Possessed Opossum

Or why Ahriman is the most mommy ever

The word "Rubric" carries a hidden weight. In modern English, a rubric is a scoring guide, a set of criteria used to grade a student's work. The word descends from the Latin rubrica, meaning "red ochre" or "red earth," which itself comes from ruber — red. This etymology mattered to medieval scribes, who used red ink to mark important passages in manuscripts, the headings and instructions that stood apart from the black body text.

But the same root gives us another word: rubedo, the fourth and final stage of the alchemical Great Work. In the sequence of colors that marked the transformation of base matter into the Philosopher's Stone —nigredo (blackening), albedo (whitening), citrinitas (yellowing), rubedo (reddening) — rubedo was the culmination. It was the moment when the Stone achieved its final, perfected form, a deep blood-red, capable of transmuting lead into gold and granting immortality to its maker.

Ahriman's Rubric is all of these things at once. It is the final work of a student who thought he could surpass his master, left for Magnus the Red to judge. And it is, in the most tragic sense, an alchemical Great Work — an attempt to transform the dying matter of the Thousand Sons into something eternal, perfected, and immune to decay. That it failed does not make the metaphor less true. The failure is, in fact, what makes the metaphor complete.

In this essay I would like to talk about Helio Isidorus, a character whose brief, strange existence represents the closest thing Ahriman ever came to success, but also the most devastating proof of his damnation.

Warhammer 40k is often built on silly linguistic determinism, and I think Helio’s name is quite telling, if you know where to look. No important name in the Ahriman trilogy is random.

Helio is the Greek word for sun, and Isidorus means "gift of Isis."

In Egyptian mythology, Isis is the goddess who gathers the dismembered pieces of her murdered husband Osiris and reassembles them, breathing life back into his body long enough to conceive their son, Horus. Horus is the divine child, the heir, the avenger who will restore order to the cosmos. Isis is the gatherer of fragments, the weaver of wholeness from scattered parts.

Ahriman's entire existence after the Burning of Prospero is an Isis-work. He gathers the fragments of his shattered Legion to hunt the shards of Magnus' broken soul. And like Osiris, Magnus cannot be truly resurrected no matter what Isis does, because he is the king of the dead now, forever bound to the Underworld, or the Warp.

He attempts, through the two of his Rubrics and through a hundred lesser workings, to reassemble what was broken, to breathe life back into the corpse of his father's dream. Helio Isidorus is the "gift" of that labor — the child born from Ahriman's obsessive reassembly of the dead. The sun, off course, is a powerful metaphor for hope. It represents renewal, the triumph of light over darkness, and the promise of a better tomorrow. That is what he is to Ahriman, a gift of hope. He appears when Ahriman is at his lowest: the second Rubric has failed, Ahriman is catatonic with grief, as there is nothing else for him to do. And then Helio Isidorus enters the stage. The unique Rubric Marine we remember from earlier, who was less dead than the others, now miraculously restored to flesh. He is quite literally Ahriman’s sun, rising over the horizon in the middle of the darkest night.

The goal of the Great Work is creation of the Philosopher's Stone, and the birth of the filius philosophorum, the Philosopher's Child, is a metaphor used by alchemists to describe exactly that. They viewed their Great Work as a living, organic process, and compared it to birth. The Stone is born from the union of opposites, masculine and feminine, it is "incubated" inside a sealed glass vessel, called philosopher's egg, and the result is a spiritual entity, rather than a lump of gold. Just as a child represents a new, pure beginning and the future potential of its parents, the filius represented a purified, divine essence born out of corrupt, raw matter. It was "born" from the wisdom of the alchemists, hence being the child of the philosophers.

Carl Jung, a psychologist whose writing informs much of my analysis, identified the Divine Child as a universal archetype — a pattern that appears in myths, dreams, and fantasies across all cultures. According to Jung, the Child represents both the past and the future, it is the vestige of a lost wholeness — the memory of a time before the ego fractured the self — and simultaneously the promise of a wholeness yet to come. The Child is what we were before we became broken, and what we might become if we heal.

