Ahzek Ahriman

Ahzek Ahriman is the former Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons and architect of the Rubric that entombed most of his Legion in dust. Raised on Prospero among the Thousand Sons’ psychic cults, he rose through the Corvidae to become the Legion’s foremost sorcerer under his primarch, Magnus the Red. When uncontrolled sorcery drove the Legion toward the flesh-change that consumed psychically overexposed Thousand Sons from within, Ahriman devised the Rubric: a single working, cast soon after the Legion’s exile into the Eye of Terror, meant to arrest the change by fixing his brothers’ bodies and minds at once. It succeeded and failed together — thousands of Thousand Sons collapsed into armour holding only dust, while a smaller remnant, Ahriman among them, kept flesh and will. The Rubric Marines that resulted still serve the Legion in a slow, ritual fashion, and the act remains the Thousand Sons’ central reckoning, claimed by some as salvation and by others as betrayal.

Magnus the Red was both Ahriman’s primarch and his defining relationship. Ahriman stood near Magnus through the Council of Nikaea’s censure of Legion sorcery and through the burning of Prospero by the Space Wolves under Leman Russ, the attack that broke the Thousand Sons as a homeworld-holding Legion and drove Magnus into the Eye of Terror. It was there, at the world known as the Planet of the Sorcerers, or Sortiarius, that the exiled Legion made its new seat, and it was there that Ahriman cast the Rubric — an act later tradition holds Magnus never forgave. Ahriman’s subsequent exile from his own Legion, undertaken apart from Magnus and from the Thousand Sons’ cults, set him on a solitary path that accounts describe as entangled for centuries afterward with former allies such as Amon of the Corvidae.

During the Horus Heresy’s climax, Ahriman fought at Terra, one of the traitor sorcerers whose powers were turned against the Imperial Palace in the siege that ended the Heresy. Afterward he did not settle into the Thousand Sons’ court on the Planet of the Sorcerers but became a wanderer beyond the Eye, seeking lore and artefacts that might reverse the Rubric’s toll or, by other accounts, complete it. That search has drawn him into conflict and uneasy alliance alike with rival Thousand Sons cults, with other powers of the Eye, and with Imperial forces who count him among the most watched sorcerers at large.

Ahriman is recorded as still active, pursuing his private work at a remove from Magnus and the Legion’s cults. The Rubric Marines he made remain the backbone of Thousand Sons companies, and the Legion’s living sorcerers continue to dispute his legacy without resolution. His story binds three points on the map and timeline directly to Magnus’s own: Prospero, burned during the Horus Heresy; the Planet of the Sorcerers, the Eye of Terror seat where the Rubric was cast and the Legion’s exile continues; and Terra, where he fought during the siege that closed the Heresy.

Accounts of his origins record that Ahriman was born on Terra in the late 30th millennium, among the Achaemenid tribes whose kings had allied early with the Emperor, and that he and his twin, Ohrmuzd, were inducted into the Legion before Magnus was found; Prospero became his home only afterwards. Ohrmuzd died of the flesh-change, among the afflicted who did not survive Magnus’s cure. Ahriman came to hold at once the offices of Chief Librarian, Captain of the First Fellowship, commander of the Sekhmet and magister of the Corvidae, the cult devoted to precognition. During the Great Crusade he served a five-year secondment to the Word Bearers, led a search for Magnus against his primarch’s wishes in the Aghoru campaign, and took part in the pacification of Heliosa, the world called Shrike, where he witnessed the return of the flesh-change and Leman Russ’s execution of an afflicted Thousand Son. He was present at the Triumph at Ullanor, at which Horus was named Warmaster, and at the Council of Nikaea, where he heard the Space Wolf Rune Priest Othere Wyrdmake, whom he had counted a colleague, denounce the Legion as sorcerers.

At the Burning of Prospero Ahriman refused Magnus’s order to stand down and led the defence of Tizca; Magnus remained commander de jure, and Ahriman is recorded as commander de facto. In the course of the battle he drew Wyrdmake into the aether, overcame him, and cast his soul into the warp. As Magnus fell to Russ, the primarch used Ahriman as the conduit for the spell that carried the surviving Thousand Sons from Prospero to Sortiarius. During the Heresy Ahriman led a fellowship that recovered shards of Magnus’s shattered essence, raiding the psyker prison-station Kamiti Sona and confronting on Nikaea a shard that had possessed the remembrancer Lemuel Gaumon, and he later accompanied Magnus to the ruins of Prospero. In the Solar War of 014.M31 he commanded the battle barge Ankhtowe and joined the Word Bearers in a ritual on the Comet that opened the warp rift over Luna through which Horus’s fleet passed. In the Siege of Terra he served on Perturabo’s staff, joined the sorcerous assault on the Colossi Gate, entered the Imperial Palace with Magnus’s party in search of the primarch’s last shard, and later visited the Library of Leng before leaving it ahead of the siege’s end.

The Rubric was cast on Sortiarius with a cabal that included Hathor Maat, Amon and Sobek, against Magnus’s prohibition; one account holds that fewer than a hundred psykers were strengthened by it. Magnus stopped the spell and banished the cabal. In exile Ahriman at first served lesser masters, for a time under the alias Horkos in the warband known as the Harrowing, until he killed Amon, who had sent agents to destroy him, and formed his own warband, the Prodigal Sons. He raided libraries and places of learning, sought the lost writings of Magnus’s remembrancer Mahavastu Kallimakus, and took the Athenaeum of Kallimakus on Apollonia in M32. He later returned to Sortiarius to cast a Second Rubric; it restored Magnus’s mind rather than the Legion, and its after-effect, the Pyrodomon, was prevented only when he used the Necron device known as the Key of Infinity to alter the course of events.

Ahriman then turned to the search for the Black Library. During the 13th Black Crusade he led the Prodigal Sons against the Arcadian Librarium, sent the sorcerer Mordant Hex to seize the Webway gate on Etiamnun III, and reached the Black Library only in astral form, his body transcribing the Tome Labyrinthus. Recalled by Magnus to the Planet of the Sorcerers, he fought beside his primarch on Fenris during the Siege of the Fenris System, dated to about 999.M41. In the Gathering Storm he ambushed the Ynnari in the Webway subrealm of Psychedelta. In the era of the Dark Imperium he is recorded as aiding the Exalted Sorcerer Khethos Vorsch’s infiltration of Mordian through his daemonhost proxy, the Vessel, rather than in person.