The Black Watch and War in the Heavens

Apostle of the Spider Queen 

In 1939, as the Nazi conquest of Poland was underway, rumors began to circulate concerning a notorious SS unit led by a shadowy Gestapo officer known only as Fischer. Some said that this unit—one of the Einsatzkommandos, or mobile killing squads, which operated in the captured territories to the rear of the advancing German army—functioned outside the chain of command, that it killed only at night, and that its methods were depraved even by the standards of the SS. Some claimed this man Fischer was in league with the devil. Others insisted that he wasn't a man at all.

During the Nuremberg trials, Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatzgruppe D in Ukraine and Crimea, testified that no such unit ever existed, and that stories about the devilish Gestapo officer were a wartime legend. Ohlendorf was hanged at Landsberg Prison in 1951, taking his secrets with him to the gallows. 

But in 1959, while in Argentina researching a story about Nazi survival, journalists with the British documentary program _Panorama_ were shown documents purporting to be field communiques from an SS captain named Visscher. These reports, which were in the possession of a retired German hotelier in the resort town of Bariloche, in the foothills of the Andes, spanned the years 1939 to 1944, and were addressed to Adolf Hitler himself. 

The communiques contained no discernible tactical or intelligence value. Rather, they described, in fetishistic detail that often went on for pages, the various kinds of killings done by Visscher and his unit. They read like pornography, of a sort. Some of the reports were even accompanied by trophies from the field—a locket of woman's hair, a length of knotted twine strung with severed ears and noses, some teeth in a jar. Among the documents was a photo of an SS officer, his facial features obscured by night shadow, his Luger P-08s worn bandolier-style, like a highwayman or bandit. 

Each communique was typewritten on official SS stationary and signed with a curious symbol that the reporters from Panorama mistook for a variant of the Nazi sun wheel. In actuality, it was Lolth's symbol—a sign of the drow.

Useful Puppets 

Terrestrial history is full of instances in which regional conflicts became proxy wars for external powers. The Ottoman Empire used the Barbary pirates as proxies to disrupt Western European trade routes in the Mediterranean. The Arab Revolt against the Ottomans during World War I was stage-managed by the British. Vietnam was an ideological proxy war waged by the Americans against the Soviets. 

War in the heavens is not so different. 

The Spider Queen's gaze reaches far in the multiverse, and she has long watched with interest the changing fortunes of the maker's creation from her abode in the Demonweb Pits. On occasion, she has even felt compelled to intervene. She sided against the maker in the Manichean conflict known to terrestrials as the Second World War (elsewhere in the multiverse, it is called the Hyperborean War), throwing in her lot with certain transdimensional intelligences that viewed Hitler as a useful puppet. But in the war for the Darkmanse, the goddess has allied herself with the maker and his Synarch, putting her most fanatical drow warriors and mages at the disposal of the Inquisition.

 Fisher of Men 

These drow are the elite core of the Black Watch. They serve the Synarchy under the war banner of the Luchd-amhairc dorcha, or “dark watchers," an ancient military-religious order from the time of the Descent. Their ranks are drawn from the Lowerdark, one of the most inhospitable environs known to elvenkind, which produces fighters of a caliber rare even among the drow. 

The Black Watch also has rank-and-file soldiers—mostly terrestrials—as well as spellcasters from across the multiverse who have pledged themselves to the Synarch. Battlefields, even cosmic ones, are prone to attract their share of mercenaries. The leader of the Black Watch is a drow warlord known as the Fisher. His citadel, which guards the approaches to the Darkmanse, is called the Nazery, from the drow root word naz, meaning "branch" or "offshoot." 

The Fisher is pious. He serves the Spider Queen with gladness in his black drow heart. He considers himself a pilgrim in the demiurge's creation, and so it is perhaps fitting that he should spend his nights as a hunter on the Pilgrim Road in devout service to the goddess.

The Fisher wears the same weapons he wore in Poland. He is meticulous in his vocation. 

And he always sends back reports.