The Child is "less than nothing but stronger than everything." It appears helpless, fragile, insignificant, a mere potential, easily overlooked or destroyed. And yet it carries the force of the entire psyche behind it. The Child can accomplish what the conscious ego cannot, precisely because it is not bound by the ego's limitations.

The Child emerges at moments of crisis, when the conscious mind has exhausted its resources and can find no way forward. It arrives as a compensation, an answer from the unconscious to a problem the ego cannot solve. The appearance of the Child archetype signals that transformation is possible, that the impasse can be broken, that new life can emerge from the wreckage.

Helio Isidorus is Ahriman's Divine/Philosopher's Child, both in alchemical and Jungian sense. His very name encodes the claim, as another name used for filius philosophorum is the"Sun Child". Carl Jung also explicitly linked the child archetype to the sun and solar mythology. In Jungian terms, Helio is the psychic compensation for futile striving. He is the answer Ahriman could not produce through logic, sorcery, or sheer force of will alone. He is the living proof that the second Rubric was not a failure.

In classical alchemy, the Alchemical Child is often depicted as an androgyne, a being who contains both masculine and feminine, who transcends the division of opposites. This is the rebis, the double-headed figure who represents the union of sun and moon, sulfur and mercury, Red King and White Queen. The androgyne is the image of psychological wholeness, the integrated self in which all contraries are reconciled.

In Jungian analysis, it represents the final product of psychological integration — the unified self. The Child helps the ego reconcile deep inner contradictions without breaking down, it integrates conflicting parts of the self into something unified and whole. It is a living symbol of individuation that represents a personality that is whole rather than split. It points toward potential growth and the continuous evolution of the human psyche.

Helio Isidorus is all of that gone wrong. He is indeed many-headed and whole, he does promise unification, he does transcend the division of opposites and he does point towards evolution, but the salvation he promises is perverted. The Child turned out to be a psychic curse that seeks to merge all Thousand Sons, both Sorcerer and Rubric Marine, into a unified gestalt Warp entity called the Pyrodomon. The Child is a monster that tries to devour its mother and her entire family.

Just as the Jungian Child, Helio is "less than nothing but stronger than everything." At first, he appeared as an amnesiac man who doesn’t remember what or where he is, and forgets all conversations immediately after they happen. His scenes with Ahriman are filled with endless repetition because of this. After a certain point, however, he starts burning Rubric Marines into ash and turning sorcerers into Rubric Marines, and finally remembers what he is.

Ahriman is forced to destroy his own child. Helio Isidorus, if allowed to exist, will consume the Legion. He will erase every individual Thousand Son, absorb them into a single psychic entity that is neither the original Helio nor Ahriman nor any of the brothers it has devoured. The gestalt will be the death of identity for the Thousand Sons.

Do you know what the failure of an alchemical work is called? Abortus. Ahriman aborts his alchemical Child by going back in time to make sure that Helio Isidorus never existed at all. He returns to the casting of the second Rubric and kills Helio Isidorus before he could be "born". He is dead dead, there is no dust inside his armor, no echo of its owner, nobody can even remember his name.

I’m sorry, I just couldn’t not insert this bullshit into here. I wrote all of this only because Rob Sanders gave us very vivid gestation and miscarriage visuals in Atlas Infernal, when he was describing the daemon Ahriman and his pupil Xarchos tried to bring back to life after the daemon has been split into shards (damn, I guess Ahriman really has a thing for collecting shards). Actually, I don’t think that the book was weird. Thousand Sons already have enough references to Hermetic alchemy — Ahriman literally states its foundational principle "as above, so below" in the books, and it is very likely that Magnus is Red because the last stage of the Great Work is red, and because the Red King is necessary for the creation of Philosopher's Stone. So, the childbirth imagery that isn’t even unique to Atlas Infernal (it appears in other TS books too, in a bit subtler way) is actually in line with the theme of sorcery and Magnus’ dream of humanity’s ascension. Magnus’ dream and the Stone are the same thing, they are the realization of absolute human potential and spiritual awakening. The Stone is supposed to transform the lead of ignorance into the gold of wisdom. Perhaps Ahriman’s hair is white in Atlas Infernal because the other component of the Stone, besides the Red King, is the White Queen. It might explain why Ahriman is Like That and why Czevak wants to call him a slur so bad. He is described as androgynous, Atlas Infernal makes him assume different illusory visages for some reason, including female ones, and in the Omnibus Ahriman literally has dissociative personality disorder, and his self-doubt and conviction that he deserves punishment are represented by a woman. Lmao. He is not beating the allegations.

