The Dark Eldar Haemonculi! Noble Artistry Of Pain And Rebirth From Suffering! Warhammer 40k Lore

car ratings and salutations friends and welcome back to more warmer 40K lore well today we are going to talk about the dark Elder homunculi and Logistics the best topic because if you put aside all of the edgy emo nonsense The Flash crafting the Torches the slicing and the dicing then the real reason the homunculi have such an exalted position in Dark Eldar Society is because they are invaluable logistical components to Common Rock now I'm not even joking most new Dark Eldar are born created more correctly by the homankili the majority of a modern day cabal's Warriors are that grown tube babies rather than the true born Sons and Daughters of a real dark Elders which makes sense I mean the dark Elder never struck me like the kind of people to uh create loving families so plus the whole thing that Eldar pregnancies are long painful and uh not very frequent either indeed in dark yellow Society having a so-called true-born child is a sign of status it shows that you have the ability to separate yourself from the rest of your duties for an extended period of time you have the spare effort and resources to raise a child although I imagine Dark Eldar child rearing might be quite the thing but we are wandering a little bit off topic already are we not so the homunculi who and what are they and why are they so important to the Dark Eldar to the cabals to the point of other cabals don't even dare mess with them to the point that the homunculi covenants have become a power in and of themselves standing not necessarily above but certainly separate from and aside to the rest of Dark Eldar Society well the first question who are they is a little bit difficult to answer because record keeping is shoddy at the best of times and non-existent as far as the monkey lie are concerned who don't seem particularly concerned about keeping their own books pretty either they are far more important things to do but the prevailing theory is that they are at the very least amongst the very earliest inhabitants of comoroc which means that they were around during the fall of the great Elder Empire which makes a lot of sense considering that they are universally ancient and wizard creatures to such an extent that even their unbelievable regenerative technology can no longer maintain their youthful appearance and I want to point out here that their regenerative technology is to the point of bringing people back from the dead so if your wrinkles are getting so bad that it is more difficult to cure them than death yeah that uh gives you an idea of that age there are also suggestions that not merely were they around during the fall of the Eldar Empire but they might have been the ones who actually instigated it as the leaders of the various Cults of pleasure that eventually corrupted Eldar society and brought about the birth of she who thirsts I'm very partial to this Theory myself because it adds another layer of rot to the Dark Eldar to think that the ones who brought about the fall of the old Empire are still Rising around like the maggot at the heart of the Apple in the new Elder Empire of komarag that is um that's a cool idea and again it would give a reason for their exalted status as when they arrived in comrad they weren't just brandos who wandered in like the rest of the refugees they were already leaders of Cults and organizations who would obviously create their own hierarchy alongside and still separate to that of the old Dark Eldar nobility which was overthrown by azero by al-vect during his own little bloody Revolution and the rise of the kebabs now as for what services they provide well they are experts in the Arts of torture and pain and flesh crafting to the point that they are able to provide something that even the witches of the Arena are not to give you an idea here as I mentioned several times previously when talking about the Dark Eldar to them pain and suffering is not merely a fun and engaging night on the town it's not merely a festive family activity or something dumb for fun and entertainment no it is literally necessary for their continued existence without it they will shrivel up and die or the very least entered into such a comatose state that they may as well be dead it is fundamental nourishment to them like food and water or maybe even air might be a more apt comparison but whereas there are various types of foods there are various types of well satisfying this urge torturing a humble Imperial Guardsman to death by cutting him open on the battlefield for example might be bread or depending upon how well you do it how long it takes might be bread with jam on it to continue the tortured food metaphor whereas a high-class ticket to one of the premiere which Arenas in comrog might be a five-star dinner with a dessert but the homunculi provider service Beyond even this as the witches can maintain a dark Elder it can even rejuvenate them make them healthier and straight up younger but what the homunculi can do is literal regeneration to the point where there is a story of one homunculi being blown apart Point Blank Range by a squad of Space Marine did his arm with to the point where his remnants needed to be gathered up with a super ladle and yet still after being deposited into the rejuvenating sarcophaguses of the homunculi he was up and about and walking again after a week granted still somewhat reduced but nevertheless from extra chunky salsa to ambulatory in seven days is quite the medical and unsurprisingly this kind of service is in high demand amongst the Dark Eldar who make a living out of constantly raiding real space who are constantly