For the Desraki, triumphing over their enemies in battle isn’t enough. They are no mere raiders and marauders; they are Khorne’s most devoted warriors. It falls to them to ensure that His will is imposed upon the Red-Earth Lands they control, and no rivals must stand to oppose His dominion. In this the Desraki have committed countless different acts of butchery and oppression, but none stand as stark a symbol of Desraki power as the Godskull Mausoleum does.
The Godskull Mausoleum was created during the reign of Desraki Khrode’s successor, Desraki Varkh. While Desraki Khrodes had forged his Dominion over the Singing Plains, Desraki Varkh was the first Brasslord to reach beyond the nomadic peoples of the Plains and strike out against settlements. The first settled culture she conquered has long since been lost to history, but the legacy of their murder would be forever immortalised when Varkh commanded the decapitation of every statue bearing the likeness of a god other than the Blood God. Skulls were carved upon the faces of the headless statues, before the Brasslord used them to bury the smouldering remnants of the first city she’d conquered, along with thousands of screaming captives. Their blood and ruined homes would become the foundation of the Godskull Mausoleum.
This practice has continued long into the present day; every time the Desraki conquer unspoiled lands, they will decapitate every statue they can find and turn their noble visages into deathly skulls, before bringing them back to the Godskull Mausoleum to add to the growing pile. In this way do the Desraki make reality the victory of Khorne over the weak gods of their enemies, and deprive the people they conquer of even the likeness of their butchered protectors. Sometimes only these headless statues can be found within miles of empty land, solitary witnesses to the unremembered murders of entire cultures.
Even in the days of the Fracturing of the Dominion, the Godskull Mausoleum is a Khorne-haunted place. It still draws both faithful pilgrims and the foul corruption of the Blood God’s Realm to it; warbands of Khornates, whether they be Desraki or no, endlessly battle one another it the Mausoleum’s benighted shadow, beneath clouds the colour of blood-flecked burial shrouds. It is believed that the last survivor of these battles will be granted a boon beyond reckoning by the Blood God, though with the constant influx of the faithful the first battle never ended. Not that the warriors must only be wary of each other. Such is the power of Khorne that Daemons can tear themselves into reality through the eye-sockets of the Godskulls, and boiling magma flow from their teeth. The Godskull Mausoleum is one of the few places in the Windless Plains where it rains, and when it does so it is inevitably with blood.
Stranger happenings can occur amidst the Godskulls, for gods do not die easily. The Desraki believe that the wrath of the gods still bubble beneath the ground of the mausoleum, and they glory in that hatred. That this hatred sometimes manifests as strange beast-avatars that stalk the shadows, or shadowy hands encircling necks, or even storms of divine energy that scour away flesh or soul, are simply seen as hazards to purge the weak and the unwary from the eternal battle of the Mausoleum. In recent times, Godskulls have even taken to going missing, sometimes reappearing in different locations, or not at all.
Most Desraki care little for the wanderings of the Godskulls, caught up in the frenzied civil war that is the Fracturing. But those priests and Arbiters that know of these strange occurrences also know the essential truth of the Realms; to a god, death is dust, and less than dust. They fear that these disappearing Godskulls have been reclaimed by slaves and rebels, but that thought holds little terror compared to the possibility that these gods might possess enough power and sentience to attempt to claim vengeance directly.