So, going back to Helio Isidorus.

To destroy the Alchemical Child is to destroy one's own hope. If the Child represents the future — the possibility of growth, of healing, of becoming whole, then to abort the Child is to foreclose that future. Ahriman, by erasing Helio Isidorus, condemns himself to remain as he is. He will never complete the Great Work and cure the Rubric.

It's a very interesting detail that Ahriman realizes that he has to die for the second casting to succeed. For the real Great Work, that is true. Red King and White Queen don’t survive the intensity of their union and die to make space so something else might be born from their ashes. The Red King, Magnus, is pretty much dead. He was killed by Leman Russ, his soul has been shattered into fragments, and those fragments will never fully reunite. Perhaps that’s why the first casting failed, because Ahriman lived. In the second one he was genuinely supposed to die, but that didn’t happen because his plans were thwarted by Knekku, who sacrifices himself to save Magnus, as much as what remains of him can be saved at that point.

Those are not all of the parallels though, there is more. In alchemical terminology, incaementum refers to the fixation of the volatile — the transformation of a liquid or gaseous substance into a solid, permanent form. The volatile principle is mercury, the feminine, the changeable; the fixed principle is sulfur, the masculine, the stable. The Work involves fixing the volatile without destroying it, giving form to the formless while preserving its essential nature.

The Rubric was an act of incaementum on a Legion-wide scale. The Flesh-Change was volatility incarnate: bodies shifting, mutating, becoming unrecognizable. The Rubric fixed them. It made the volatile solid, turned flesh into dust and bound that dust inside immutable ceramite. The Rubricae are the fixed principle, the volatile made permanent, but they are also the volatile destroyed. 

Helio Isidorus represents a second attempt at incaementum — not of individual bodies, but of the Legion's collective soul this time. He wants to fix the scattered Thousand Sons into a single permanent entity, to complete the Work that the Rubric began. And the result is the same: the volatile is consumed instead. The cure ends up identical to the disease.

Alchemical texts emphasize the importance of the vas hermeticum, the sealed vessel in which the Work takes place. If the vessel is cracked, the Work fails. If the vessel is impure, the Work is corrupted.

Ahriman's vessel is his own soul, and his soul is very far from clean. The vessel is cracked by pride and by desperation, by the massive guilt of having destroyed his own Legion. The vessel is impure, contaminated by Tzeentch's influence, by the corrosive environment of the Eye, by the cumulative weight of unforgiven sins.

He does perform the nigredo, the stage of the blackening and death of the old self, though. Prospero is destroyed in fire once again, to help the Exiles reach the Planet of the Sorcerers. Alas, that is not enough.

In alchemy, there is a concept called circulatio, and it is the circulation of the material through repeated cycles of dissolution and coagulation. The circulatio is a necessary stage of the Work, but it is meant to be temporary. Eventually, the material must stabilize. Eventually, the Stone must form. In essence, it is a loop, and Ahriman’s story is full of loops. Two failed Rubrics, multiple shards of Magnus hunted willingly and unwillingly, literal time loops he relives again and again to defeat the Hyksos Phaeron Setekh. Ouroboros, by the way, is the symbol of the alchemical circulationI’m talking about. Alchemists believed that the Stone required the substance to "die" and be reborn countless times through circulation. I think that might be what Rob Sanders wanted to say with his version of Ahriman focusing so much on illusion and changing his face again and again. Ahriman is trapped in an eternal circulatio, his soul dissolves and coagulates, dissolves and coagulates, never reaching rubedo and never producing a viable Child. Maybe the change of the face was Sanders’ metaphor for that.

