Ahzek Ahriman

Ahzek Ahriman was among the most brilliant of all the Thousand Sons, a master of the arcane whose skill was second only to that of his primarch. As Chief Librarian of the Legion, he stood at the heart of its scholarship and its sorcery, and it was to him that his brothers looked when the flesh-change returned to ravage their ranks in the aftermath of Prospero's fall.

What he did next would define him for all the millennia to come. Seeing his Legion consumed by mutation, Ahriman conceived a great and terrible working he named the Rubric, a spell intended to halt the flesh-change and preserve his brothers. He gathered the sorcerers of the Legion and enacted the ritual against the warnings of those who feared its cost. The Rubric worked, after a fashion, but its price was ruinous. The strongest sorcerers were spared, but the countless thousands who lacked such power were reduced to animate dust bound within their armour, their souls burned away, transformed into the mindless automatons remembered ever after as the Rubricae.

When Magnus learned what had been done, his fury was boundless, and Ahriman was cast out from the Legion into exile. So began the long wandering that would earn him the name Ahriman the Exile. For ten thousand years he has roamed the galaxy, gathering to himself warbands of like-minded sorcerers, plundering forbidden archives, and pursuing an obsessive quest for the knowledge that might reverse the Rubric and restore his brothers to what they were.

His power is immense, rivalled among the Thousand Sons only by Magnus himself, and his mastery of sorcery makes him one of the most dangerous individuals in the galaxy. He wields the ancient force staff known as the Black Staff of Ahriman and can unleash psychic devastation on a terrible scale, yet he is as much a schemer as a warrior, weaving plots that span centuries in pursuit of his singular goal.

Ahriman is a figure of profound contradiction, a scholar whose thirst for knowledge doomed those he sought to save, an exile who yearns to restore the Legion that cast him out, a man of formidable will forever chained to the consequences of a single catastrophic choice. He does not seek power for its own sake, nor conquest, nor the favour of the gods, but only the undoing of his greatest failure. In this relentless, doomed pursuit, Ahzek Ahriman embodies the whole tragedy of the Thousand Sons: the seeker of forbidden truth who finds, at the end of every road, only the ruin his own brilliance has wrought.