Urien Rakarth

Urien Rakarth is the foremost of all the Haemonculi, Master of the coven known as the Prophets of Flesh and reckoned the most influential flesh-crafter in the whole of Commorragh. His is a body that has drawn breath since before the Fall of the Aeldari, an antiquity so vast that his true age has long since ceased to hold any meaning, and across those uncounted millennia he has refined the sculpting of living matter into a genius of surpassing and depraved brilliance. Where once he schemed with the rest of the Dark City's aristocracy for standing and influence, he has long outgrown such trivialities; now only the most grandiose transmogrifications of Commorrite existence can stir his interest, works of atrocity grand enough to let him wallow in undiluted depravity.

So many aspirants clamour for a place among the Prophets of Flesh that each of its Haemonculi commands thousands of Wracks, and at the apex of that pyramid of horrors sits Rakarth. It was he who perfected the very art of Haemonculus resurrection, and the secret of that dark rebirth is written into his own altered bones. Each of them, surgically prepared across ages, holds the key to his return, so that whenever Urien Rakarth is at last slain, his scattered remains are gathered up and coaxed, slowly and lovingly, into growing a fresh incarnation of the Master Haemonculus. Death, for him, has become little more than an inconvenient pause.

Yet in recent centuries something has gone subtly, hideously awry in that flawless cycle. Each new Rakarth now rises bearing some vestigial fragment of the one that came before, and incarnation upon incarnation the corruption has compounded, until the creature that walks the coven-halls today is a nightmare even by the standards of his kind. Ranks of surplus spines erupt from his hunched back, and his leering, ancient face hangs tethered to his skull by cords of leathery flesh, a mask of himself worn over the accreted ruin of a hundred prior lives.

For all this monstrousness, Rakarth remains an artist of unrivalled skill and a general of cold, patient cunning. From his workshops flow the Grotesques and the engines of pain that lend the covens their strength, and when he deigns to take the field in person he does so as a connoisseur come to appraise fresh material, dissecting his enemies with the unhurried curiosity of a craftsman who has all the time in the universe, because, quite literally, he does.