Created with Kingdom Death's armor kits + Candy and Cola exclusive mini (plastic, by Jon Troy Nickel and others)
Here is the link to all the entries of this painting competition:
http://www.kingdomdeath.com/wp/category/painting-contest/
More pictures and WIP soon...
Here is the text that presents this character:
Candy, the Ultimate Dancer
When she was born, Candy was a special child.
The day before her birth, her mother had a dream of a blue banner emerging from
the mist. She knew her child would be endowed with a special ability for
combat, she would be a monster slayer and she would critically hit and maim
most creatures that would cross her path.
When Candy was seven, a white speaker came to
the settlement and blessed her with her chants. She told the survivors that
Candy was indeed special and that she would become a dancer. Nobody understood
the words of the white speaker, they had never heard about dancing and Candy
could not fathom what a dancer was. But when the white speaker anointed her with
the blood of a screaming antelope, she had a potent vision of what dancing
meant. She saw herself wearing a feather headdress and running towards
monstrous beasts with a giant axe with swirling hooks. She realized that a
dancer was a fearsome huntress who was able to decipher the secret steps of her
enemies and who could use this hidden knowledge to destroy them.
From now on, she would accompany the hunters
and she would tell them how to dance so that they could avoid the deadly blows
of the creatures that lured in the dark and dodge at the perfect moment. She
was a mere child but she was so fast that the beasts could not harm her in
anyway. She was able to foresee their moves before they would even think about
charging her.
She slayed her first white lion when she was
eleven, ripping his testes off with a single blow. Then she killed a screaming
antelope and another lion, twice the size of her first kill. She defended her
settlement against a hooded knight and a king’s man. Thanks to her strength and
will power, her settlement innovated frequently and the resources she brought
back from her hunting trips proved essential for her protection. She was given
screaming bracers, a rawhide vest and a leather skirt and boots. She had almost
become the dancer she had seen in her visions, but she knew something was still
missing.
One night, she had another vision about a huge rainbow-colored
bird and she knew her quest would not be complete unless she slayed that
monstrous beast. Her mother told her this legendary creature was called a
phoenix, but she warned her against its wrath. Candy ignored her mother’s fears
and went hunting for the phoenix with a group of three other survivors. They
found some muculent droppings in a field of golden grass and followed the trace
of the giant bird, until they reached its nest, reeking of a rancid melon
stench exhaled from its contracted pustules. After a hard and almost endless
fight, the group of survivors finally killed the beast. Candy dealt their
quarry the killing blow, cutting the right wing of the phoenix in a swirl of
lustrous feathers and blood.
The fight against this mighty predator had been
wearying and it had drained all their vigor. Two survivors’ hair had turned
white and they had died of exhaustion. Although she had gained much experience
by defeating this fantastic creature, Candy had aged more than she could have
imagined, as though time had flown rapidly forward. Her fiery red hair had not
whitened but they had grown so long and resistant that they could not be cut
anymore. She had to dress them in long wavy strands.
When she came back to the settlement, she went straight
to the plumery and gave the master plumer the resources she had taken from the
phoenix: a hollow wing bone, a phoenix finger and multi-colored feathers. A few
days later, she was given the final piece of her dancer armor. When she put the
phoenix helm on her head, the surge of power was so huge that she almost
fainted. She realized that she had become the dancer of her dreams. The white
speaker’s prophecy had been fulfilled.
But Candy’s quest was not yet other. She
increased her mastery of the dance of death and transmitted her skills to other
survivors. She asked a weapon crafter to design a polearm that could match her
urge to slain and her ability to deal blows from a distance. He designed a
battle axe whose ornamented head was equipped with swirling hooks that could
tear chunks of flesh from beasts before the axe cleft them into pieces.
When her mother died after her brain had been
burrowed by a sword beetle, Candy burnt her body on a funeral pyre. She would
always keep her mother’s lantern next to her own and would proudly flaunt these
in combat at the end of a rope, to distract the monsters’ attention. Candy
decided to pay her mother a tribute by creating the banner she had been
dreaming of the day before her daughter was born. This “banner of seven sorrows”
would consist of different parts Candy had torn from the monsters she had
slain: an antelope’s skull, the hide of a lion, the plumes of a king’s man, the
hands of a butcher and the talons of a phoenix. This awe-inspiring banner
paralyzed creatures and nemeses. Candy’s foe understood that she was not just a
dancer but the ultimate dancer, an invincible warrior who had defeated several
of their kind.
Years after years, she became a legend.
Whenever she reached a new settlement, survivors hailed her power and
worshipped her dance of death. One day, she mustered her courage and decided to
fight against their ultimate nemesis, an entity called “the watcher” whose
ethereal nature made him almost impossible to defeat. She forced him to accept
a duel. As usual, she would anticipate her opponent’s moves, but the watcher
absorbed her energy and flooded her with his spectral light as he vomited
lanterns from the recesses of his cloak. He would relentlessly attack her with
his vine tentacles and his radiant void fluids, causing her to avert her eyes
each time he charged towards her. She had to drop her banner of seven sorrows to
put her left arm in front of her eyes, because the light that luminesced from the
watcher’s cloak somehow pierced through her eyelids and inflicted a searing
pain in her brain.
The moment she dropped her banner, the watcher moved
forward and sprayed her with gouts of viscous ichor erupting from the dark
folds of his cloak. The void toxin seared Candy’s legs but she managed to dodge
before the lethal robe of the watcher could voidwrap her into a shroud of
nothingness. She realized that she had almost been whited out by her nemesis
and she mustered all the strength she had left to dash towards the creature.
The hooks from her weapon tore into the very fabric of the watcher’s cloak and made
him scream in agony. Then, she dealt the final blow as the head of her battle
axe ripped the void hood apart from the rest of the robe, decapitating the
invisible head of the nemesis.
The watcher collapsed, his void essence exuding
from the fabric in a long and eerie sigh, illuminating in a giant circle the
stone faces that littered the ground. Candy surrounded the watcher’s dying
robe, which had become his own shroud, with several shining lanterns. She had
to accomplish this final ritual, the circle of light, to honor the memory of
her mightiest foe. The watcher’s void soul oozed from his cloak and penetrated
into the surrounding lanterns. It would be trapped inside these for generations
and would enlighten the survivors with an eternal and intense luminescence.
Candy only kept her mother’s lantern and her
own and left the others to the remaining survivors of her settlement as her
legacy. Then she bid them farewell and disappeared into the dark. The two
radiating lights of the lanterns she carried finally faded into black. The
ultimate dancer had become a mere memory.
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