Damon Prytanis

Damon Prytanis was a Perpetual assassin in the service of the Cabal, the covert conspiracy active during the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy. A Perpetual is a human who does not permanently die, and Prytanis is recorded as having forgotten his original name; “Damon Prytanis” is the identity under which he acted. His origins are associated with Terra, and the Cabal is recorded as recruiting him after the Battle of Iwo Jima. Over the following millennia it directed him against individuals it judged inconvenient to its purposes, including men of good character. He referred to humanity as mon-keigh, an attitude of open contempt. John Grammaticus, another Perpetual associated with the Cabal, by comparison feigned regard for the species.

His repeated deaths and recoveries played a part in the recruitment of Cyrene Valantion. In convincing her that she was herself immortal, Prytanis died several times in her presence, and he then brought her into the Cabal. During the Horus Heresy the Cabal’s operations extended to Macragge, where Prytanis assisted the fulgurite plot against the primarch Vulkan. When Konrad Curze, the Night Haunter, came too close to the conspirators, Prytanis confined him in a daemon-flask. These episodes tie him to Macragge in the period of the Heresy, alongside contemporaries such as Grammaticus and Valantion, and to the wider Cabal network that also operated on Terra.

Prytanis’s defining characteristic was his loyalty to Slau Dha. His end followed from a judgement by the Aeldari seer Eldrad Ulthran, who concluded that the Cabal’s condition for victory was an Aeldari funeral. Narek then broke Prytanis’s neck and, while the Perpetual attempted to return to the body, ran fulgurite through him. Fulgurite is the material used in the plot against Vulkan, and it is recorded as preventing the recovery on which a Perpetual depends. Prytanis is therefore treated as dead: unlike his earlier deaths, this one was not reversed. Accounts of the precise sequence of events differ in detail, but they agree that he was killed by Narek as a consequence of Eldrad’s reading of what the Cabal’s victory required.