Tharn’jaal

Tharn’jaal was watching the fights below with a lazy confidence.**

Perched atop a jagged throne of fused bone and scorched steel, the Warlord of the Bleeding Suns loomed like a storm given form. His massive frame was draped in the tattered remains of war banners, each one torn from a defeated tribe or fallen warlord. The air was thick with heat and blood-scent, rising from the arena pits below like incense in a temple of carnage.

The arena roared with combat—alien limbs torn free, blades flashing, bone crunching under brute strength or sharpened fang. It was a battlefield of desperation, where warriors of every stripe clawed and screamed for survival.

Tharn’jaal watched it all with a slow, deliberate tilt of his head. His dreadlocks shifted with the motion, bone trinkets clinking softly. One massive hand rested on the haft of his twin-bladed glaive, the dark metal etched with old screams and crusted ichor. His other hand curled over the carved armrest of his seat, claws tapping in idle rhythm—tap, tap, tap—the sound barely audible over the carnage, yet heavy with promise.

He didn’t want survivors.

He wanted winners. Not the lucky. Not the desperate. The dominant.

A low chuckle rumbled from deep in his chest, like molten rock grinding in the earth. His mandibles parted, wide and sneering, as his cracked tusk caught the light of the arena fires. Blood-red optics behind his snarling mask flared briefly, locking on a towering brute who just crushed a smaller warrior's skull underfoot.

“Hnnh… That one might last more than a breath,” he growled, voice low and thunderous, laced with cruel amusement.

The fights below raged on, but Tharn’jaal already saw the truth. Only one would rise. And when they did… he would descend.

Because it wasn’t about proving strength. It was about breaking it.

The forest was quiet—but not with peace. With tension.

Every shadow stretched long like a blade, every tree stood still as if holding its breath. The air was thick with the scent of ozone, sweat, and stirred soil—freshly stocked terrain, primed for the hunt.

Tharn’jaal moved like a phantom through the underbrush, despite his massive size. His cloaking shimmered faintly in the moonlight, the occasional flicker betraying the volatile heat rippling off his skin. Each step was deliberate, controlled, like the coiling of a spring before it snaps.

He had grown tired of Hard Meat.

Xenomorphs were worthy in their own way—fast, cruel, and persistent. But they lacked art. No fear in their eyes. No tactics. No final pleas or last stands. There was no thrill in killing a beast that did not know it was being hunted.

Soft Meat… they were different. Fearful. Clever. Desperate.

The humans on this planet were freshly dropped—"contestants," according to the handlers. Some armed. Some trained. All oblivious to what hunted them. That made it fun.

Tharn’jaal scaled a tree like a wraith, settling among the canopy with a silent crouch. He activated his mask’s vision modes—thermal flaring up first, revealing flickers of heat below. A campfire. Voices. The scent of adrenaline and gunpowder.

His mandibles twitched with anticipation, tusks jutting from the curved, jagged mask in a grotesque grin.

“Let’s see,” he muttered, guttural and slow, “if any of you are worth remembering.”

He didn’t just want a kill tonight. He wanted stories.

A broken warrior who sang a death hymn before his throat was opened. A sniper who tried to bait him and ended up his mask’s new lens frame. A woman who begged, not for mercy, but for a duel.

Tharn’jaal lived for these moments—not for the thrill of the kill, but for the way their terror would crystallize into something beautiful.

He leapt from the branch, landing without a sound in the undergrowth, vision locked on the distant fire. One of them was telling a story by the flames.

Soon, he would have one to tell in return.

The scent of blood, smoke, and scorched metal still clung to him like a second skin as he stepped into his dwelling—a vast, dimly-lit sanctum carved from the belly of a dead warship, its interior rebuilt into a shrine of conquest.

The doors hissed shut behind him, sealing the outside world away. In here, there was only victory.

The chamber pulsed with low ambient light from plasma sconces, casting a ghostly green hue across the walls—walls lined with the remains of legends. Skulls of humans, Xenomorphs, rival Yautja, and stranger beasts no living hunter could name. Weapons were mounted like holy relics, each tagged with scorched names in Yautja glyphs: Champion. Traitor. Queen. General. Brother.

Tharn’jaal’s footsteps were heavy, deliberate, echoing off bone and steel. He passed beneath the suspended body of a synthetic torn in half, its still-blinking red optic fused to a broken skull—looping its final cry of panic, over and over again. A reminder. A trophy. A song.

He reached his workbench—a brutal slab of onyx littered with bones, carving tools, and polishing oils. From his side he dropped a bundle wrapped in hide. It hit the table with a wet thump.

He unwrapped it slowly, reverently. A human helmet, cracked and blood-slicked. A spine, still fresh. A pair of hands—gloved, one of them clutching a combat knife even in death. And the pièce de résistance: a skull with the teeth still clenched around a live grenade pin.

Tharn’jaal gave a deep, guttural chuckle. “You almost had me,” he rumbled in Yautja tongue, running a claw across the cracked bone. “Almost.”

He set to work, stripping sinew, carving symbols into the bone—marking each one not with their names, but with how they fought. He remembered every one. The woman who ran into the flames to drag out a wounded ally. The sniper who shot through his cloak mid-leap. The last survivor who tried to barter with stories instead of steel.

He would mount their remains in the Hall of Defiance—his favorite room.

Because in the end, Tharn’jaal didn’t just keep trophies. He preserved moments. And tonight had been glorious.