Template:Wh main unit long text vmp black knights

In the times before the Empire, there were few domesticated horses, and horsemen were exceedingly rare. In most tribes, a steed was a symbol of wealth and status. So it was often that only a Chieftain and his closest warriors would ride mounted into battle, the wealthiest of their number clad in crude iron plate and carrying stout shields. When these early Knights died, their horses were ritually killed and buried in the barrows alongside their masters, to carry them in the afterlife. Many centuries later, the Vampire Counts are known to summon forth the gruesome remains of those ancient Knights in order to bolster the masses of lesser Undead minions under their control. As a Vampire stalks through barrows and mausoleums, Dark Magic swirls invisibly around him like a cloak, probing and penetrating the cracked and overgrown porticos of each resting place and saturating the bones of the armoured corpses within. A thousand years of dust shifts and dissipates as the parchment-dry cadavers twitch and sit upright. In a morbid mockery of their old lives, these Black Knights stir into motion, tearing themselves free of thorny creepers and thick cobwebs, cold fingers clamping around the hilts of age-blackened blades. Alongside them, the skeletal remains of their steeds jerk to Unlife, twisted by magic into hellish mockeries of the noble beasts they once were.