The smoke of the guns cleared and I saw it; it was huge. I mean, three times the size of a man. And it smelt like... I used to be a farmer, you know, and I used to dig; the smell of fresh turned earth, thick, loamy... smelt like that. Not unpleasant. It moved stiff, jerky, like a puppet with broken strings. Some of the gunners tried to fire on it and their musket balls pinged off that rusty armour or got sucked into those mouldering robes... and it touched them. I heard a man drown once. The liquid noise when they were screaming and the water flooded into their throats? I heard that on dry land. I ran. As I ran I heard the wet screams behind me and saw the other men... they were melting. I wanted to go back to the farm... but every time I smell that fresh turned earth, I'll hear men drowning on their own flesh.
A noble Knight, fallen on a forgotten battlefield, buried according to his kind in Barrow on the High Fells. But then the time of ending came and the world shattered into realms; the remnants of the High Fells were flooded with strange magics. The earth over the barrow shuddered and a form shouldered forth.
Now he stalks the lands, bringing the release of decay and rebirth to all he touches; where his feet tread, the ground becomes mulch and sprouts forth new growth; where his gaze falls, brick crumbles and returns to clay; and those he touches feel the flesh peel off their bones and they fall back into the earth from which they came. He is The Barrow Knight, the eternal dead; he stalks every battlefield bringing his gift of peace and life.
This one was more by accident than anything else; i wanted to build a Sauron for my Middle Earth collection and ended up buying two incomplete ones in order to construct a whole one. One of the incomplete ones I picked up was slathered in so much primer I couldn't strip most of it off without scrubbing away the detail. So I was faced with how to use this:
And then it simply a matter of painting. This one was, again, all about the filters and washes; a few veins and branches added with chesnut wash and an old skeleton that used to decorate the front of a penal battalion armoured vehicle. A very imposing figure due to his height and a nice addition to my warband of the Lost and the Damned.
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