Editing Nobledark Imperium Forces of Chaos (section)

===Nightmares===

Nightmares are some of the most depraved of all Crone Eldar creations, living siege engines that lay waste to anything in their path. Nightmares are in effect perversions of spirit stone technology, the same technology that keeps the souls of Craftworlders from being eaten by She Who Thirsts upon their demise. Crone Eldar normally hate spirit stones, calling them “soul traps” and seeing them as barriers that keep eldar from being closer to their gods, but they are more than creative enough to turn this technology to their own needs. Although spirit stones are normally used to protect the recently dead, they can also be used as holding vessels for souls forcibly ripped out of their host bodies. Dark Eldar have used this to forcibly swap the souls of different races as part of their sick pleasures. Crone Eldar have taken this concept and weaponized it. And being on the Crone Worlds, the developed worlds of the Old Eldar Empire, the Crone Eldar have a lot of spirit stones to work with.

Nightmares are massive goliaths, made of hundreds of stolen souls linked together into wraithbone lattices and clothed in warp-tainted flesh often stolen from the bodies of slaves. The souls that compose a Nightmare are all aware of their situation and feel the sensation of their entire body, but are typically only able to control a small portion of their form. This decentralization makes Nightmares incredibly hard to kill, as they are able to ignore most forms of pain not specifically tailored to harm them by their masters and will keep fighting until they are too damaged to move. In order to impose some degree of control over the Nightmare, all of the souls composing the abomination are linked to a single empty spirit stone, which is able to coordinate the movements of the entire monstrosity despite each individual soul only able to control a small portion of the beast. Typically, the only way is to destroy this linking spirit stone, and sets the component souls of the Nighmare free (to where is unknown, but it is arguable that even oblivion is preferable to life as a component of a Nightmare).

Being living macabre works of “art”, no two Nightmares are the same, whether in the number of eyes, number of arms, number of heads, even the very souls that make up their being are often taken from a multitude of species. The only similarity is that all Nightmares fear the lashes of the Flesh Wardens that drive them into battle. The only pleasure they ever receive is the flood of endorphins released into them by remote control at the end of each successful battle, which coincidentally sedate a Nightmare and make it possible for other Crone Eldar to wrangle it back into containment. On rare occasion, a particularly brave or foolish Crone Eldar will actually be able to break an abomination and ride it into battle, typically those Eldar devoted to courting the favor of all four Chaos Gods simultaneously, seeing as they tend to not have much of a survival reflex in the first place.