Horned Rat
DIE DIE MANTHING! LOOT LOOT RATKIN! RAPE RAPE DAEMONMEN!
- The Chant of The Horned One being still illiterate
"By gnawing through a dike, even a rat may drown a nation."
- – Edmund Burke
Introduction
The Horned Rat is the festering disgusting god of the equally disgusting Skaven race in the Warhammer Fantasy setting. The horned rat is everything terrible about each God of Chaos distilled of even the most fleeting slivers of good that come with the whole package. He is what happens when the Machiavellian backstabbing genius of Tzeentch meets the ratty repulsiveness of Nurgle all while getting off on the indiscriminate slaughter of the meek & helpless. Especially the women & children.
Spreader of AIDS and STDs, rolling around in his own muck & delighting in plucking of limbs from squirming insects the Horned Rat only exists to troll his own worshippers and the rest of the world and to tear down civilization, the arts, anything remotely good and replace it with his own favourite pastimes (namely disease, ruination, backstabbing, and cruelly toying with others).
He hangs out in an area of the warp known as the realm of ruin, a decaying hellhole that resembles a world completely taken over by skaven. The realm is inhabited by as many verminlords as there are living skaven, as well as demon rats and the souls of dead skaven. This is no heaven for the skaven, since most of them are turned into suffering demon-rats or fat blind mice that are forced to wallow in their failure for all eternity. The only good fate that awaits a skaven is if he becomes a vermin lord.
As you can expect, no one likes him and he is the archenemy of several gods, particularly Sigmar and Sotek. The only reason he hasn't been curbstomped and fumigated is because he has perhaps more worshippers alive then any other god in the setting and this gives him a bloated amount of power (and a needless sense of self-importance). Granted the prayers of skaven carry about as much power as the value given for skaven lives as but put enough together and it gives him enough power to be a major god of the underworld.
However, he doesn't do anything, as he is too busy getting eaten by Sotek or his head smashed in by Sigmar's hammer.
Once his divine majesty deigned to make an appearance, to end one of the civil wars that was tearing his people apart. Summoned by the Grey Seers, he ate a few skaven, gave them a telling off, ate a few more and then left some pillars of warpstone behind with instructions on how to backstab and bitch better in his name. And no word of him since then.
The Horned Rat keeps going on about a great plan to take over the world and passes it onto his Grey Seers for them to tell the masses but this is really just a tool to keep the Skaven in line and generally striving towards the Rabid Rat's goals. Needless to say, once (if) the Skaven do take over the world, then the Horned Rat will swoop in, thank them for their hard work and then eat them all, satisfied he has finally won (just as planned).
He has his own greater daemons, the Verminlords, who are renowned trollers who give any skaven and others quite rightly the creeps. It is one of the toughest units a Skaven force can wield, combining powerful magic, strong combat skills and general unpleasantness into one hideously glorious model.
Considering his penchant for scheming he is probs Tzeentch's pet rat that got too much of an ego boost and decide to go it alone. Although equally possible with his connection to disease he is Nurgle's test subject and is taking out his pain through others. Khorne regularly tries to stomp on him since he despises cowards and well...does Khorne need a good reason to get angry? Slaanesh meanwhile constantly has strange ideas about what to do with the Horned Rat that for reasons of mental hygiene cannot be repeated here.
Whatever the case is, other chaotic beings look down on the Skaven and the Horned Rat as mere vermin, perhaps useful to a degree but not worthy of respect and they are usually killed on sight. And this is what other chaos races think of the Skaven. So being a ratman is not a good sell.
Should you see a Horned Rat in your area, call your local fumigators to get rid of the problem. Nothing ruins a day like a nasty ratmen infestation.
One interpretation is that the Horned Rat is actually a guise cooked up by Tzeentch to create his own exclusive race of mortal worshippers. Let's see; a race driven entirely by ambition (Tzeentch's fueling emotion), that prizes constant innovation (Tzeentchian doctrine), noted for its embrace of both constantly changing technology AND rampant mutation/biomanipulation (more Tzeentchian doctrine/methodology), with a creedo of being the ultimate survivors and manifest destiny (you see where I'm going here, right?)...
The only possible dissension is the existence of Clan Pestilens, which reveres the Horned Rat as a spirit of disease, decay and ruination. But this is still compatible with the interpretation above when you remember Clan Pestilens and its doctrine came after Clan Pestilens was trapped in Lustria for multiple generations and had a "revelation into the true nature of the Horned Rat", and that the other Skaven considered Clan Pestilens as heretics when they first returned and still regard them as heretical to some extent today. This suggests, then, that Tzeentch made the Skaven first in his guise of the Horned Rat, and then Nurgle took on the Horned Rat's guise himself to try and stick his grotty fingers in Tzeentch's pie by luring the Skaven into worshipping him instead.
End Times
In the End Times, the Horned Rat plays a major role in Thanquol. He speaks directly to the Council of Thirteen and politely tells them to cut all the shit and stop fighting each other; after all the Warhammer World is ripe for the taking and the Horned Rat wants the Skaven to conquer it, as a unified race. To emphasize this, he incinerates the current Grey Seer and replaces him with... Thanquol. Yes, that Thanquol. The drugged up failure of a rat, so incomprehensibly incompetent that he could only function as "that one guy who tries to be evil and cool but fucks up all the time because of how fucking stupid he is." Although, of course, he makes an easy pawn for the Vermin King.
