by Ruo Yu Chen
The Blood Naga Queens or Witch Serpents are the horrifying rulers of the Snake Men’s matriarchal society. Ancient beyond reckoning and malevolent beyond reason, these sorcerer-scientists have reigned over the shadowy realms within the Hinterlands of Khuresh for eons. They have undertaken the Mahavidia, the Great Experiment, to uncover the answers to ageless questions only they are now wholly privy to. In their frenzied search for enlightenment the Naga have once collectively plunged the world into a dominion of terror, before barely being confined to their vast jungle peninsula. The twelve eldest of their number lead the marga, the great brood-sect factions divided between the Queens’ perception and understanding of the Questions and intended resolution of the Experiment. Each Primordial Queen is served by dozens of vassal matriarchs under them, all formidable spellcasters in their own right.
Once majestic serpents, the Naga's pact with Chaos during the great daemonic incursions has corrupted their sinuous forms into living nightmares. Now the four-armed Blood Naga Queens bear vaguely humanoid features that only make their visages all the more disturbing: Long unkempt dark hair encrusted with gore and ornamented with gruesome talismans or gaudy crowns, falling across leering faces with insane bloodshot eyes. Large snaggletooth fangs dripping with venom, emerge from mouths fixed in a perpetual rictus grin.
The Naga Queens’ appetite for blood is notorious, seemingly a defect inherent in their creation by the Old Ones, exacerbated by their exposure to the Ruinous Powers and the Warpstone used in their research. The Naga keep vault upon vault of flesh larders within their temple-laboratories, culled from the remains of myriad test subjects imprisoned in sprawling pens or taken in meticulously scheduled hunts. Their grim reputation has reached even the faraway cities of Men in the Old World, where the thirst of the Vampire Bloodlines pale in comparison.
Innately gifted in magic, the eldest Naga Queens learnt spellcasting from the Slann in their earliest days and have since augmented their knowledge with that gained from the Realm of Chaos and through their own vile experiments. The Blood Naga Queens are now masters of forbidding primordial lore and perverse alchemy. They are skilled in the making of curses, elixirs and strange effigies - hidden in trees and crossroads throughout Khuresh - that allow them to appear suddenly from the gloom to ambush chosen prey, hundreds of miles away from their previous location. They are wont to transmogrify their own bodies, grafting extra limbs, eyes, nails, stinging tails and wings depending on their current aims or disposition, while some have grown into the size of sea serpents.
The Naga Queens can control the weather through gruesome rituals, deluging their foes in oily torrential rain, withering them with drought or concealing their armies in dense fog. Their experimentation on the corrupted geomantic web of Khuresh has borne baleful fruit. Murmurs resonate sporadically from the ruined towers of the Old Ones, triggering bizarre phenomena and driving the inhabitants of the hinterlands to wild rutting or frenetic bloodshed. When a Storm of Magic descends on Khuresh this wave of insanity emanates outward across the continent, invading the dreams of mortals with disquieting visions of past and present slaughter, and luring the weak-willed to the jungles.
The Blood Naga wield undulating ritual kris blades and dha swords in battle while also fielding an array of powerful Dhar magic items, including the Brain-tapper Staff and the Liquidator Canister. One infamous object is the hourglass-shaped Ulgu-harnessing White Sistrum, which serves to magically echo the hinterlands’ madness wherever it goes, bearing only a tiny measure of the true horror that is the Snake Men civilization. Arhunt Suryasurash, eldest of the Blood Naga Queens, relishes in sending such blighted artifacts out into the world through her agents to sow misery.
The Blood Naga have no use for traditional forms of currency. Instead they barter with vials of rare and magic-infused blood specimens, newly crafted artifacts, mutated creatures for their war menagerie, and extracted souls imprisoned in intricately crafted containers.
They can often be found riding atop the grisly Crucibles of Manifestations into battle. As much sacrificial altar as it is a field operating slab, these wheeled juggernauts of stone, metal and wood are festooned with banners, blood-vines, thick ropes of ensorcelled dead hair, skeletal limbs and squirming still-living tissue. Strange mutant insects crawl around the contraption, adjusting and tending to the noxious apparatus. These altars serve as mystic loci on the battlefield, allowing the Blood Naga to more easily channel the Winds of Magic and conduct rites unimpeded above the chaotic masses.
Others go into battle atop the massive horned Sawanak Feynaga, clinging to harnesses strapped across the length of the monsters and preventing the monsters from completely burrowing into the ground. These Naga Queens enjoy such mounts for their ability to crash into the ranks of the enemy with abandon, where the Naga can delight in the ensuing explosion of bodies.
Hello, I have loved the proposal to encourage the history of the Naga of Khuresh. But there are some contradictions in the story that they are trying to build, regarding the lore of Warhammer. And some inconsistencies are created when wanting to adapt it to the canon. For example. It must be assumed that the Naga and the Lizardmen have a common origin. They are first cousins. What does that mean?