Just as a head's up, writing Skaven speaking is hard, so they might sometimes talk in an irritating way, and I'm sorry, I'm just trying to do my best here.
Also, this chapter and this story in general is not going to be a happy story. The Skaven are cruel and vicious and while our main character may be unique, she is going to go through hell in this first chapter alone. So, don't go into this expecting the MC to suddenly just take over the Skaven race entirely and live a happy and harm-free life.
This ain't that kinda story.
Chapter 1
The first thing she was aware of was that she was trapped.
Her last memory was of being killed via wet cement being poured down her throat, not exactly a pleasant way to die. As she finally, mercifully asphyxiated, she didn't really expect or hope for anything, she had no thoughts of what life after death would be. What she didn't expect was to regain awareness feeling as though she was trapped somehow. Her mind didn't take long to realise that she was in a womb, as the umbilical cord that she could feel attested to, as well as the fact that around her, she occasionally was bumped into by other things.
However, while she did that, she also swiftly realised that she was not a human anymore, and finding out what she had become was definitely scary. Her forward limbs were put to good use feeling her own body, and what her sense of touch reported back was quite frankly that she was freakishly inhuman. Her face wasn't flat, it was pointed, indicating a muzzle of some kind. What was worse was the prehensile appendage that she could feel attached to her rear-end. It was thin and ended in a rather swift point. And then, what sealed the deal was her face, more specifically her mouth, which revealed that she had two long and sharp teeth at the front of her mouth.
Putting all that together, she knew she was a rat. However, the fact that her limbs, while a little bit weird, were not even remotely like a quadrupedal rat, tipped her off that she was not just an ordinary rat. No, her body was shaped in a bipedal fashion. In the back of her mind, she already had a very strong assumption that she knew exactly what kind of world she had just been born, or rather reborn, into, and it was not one she wanted to be in. She honestly didn't even wish for the people who had executed her to be sent to such a hellish world.
Reaching her arms down to her private areas, she ascertained that yes, she was still the same gender. And no, if she was right then that was not a good thing. That was a very, very bad thing. In the world she believed herself to be in, the females of the race she assumed she was were treated absolutely hellishly. They were kept safe and alive, yes, but they were no better than livestock, with no free will, existing as nothing but factories for producing more young. If it came down to it, killing herself would be an infinitely better fate than what was potentially in store for her.
Opening her eyes, she focused intently on trying to see through the blurry amniotic fluid, spying the dark masses that were floating around in the fluid, not moving much. After a while, she shut her eyes again, as she couldn't see anything, and having amniotic fluid in her eyes wasn't pleasant at all. However, what she did see practically confirmed what she believed, as the forms of skaven pups were what greeted her vision.
Rubbing her hands over her new muzzle and her eyes, with soem curiosity at the two tiny little nubs on her head, she tried to rationalize. She had been reincarnated as a female skaven in the Warhammer Fantasy world. There was potential though that she wasn't even there, where at least death was more direct. There was the small chance that there were in fact skaven living in the Warhammer 40K galaxy, where planets could be destroyed entirely by Tyranids, swarms of Orks, Imperium bombardments or any number of utterly inane methods.
She shivered slightly, disturbing the fluid that she was floating in. But she didn't let long before she felt it, a current of flowing liquid as the amniotic fluids around her were suddenly and rather quickly drained away, and the space around her became more cramped, movements as the other skaven pups started to be confused by what was happening. She already knew, the rat mother was having contractions and her water had broke, meaning birthing was about to begin.
Thoughts of doing something, of biting her two front teeth into her veins or trying to claw her own throat went through her mind, and just as quickly, she suddenly found herself being shoved by the mass of twitching and shaking skaven pups in the direction that the amniotic fluid had gone. Pressed between several skaven, she had the ability to even more her own arms or legs taken away as she was unceremoniously pushed outwards, and after just a minute or so found herself falling head over ass, handing roughly on callous and lanky arms.
Her dignity was immediately stripped away while she tried to blink her way into vision as she felt those arms grab her two legs and pull them painfully apart, forcing her legs into splits that exposed her private parts to the world in an utterly humiliating fashion. "This-this one is female yes-yes! Oh great ven-venerable one, the Great Horned Rat smiles upon your brilliance and omnipotence!" She...wasn't quite expecting that. As far as she was aware skaven spoke Queekish, not Reikspiel, which she assumed would be the language she was most likely to recognise.
