When a juvenile Skordyre Queen leaves her home to found a fresh colony, she bears a clutch of eggs on her abdomen. Shedding her wings and burrowing deep within the earth of Arboreas, she broods these precious eggs for months, ranging far and wide to amass a stockpile of cocooned nutrients for her gestating young.

When they finally emerge, egg-slick and ravenous, they form the heart of the Queen’s nascent hive. They are the first of her many children and her finest warriors. Subsequent spawnings provide many other workers and warriors, but the first-hatched Honor Guard are prized above all.

The remnants of Maladrix’s murdered hive arrived on Valhalla scattered and broken. Weakened, disoriented, and bereft, the Honor Guard followed their Queen’s pheromone trail for thirty days and thirty nights until they were reunited.    

Were they still on Arboreas, it would be a simple matter to rebuild. But something is amiss. The soil of Valhalla is all wrong, the nutrients she has cocooned are peculiar and unpalatable, and her eggs refuse to hatch. Yet all is not lost. In her desperation, Maladrix discovered a twisted solution: by injecting zygotes into living hosts, she has found a horrific new way to replace her losses. Only the strongest hosts produce offspring, and the broodlings that emerge are strange and sinister. Still, for now, she has kept her dream alive.

These gruesome implantations are merely a stopgap, a far cry from the vast fecund brood-pits of her murdered hive, but Maladrix knows it is crucial to preserve her Honor Guard at all costs. In turn, her Festering Honor Guard fight with everything they have, their unbreakable loyalty forged from bonds both spiritual and chemical. Even mortal wounds can fail to stop them; often total dismemberment is the only recourse. Should their Queen fall, they become even more dangerous in their grief, and will lash out at anything within reach in a berserker frenzy.

Festering Honor Guard is available in the Rising Tide: Queen Maladrix and Festering Honor Guard Army Expansion!