Menkaura belongs to the Corvidae, the sorcerous brotherhood of the Thousand Sons devoted to divination and the reading of the future, and among that fellowship of seers he is counted an elder and a master. His gift is the perception of things to come, a talent as much curse as blessing, for the futures he glimpses are seldom kind and never certain, shifting like a storm-tossed sea rather than flowing like a river toward a single fixed and knowable end.
His fate became entangled with that of Ahzek Ahriman, whose cause he took up in the long aftermath of the Legion's ruin. Menkaura was among the sorcerers who joined Ahriman's efforts to recover the scattered shards of their broken primarch, and he fought at his side in some of the most desperate of those undertakings. During the war for Terra, in a bloody incursion into the Imperial Palace to reclaim a lost shard of Magnus, he slew the Space Wolf Svafnir Rackwulf, but took wounds so grievous in the doing that only the healing arts of the Pavoni could drag him back from the brink of death.
The centuries that followed changed him profoundly. Menkaura passed beyond the role of mere battle-seer to become an oracle in the truest and most terrible sense, a prophet upon whose visions Ahriman came to rely in the pursuit of his endless quest. In time he took up residence within a moon of solid black crystal, a perfect sphere hollowed at its heart, whose interior is bound to the labyrinthine ways of the Warp. That place is a fane of oracles, and the daemons drawn to dwell within it are compelled to answer, without deceit, any question put to them, so that Menkaura sits at the centre of a web of truth in a universe built upon lies.
There he endures, less a warrior now than a living instrument of prophecy, his sight turned forever toward the churning futures of the Great Ocean. To seek him out is to seek knowledge of what may come, and to accept that such knowledge, once gained, can be neither unlearned nor its price refused. In Menkaura the ancient purpose of the Corvidae reaches its bleak fulfilment, to see all and to foresee all, and to be forever chained to the seeing.
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.
Magnus the RedThe Crimson KingMagnus the Red is the daemon primarch of the Thousand Sons, a towering figure of crimson flesh and boundless psychic might, and one of the mightiest sorcerers the galaxy has ever known. Gene-son of the Emperor, he built upon Prospero a civilisation of learning before his pride and his forbidden studies brought ruin upon his Legion. In his desperation he bound himself to Tzeentch and was ultimately raised to daemonhood. Now returned in the flesh, he wages a war of vengeance and revelation against the Imperium that cast him and his sons into damnation.