Among all the sons of the Emperor, none was more gifted or more damned than Magnus the Red. A giant of crimson skin marked by a single burning eye, he possessed a psychic power that rivalled that of his gene-father, and an intellect that hungered without limit for knowledge. Reunited with his Legion upon the world of Prospero, he raised there a great civilisation of scholarship, delving into the mysteries of the warp in the certain belief that no understanding could truly be forbidden.
That certainty was his undoing. The flesh-change, a spreading mutation born of unchecked psychic power, ravaged his Legion, and in his efforts to master it Magnus was drawn ever deeper into the arts of sorcery and, unknowing at first, into the schemes of Tzeentch. When he perceived the treachery of Horus brewing, he cast a desperate psychic warning across the galaxy to the Emperor, shattering a great work upon Terra in the process and confirming every dread the Master of Mankind held about his most brilliant son.
The retribution that followed burned Prospero to glass. Betrayed and besieged, Magnus made a final, fateful bargain with the Changer of the Ways to save the survivors of his Legion, and in doing so bound himself and his sons wholly to Chaos. He bore them to the Planet of the Sorcerers within the Eye of Terror, there to brood upon their fall for ten thousand years.
Over those long millennia Magnus rose to become a Daemon Primarch, a being of terrible power that blended the majesty of a primarch with the unbound might of a greater daemon of Tzeentch. He wields sorcery on a scale few can comprehend, capable of unmaking armies and reshaping reality itself, and his cunning is the equal of his power, honed by ten thousand years of scheming.
In the age of the Great Rift, Magnus returned to the material universe in the flesh, restored to physical form through a great and terrible working. He remains a being torn between wrath and regret, contemptuous of the Imperium that destroyed his dream yet forever mourning what his pride cost his sons. He pursues schemes of galactic scale, seeking forbidden knowledge, striking at worlds of psychic significance, and turning always toward the distant hope of undoing the ruin he wrought. Magnificent, tragic and monstrous, the Crimson King is the wrathful heart of the Thousand Sons, a fallen genius who reaches still for the understanding that damned him.
Heroes & legends
More Thousand Sons
Ahzek AhrimanThe ExileAhzek Ahriman is the greatest sorcerer of the Thousand Sons after Magnus himself, and the most tragic and reviled figure of his Legion. Once its Chief Librarian, he worked the great spell called the Rubric in a desperate bid to save his brothers from mutation, only to reduce the many thousands of them to soulless dust. Cast out in disgrace and haunted by his failure, Ahriman has wandered the galaxy for ten thousand years, forever seeking the arcane knowledge that might undo the catastrophe his own hand unleashed.
AmonFirst of the CorvidaeAmon was Captain of the Ninth Fellowship and equerry to Magnus the Red, the primarch's tutor and trusted confidant and the first master of the precognitive cult that would become the Corvidae. He survived the fall of Prospero and the Heresy only to be undone at last by Ahzek Ahriman, the very pupil of his lord he had sworn to guard.
MenkauraThe OracleMenkaura is a venerable battle-seer of the Corvidae, gifted and cursed with visions of what is to come. A prophet who cast his lot with Ahzek Ahriman, he endured mortal wounds and long centuries to become an oracle bound to the Arch-Sorcerer, dwelling within a hollow moon of black crystal at the edge of the Great Ocean.