Maybe I’m crazy, but Ahriman’s tragedy is very maternal to me, because of the alchemic parallels and how much the narrative feminizes him. We are informed that he was a sensitive crybaby while his brother was a more traditionally masculine chad, his royal blood, moe tendencies and the love for faking vulnerability to deceive others make him look like the biggest damsel in distress. All sorcerers are perceived as feminine by the Western eye, since they wear flowing robes and paint their eyes with kohl. Warhammer in general likes to queer code Chaos. Really, if a twink appears on the screen, you just know he’s gonna be evil. Pre-Rubric Ahriman has the personality of an annoying overachiever girl from your school, the teacher’s pet who keeps reminding the teacher about homework at the end of each lesson. When he tries to forge a friendship with Wyrdmake it looks funny and sad at the same time, he really is like a girl faking her interests and personality so she could get the cool bad guy’s attention. And he is super super patronizing and condescending, in the way an elementary school teacher is condescending. He is actually very different from Magnus in that regard, Magnus isn’t that sugary.

The best canon line is this!

>Sevatar managed to unclench his jaw. ‘You have a way of treating brother-warriors like children, you know. The sugary treacle in your tone does not hide the fact you are a patronising Terran shithead.’

Ahriman shook his head a second time, patient in the face of this tirade. ‘It is not my intention to mock you, Jago.’

He punishes himself for the failure of the Rubric with passivity and forced submission. Like, oh my God, he’s literally in some guy’s hot witch harem, acting like a whipped dog (the actual words from the canon line). I’m not equating feminity with submission, that is what our society does. He acts like a middle-aged widow whose husbands keep dying under mysterious circumstances while she enjoys their inheritance. There is one line that implies he feels some sort of envy over Pavoni’s flesh-altering talents (the obvious seductions of being a strutting peacock, lmao, the actual words from the book. That 100% wasn’t about the use of their talents in combat). Don’t make me mention his fucking boob plate. His post-Rubric self is very sentimental. He’s so caring about the Rubricae, the only thing that cracks his mask of perfect control is that one conversation with Ignis, where Ahriman gets angry at him for calling that he’s doing to Helio a "dissection". Off course he doesn’t want to hear that he’s dissecting his precious baby. Helio is Ahriman's son in the way that a child is the son of a mother: carried, nourished, and delivered through agony into a world that will destroy him. That is horrific in such an existential way, honestly. A woman surrounded by her dead children, and the only one who opens his eyes and speaks tries to kill her. If I were to joke about Ahriman’s postpartum depression and miscarriage, would that even be a joke at this point? All of it does read as a drama about spiritual infertility. Yeah, that’s extremely cursed, but it’s true. Honestly, that graphic detail about the daemon he and Xarchos tried to summon having an underdeveloped conjoined twin attached to its body was pretty peak if you think about it. Ahriman is always metaphorically carrying his twin brother’s dead body around and having flashbacks about him.

This is a very messy meta, I know, I didn’t want to post it. But I guess it’s my blog and I’m allowed to post bad takes here, and since I’ve been called "Ahriman scholar" before, why not this one? I don’t like when metaphors are too obvious, or when essays provide conclusions ready for use. Ahriman is a great character because of how much deniability there is in his story. My take being pure insanity and the most deep take on Ahriman at the same time fits his duality very well! Everything is a truth and a lie, and you never know where one ends and another begins. I love Thousand Sons for being crazy that way.

