"Mea Maxima Culpa!" Arco-Flagellants

More Sisters production this week with another wacky bunch of sinners: Adeptus Ministorum Arco-Flagellants. These are original metal miniatures and came straight out of a sealed box from 2002. I got 'em on eBay of course.

Great models these; they came in a box of six with two different base sculpts. Cost? Well I don't exactly want to say - they were a bit more than a new plastic box of ten models - but they were well worth it to keep consistent with the old-school style of my army.

Lots of flesh to paint on these models - I layered Doombull Brown, Cadian Flesh, and Kislev Flesh, washed lightly with Reikland Flesh wash.

Metal bits were straight-up Leadbelcher washed with Nuln Oil.

These guys are really going for it aren't they!

Throw in a Ministorum Priest and you got a hard bunch for close combat action. I have to say that there's a really cool bit of fiction featuring some Arco-Flagellants in the Black Library "Book of Martyrs". Phil Kelly's novella in that book ("The Martyrdom of Sister Anarchia", a pretty good story about a Sister of Battle captured by T'au). Phil's description of the Arco-Flagellants was great:

"Human corpses, shas'vre."

"Are we sure they are not alive?"

"The waxy pallor indicates they are already dead, and their thermal life sign correlates with that of a cooling human corpse."

Sure enough, near-naked bodies were spread in awkward repose across the swamp, some missing limbs entirely...their lack of clothing was puzzling, disturbing even, but it paled next to the extent of their cybernetic augmentation. Their replacement limbs were as crude as they were horrific. One of the vilest aspects of humanity was its habit of repurposing its lost and unwanted as brutish tools of labour, each lobotomised and given but one task to slave away at, monotonously and without reprieve, for the rest of their foreshortened lives...

Most of the swamp-corpses were dotted with strange ports and sockets, their arms ending in sheaves of primitive electrical cabling...

[Then] the corpses in the marsh sat up as one... jerking as if electrocuted. In awful synchrony they rose to a crouch, then leapt forwards into a splashing, pell-mell run. There was an awful screaming sound, mechanical as well as biological, as their cybernetic limbs crackled with sickly green lightning. 
 

Good stuff eh?? I'd love to read some more BL fiction about the Adeptus Ministorum and Adepta Sororitas weirdos like Arco-Flagellants and Sisters Repentia. Maybe we can start a petition to get Dan Abnett to take that on!

Anyway I hope this is inspirational for your own projects. May the light of the Emperor shine down upon you!