Kharn the Betrayer

The Captain Who Counselled Restraint

Kharn was not always the raving butcher his name has become. In the Legion's earlier days he served as equerry to his primarch and was reckoned among the most level-headed of the World Eaters, a warrior who understood the terrible cost of the Butcher's Nails and sought, where he could, to temper their influence. He acted as a bridge between his increasingly deranged gene-sire and the wider Legion, and his counsel was valued precisely because he had not yet surrendered wholly to the rage that gripped his brothers.

The Fall to Blood

That restraint did not survive the wars of the Heresy. As the Legion consecrated itself ever more completely to Khorne, Kharn was drawn deeper into the Blood God's service, his own Butcher's Nails driving him toward the same all-consuming fury he had once tried to hold at bay. He became a favoured champion of Khorne, blessed and cursed with the god's attention, and the last vestiges of the measured warrior he had been burned away in the fire of constant battle.

The Betrayer

The deed that earned Kharn his terrible name came during a campaign in the frozen ruin of a besieged world, where two traitor Legions turned on one another amid the cold. Enraged by the sight of warriors sheltering from battle rather than embracing it, Kharn fell upon friend and foe without distinction, and in the massacre that followed he struck down allies and enemies alike. From that day he was Kharn the Betrayer, a warrior so lost to Khorne's rage that even his own side could not count on surviving his presence.

An Eternity of Slaughter

In the ten thousand years since, Kharn has become a living embodiment of the World Eaters' damnation. He wields a monstrous chainaxe he calls Gorechild and fights amid a permanent red haze, cutting down anything within reach in his ceaseless quest to please his god. His own warbands regard him with a mixture of reverence and terror, for to fight alongside the Betrayer is to court death from both the enemy and from Kharn himself. Yet his sheer prowess is undeniable; wherever the killing is thickest, there he will be, an unkillable avatar of murder who has offered more skulls to Khorne than any other living champion. To face Kharn is to face the World Eaters made flesh, a warrior who has abandoned everything but the joy of the kill.