Thousand Sons sorcerer having rubrics carry him in a fucking palanquin was sick as fuck, I'm stealing this. Xarchos is horny for some reason and his eyes "feast on Czevak’s young and athletic body". To comment that the Inquisitor looks younger off course, what else were you thinking about, perverts? TS are so othered by the narrative (as usual), that Czevak makes up a whole new slur for them, [chaos] spawn-fondler. Lol. TS must be the honorary mpreg Legion bc once again there is pregnancy imagery and it's even more obvious than in other books. They're growing a super powerful daemon inside a planet, the planet itself is compared to an egg and a womb, and the daemon to a fetus, the daemon's gestation gets interrupted and there's a detail about it having an underdeveloped conjoined twin attached to its body. I'm sorry for Ahriman's and Xarchos' miscarriage or glad for their abortion? 😭😭😭 Ahriman lifts his ass out of the cuck chair to make fun of Czevak via his telepathic link with Xarchos. Czevak calls him a slur again ("deviant"). Ahriman who is puppeteering Xarchos sets Czevak’s harlequin coat on fire bc he wants the Atlas Infernal he assumed would be in the coat's pockets. There is no Atlas Infernal in the pockets and he's angry. Thankfully, he burned only the coat, Czevak isn't naked. Ahriman is being weirdly coquettish about torturing Czevak again. Then we get back to the pregnancy bullshit (different this time). Ahriman retreats from Xarchos' consciousness bc Xarchos gets killed by a fucking fetus (top 10 anime deaths ahh moment). Czevak has brought an Omega Minus pariah embryo in a jar and Ahriman opened it bc he's stupid (or smart? I don't know what he wanted). Xarchos is killed by it. The poor baby daemon gestating inside the planet is getting aborted by the pariah aura. Czevak escapes. Ahriman is so fanny traggot coded here that Czevak misgenders him by calling him "it". Ahriman has learned the location of Czevak’s ship from Czevak’s mind and that actually happened 50 years before their actual conversation bc the world it's happened on has a moon that's affected by a warp anomaly, it exists 50 years into the past relative to the world it orbits, so Czevak assumes Ahriman must have sent the warning to his own confused 50 years younger ass. Don't look at me like that, I was confused too.

Sorry, I'm not including everything of this in attached quotes. I don't think anybody will be that much interested in the fetus daemon or the way pariah fetus makes a psyker die. Go read Atlas Infernal if you wanna see that. Killing Xarchos with a super gross aborted pariah clone baby was still less embarrassing than the Crimson King by the way.

>Looking up, Czevak watched a further squad of Rubric Marines stomp down the nearby scree. Upon their shoulders the undead Adeptus Astartes carried a golden, pyramid-style palanquin, upon which sat an armoured, androgynous giant. He wore the gleaming, ornate armour of the Thousand Sons Traitor Legion and as he got up out of his warped throne and walked off the palanquin, his boots telekinetically carried him to the ground as if walking down invisible steps. The monster pressed his palms and dark-rune painted claws together and feasted his eyes on Czevak’s fresh face and athletic, younger body.

‘You are looking well, inquisitor,’ Xarchos observed, his own features rapidly changing, every turn and angle producing a different face. He finally settled on an unsettling reflection of the High Inquisitor’s own. ‘Far better than when I last saw you. I see the eldar have been treating you well.’

‘Their hospitality was better than yours, warp scum,’ Czevak told the sorcerer.

>‘Damn you, Xarchos,’ Czevak shot back with a smile.

‘Erudite, inquisitor. But hardly surprising. A truly learned man would not have been – for the longest time – my puppet, his strings tangled in my web of intrigue.’

‘Save it, spawn-fondler,’ Czevak called. ‘I’ve cut my puppet’s strings and seen myself for the pawn I’ve become.’

>‘Where’s that sorcerous bastard master of yours?’ Czevak asked, staring into the depths of the warp void below. ‘I would have thought he would want to see this story through to the end.’

Xarchos smiled. ‘He’s watching.’

Like a pebble dropped into a still pool, Korban Xarchos’ face sploshed and rippled. As the wrinkles radiated outward the face became still once more, but instead of Czevak’s features, the traitor’s face was now that of Ahzek Ahriman. The sorcerer beamed cerulean majesty and turned his demigod’s eyes on Czevak.

‘Inquisitor,’ Ahriman greeting Czevak with cold civility. ‘Still the maggot wriggling through the rotten flesh of galactic corruption, I see.’

‘Until maggots devour yours, deviant,’ Czevak replied.

>Before Czevak had time to reply, the sorcerer waved two casual fingers at him. The inquisitor’s Harlequin coat was suddenly aflame. The enchanted blaze flashed through the garment, incinerating the item about Czevak’s body until all that was left was ash on the breeze and the junk that the inquisitor kept in his pockets. Peering at the items piled either side of the inquisitor from his now non-existent pockets, Ahriman’s eyes glowed and narrowed.

‘Could I be so bold as to save me some time and you unbearable agony – again – by asking, inquisitor, where is the Atlas Infernal?’