Anyway, for the first time in history, the Skaven are truly united and rise to the surface in the millions at the command of the Horned Rat. They then take the role of the Tyranids by infesting/invading Estalia (olé-olé!), Tilea (Rome burns, yes-yes), the Border Princes, Araby (Horned Rat akbar-akbar!), the Kingdom of Ind (Ant nikat hai!), the Southlands, Lustria (meteor-induced dinosaur extinction!), Bretonnia (c'est terrible!), Naggaroth (though all they did was helped destroy one city), Nuln, Nippon (Horned Senpai notice me!), Karaz Eight Peaks, Cathay (though Cathay was triple-teamed by them, the followers of Chaos and the Orcs, though the Cathayans managed to wipe out the Skaven in their lands and fled on boats on their own terms)... Actually, let's just say the only nations they didn't wipe out, heavily damage, or at least do harm to were:
- Ulthuan (because the Elves already fucked it up pretty badly as-is, in addition to being unable to reach a seaborne island by tunneling underground)
- Nehekhara (because Nagash and co. got there first and worked it over. Also Skaven are gluttinous cowards and a desert full of undead armies that will kill them on sight is too desolate and scary for them. To be fair, they did send an assassin to Prince Apophas to point out the Destroyer of Eternities as a means to kill Nagash. Apophas even managed to stab him with it but at that point Nagash had reached godhood so it was as dangerous to him as a back scratcher)
- Athel Loren (because magic shenanigans).
And then they blow up Morrslieb, which is both fucking Awesome and incredibly stupid, since the Warhammer World would have been destroyed by the resultant meteors (which it would have been if not for the Slann managing to stop most of the meteors from colliding)(wrong wrong manthings, plan was to destroy surface empires all along, with skavendom safe-secure underground).
The Horned Rat, however, had to admit that, even with such successes, the Skaven still wouldn't be able to defeat the forces of the Chaos Gods, and so he makes a deal, through Thanquol, with Archaon. Their contribution to the forces of Chaos is a force under the command of Ikit Claw tunneling into Nagash's Black Pyramid (airlifted from Nehekhara's ruins to Sylvania) while the undead are fighting the forces of Nurgle and traitor undead and blowing it up with Warpstone nukes.
The Horned Rat moved Skavenblight into his Realm of Ruin, as the physical world was destroyed by Archaon & Co, later becoming part of the Realm of Chaos when Slaanesh disappeared.
Age of Sigmar
As of Age of Sigmar, the Horned Rat has added the term "Great" to his title and has been promoted into a major Chaos God, replacing Slaanesh as the fourth Great God of Chaos, so things are looking up for rats in the world. The rest of the Chaos Gods hate his guts even more than they hate each other, and when he tried to grant his blessing to Archaon, the new Incarnate of Chaos literally just spat in his face.
40k
Ratskins worship a rat god named "the caller". This obviously is not the same god given that it's not assholish enough.
Total War: Warhammer II
Do not click unless you have beaten the game as any faction or afraid of spoiler.
 This article contains spoilers! You have been warned. |
To resurrect their favorite god, the skaven has yet came up with the most balls-to-the-wall insane plan of all time.
First, the skaven designed a space ship that makes it looks like a twin-tailed comet in the sky (yes, skaven can into space now, but the space ship crushed as soon as it ran out of fuel anyway, but is still pretty impressive compare to other faction that don't have the power to build the thing.) so it could only fool every major faction in the new world to shit their pants, result it in a race to control the vortex.
Then, after the race has reach it's final stage, whoever reach the first place in the race will have to fight a last battle that will have them fight a massive battle against other three major faction. Of course, even if the skaven faction didn't win, there will be ANOTHER skaven armies, ambushing the already exhausted winner who had just fought of the three armies from each faction.
The final step will require a bell device that could soak in all the magic from the vortex, further strengthened by the magic poured in from every major faction participated in the ritual.
If the Skaven were victorious, they will be see their horned god in the vortex, where the horned rat would manifest to the material realm after ring the bell device 13 times.....but that is still not enough and it requires "sacrifices".
It seems like the council of thirteen had already planned this, that whatever clan win the war will have their entire clan sacrificed to the horned one to complete its resurrection. Yeah, pretty typical of a Skaven scheme to fuck over their own people. Though in the end, the chosen clan does end up fucking over the council in return by spilling the blood of a grey seer on the bell's clapper, resulting in the grey seers being marked for sacrifice instead.
Also, this is the second time in the history of Warhammer that the Horned Rat has made its official appearance, he made a brief cameo in the bad end for the video game Warhammer: Shadow of The Horned Rat. You can see him in the background of the final battle where he tried to break into the material realm, as well as in the grand reveal cinematic.
Gallery
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If this thread ends in 13, you are a faggot and shall be sacrifice to resurrect the horned god!
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The horned rat, as he emerge from the vortex and prepare to snatch every kids from the world and eat them.
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Concept art on the horned rat, initially mistaken for a verminlord piece. Puts the "horn" in Great Horned Rat and it is glorious.
Rat Facts
- Great Horned Rat Day is a thing
| The Chaos Gods of Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy | |
|---|---|
| Four Main Chaos Gods: | Khorne - Nurgle - Slaanesh - Tzeentch |
| Other Gods of Chaos: | Archaon - Hashut - Horned Rat - Nuffle Malal - Morghur - Necoho - Zuvassin |
| Chaos Gods of Law: | Alluminas - Arianka - Solkan the Avenger |