Hathor Maat

Hathor Maat was a Thousand Sons biomancer, Magister Templi of the Pavoni cult and captain of the Third Fellowship on Prospero. The Pavoni were the Legion’s cult of transformation and the body, and among them Maat was noted less for restraint than for vanity: he regarded his own appearance as a work of art, tending to his physical perfection with the same discipline other captains gave to war. As a Fellowship commander he stood alongside cult masters such as Ahzek Ahriman, and among the Legion’s senior sons he was a familiar presence in Tizca in the years before the Heresy reached Prospero.

When Magnus the Red’s unsanctioned warning to the Emperor drew the Space Wolves and their allies down upon Prospero, Maat survived the sacking of the city and the Legion’s flight into the Eye of Terror that followed. The attack broke the Thousand Sons as a settled power and left the burden of the Legion’s uncontrolled mutation, the flesh-change, without remedy. Maat continued to hold that Ahriman’s efforts to arrest this decay, whatever their cost, offered the Legion’s only future worth having.

When Ahriman proposed the rite later known as the Rubric, Maat voted in its favour, judging a Legion reduced to dust preferable to one dissolving into mutation. This was, for a Magister of the Pavoni, a considered reversal: his cult had always held the body as the object of its art, yet the Rubric treated the body as expendable, to be discarded so that only the psychically shielded would remain whole. Maat, like the great mass of Thousand Sons who lacked that protection, was reduced to dust when the rite was cast on Sortiarius.

Ahriman kept his form, and, by later account, a long apprehension of what he had done. Maat kept neither. He is remembered as a Tizca captain known chiefly for his vanity, and his end stands as the clearest instance of a Rubric supporter who was not spared its judgement. The Thousand Sons, in the ages that followed, have made little study of that irony.