‘I couldn’t tell you…’ Czevak began.

‘I really have no interest in occupying the narrow confines of your mind again, inquisitor…’ Ahriman’s voice was everywhere, bouncing around the open-cast crater and through Czevak’s mind. The Rubric Marines tightened their deathless grip on the inquisitor’s arms, holding him in place as their sorcerer lord gazed into him. ‘But if you press me.’

The speed and savage force with which the sorcerer attempted to ravage his soul surprised even Czevak.

>He re-lived the polluted presence of the sorcerer. How he had invaded Czevak’s mind once again on the surface of Melmoth’s World, with the Rubric Marines holding him still. In his feverish search for the Atlas Infernal, Ahriman had set upon Czevak’s suspicious memory of Father, but Czevak hypothesised, what if the sorcerer had seen more? Travelled back further in his memories and only in the reflection of defeat had seen Czevak give the Atlas Infernal to Klute; had seen the Scorpento Maestrale and the deep blue star outside of the bridge lancet windows. An astrotelepathic message sent to Auboron – perhaps only the simplest of warnings and locations – forwarded to a confused Ahzek Ahriman, fifty years in his past. Would the daemon sorcerer heed its own garbled counsel? He might, with nothing left to show for years of intricate planning and failed entrapment than a vanquished daemon and an Omega-Minus level soul-scalding, high up above Melmoth’s World. Czevak grunted. The Eye of Terror was certainly strange enough to support such a hypothesis.

>>>An astrotelepathic message sent to Auboron – perhaps only the simplest of warnings and locations – forwarded to a confused Ahzek Ahriman, fifty years in his past. Would the daemon sorcerer heed its own garbled counsel?

>>>Its

Don't believe me? Read this:

>‘What shames you, pawn of the False Emperor?’ Xarchos put to Czevak as the inquisitor bit back his sobbing and suffering. ‘What haunts your memories with its self-loathing and disgust?’

‘Pissed my robes… on the firing range, at Schola Byblos.’

‘Yes,’ Xarchos hissed his insistence.

> ‘One more,’ Xarchos said. ‘A deep disgrace.’

‘I ache for a girl I cannot have,’ Czevak admitted, tears streaming down the sides of his battered face.

The androgynous giant savoured Czevak’s cruel honesties. Then his face changed to that of a concerned mother, then to a cardinal world confessor with prayers and homilies tattooed into his face-flesh. ‘Czevak the deviant,’ Xarchos said.

‘She both disgusts and excites me.’

‘Continue,’ Xarchos urged, soaking up the inquisitor’s squirming mortification. ‘What is she? Xenos? Child? Mutant?’

‘Bloodlover,’ Czevak said. ‘But that is not why I long for her.’

‘Long for her?’ Xarchos repeated, drawing out Czevak’s dark truth. Callibrating the prisoner for further truths of greater significance. ‘You love her. From afar. Why not take her?’

‘I cannot defile a Living Saint of the Creed Imperial.’

‘And why not?’ the sorcerer repeated playfully.

‘She must be pure. Her reason just. She is a Saint, for Throne’s sake. It is by His Will she lives at all. She is His to do with as He will.’

‘And what would you do?’ Xarchos asked, looking up at his master. The sorcerer’s face morphed from one form to another with rapid excitement. They were getting closer to breaking him. Ahriman looked down on proceedings with the disinterest of divinity. To Czevak’s further shame, he told them.

>Czevak saw in Ahriman’s graven eyes the brightness of the fever he had planted. An unquenchable thirst for knowledge. The meme-virus. Czevak had spat into the sorcerer’s eyes just so he could infect the monster with an affliction that in the already insatiable Ahriman would become an undeniable and all-consuming obsession. An obsession that had kept Ahriman away from securing the prize. And so Czevak had given the Chaos sorcerer a thousand dangerous but time-consuming facts in order to deny him detail of apocalyptic proportions. The Counter-Clock Heart, the Black Sovereign of Sierra Sangraal, the Corpus Vivexorsectio, the location of the Obsidoculus, the fragments of the Indiga Staff. Hundreds of dark secrets – irresistible obstacles to the Black Library’s location. Xarchos began to realise that something was wrong when his usually distant master assumed control of the interrogation himself. Both questions and answers flowed freely, reducing Xarchos to silent observer. The shattered inquisitor began to draw strength from the respite his truths provided. Ahriman seemed less than himself. He was there, feverish in the moment rather than cold, controlled and everywhere at once. His desire for knowledge and answers an all-too-human hunger in comparison to his usual cool omnipotence.

