Vashtorr the Arkifane

Vashtorr the Arkifane is a daemon unlike any other, a Greater Daemon born not of a single Chaos God but of a passion shared by mortals across the galaxy: the endless obsession with technology, invention, and the relentless march of mechanical progress. He is a being of ordered and meticulous evil, his will grinding ever forward with the cold inevitability of some vast and unstoppable engine. Where the daemons of the four great powers embody rage, decay, ambition, or excess, Vashtorr embodies the dark communion of flesh and machine, and he styles himself the Soul Forge King, master of hell-wrought manufactories beyond the veil.

His ambition is nothing less than apotheosis. Vashtorr seeks to ascend to the ranks of the great gods themselves, to become the fifth power of Chaos and claim a share of the Immaterium to rival Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch, and Slaanesh. To seize that dread destiny he requires power beyond the reach of any ordinary daemon, and he learned of an artefact that might grant it: a fragmentary key, scattered and hidden, that could unlock secrets left over from the War in Heaven and set him upon the road to godhood.

To gather the pieces of the key, Vashtorr forged an alliance with Abaddon the Despoiler, offering the Warmaster his services in exchange for aid. From captured space hulks he wrought the Arks of Omen, colossal voidships that carried Abaddon's campaigns across the galaxy, and in return he was left free to pursue his own designs. Marshalling a host of indentured daemons alongside warriors of the Black Legion and the Iron Warriors, the Arkifane hunted the fragments of the key from world to world, bending the servants of Chaos to a purpose that was, in the end, his alone.

His search led him at last to the Rock, the mountainous fortress-monastery of the Dark Angels, where he believed another fragment lay hidden. Deceiving a monstrous machine-intelligence into predicting the Rock's passage through the void, Vashtorr launched an all-out assault upon the guardians of the First Legion, seeking to prise the secret from their vaults. Though the Dark Angels stood against him, the Arkifane's designs did not end upon their walls, for he had already gathered engines of terrible purpose and set his sights upon a vault of the Old Ones, sealed since the earliest wars of the galaxy.

Vashtorr is a patient and implacable foe, undeterred by any single defeat. Somewhere beyond the veil of reality he labours still to breach that most ancient of prisons and plunder the knowledge sleeping within, a cold and calculating horror who would remake himself into a god and reshape the galaxy upon his anvil.