Menkaura

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.