Malakim Phoros

Malakim Phoros is Chapter Master of the Lamenters, styled Lord of Ruin and Watcher of the Deeps, who restrains the Black Rage in battle. He is described as a golden statue of a man, and his brothers follow him without question. Rumours that his hold over the Black Rage is weakening nonetheless accompany him.

Phoros distrusted the Adeptus Terra after the Chapter’s castigation, and that distrust allowed Lugft Huron to persuade the Lamenters to join the Badab conflict. The Minotaurs destroyed the *Daughter of Tempests*, and the Imperium recorded Phoros as dead. He survived the wreck, rejoined the Lamenters’ penitent crusade, and later sat in judgement of Gabriel Seth after the war on Armageddon.

The Lamenters are a fleet-based Chapter with a record of misfortune. Phoros remains alive in the forty-second millennium (M42) and continues as Chapter Master. He grants the Lamentations himself when no priest is aboard. His role combines the Chapter’s mourning with the duty to keep it from falling.

In the Badab War Phoros commanded the Lamenters as one of the Secessionist Chapters allied to Huron. He is listed among the Secessionist commanders in the Pale Stars, a resource-rich region of the Maelstrom Zone that the Lamenters invaded in 904.M41; there honour-bonds forged with the Marines Errant during the Corinthian Crusade of 698.M41 led both Chapters to grant each other quarter. In 908.M41 the Minotaurs found the depleted Lamenters in the Optera System and forced them to defend their principal vessels in a battle fought in the void and on the feral world Optera IV. The surviving 311 battle-brothers surrendered, and Phoros was reported missing, believed killed when the battle barge Daughter of Tempests was lost; one account records that the Minotaurs afterwards claimed the ship as a prize. His fate remained uncertain when, at the war’s end, the surviving Lamenters were shown mercy on condition of a hundred-year penitent crusade.

Phoros is recorded as having rejoined the Chapter during that crusade, which brought it into the path of Hive Fleet Kraken. Late in the forty-first millennium, after the Flesh Tearers’ conduct in the Third War for Armageddon, he was among the Chapter Masters of the Sanguinary Brotherhood who sat in judgement on Gabriel Seth in the Forum Judicium of the Arx Angelicum, the Blood Angels’ fortress-monastery on Baal. During the proceedings he answered Seth’s condemnation of Mephiston by contrasting the Chief Librarian’s restraint with the excesses of the Flesh Tearers’ Death Company. The court found Seth guilty, but the intervention of the Blood Angels High Chaplain Astorath allowed the Flesh Tearers to continue in service. By the forty-second millennium the penitent crusade had ended, Primaris reinforcements had joined the Chapter, and Phoros remained its Master.