You Have Served Your Dark Lords Well, Skeleton in a Barrel

Nameless Skeleton, word of your deed has reached my post miles beneath you. I am impressed, for you are the first of our wretched kind to ever successfully pop out of a barrel and kill a mortal. In all my two thousand years of eternal torment, my burning eyeballs have not once beheld such a ghastly sight. Had I been there to witness it firsthand, I might have wept great tears of blood and flooded the dungeons with my demonic ocular broth.

Indeed, no tome in all our countless miles of musty dungeon libraries has ever recorded an instance of this deception working. As you know from your Unholy Legion orientation some five hundred years ago, many skeletons spend godless eons locked in their wooden wombs, waiting to unleash demonic vengeance upon any mortal foolish enough to release them.

These long waiting periods can play cruel tricks on a skeleton's mind. He may find himself lost in madness, or he may even grow fond of his surroundings and fear the world outside his barrel. You did your bony brethren proud, Nameless Skeleton. You exploded from that wooden cask with ferocity, and I am told you plunged your blighted axe deep into the elbow of an elderly mortal looking for a pickle barrel, causing him to die some weeks later from an infection.

Your actions enter you into the halls of legend. You join the ranks of such brutal abominations as Grimmaw Screamface, Glibrat the Unclean, Bloodpube Facestab, Filthblood Screamface (no relation), Direblight the Micromanager, Hatesack Bloodshriek the Genital Mutilator, Bloodclumps the Putrid One and the ghastly genocidal monstrosity himself, Ratspewer Deathblud. These are the cursed manslayers that every demonic underling aspires to be, and every mortal fears.

You are something unique, Nameless Skeleton. That is why from henceforth you will no longer be nameless. Using the blood-honored system of throwing poisoned daggers into a giant piece of flesh carved with profane words of evil, I offer you your new moniker: Deadscream Bloodfist. I trust you to carry out glorious atrocities in this name.

My own hellish overlord has also heard of your deeds. He, too, is impressed. He has chosen to imbue you with an incomprehensible curse: your murder hand shall grown tenfold in size, and the weight from this rotten appendage will cause incapacitating stress on your bones. The pain shall hound you always. When you swing your new arm, it will take minutes for you to recover. And your giant bonefist shall ooze a terrifying acid that burns and vexes everything it touches, including yourself. Revel in your nightmarish new form, Bloodfist!

I am told by your supervisor that you have declined a promotion. That is a grave shame, Bloodfist. The Skeletal Horde has long been the laughingstock of the Unholy Legion. Many of the Death Lords believe the entire skeleton reanimation program should be suspended, claiming our weak forces provide vital training to adventurers, enabling them to build their skills and inflict more harm upon the Unholy Legion. This is blathering nonsense, for without us there would be no one to weed out the weak, like that feeble old man you slowly murdered over the course of several weeks.

I was prepared to put you in command of a some 100 horrid barreled skeletons, but I am told you have simply requested a replacement container for yourself. Bloodfist, I can oblige you in ways your dim, vacuous skull could never have imagined.

Know this, Bloodfist: I shall fashion you a barrel gilded in the finest gold, adorned with the skulls of fallen heroes, draped in their flesh and covered with poison-tipped spikes. The darkest demons from the deepest depths shall fornicate within this barrel, leaving their vulgar essences behind. Once you are inside, we shall fill it with the feces and vomit of our most vile netherbeasts, including prolapsed scatmaws and pustulating corpubuses. When I am satisfied with your new unholy vessel, our darkest warlocks shall bind it shut with you inside.

And know this as well: we will put your barrel on the frontlines, Bloodfist. Your barrel will be carried to and fro the fields of slaughter so that you may inspire the troops and strike fear into the hearts of the living. They will know the sight of your barrel, and they will tremble before it.

Bloodfist, we began the skeleton-in-a-barrel program with only modest hopes. In truth, we put our worst soldiers in those barrels, knowing they would better serve us locked in casks than getting in the way of more experienced bonesmen. We placed you in such a barrel believing you would never amount to anything. You didn't know archery, you could barely hold a weapon, and you had severe scoliosis. You proved us wrong, Bloodfist. You proved the skeleton-in-a-barrel program is worth the effort.

For that you have my unholy gratitude. Do not disappoint me, Bloodfist. Ever.

Goreface Bloodstab,
Bone Master Prime, Skeletal Horde

– Josh "Livestock" Boruff (@Livestock)