The Deadminder

A 'Chariot of the Harvester' from Gamezone Miniatures, painting finished in April 2016. Despite being rather small, this one took much more time than it should. The assembly was a bit demanding but it was nothing that greenstuff couldn't fix. The painting after that was just tedious - it was really difficult to discern what is what on the mini and my motivation wasn't the best at the time.

Either way, I am rather satisfied with it and it was an interesting experiment with basing. It's difficult to see it here, but I made a road with wheel-ruts on it and covered only the sides and the middle part with grass. This was the first time I used big tufts of grass and they proved most useful for this one.

A deadminder was a very important profession in the varsavian society of Death God worshippers. Wars were being waged, animals were being hunted in the forest, villages were being raided by bandits. All of that left many corpses - which left untended, were later eaten by animals, forgotten and unmourned. The deadminder was supposed to gather all the corpses - in whatever state they were left - and later perform the necessary rituals and send the deceased to the Death God's embrace. Many people had this profession over the centuries, but one particular was immortalized in the folk stories. He was a father pleading his loyalty to both his family and the Death God. He often spent many days far from home, burying the dead and then coming back to spend few days happily together with his wife and children. One time, he went away and weren't coming back for many, many weeks. Then the hard times came and the mother began having difficulties to feed the whole family. The youngest daughter saw her mommy overwork herself, only to get barely enough food for all of them. She decided to lighten her mother's burden - being driven with the love for her father and the devotion to the Death God, she ventured into the forest to find the deadminder, live with him and help him, for he surely had a lot of work. It's said that she found her father, worked together with him and for their devotion the Death God let them stay in the world of the living. Some think they both died in the forest, but others can swear by seeing both of them traveling slowly through Varsavia, minding the dead as always.