Baharroth

Baharroth, called the Cry of the Wind, is the Phoenix Lord of the Swooping Hawks and the youngest of Asurmen’s first students. Where his teacher and siblings-in-arms mastered the blade, the fist, and the silent kill, Baharroth turned to the open sky, founding the Swooping Hawks upon the principle that height and speed are themselves weapons. He carries the Shining Blade, said to have been forged in the heart of a supernova, and wears war-plate crowned with wings that mark him, among the Phoenix Lords, as the one who fights from above rather than from the shadows or the line.

Among his fellow Phoenix Lords, Baharroth is bound most closely to Maugan Ra, the Harvester of Souls: the two are spoken of as sun and moon, warriors paired in a single ongoing war yet fought from opposite sides of it, their victories and losses said to answer one another across the strife of the Aeldari race. He is also recorded among the Phoenix Lords who accompanied Jain Zar, the Storm of Silence, when she pledged her service to the rousing god Ynnead, a moment later tradition treats as a turning point in the Phoenix Lords’ relationship to the Aeldari’s search for salvation from the Fall. These bonds place Baharroth alongside Asurmen, Maugan Ra, and Jain Zar as contemporaries whose separate wars are understood, in Asuryani lore, as threads of one design.

Baharroth’s most recent recorded battle was fought deep within the labyrinthine Webway against the servants of Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways, a conflict in which he vanished and has not since been seen to return. Accounts differ on whether this marks a true death or merely his present absence from the wars of the material galaxy; like all Phoenix Lords, Baharroth is held to die and be reborn, his armour and blade passing in time to a new bearer when the wearer before him is consumed by the spirit within. This cycle of loss and return is treated by the Asuryani not as tragedy but as the natural rhythm of a weapon that cannot be permanently destroyed, only misplaced between wars.

The Asuryata, the prophetic tapestry of Aeldari fate, names Baharroth among those whose final death is fixed for the Rhana Dandra, the last battle at the end of all things; he is said to regard this not as a threat looming over him but as an appointment already kept in spirit, awaited rather than feared. On the craftworlds, his absence has passed into custom rather than mourning: when the wind shifts unexpectedly, Asuryani are said to look to the sky, half in habit and half in hope that the Cry of the Wind has returned to the war he never truly left.