Kheradruakh

Kheradruakh, called the Decapitator, is a Drukhari lord of the Mandrakes who rules Aelindrach, a shadow realm bound into Commorragh. His name is rendered as ‘He Who Hunts Heads’, and among the Mandrakes — Drukhari who slip between shadow and substance rather than fight as raiding kabals do — he is regarded less as a warlord than as a patron of murder, the figure to whom solitary killers among his kind answer.

The Mandrakes do not hold territory in the ordinary sense of Commorragh’s spires and dens; Aelindrach is described as intruding into the Dark City rather than sitting within it, a realm reached through shadow rather than through its gates. Over a span of time reckoned in millennia rather than reigns, Kheradruakh has pursued a single obsessive project: a pyramid built from the perfect skulls of victims he judges worthy, each taken personally rather than by proxy.

His best-attested deed dates to the half-awakening of Ynnead, the Aeldari god of the dead, which tore open a fresh Dysjunction through Commorragh. Amid the chaos Kheradruakh took the Archon Sythrac’s head as the thousandth skull for his pyramid, then bored a door from his throne into the Midnight Dimension. For a dozen miles around him the Dark City turned to living shadow, a tide that consumed daemons summoned by the Dysjunction and Kabalite warriors alike without distinction.

Supreme Overlord Asdrubael Vect taxes and disciplines the Kabals of Commorragh as a matter of course, but his authority reaches Kheradruakh only weakly: the Mandrake king hunts from a dimension with no doors for Vect’s agents to watch, and answers to no writ but his own. That standing outside the city’s hierarchy, rather than any single victory, is what marks Kheradruakh’s present status — an active and largely unchecked collector of heads on the fringes of Commorragh’s politics.