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Zaraphiston, a spider patiently weaving his web across multiple timelines. Tall and thin, his long white hair draped around his shoulders like a mantle of pale silk. His milky white eyes stared always into unfocused distance, dreamy and vacant, while the third, vividly blue eye remained locked with on the single most favorable thread of the future.
He was a gifted seer, utterly indifferent to the present moment and to any bond beyond the minimum required to shape the timeline he desired. Interpersonal warmth held no value to him; only outcomes mattered.
Abaddon did not mind. He tolerated the seer’s dry, cryptic speech, the naked self-interest driving every action, the casual disdain shown toward his brothers—so long as Zaraphiston’s own fate remained bound to the Legion’s ascendancy.
At times Zaraphiston would seek the Warmaster’s attention, slipping into the throne room in the hush that followed the departure of the others. Sometimes Abaddon indulged him. Yet even when held in the Warmaster’s arms, even as callused fingers traced idle patterns across his narrow back, Zaraphiston’s gaze never truly returned to the here and now. The necessary cascade of events had already been secured; the present was merely residue.
Ygethmor, a sorcerer whose birth name had long since faded into irrelevance. Ruthless, diligent, methodical destruction given form. He embodied the old spirit of Cthonia made flesh—an ancient thirst for violence distilled, mastered and applied.
To Abaddon it mattered little who Ygethmor had once been or where he had drawn his first breath. What mattered was the cold cruelty with which he dismantled their enemies, a quality worthy of Cthonia’s best.
They would always find themselves late in the straregium, after the chamber had emptied. Ygethmor’s four crimson eyes would be fixed on the daemonic sigils scrawled across the manuscripts Abaddon laid before him. His sorcerous knowledge was unmatched: not mere rote learning, but a deep, almost instinctive grasp of the Warp’s hidden mechanisms.
Short, ruffled brown hair crowned with a circlet of bony horns; an uncannily symmetrical face that seemed carved to reflect the profane geometry of the Immaterium itself. He was never overly arrogant. When he spoke to Abaddon it was nearly as an equal, though an undercurrent of genuine reverence always threaded beneath the words.
Once, Ygethmor had told him plainly: Abaddon was the point where the Warp began and ended, the pinnacle around which its currents were shaped.
Small wonder that a mind so ambitious, so ravenous for forbidden understanding, would wish to be close to that pinnacle.
Xorphas, all sharp smiles and honeyed words, a warm embrace that concluded with a dagger slipped between the shoulder blades. His warriors would do anything for their beloved master—squabbling among themselves for the privilege of earning an approving glance, a brief word of acknowledgment, or, on rare occasions, a more physical reward. He knew exactly how to speak, what phrases to choose, how to tilt his head or soften his gaze; he read people as though their thoughts lay open on a page before him.
Abaddon had seen him unhelmed and unarmored many times. Long red hair cascaded down his back, framing a pale, lithe body scattered with constellations of freckles. His face carried a deceptively innocent cast, sharp teeth concealed behind an easy, disarming smile. All of it, naturally, shaped with the true mastery of one who had studied under Magnus the Red himself—crafted to appear entirely effortless, as though it were simply who he was.
Xorphas was as loyal as a creature of his nature could be: devoted to his mentor Ygethmor and, in turn, to the Despoiler. He anticipated Abaddon’s desires before any command needed to be spoken, offering himself readily. Whether the eagerness stemmed from genuine want or calculated performance, Abaddon did not trouble himself to discern. He also knew how to play this game.
Ruven came to him first as a beaten exile—paranoid, distrustful, a soul scarred by suspicion. Yet he thawed under treatment free of prejudice or instinctive fear of his inherent otherness. Ruthless and fiercely loyal, cold-blooded in the manner only a former Night Lord could achieve. He trailed Abaddon like a hound, desperate to prove his worth, to validate the trust extended to him.
He obeyed any order without hesitation, but more often he sought Abaddon of his own accord, when the gratitude pooling in the tar-black depths of his soul grew too heavy to contain. That desperate passion, that willingness to please at any price, rendered him submissive and pliant almost to excess—grateful merely for the chance to feel himself useful, pleasing, wanted for once.
A shame that he eventually broke under the pressure of the Long War.
Many were lost over the centuries, and many more appeared—a glittering procession of Warp-touched warriors drawn into Abaddon’s orbit. Sorcerers and seers, prophets and soothsayers; they circled him like brilliant, doomed stars orbiting the eldritch, unknowable, unreachable core at the galaxy’s heart.
They could never truly approach him, no matter how fiercely they yearned. The Despoiler’s mind remained an impenetrable fortress, a lethal snare lined with razor edges.
The Despoiler harbored no weaknesses, no fissures in the walls that guarded a heart forged of stone and ceaseless, burning hatred.
Iskandar Khayon. A shard of the Tizcan sun whose light once fell across the high walls of the fortress. Turquoise waters of an oasis spring, seeping through the cracks between ancient stones, coaxing hardy plants to take root—plants he could never quite bring himself to uproot entirely, no matter how much he tried, or perhaps because he did not truly wish to. A hot desert wind that scattered fine golden grains of sand across the battlements and into the mechanisms of every trap.
Someone who had stood at his side from the very beginning, offering everything he possessed without hesitation—for the cause, for Abaddon himself. One of the few who, long ago, had looked deep into the uncertain future: an uneven battle, a war that seemed impossible to win. Yet when Abaddon laid out that future and promised it could be seized, Khayon had believed him. Trusted him completely.
Someone willing to die at Abaddon’s word, who had proven again and again that no odds were insurmountable so long as the Warmaster’s gaze rested upon him. Someone who grasped the vision in its entirety, who did not merely understand it, but shared it, lived it, breathed it as though it were the only air worth drawing into his lungs.
A deadly blade—Abaddon’s own blade—yearning for nothing more than to be wielded by his hand.
A weakness.
A weakness that had never truly departed his heart, not even when he sent Khayon away to die in enemy hands, far from the Vengeful Spirit.
Their last conversation had taken place beside the waiting shuttle, the one that would carry Khayon to his execution. Khayon had looked at him and said, quietly, that he knew. That he understood the necessity of it. Abaddon had given no reply, no gesture of acknowledgment. He had wanted to speak—wanted to order Khayon to stand down, to unload the craft and remain at his side. But the words never came.
All weakness had to be eradicated.
So he had simply watched as Khayon offered that final, understanding smile, sadness pooling deep in the turquoise depths of his eyes, and turned without hesitation toward his fate.
Now, years later, Abaddon understood.
With every passing cycle, with every new sorcerer who drifted into his orbit, he saw the truth more clearly: none of them could compare to the one who had stood with him through every betrayal, every campaign, every long silence. Attachment to a weapon was not weakness. It was a rare, unbreakable bond few could ever know.
The Astronomicon’s light did not pierce realspace, yet Abaddon always knew where Terra lay. He stood at the viewport, staring into the black expanse of the void, and he knew, that somewhere there, his blade was waiting for him.
“I will reach Terra,” he whispered to the emptiness, trusting that the howling winds of the Warp or the ceaseless murmur of the daemons that trailed in his shadow would bear the words across the distance to the one for whom they were intended. “And I will take back what is mine.”