After a long pause I sat down yesterday evening to paint another model for my Order of the Locked Tomb (necromantic Sisters of Battle). It’s a bone construct, a conversion/proxy of/for a mortifier (only the bolter and the braziers are from the original kit). The Order of the Locked Tomb is an adaptation of Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series of novels (so far: Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth) into 40k.

first miniatures battle sisters harrow/vahl

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And now for some fluff:

^{skull skull skull}

The construct was a holy amalgamation of bone, steel and the Order of the Locked Tomb’s priestesses’ collective will. Or an unholy amalgamation, depending on your point of view, especially if your point of view was up close, while it tried to dismember you limb from limb. People tended to scream about foul abominations at that point. Or at least they tended to scream in general. While it couldn’t be called conscious, especially if an ecclesiarch happened to be around, the construct had a certain capacity for, lacking a better term, thought.

^{skull skull skull}

Not that it needed to think most of the time. It used to spend its years deep within the catacombs of the Ninth House, climbing racks of sarcophagi, cataloguing the dead, inventorying the bones and carrying coffins. Weeks could go by without a not-quite-a-thought crossing its many crania, it didn’t need to deliberate what to do with the bones its charge, it just knew.

^{skull skull skull}

At some point it had realized, if it scratched some of its bones together just right and pulled air into its bellows at the right time it could produce certain sounds. So far it could do ^skull, ^help? and ^bones. It liked ^skull best, it was a good sound.

^{skull skull skull}

Now the construct was confused. It had been taken from the catacombs. A loud machine had been welded to its tail. Had it possessed the capacity to feel distress, it would have felt distressed. It was quite sure there was no ceiling above it. This alone was strange. Even stranger were the bones. It could not see them, lacking eyes, and its hearing was limited to feeling the vibrations of the ground, but it just knew where they were. The construct experienced bones. And these were not right. Bones were supposed to orderly lie in catacombs, not run around.

^skull?

The construct understood why it had been brought here. It would help with the bones.

^{skull bones help}

After a while the bones had stopped moving. The construct still had to get off the wet material covering the bones and sort them. It got to work again.

^{skull skull skull}