having assassination attempts launched against them brutal gang Warfare or into cabal's Strife not to mention the open Warfare that occasionally breaks out between them the ability to return from the dead is quite nice although it does come at um excessive cost limiting the service to only the uppermostrata of hoity-toity Dark Eldar nobility and of course to the Harmon killai themselves for whilst there are not actually all that many homankelai they don't die very often not permanently anyways the monkey organized themselves into so-called covenants this is done as both a way to share resources and to make sure that even if they were to fall there is always somebody around too but literally in their case pick up the pieces and return them to a active state beyond the purely practical as well the covenants are also um fetish hangout groups essentially as those who tend to enjoy the same kind of extreme entertainment gather together one would presume that as it is mentioned that over the length of homunculi's unending Immortal Life their tastes tend to grow more extreme and specific you will then have a covenants within covenants or perhaps you will have a homunculine traveling from one Covenant over to the other perhaps there are even recruitments between them though they strike me as more as um voluntary associations rather than competing organizations like for example the cabals in fact that is an interesting distinction to make the cabals overthrew the old decadent Dark Eldar nobility precisely because they had grown decadent and stale they they were no longer sharp they were no longer dangerous the only thing that provided them protection was well their status their money their ability to buy bodyguards and this was not enough to protect them from the cabals but the cabals in turn are also painfully aware that if they do not continuously remain strong sharp dangerous and Powerful they too will be immediately torn down by the other two dozen cabals rising up from below them desperate for their turn in the Sun the homunculi on the other hand are separate from this because again well they provide services that the cabals require the ability to bring back their leaders from Death the ability to bring back favored Warriors a particularly excellent bodyguard for example or a favored witch as a sign of favor or even as a way of purchasing their Illusions and or Loyalty The Witches cult in turn two have need of the homunculi services both for the obvious Resurrection things and for the providing of particularly delectable pieces of entertainment of architectural Delights living tapestries of Flesh and Blood and particularly Exquisite tortures the um top of the lion gourmet food one might compare it to of the Dark Eldar Realm and in addition to these practical concerns there is also the fact that the covenants are significant military forces in their own right as well employing hordes of racks and grotesques these abominable flesh craft creations of the homunculine are both their servants their aides and their Stormtroopers they provide the humankind with all of the various Services they require they take care of their prisoners they feed the stock they rile them up when required they keep them in line they maintain their palaces and they also fight their Wars something in which they Excel incidentally as each and every one of them is crafted to carry out their specific Purpose with a few artistic flourishes here and there of course as no two racks or grotesques are ever truly alike they're always going to be little touches here and there an extra limb slightly different curvatures of the hooked arm blanes or the fingers slightly different as face mask or tattoo patterns or different sorts of chemical injections to keep them riled up shall we say this makes them absolutely lethal Close Quarters combatants and combined with the fact that they can be unloaded in ridiculous numbers on the enemy very very dangerous and no cabal would want to piss off the homunculi unnecessarily there might be reasons to make an enemy of a covenant at least temporarily should they prove weak but uh the thing is even if you manage to defeat the Covenant in its total if even a globular of their Gore survives to be recovered by a different Covenant well now you have an immortal extraordinarily patient and dangerous enemy more than willing to wait a century or more to carry out their Vengeance in fact there are stories of them doing just this a one case including the Raven God the amankili abducted a company of Raven God and then allowed the Raven God to rescue them once again without the Raven God's knowledge their monkey lie had subtly disfigured and corrupted their Gene seed so that the next generation of Raven guards several hundred of them all suddenly all at once due to some brilliantly interred form of genetic coding turned into monsters and began attacking their comrades instinctively The Raven God ended up having to kill several hundred of their new neophytes and even early battle brothers due to this again the homuncular very very patient and they take a great deal of diligence in their uh art my favorite example I believe I've mentioned this once previously but there was an imperial Hive world that was visited by one of their uh carnivals festive name for a homunculi war host uh five years later the Imperium sent an expedition to the world because while they were wondering where their taxes were and when they arrive they found a hive perfectly intact without so much as a Fleck of blood or a single Scorch Mark anywhere in the hive that was unnerving and imagine here's a high world even the Dark Eldar cannot attack and take a hive without a bit of