Entry II. - Hive Spire Nobles: The First Knight

Here I present the second member of my Noble House warband.

The wily and ruthless Syr Zanthamel von Ymir; Knight in service to House Corbulio, by way of the ancient Tithe system.

While he may have a Knight's title, like his liege lord he is little more than a ruthless and depraved cutthroat.

His family has sworn loyalty to the Corbulio dynasty for several generations and rules over a smallholding inside the House's Hab-Sector.

Zanthamel has the Ymir family crest on his badge; a golden field charged with a crimson "Pall" Heraldric Ordinary stylised as "Y" (for Ymir).

Like his master, he carries copies of his official family documentation, alongside his antiquated but no-less deadly Meltyr Gonne.

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In terms of the design of this model, I chose a Free Company head that reminded me of Heihachi Mishima from Tekken. I wanted him to look like quite an untrustworthy character.

I also added a stripe of black warpaint down the side of his face with the non-bionic eye. This was inspired by the recent Macbeth film with Michael Fassbender. I'm thinking I might do this on several models as I just think it's really cool and scary looking, and also reminds me of the War Boys from Mad Max: Fury Road.

The rest of the paint scheme simply follows in the same pallet as Titus. 

+ The Meltyr Gonne +

This was a pretty simple kitbash; it's an Ad Mech Radium Carbine (from the Skitarii kit) with a small piece of plasticard tube as the muzzle. 

I scored the tube twice around with my tube cutter for some visual interest and to give the look of cooling ribs or vents. The back end is from an Empire/Freeguild crossbow; I added a little rectangle of plasticard with a plasticard rivet detail on top to cover the join as a kind of charging handle.

I painted the weapon to look like it's made from a mixture of mystery future metals and has Verdegris and patina throughout. 

+ Heraldry +

Of all the historical periods I'm interested in, the Medieval era is probably the one I enjoy the most, and within that I love the armour and weapons of the time, but also the heraldry, which is something I get quite nerdy about.

For Zanthamel von Ymir I opted for a different route from Titus, who himself had a fairly straightforward heraldic style. 

To my knowledge it's not something that occurred very often, but I thought it would be interesting if Zanthamel's heraldry communicated something about his family name. 

The only other time I've seen this in historic records is the family Parteneck, which featured an image of an axe head as its "charge" - the charge is the image a shield is "charged" with over its background colour or division of colours (the "field"). 

The archetypal charge is something like an animal or an object; a wolf or a bear, for example, or as with Parteneck, an axe head.

However, some charges were very simple geometric shapes, these were called "Ordinaries", and one such Ordinary is referred to as "Pall"; this is essentially a coloured field with a "Y"-shape over it in a different colour. 

To me this communicated "Ymir" almost perfectly, but to give it a bit more visual interest I decided to add a cross-bar to the Y, which reminded me of the cross symbol used in the medieval badge of the Kingdom of Hungary.

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