>‘My lord,’ Xarchos addressed his master, ‘all these petty secrets and much more can be yours when you take the Black Library as your own. There in the alien eldar’s ancient shrine of lore you can drink your fill of the galaxy’s mystery and devour the feeble hopes of everything that walks or crawls. There, he that is more than man may become god!’

>‘You think to tell me what I will and will not do, apprentice?’

‘I live to serve you. But you are not yourself, my master,’ Korban Xarchos told him, his face now remaining that of the androgynous giant. ‘I fear this mortal has tricked or poisoned you with his weakling ways.’

>Rending a claw-like hand through his Coptic robes to reveal the withering curves of an ancient but still muscular chest, Ahriman began to ripple his fingers in a drawing motion. With some exertion, tiny droplets began to appear on his chest, blotching and collecting on the white hair of his body before drifting towards the mesmerising motion of his hand. As the last of the liquid was drawn from his enchanted bulk, Ahriman relaxed and held a fist out over Czevak’s smashed form. The stringy secretion dribbled from between the knuckles of the ancient Adeptus Astartes’ pulverising fist. Czevak had no doubt that the fell sorcerer had just used his powers to extract the raging meme-virus from his body. When he spoke, his words were as ice again.

>‘Joaqhuine…’ Czevak whispered.

The Idolatress looked down at him and with the finishing touches of her agonising regeneration complete, allowed a tear to roll down one perfect cheek.

‘I know something of this, inquisitor,’ Ahriman said. ‘To destroy the thing you love. What were you trying to do? Harness the secrets of resurrection? Did she know that eventually she would be destined for a laboratory? That her gifts were meant for your Corpse-Emperor, in the vain hope that you might resurrect Him one day?’

>‘No!’ Czevak roared, writhing feebly on the altar. Above him danced the hands of Xarchos, a pushing motion telekinetically launching Joaqhuine’s thrashing body back toward the oven’s open door.

‘Czevak!’ she screeched as the flames re-ignited and the blast wave of heat from the inferno rolled across the pancratitaph chamber. As the Idolatress’s body was swallowed by the blaze and the incinerator door slammed shut under Xarchos’s control, Czevak could hear her screams. The screams of a woman dying, slowly burning alive but pleading for a swift death. A finality that the Thousand Sons would never allow her.

‘Release her!’ Czevak howled. ‘Release her! Now!’

>‘What is sacrifice, inquisitor, if you’ve nothing to lose? What is loss without love? A brother’s love? A father’s? An Adeptus Astartes’ love for his Legion? A subject for his Emperor? A man for a woman?’ Ahriman asked. Omnipotent. Everywhere. ‘I beg of you, inquisitor. This is all so unnecessary. Give me the runecodes to the warp gate on Etiamnum III and I can end this pointless suffering.’

>‘I have the runecodes,’ Ahriman said with impassive triumph.

‘Then the webway is ours,’ Xarchos said.

‘Assume your battle-plate, my apprentice,’ Ahriman said, lifting himself from Czevak’s defeated form and laying the clawed fingertips of a huge hand on Xarchos’ shoulder. ‘Land our troops in preparation for a cross-dimensional assault.’

>Clutching his Black Staff the Chaos sorcerer waved a palm at the Great Harlequin. The pistols suddenly exploded, their detonating containment flasks vaporising the surrounding deck in a ball of sun-furious plasma. Despite Ahriman’s efforts, the raw, white heat of the detonation set alight his Coptic robes and melted the cerulean flesh from the tip of his nose and patches across one side of his face. The sorcerer brought his clawed fingers up to the exposed tendons and roasted muscle before tearing the robes from his ancient, muscular frame. As the bubble of plasma and destruction receded, it became obvious that the Great Harlequin had disappeared once again.

