Flesh-eater Courts

Scattered across the Mortal Realms are kingdoms that appear on no honest map: candlelit halls where minstrels play, banners stream, and gracious lords preside over endless feasts. None of it is real. The Flesh-eater Courts are nations of mordants, ghoulish cannibals crouched in collapsed keeps and plague-emptied cities, bound together by a single inherited madness. The curse began with Ushoran, a vampire lord who longed to be adored and was punished for it, and it flows down through his abhorrant descendants like a poisoned bloodline. Wherever an abhorrant king plants his standard, the wretched gather, the dream takes hold, and another shining court convenes amid the rubble.

At the heart of every court squats an abhorrant: a Ghoul King whose broken mind radiates delusion the way a fire radiates heat. Those who linger too long in that glow begin to see as the king sees. Starvelings become sturdy yeomen; shrieking packs become companies of men-at-arms; the strongest are elevated to knighthood and believe their pallid hides to be polished plate. The courts observe every nicety of a chivalric age (heraldry, tourneys, oaths of fealty, courtly love), and only the details are wrong. The pennants were never woven, the goblets never forged, and what is served at the long tables is better left undescribed.

The courts do not think of themselves as servants of Death, and therein lies their peculiar danger. Many believe they fight for noble causes (some even imagine themselves Sigmar's truest knights), and they extend hospitality, declare honorable war, and answer imagined summonses with complete sincerity. Travelers who stumble into their halls are treated as honored guests for exactly as long as courtesy demands. Nagash counts the courts among his subjects and finds them distasteful but useful: an army that believes it is saving the realms will march anywhere, endure anything, and never once question the cause.

With the shattering of the Shroudcage, Ushoran himself walks the realms again as the Summerking, Mortarch of Delusion, promising his scattered descendants an eternal summer of plenty, and the grand courts flock to his banner in joy. Yet the true horror of the Flesh-eater Courts was never the feast: it is the sincerity. Their courage is real, their loyalty is real, their mercy, as they understand it, is real; every virtue of a golden age survives in them, bent through hunger like light through dirty glass. The question that haunts those who study the courts is simple and unanswerable: whether it would be kindness to wake them, or cruelty beyond measure.