violence obviously but that means that they took it they killed everyone or carted them off as slaves they brutally eviscerated The Garrison slaughtered its leaders or tortured them and then they cleaned the place up perfectly to the point where not even of blood remains they crime scene cleaned the entire Hive City from top to bottom it must have taken months years maybe and all of this for no other reason than to freak the out of the guys who'd come investigate it five years later oh that is dedication right there and again why you would not want to make an enemy out of the homunculi for their part the various covens tend to remain near perfectly neutral when it comes to the day-to-day businesses of comoroc they'll take uh occasional minor preferences inside here and there if they have an agenda but by and large they will provide their services to anyone for any reason though again at a price of course not just Rejuvenation and regeneration technology but also the creation of fresh Warriors as I mentioned a little bit earlier on the homunculi is the source of many of the cabal's fighters as the actual birth and raising of a Dark Eldar is a very very very very slow and long-term effort usually done as a Prestige project if at all whereas the monkey line can take a fertilized egg and Via an ingenious system of rapid growth that create a fully grown and matured warrior in a fraction of the time these kinds of services however are usually carried out in exchange for real compensation see one of the interesting things about dark yellow Society is that they have a lot of different forms of currency in reality the currency is whatever the opposition wants out of the transaction and whatever you are receiving is the currency that you want it's closer to a bartering system really than our current Day idea of an economy and in the case of homunculi well some things will obviously always have value a certain alchemical ingredients that are rare or difficult to come by for example extraordinarily rare plants or poisons may have or chosen body parts from slain foes or particular organs from great foes like well Gene seed is an obvious example or maybe the acid organs from tetanids Etc the more difficult it is to get the more value it undoubtedly holds in other cases it might also be the specific preference of the humankalai in question as we mentioned earlier on again her monkey and I tend to develop a more extreme tastes over the course of their Immortal lives they grow ever more picky in their habits some might for example only feed on spleens of female humans between the ages of 25 and 27. nothing else that's the only thing he'll eat which means that to him a steady supply of this is very valuable because it's his literal food whereas another might not eat at all but dine only on the suffering of other Elder for example maybe he has a particular taste for proper Elder he is non-fallen cousins yet others again might actually prefer the slightly acrid tinge of Dark Eldar Souls another obvious form of currency would be slaves and this is probably the most common one because well Canadian stuffs like the wretches and the grotesques not to mention all of the various experiments of the homuncala carry out continuously to further push the limits of their flash crafting Arts requires a great deal of raw resources of varying types as well humans Orcs Elder tyranids whatever is out there some will have some designs for them and usually again they will require quantity although occasionally qualities that acquired Resource as well perhaps a specific experiment can only you be carried out on a Space Marine or only an orc or only a tetanid Etc in these cases a homunculi might be offering up sponsorship or a coven more likely to a cabal in return for a real space raid against a desired Target a specific Hive world for example alternatively the caverns themselves might also organize their own little real space outings they're uh carnivals in these cases though they are not necessarily doing so for profit in and of itself that exalted position within camaradian society means that if they ever needed anything odds are there are plenty of cabal Lords and Ladies out there willing to give it up to them in return for their services but if they've got a personal agenda for example the creation of what they would view as a a piece of art maybe then of course using the cabals as a former's payment is an option but can you trust rough crude cabalite Warriors to fully understand the Grand Vision of a master flashcrafter can they figure out exactly why it is very important that the bodies be placed in exactly just such shapes to create create a larger more glorious impression after all if you're building a half living scarecrow out of the flayed corpses or imperial citizens the devil really is in the detail and considering the Hamman can I do this for their own entertainment pleasure as much as they do for the cousins as well they undoubtedly have some sort of internal hierarchy however unofficial it is there is a degree of superiority of position depending upon age and creation and as such undoubtedly there are competitions within the covens as well to create the most majestically disgusting works and as with all artists there are differing levels of skill and ambition on display as well perhaps one of the more famous is urian rakarth a very famous individual in the Dark Eldar world he announced that he was going to put on a special show using his Carnival of pain during the morning period for azerbal vet who died temporarily during that whole Ephraim thing in the Gathering storm that surrounded it as you might imagine the death of the supreme leader of comrade