She found herself dumped suddenly in a pair of longer and fur-covered arms that were vastly more comfortable than the previous. Continuing to blink, Sora got her first glimpse of an actual skaven, and to say she was confused was an understatement. Examining her keenly was a tall and brown-furred skaven. However, where she expected to see pure malice, cruelty and selfish interest, she saw pure curiosity and potentially even a little bit of...awe? She had to be forgiven, but she wasn't exactly good at reading the face of a skaven for emotions.
"A female will be born unto your smallest Rat Mother. With pink eyes like rose quartz, nubs of horns growing out and fur white as snow. Eyes open and blinking moments after birth. And even now she looks at you, not as the curiosity of a newborn but with intelligence and understanding. You see-see? I am never wrong when matters of the Great Horned Rat!" The skaven examining her looked at the one who was speaking, and she followed his gaze, not actually too surprised to see a Grey Seer stood in the room, leaning on a staff with small embers of incense burning atop it.
"And you will have your prize!" Rather unceremonious, she quickly found herself tossed into the air, a moment later being caught by another rough and thin pair of arms, a skavenslave her mind oh-so-helpfully supplied. "As we-we agreed upon, you will take the prophesized pup and teach it, yes-yes! Bring great power to Clawfex you will!" That last sentence she realised was directed at her, which was definitely not a good thing. But there wasn't exactly much she could do and it seemed as though she was some kind of prophesized pup, so at least she hadn't been reincarnated to be turned into a fucking breeding factory.
That really would have been too much to bear.
"So, this is the chosen pup, yes-yes?"
Dropped onto a rough but bouncy fabric, she found herself suddenly being peered at by a group of rather disgusting-looking skaven, who quickly found themselves on the receiving end of blows from the Grey Seer's staff. "No-no, no-one is to touch, lest your unworthy filth were to damage it. Food, water, all provided to the white-fur! Now go-go!" With another swing of his staff, the Grey Seer sent the other skaven scurrying away to their tasks.
When the final one scrabbled through a hole in the ceiling and out, they turned to peer at her before sighing and rubbing their face with their free hand. "Grave portents are upon the Skaven. We must find a way to secure our place in this world, or the ever-advancing tide of man-things, beard-things and other surface-dwelling races. Clan Skryre endlessly produce new technology that can ravage armies, and Clan Pestilens soldier on in the creation of disease and pestilence to slaughter, but if we are to survive, we need-need a leader, a rallying point for all of Skavendom, one safe from backstabbing and treachery. And so the Great Horned Rat has sent unto us only you, a single unique rat. No female rat has ever been born with white fur. Neither have their heads been adorned with the nubs of future horns. You shall do great things for the skaven."
He then leaned in, making sure that she saw the blood vessels of his eyes and smelled the scent of his body strongly. "And if you should fail, well, the Great Horned Rat does not suffer the weak and the failures. You cannot imagine the horrors I will craft upon you as the price of failure." Peering back up at him, she remained unphased at his callous and malice-filled words, even lifting herself slightly in defiance. "Good, you are also ambitious and defiant, that is good." She then had the wonderful pleasure of being picked up by the tail and thrown across the room, sliding across the floor and smacking into the wall, pain rippling up her side and radiating from the base of her tail.
"It will make it all the more pleasurable to beat it out of you."
The first year of her life was filled with pain of all kinds.
If she wasn't being physically abused by the Grey Seer, then it would be mental abuse. The punishments she suffered for any defiance were hellish, and the creativity that the Grey Seer had when inventing punishments for her was utterly unfathomable. She very quickly learned how to act subservient and obedient, which of course meant that the Grey Seer then just started punishing her for not doing what he ordered in a satisfactory manner, either taking too long or not doing it how he wanted it done.
What she had going for her however was that he couldn't do anything too extreme that could potentially kill or cripple her since that would waste his investment, and also that she logically knew exactly what he was doing, which was conditioning her to be subservient and obedient to him, probably so that when the time came for her to 'take over Skavenblight as Ratqueen' he would be the puppeteer pulling her strings.
