Ozmot leans on his runesword, the shimmering blade thrust into the arena sand beside him, its light too strange to look at directly. His helmet conceals his face, but the tone of his voice carries the weight of his story. “I wasn’t always here, wearing this damned helmet, holding this cursed blade. Once, I was just a pit fighter—no name, no future. Just another bruiser in a nameless backwater, scrapping for coin and a meal.”
He tilts his head slightly, as if recalling those distant days. “I wasn’t the best, but I was good enough. Brawls, blood, broken bones—it was all I knew. Then one day, a group of adventurers wandered through. They had that swagger, that look of purpose. Gold gleamed in their pouches, and I thought to myself, ‘Why not? A cut of treasure’s better than a broken nose.’ I joined them. A fighter for hire, nothing more.”
His hand shifts on the hilt of the sword, the runes flickering faintly as if in response to his mood. “It was supposed to be simple. Clear out a beast den here, escort a merchant there. But the jobs got bigger, the risks greater. We found ourselves tangled in something we couldn’t walk away from. Word of a war to the north—a campaign into the frozen wastes. The adventurers thought it sounded like glory and fortune. I thought it sounded like madness. But I was with them, and so I went.”
He chuckles bitterly. “Turns out, it was madness. The things we saw, the things we fought—nightmares given flesh and fury. I wasn’t a soldier, not like the others. I was just a pit fighter trying to keep my skin intact. But the campaign didn’t care what you were; it swallowed everyone whole. Men fell, minds broke, and the ground itself seemed alive with the whispers of something vast and cruel. And when it was over, when the army limped away, I didn’t. I couldn’t. The wastes took me.”
Ozmot pauses after his voice echoed through the slits of his closed gladiator helmet. The dim glow of the arena torches flickers off the intricate carvings on the surface of his runesword, a weapon so strange and mesmerizing that looking at its blade for too long feels like staring into an abyss of shifting shadows. He adjusts his grip on the hilt, the movement deliberate and steady, a reflection of his unyielding discipline.
“It was in the frozen wastes of the north where my story truly began,” he continues. “My comrades and I had fought bitterly against horrors that defied reason, creatures that tore at the flesh and the mind alike. When the campaign ended, victory was a hollow word. I was separated, stranded in a land where reality twisted like a serpent coiled around its prey. There, amidst the swirling madness of the storm, I stumbled into the maw of something far greater than I could comprehend. My masters call it the Eye.”
He pauses, the weight of his journey evident even through the stoicism of his armored visage. “I emerged… somewhere else, somewhere impossibly wrong. The skies were alive with color, the air heavy with whispers and promises. It was there that they found me—the robed ones, their laughter like shards of glass piercing the mind. They took me, like a prey or a tool, a toy for their endless games.”
His gauntlet clenches tighter on the sword’s hilt. “They brought me here, to their arena, to fight for their amusement. Beasts, warriors, creatures beyond the veil of reason—time after time they pitted me against them all. Yet, through it all, I remained unchanged, unbroken. They called it a curiosity, a disappointment. I know better. It is discipline, will, and…” he chuckles softly, a hollow sound from behind the helmet, “…the apple.”
An audience member scoffs, and Ozmot turns his helmet slightly toward the sound. “An apple a day, they say, keeps the darkness at bay. For me, it has been my armor, my constant. While others warp and twist under the mutating gaze of this place, I remain. A man, not a monster. A soldier, not a puppet.”
He raises his runesword slightly, the blade shimmering with an almost hypnotic malice, as if it hungers for more than flesh. “This sword, a gift from my captors, they say, is bound to me now. A curse and a blessing. It hungers as they do, but it obeys my hand alone. They thought it would change me, mold me. But I wield it now, not the other way around.”
His voice hardens, the echo reverberating through the chamber. “So here I am, Ozmot ‘the Apple,’ a pit fighter for gods who laugh at mortals like me. I fight because it is what I know, because it is what I am. Let them watch. Let them scheme. I will endure, as I always have, and when the time comes, perhaps even these games will end. Until then, let the sands drink their fill.”
Ignis Aeternus WH 40K campaign notes 