Witch of the Siege Cabal
Description
No one truly knows how these two powers came together, nor the exact terms of the pact sealed between them. But two things are certain: the Witches of the Siege Cabal march alongside the Heresiarch’s Legions, raining fire and iron upon their enemies; and in return, every time the Heresiarch takes prisoners, one sixth of the captured women are delivered to the Cabal for their rituals. Always one exact sixth.
The numbers are never rounded. If that fraction amounts to “a dozen and a half” or “two fifths of a person,” the Taxing Matrons and the Heresiarch’s Veiled Priests take their measures, weigh, and make the necessary cut. After all, as one might expect, precision in calculation is vital within a sisterhood devoted to the arts of ballistics, goetic geometry, and the dark sciences of siegecraft and bombardment.
Everyone knows that the prisoners are tortured, twisted, and remade. Their minds are erased, and many claim their very souls are torn from their bodies. The witches thus created no longer speak; they need no eyes to see, nor mouths to communicate. When they fight, they do so with the cold precision of automatons, bodies of flesh and steel wrapped in clothes and armor, like perverse and lethal dolls. The rest of the time, they simply stand motionless, waiting until the Cabal, or the priests who command them, assign their next mission.
The only question that remains is what truly dwells within their bodies, and under whose power they move and respond.
Some believe the True Cabal are ancient beings, dwelling in secret temples, cursed by God never to walk the earth or see the sun—fighting their wars and exacting vengeance through these puppet vessels.
Others, more pessimistic still, claim that the witches are nothing but hollow shells of a soulless intelligence—born from impossible equations, intangible code woven from infernal spells and corrupted algorithms. As if the insidious demons that rule the forges of Hell had simply experimented to create something that replicates, destroys, and endures at all costs—existing only to offend the Creator, endlessly, without purpose or end