terrifying. Nihilators grow so blinded by their desire for glorious death that they soon lose the ability to distinguish friend from foe and many of them die on the blades of their comrades as they hurl themselves wildly into the fray.[1]