Recognising it meant she knew what his intention was, and that in turn meant she could actively resist what he was doing. She always maintained in the back of her mind her own sense of self, probably assisted by the fact she was a human before and really valued self-freedom, whilst visibly, she made it seem as though her defiance was being whittled away by the pain, the humiliation and the passing of time really.
One of the weird things he had her do though was intaking warpstone. Of course, as the Grey Seer of a tiny Skaven town located Horned-Rat-knows-where he could only acquire a small amount of the precious material, but it was still enough that every single meal she ate, one of the few things that had any effort put into it, was covered in a sprinkling of the stuff.
It was likely why her body seemed to be growing at a rate even faster than a skaven would typically grow, which was about five to six times as fast as a human. After just a year, her body resembled the body of an adolescent skaven. However, it also beheld changes that were not simple growth enhancement. Whether it was because in her mind she still regarded herself as at least half-human, or just the fact that her soul originally came from a human body, her skaven body was changing to match it just a little.
Nothing major, her white coat of fur, one of the few things about herself that she loved and tended to daily, still covered her entire body from tail-tip to ear-crests, but her arms and legs had more flexibility, while her paws elongated a little, slowly forming into a weird hybrid between a four-fingered hand and a skaven paw. Beneath her fur, the teats that marked her as a female skaven disappeared, aside from the top two which began to grow out just a little, forming small little mounds very similar to a pair of human breasts.
Whether her internal anatomy was changing as well she didn't know, all she did know was that her body, while still blatantly being a skaven, had changed and settled upon a form that had just slightly started to shift to human. However, she didn't hope for, nor did she appear to be, becoming a human entirely. That would have probably seen her killed by the Grey Seer, as it would ruin his plans entirely if she suddenly looked like an actual human.
No, this form seemed almost designed for the task at hand. She was clearly skaven, white-furred and thus an emissary of the Great Horned Rat at the very least. Added onto her features was the fact that she looked nothing like a rat-mother, obviously, and that her body quite clearly was not designed to be used for breeding, lacking the numerous teats necessary, which would likely cause many skaven to falter.
In their eyes, she was a female skaven, but one marked by the Great Horned Rat, with the body of a skaven, yet at the same time not quite a skaven, as though she had evolved into a different, better and more efficient form. Piled on top of that, she was imbued with great intellect, at least considering typical skaven intellect levels, and you had a recipe for an icon, something for the skaven to rally around.
Sure, skaven like Queek Headtaker 'ruled' their own little realms, and the Council of 13 controlled Skavendom in general and Skavenblight directly, but if she could take the 13th seat as the emissary and mouthpiece of the Great Horned Rat himself, she would be able to command all of Skavendom. The only issue was exactly the group she was intended to take control of. The Council of 13 paid lip-service to the Great Horned Rat, at least in so far as him having a symbolic seat on the council, but if she came along proclaiming to be the mouthpiece of the Great Horned Rat and tried to take that seat, then she would likely find a Clan Eshin assassin digging their blades into her back.
No, she had to have some modicum of power and authority behind her, which she supposed was why she was being a generous and ever-increasing dose of warpstone with each meal she had, in the hopes of making her more powerful personally. However, personal power wouldn't be enough. She needed to get her claws into at least one of the four main clans, Skryre, Pestilens, Moulder and Eshin.
When she thought about it, the best clan for her to try and get behind her would in fact be Eshin. Skryre wouldn't respect her at all since she knew absolutely nothing about skaven technology. Pestilens was all about disease, plague and things she didn't want to touch with a fifty-foot metal pole. Moulder involved warpstone-induced mutations and other such fuckery, again, not something simple to learn, nor what she felt she could really dabble in or talk about.
But Eshin? Eshin were a clan of stealthy assassin rats. They were likely to stab her in the back, but that was true for any skaven, so it was just an occupational hazard. Plus, the profession of assassin was by far the simplest occupation of the four clans, and the thing she felt she could act with best. After all, she had been executed publicly precisely because she had succeeded in assassinating a target, and doing such a good job of it that she had to be silenced forever, so what better way than to publicly execute her to show that they were doing justice to the deceased?
And, with her snow-coloured fur, that meant she'd likely be sent to snowy areas if she was to be tested somehow, so it was truly a win-win in her book.
