What May Be Found in a Fish-hag's Wares

It was not the voices in his head that bothered Hieronymus Knyphausen. He had long been accustomed to the solitary life of the scholar and the sage. Loneliness was the lot of a wandering warlock-for-hire.

No, what bothered Knyphausen was that the voice in his head spoke to him in a language he had never learned. 

He recognized it, of course. All wizards encountered the gnarled, glottal words of the Dark Tongue. It was scribbled in the marginalia of moldering codices and scrawled in the mad jottings of mystics and madmen. It was the language of the Chaos Gods. 

But Knyphausen had never learned the language himself and had consciously restricted himself to those grimoires and tomes that had been written in Reikspiel, the language of the Empire, the language of the law and the authorities, the language of the Sigmarite cult. Now, as he traveled northwards, towards the ruined corpse-city of Mordheim, the Dark Tongue invaded his thoughts. It ruled his dreams.

It came to him again.

As the saying goes: the fields have eyes and the forest has ears, little man. I am like them. I see all things. I see what festers in the hidden nooks of your mind: your secret wants, your shameful hungers, your obscene lusts. I know them all. My minions have cataloged them in a thousand volumes, penning them on stretched human skins, and hoarding them in my infinite library. You have great ambitions, Knyphausen, and you want many things. I would help you realize those ambitions and make those wants into realities.

Knyphausen tried to push away the voice, to banish it with a soulless prayer to Sigmar for protection.

The voice cackled, then broke out into hysterical laughter.

Pathetic. It will take more than a prayer to your dead man-god to send me away, magician. I have watched you since you were a faint stirring in your mother’s belly. I will be watching you when your utter your first hex, when the Word of Pain first dribbles from your lips, and my blue fires ooze from your cankered fingers. I will be watching you when my fleshly gifts become too much for your mortal frame to bear, when you shatter apart, becoming a mindless, shifting mass of eyes and jaws and wings and teeth. I will be watching you when a Witch Hunter casts you into the fire, and I will laugh as you burn.

Knyphausen fell to his knees. The mud stained his purple robe. He clutched at his skull and screamed, trying to banish the gibbering voice, trying to drown it in the sheer volume of his pain.

He screamed for what seemed like an eternity.

Then he collapsed into the mud. A whispering wind hissed through the somber trees.

He knew how this had happened.

It was all his fault.

The warpstone shard he carried had seemed so small, not much bigger than a pebble or a pea. It had looked like a piece of spectral green glass when he’d spied it among the wares of an eyeless crone who hawked trinkets and baubles in a stall outside the Altdorf fish market. The crone had furtively withdrawn it from its hiding place in the stringy grey guts of a three-eyed herring. It had looked like nothing. Just another article of sorcerous kitsch.  

And yet it had called out to him.

The crone had promised it would augment his spells and help him channel his magicks. The shard had certainly done that.

But that’s not all it had done.

It had let the voice in.

The voice in his head laughed again, then it gibbered in a chorus of impossible, alien tongues. It seemed to squabble with itself, as if the being to which it belonged was fracturing apart.

It was not to be. The voice returned, unified, whole again.

You are mine, little man. You are my pet. My plaything. My toy. Many blessings will I bestow upon you, but I must warn you that I am a wreckful, wrathful master, and your fate was written long ago, when the universe was new and your world existed only in the crude theorems of extinct star-gods. Look upon yourself once more, Hieronymus Knyphausen, for your mortal form is putty to me, clay for my whims and fancies.

Knyphausen did as he was told. He looked down into a muddy puddle in the rutted road. He saw the reflection of an old and tired man staring back at him. And he saw something more.

Horns, budding beneath his parchment-thin skin.

That skin seethed. It looked green in the fading afternoon light.

At his side, the warpstone shard burned bright, glowing like a poisonous star. 

I quite enjoyed painting this odd little wizard. I used the pinks, purples, and blues associated with Tzeentch, the Chaos God of magic, to suggest that the tendrils of corruption have begun to worm their way into him. 

Below, you can find the provenance and manufacturing information associated with this chap, as well as a pic of him standing besides a rather oblivious-looking Middenheim halberdier. 

C02 Wizard 28

Vessilitus Scrollscribe

Catalogue Reference: http://www.solegends.com/citcat88/1201wizards-01.jpg