Drew quite a crowd everyone who was anyone in coverage in society attended the funeral just like urian had anticipated and during the height of the uh celebration slash morning he turned his Creations upon the attendance who were universally to the last man and the woman Torn to Pieces and half devoured by his monsters but that wasn't the true Artistry no no no anyone can kill was far more impressive was he that he managed to use the pain the anguish the Betrayal the blood of the attendance to resurrect azra bile that not through the usual lengthy process of rebirth that can take weeks and weeks but instead of the course of mere minutes and hours returning him not just to full strength but better than before and as a final Flex just to really drive home the point urian then turned around and resurrected the guests as well somehow managing to take the presumably finite energy is released by their death and not just resurrecting the chosen Target vect but all of them too now not all of them in the same state of course urian had done this specifically to ensure that he had the patronage of vect for all eternity the unquestioning patronage and and so he allowed the Great Master of comorog to determine who would be brought back in full and who would be um more living corpse than truly alive an everlasting reminder of the cost of going up against azdrubile vector to the only punishment azra Bell had urian work out for him either mind you in one particularly fiendish and insulting punishment Vic had urian figure out a way to turn Dark Eldar into humans perfect replicas of human beings that moved like humans that talked like humans even that smelled like humans yeah you might be wondering what's so bad about that well to the Elder we are particularly disgusting creatures because they see something of themselves in us and yet they are devoid of all of their Grace all of their fine features there are extraordinary nature it is like if we were to look at a particularly Monkey and be told hey that's you be insulting wouldn't it this punishment was created specifically to punish those of the Dark Eldar who were beginning to fall to the yinare faith the Elder goddess of the Dead Union which was created during again that whole storm of blah blah blah blah blah dumbass nonsense actually I don't hate the Elder part of it anyway it near as a much as I dislike the Imperial part of it now it does have a bit of a stink of the end times over it because suddenly The Irregular Eldar and the Dark Eldar have something in common like how the wood elves the Dark Elves and the High Elves of Warhammer well suddenly all friends and Buddy Buddy again you know despite the hundreds of years if not thousands of continuous vicious hatred that they share for one another but hey you know they figured out the witch King was really their actual Boss by divine right and so obviously they'd all just accept that right much like the Dark Angels will just accept primaries Marines because it's not like they've got any secrets or anything uh the current level of 40K writing hurts me anywho these new Dark Eldar turned humans were even used to infiltrate Human Society in effort to try and track down the faithful and assassinate them whatever possible and Punishment of course is another valuable commodity that the Hamman can I offer up to the rest of the Dark Eldar as I'm sure you've figured out by now they tend to be rather um asshole-ish people exceptionally so in fact and when they make an enemy out of someone they don't just want to kill them that's far too easy they need to be displayed in full public as a screaming flag or something or be turned into a particularly disturbing set of furniture or a walking meatball blob to Waffle through the streets randomly attacking and killing civilians you know stuff to that in general extent the problem is it's kind of hard the the Mortal body is usually only able to sustain so much before it um kinda just dies obviously the homunculi's ability to make sure that the body doesn't die no matter how much punishment and horror they Heap upon it is probably as valuable a skill to the dark Elder as Rejuvenation is these varying Services also mean that there is some competition between the various Caverns as well for as much as the whole monkey I like to think themselves above Dark Eldar Society at large the truth is that even in their extraordinarily exalted position there's only ever so many resources to go around and with the ever increasing ambition and Madness of the average homunculi requiring more and more and more they do tend to want to build reputations as specialists in certain fields for example the hex coven are considered to be the best flesh Crafters if you need something truly imaginative created they are the ones you go to for example if you want your favorite enemy turned into a goldfish that will live for the rest of its eternal life in a tank filled with nothing but the this just slimy half fluid excrement of your enemies whilst of course the fish can never be allowed to die and the person that you turn into the Goldfish must also be able to always be perfectly aware of his suffering as well a tall order mayhaps but the hexers will undoubtedly be able to figure out some way to make it work out alternatively if you need something more subtle like a poison or a plague the altered are the coven of most people's choice as they will create not only just toxins that create excruciating suffering for Choice victims but even specifically coded poisons that can be released into the atmosphere of entire planets that will only kill those in a particular grouping as I mentioned previously with certain Harmon killai figuring out that they