Kabal of the Screaming Heart

"*The currency of the Dark City is the life of lesser beings, and the path to power is through currency. I will not stop until the whole of the galaxy are bleeding, broken, and weeping within the black halls of Commorragh, and we Drukhari finally inherit our birthright. Let the gods be my witness in this: I will do it, even if it kills me... or any of you, for that manner.*"
— (Former) Archon Jizai Hellsun
The **Kabal of the Screaming Heart** is a young and lesser-known Kabal on a meteoric rise to power in the latter half of M41. Founded in late M40 by the Archon Jizai Hellsun as he broke away from the massive Kabal of the Obsidian Rose, it has somehow acquired a large fleet within a short period time and has begun tormenting both Imperial sub-sectors and Tau Septs with alarming frequency.

## History

The young (by Drukhari standards) Jizai Hellsun rose to power as a young Trueborn Kabalite Warrior within the ranks of the notorious Kabal of the Obsidian Rose sometime in the middle of 871.M40, a weapons manufacturing powerhouse within the Dark City. Arranging for the death of his Dracon's death in an orchestrated botched raid on an Imperial Guard mining world fortress, the cunning Jizai carefully won over the allegiance of hundreds of the Kabal's Trueborn Warriors and Wyches - bribing, coercing, or swaying his allies using trueborn-supremacy rhetoric.

Having amassed a powerbase large enough to ensure his dominion over a large chunk of Low Commorragh while still evading the attentions of Archon Aestra Khromys, Jizai eventually chose to flee the primary inner wards of Commorragh with all the assets he could carry. Arriving at one of the distant outer realms (though still home to billions amongst dense urban landscape), the new Archon immediately set about killing off or absorbing the petty Kabals in the lower spires of the district of Drzzyndaya while evading the retribution of his former rival Dracons of the Obsidian Rose who had begun to come after him.

Within a decade, Jizai Hellsun had come to dominate the underspires of his adopted home. Having imported many slave-artisans from the legendary workshops of the Kabal of the Obisidan Rose, Jizai's Kabal of the Screaming Heart established many weapons factories and used their products to gain standing with the many Wych Cults and Incubus Sects located all over the outer realms. The cost of loyalty from such esteemed institutions for a Kabal carrying the enmity of such a larger power has been extremely high indeed. The Screaming Heart must constantly engage in piracy to acquire slaves to pay the Incubi and fill the arenas of the Wych Cults. As the prices being asked go up, and with the death of Jizai himself - the various Dracons vying for leadership have begun to obsess over how to out-do each other in their brutal raids to collect the slaves they need as currency, and their raids have grown more and more risky, wild, and violent.

 The Dracon who finally rose to leadership, Taiala Heartstrike, did so in an act of brutality - even by Dark Eldar standards - capturing all the assembled members of the Kabal through gaseous drugs aboard their flagship under the pretense of a raid, only to isolate her competitors and force their underlings to flay them living as she used soul-traps to capture their soul and use them to lure Slaaneshi daemons onto various Corsair ships with whom they competed for hunting territory. She has sworn vengeance against the Ordinators and several Imperial Battlefleets for the near-ruination of her Kabal and the subsequent loss of prestige (as well as a fleet engagement in which an Ordinator, Inquisitorial, and Imperial Navy patrol seized a slave-transport full of Gue'vesa to make into servitors at the beginning of her reign) , but currently plots against them all while attacking the Tau Empire's less developed "lesser member species'" worlds.

By 112.M42 the Kabal had returned to glory and grown to tremendous strength - near 600,000 strong. Having generated a huge income from millions of seized Tau and humans, the Kabal has consolidated itself in a satellite realm of Commorragh called Port Khaigara - a city whose webway tunnel to Commorragh proper has partially collapsed and is prone to daemonic incursions, making it a location where Dark Eldar come to exile themselves and escape scrutiny of the greatest forces of the Dark City. Originally outcast at their weakest, they have grown stronger than ever preying on various Kabals and currying favor with Wych Cults, sponsoring famous Reavers, and enticing Haemonculi Covens to work for them. They have conquered all but two Kabals in the city - the Black Knife and the Endless Wail. The Screaming Heart has settled into an uneasy truce with these two, but machinations are plotted by each against the other every day. With each successful raid - especially in their new hunting ground of the Honesta Exercitus sector - they have grown Port Khaigara into a greater and greater satellite realm, despite its tenuous position.

## Major Conflicts and Wars

**The Battle of Slaver's Gulf (**969.M41**)** - A full third of the Kabal's fleet is ambushed by a huge force of the Ordinators Chapter while finishing the final phase of a system-wide slave raid on the Imperial civilized world for Aios. With Jizai caught and killed by the Chapter Master of the Ordinators, Decimus Aurelian, himself - and his entire ground force caught in a storm of Space Marine drop pod forces led by the Ordo Xenos - the leadership of the Kabal is decapitated overnight, and the organization plunges into a vicious cycle of internal warring and unrestricted external resource-raiding. A full half of the remaining Kabal have begun to reap their bloody harvest from Tau Septs along the exterior of the Empire, while the other has been striking all over the Southern Imperium.

**The Reaping War (**079.M42**)** - After being fought off by the ingenious naval tactics of both the Imperial Navy and several Tau Sept naval forces in their preferred hunting grounds, the Kabal is still reeling - never having recovered from their tremendous losses of troops, vehicles, and voidcraft after their crushing defeat at the hands of the Ordinators over a century prior. The new Archon, the wildly vicious and deadly, but short-sighted and impulsive former-Wych, Taiala Heartstrike has decided to focus on raiding Gue'vesa worlds and outer edges of the Tau Empire on newly-incorporated species still catching up to the technological level of the rest of the Tau dominion - bearing the ultimate goal of seizing millions of slaves from the home sector of the chapter that crippled their rise to power. Though it has allowed the Kabal to take enough slaves to rebuild part of its fleet and buy hundreds of new clone Kabalite Warriors, it is said a large Air and Fire Caste defensive force is being amassed among the upper echelons of the Empire to end her reign of terror along a segment of the outer borderworlds.