Hellions

The Hellions are the wild children of the Dark City's endless night, feral and lithe outcasts drawn from the anarchists, exiles and wanted felons whom even the Drukhari account too rebellious to trust. They gather into gangs that infest the upper reaches of Commorragh, and to ride with them is to renounce the intricate hierarchies of kabal and cult in favour of a brutal freedom bought and defended with the knife. What binds them is not loyalty but the intoxication of speed and the sport of killing from on high.

Each Hellion rides a skyboard, a single-seat anti-gravitic skimmer slung with splinter-pods, and prizes it above almost all else as the very emblem of independence. These craft are hung with trophies and daubed with jagged glyphs, though few remain long with any one rider; most have changed hands a dozen times, won in knife-duels or stripped from the corpse of a rival. Twitchingly responsive, a skyboard rewards its master with astonishing bursts of velocity and punishes the clumsy with a fatal plunge between the spires.

The Hellion's chosen weapon is the hellglaive, a long polearm bladed at both ends and set with recurved hooks that let a rider snag a passing ledge or throat and wrench himself into a sudden new heading. In battle the gangs sweep low over the enemy in a screaming, weaving tide, hooks flashing out to drag heads from shoulders before the riders bank away into the smoke. Each gang answers to a Helliarch, the deadliest flier among them, who won that place in a high-speed duel to the death and holds it only until a swifter blade unseats him.