have very unique proclivities they might be looking for slaves of only very certain types and finding all of them individually can be a real bother all right well just aerosolize the entire planet with a form of genetic marker that grows over the course of years identifying every single left-handed person for example so that when the dark Elder launch a real space raid a decade later they can simply just open up their little fancy dark Elder iPad and find the location of every single person with the genome that they are looking for of course there are also far more um direct ways of using toxins and plagues Etc you could kill off an entire population or preferably nearly weaken them enough to the point where they'll still be a good sport but they won't actually provide any actual threat to the Invaders after all if they're all dead when the dark Elders show up well I'll just be a down the bomber now won't it plus poison is a subtle weapon and can be used against uh non-outside enemies as well with relatively little chance of Discovery the dark Eldon as always as fond of killing one another as they are of dealing with the lowly creatures of the outside world and if an homunculus coven can be on your side instead of the enemy as well all the better even more so if it offers the opportunity for the acquisition of truly choice specimens for the homunculi As again since they are ever pursuing the Perfection of their craft well Dark Eldar specimens are perhaps as highly prized as anything else after all if you are a member of say the Nemesis Covenant for example who seeks the most perfect way of killing every single living thing in existence not necessarily eradicating them just the objectively best way to kill a member of a certain species well you gotta figure out a way to kill dark and the lordlings as well surely including even demons he there is a fair amount of actual experimentation within the hamonkillai orders and the covens more correctly where despite them having been alive for a very long time they still do not know everything and occasionally their hubris causes a little bit of a screw up or two either there was on one occasion for example they abound the soul of a greater demon to a Dark Eldar lordling and while they didn't know that until the Dark Eldar ordered the havanka light haunt to pieces and eaten well you know sometimes in experimentations you've got to die once or twice before you get it right but nevertheless can't make an omelet without breaking a few hamunculi eggs I believe it was in um connection with that Resurrection too that well here's the problem there are certain limits to the resurrectionist Arts if a corpse has been reduced too greatly it's going to be very difficult to bring them back no matter how much uh ass hurt you pour into their recovery coffins furthermore if the body has simply disappeared being blasted into atoms or you just don't know where it is again that poses a considerable challenge to the homuncula's Arts so many of them have been researching for quite some time to figure out a way to Bring the actual soul back as well rather than merely rebuilding the body and there have been some successful experiments usually involving their more straight laced cousins in this particular experiment I believe it was a um a farseer or something um that was sacrificed over a period of a very very very very very very very very very very very very long time and his death screams were used to entice the soul in question once the soul had been brought into uh their grasp the homunculi managed to capture it and reconstitute the body from the soul itself don't ask me how that works particularly considering the fact that well souls are a valid valuable resource in the immaterium and even if a body goes dead inside of comorog you'd think it would slip out somehow but apparently this suggests that anyone who dies in komarag will forever be trapped in komarock hey and on the one hand reassuring note considering what awaits any Elder that dies in the 41st Millennium and yet at the same time maybe being eaten by slaanesh might actually be a preferable fate that's a philosophical debate for the ages right there and it is still a pressing field of research for the homunculi but because once they are functionally Immortal even if killed in the midst of battle again if the body is so reduced it is literally unrecoverable even a homunculi may die and uh considering they're somewhat obsessive nature and that view of themselves as dark Gods ruling above lesser beings death is something that they would rather like to avoid something they would wish to conquer as quickly as possible but even their dark arts presumably has some limitations even if they might disagree with that evaluation and unfortunately for the rest of the 41st Millennium by and large the homunculi are still correct when they Proclaim themselves Immortals as even over the preceding thousands of years their numbers do not appear to have diminished noticeably as they continue to spread fear and Terror throughout the Galaxy and on that happy little note I will wrap this one up until next time I have been Arch thank you all very much for watching and I hope to see you all again soon until then have a good day [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Arch

Views: 95,211

Keywords: arch, dark eldar, 40k, warhammer, eldar, Haemonculi, xeno, asuryani, aeldari, dark eldar tribute, warhammer 40k, warhammer 40000, 40k lore, warhammer lore, 40k explained, warhammer 40k lore, wh40k, lore, drukhari, imperium, gaming, xenos, history, warp, commorragh

Id: rMgFQNaFx2E

Length: 38min 19sec (2299 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 16 2022