Editing Horned Rat (section)

==Introduction==
The '''Horned Rat''' is the festering disgusting god of the equally disgusting [[Skaven]] race in the [[Warhammer Fantasy]] setting, as well as the god of one incredibly batshit insane cult of humans but more on them later. 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 you combine the Machiavellian backstabbing genius of [[Tzeentch]], the ratty repulsiveness of [[Nurgle]], the will for indiscriminate slaughter of [[Khorne]] toward the meek and helpless (especially women and children), and the intense hubris of [[Slaanesh]].

Where Khorne is the god of war and bloodshed but also the god of strength and honor, Tzeench is the god of assholes and backstabbing but also the god of hope and ingenuity, Nurgle is the god of decay and death but also the god of contentment and rebirth, and Slaanesh is the god of excess of all kinds but also the god of love and fun; the Great Horned Rat is the god of murder, betrayal, decay, and all negative excesses such as pain and rape. Unlike Chaos, he has no good aspects. At all.

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 worshipers 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 verminlord.

As you can expect, none of the other gods like him and he is the archenemy of several of them, particularly [[Sigmar]] and [[Sotek]]. The only reason he hasn't been curbstomped and fumigated is because he has perhaps more worshippers alive than 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. And that’s not taking into account the the power boost that comes from his…other followers.

See incredibly enough, despite, or rather perhaps because of all the horribleness mentioned before there is in fact one group of humans who actually worship the Skaven’s god as their own. According to the Warhammer RPG books in the wake of [[Archaon]] arriving on the scene and making a mess of the Empire’s day some humans fell to nihilism and began to believe that the fall of the Empire was inevitable. As a result these depressed humans started to look for ways to survive what they saw as the inevitable collapse of civilization, hopefully without having to endure all the nasty ass mutations that usually come from siding with a chaos god. Eventually they came to believe that following the Horned rat was their best bet and founded the Cult of the Yellow Fang in the Carroburg area of the Empire to further his dark ends. Members of this cult typically carry around fang shaped daggers and can be identified by things like: a yellow fang tattoo hidden on their body, wearing symbols that vaguely look Skaven, or even by the fact they will sometimes knock out of one of their own teeth and wear it in a necklace around their neck (something which is easily overlooked since most people in the Empire have crap dental hygiene so a person missing a tooth isn’t that uncommon).

At first glance the idea of such a cult existing among humans sounds utterly inconceivable, but to play the devil’s advocate, given that the Skaven have managed to survive all these years despite the anarchic and backstabbing mess that is their civilization something must be working in the rat folks favor and the cult believes that something be the Skaven’s god…hence why the cult wants to co-opt him for their own ends. As the cult sees it, the Skaven may be great survivors thanks to their god’s assistance but considering the Skaven got their asses handed to them by Emperor Mandred Skaven Slayer the last time they tried to conquer the world they obviously aren’t meant to rule over things. Instead the cult believes the Skaven are merely tools for their god to undermine the existing world order. Once the dust settles the cult believes the Skaven will inevitably turn in on themselves and at that point the human underlings on the winning side of things will have a chance to rise up to supplant the Skaven as the Horned Rat’s true chosen ones. Therefore in the meantime while they wait for the day the Horned Rat stands triumphant over the world the cult does everything in their power to try and curry the favor of the Rat god both to gain power from him and with the hope of one day convincing the god to move his favor away from the Skaven and towards his human worshippers. To that end the cult tries to be as useful as possible to the Horned Rat, assassinating their god’s enemies, feigning subservience to Skaven who they’ve “allied” with, assisting said Skaven with their plots, poisoning water supplies, undermining human societies from within, covering up Skaven operations so the common folk will continue to think the Skaven are a myth, selling the Skaven info on human city defenses and persons of interest, and occasionally sacrificing sapient beings to their demonic god.

The Horned rat and his Skaven underlings for their part find the whole thing utterly hilarious and are more than happy to accept the assistance and worship of these desperate fools as in their minds it’s only natural that their inferiors should strive to try and be useful for their betters. Heck they don’t even care about the cult’s schemes for gaining more power since that’s exactly what they would do if the roles were switched! To be fair to the cult though, their efforts to impress the rat do seem to have somewhat worked as the Horned Rat did eventually instruct his followers to work with the other chaos god’s human followers during the End Times…but more on that later.

Anyway, beyond the petty schemes mentioned before the Horned Rat didn’t really do much of anything throughout Warhammer Fantasy’s history, as he was too busy trying to avoid getting eaten by Sotek or his head smashed in by Sigmar's hammer.
[[File:AoS Great Horned Rat.jpeg|500px|right|thumb|VERMINTIDE!]]
One of the few times his divine majesty deigned to make an appearance was 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. Beyond that there’s been 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 [[Verminlord]]s, 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 worshipers. 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?).

However the existence of Clan Pestilens, which reveres the Horned Rat as a spirit of disease, decay and ruination, challenges this, and Age of Sigmar refutes it completely by confirming that Tzeentch, Nurgle and the Horned Rat are three separate gods, the former two are far more powerful than the latter and they all despise each other, with the Horned Rat being the most hated.