Heldenheim
Francis Ploof
This place had been dubbed Heldenheim. A bastion of order within a land plagued by repugnant darkness, and a tumor that had grown fat on the land. It sat on a plain of crystal, a plethora of wealth, jagged outcroppings, and flensing ravines: the perfect geometry of the land commonplace, each little crystalline rock perfectly geometric: maddeningly so, some would say. But all was not perfection, for wherever you looked on these Diamond Plains the great Iron Walls of Heldenheim rose high, lined with hundreds of mighty cannons twice the size of a man, flame spewing gargoyles, great multi-barreled organ guns, and the outcroppings for a thousand Handgunners to unleash their salvos. All these so necessary to the simple survival in these wild realms, for all was not well in Heldenheim: no, it never was.
For the City was plagued by enemies on all sides, each more vile than the last. To the east lay the Orruks, rampaging Greenskins of near bursting muscle; jagged and broken teeth jutted from underbites, who fought viciously for the “shiny bitz” that laid throughout the city and the plains, these crystals hacked and smashed into the jagged armored plate wore on their mighty when they rampaged out to war, purely for the joy they wrought in fighting.
To the South laid those rampaging despoilers far worse than any Orruk could claim, for there laid the Beastmen: the antithesis of disorder, for the very concept of civilization was poison to their braying herd. Heldenheim was a blight on these untamed lands that needed to be shattered into little more than debris and gore, these creatures with the bodies of muscled man, the braying and frothing heads of goats, stamping hooves, bodies riddled with scars and wounds from the savage fighting of the tribe, fur coated in dried blood and dung: disgusting creatures they were, they were nothing compared to the Hedonites that laid to the West.
Truly the most repugnant of the many creatures who tried to take claim to these Diamond plains, they were hedonists without peer. Vile and despotic, lead by their crazed warlords, they ravaged and despoil, for whilst Orruk fought for material, and Beastmen fought to destroy what they deemed evil, the Hedonite only fought for the pleasure within it of it: to watch men die, and cities burn. Swinging their incense that stunk of rotting meat and choking hallucinogens, rings of emerald, gold, bone, flesh, pierced into flesh. They waved their banners that were maddening for men of sane mind to look upon, they threw themselves at the walls with reckless abandon: for you could not scare one who only saw death as merely any experience to enjoy.
And so, smog belched from the city to the clear skies like a trashy cigar, a dozen of them, a hundred of them. It was the industry that kept these people alive, living mundane and dull lives, the land became filled with the muck and waste of industry, generations toiled in great fortress-factories that dwarfed their workers a hundred times over: they forged cannons, crafted crossbow and handgun and whatever else the local garrison needed to keep the walls standing tall. The unfortunate cleaned the bodies that littered the walls, from failed assaults by whatever which foe decided it was time to besiege. Smoke belched, and the skies darkened, beauty was turned to muck in the name of pure and simple survival. That basest of desires in all men that leads them to abandon so much. For whilst Heldenheim stood as the great bastion of Order in a land plagued by such vile creatures of the dark, it had grown into a hellscape of its own right: a place of hard, unforgiving, industry that merely waited for the next siege to crash into it’s mighty walls: some would say that hope and order are interchangeable things, but it can grow mighty hard to see hope through the smog.