>Klute was forced to break off. Mammoshad had provoked the High Inquisitor to frenzied apoplexy with some lie, twisted truth or daemonic silence and Czevak had seized the hexagrammic stamphammer and was smashing indiscriminate purity runes into both the bouncing coin and Torqhuil’s heretical construct. Czevak was roaring at the coin and the daemon was bawling back through the speaking trumpet.

‘Bastard thing!’

‘Grow to enjoy it I think you did, Bronislaw!’ Mammoshad squawked. ‘Got a taste for victimhood and the lash. Enjoyed Ahriman inside you, I think, violating your mind and polluting your spirit.’

Klute grabbed his friend from behind, a hand digging into each thrashing shoulder. Torqhuil pulled his device of daemonic congress away from the swing of the hammer and the High Inquisitor’s flailing boots.

😳😳😳

>>>Got a taste for victimhood and the lash. Enjoyed Ahriman inside you, I think, violating your mind and polluting your spirit.’

Why did Czevak enjoy Ahriman inside him and why is this bitch ass daemon kinkshaming him for that

>Czevak felt as though he were in the presence of a god – or at least one that aspired to such exaltation. The air was bleached of all else but the being’s will. A cold desire – devoid of the fever of human passion – saturated Czevak.

😳😳😳 Listen I took this one a bit out of context ("A purity of purpose so powerful as to scorch lesser evils and the taint of corruption from its unswerving path." is the next line that explains the nature of the said desire) but that was still a weird thing to say you know

>The inquisitor’s eyes widened in panic and once again he began to convulse against the restriction of his bonds. Ahriman’s blazing eyes narrowed before the sorcerer laid his gauntlet upon the aged inquisitor’s chest. The spasms subsided and the cramps faded to terrifying memories.

‘Like all others – of the flesh, of the other, of the ether – I am driven by need. I would no less allow your heart to stop beating than I would allow my own, inquisitor – for both now beat beyond their natural inclination. They beat that I might learn the rune designations for the eldar warp gate on Etiamnum III. They beat that I might breach the eldar webway without invitation. That I might enter, as you have, the hallowed halls of the Black Library of Chaos and further learn my fate, the fate of this galaxy and the relationship between.’

Ahriman touches Czevak's chest and keeps being a pervert towards old men as usual.

> Czevak threw forward his face and spat a stringy gruel of blood and saliva into Ahriman’s blazing eyes. Blinking, the Thousand Sons sorcerer unclipped one of his gauntlets and brought a glowing hand to his god-like face. With delicate fingertips he wiped the blood and spit from his eyes before rubbing the spittle between fingers and thumb with interest.

If I had a nickel each time someone spat in Ahriman’s face and survived that, I would have 2 nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

>‘For all this talk of hearts beating,’ Ahriman told him with a cool, celestial certainty, ‘blood is not my medium. But I have seen what you may do and what you will do. Please forgive me the horror we both know you will make me put you through.’

Beautiful excerpts from Atlas Infernal by Rob Sanders:

>The Hexenguard were no longer hulking figures in blessed plate but Traitor Space Marines in ancient power armour, helmeted Thousand Sons in blistering azure, clutching bolters and waiting obediently for orders. The only armoured figures without helmets were the cloaked sorcerers who acted like lieutenants on the bridge, their unhealthy features glowing with dark power and minds in constant congress with the warp. Chief among these was an androgynous tyrant standing where Sister Archangela Voightdecker had been.

>>>ANDROGYNOUS TYRANT

‘Welcome to the Impossible Fortress,’ the sorcerer leered. Gone was the androgynous monster. His face had changed and seemed in constant motion: a Cadian grimace, a courtesan’s smile, a nightworld barbarian, the alien eyes of an eldar, the rictus grin of a servitor, Voightdecker, Czevak himself. The transformations continued, less a morphing of the flesh than an elusive trick of the eye.

>>>Courtesan's smile

Ahriman is also canonically a professional catfish lmao

>‘Thank you for remaining with me, Ctesias,’ said Ahriman. Ctesias blinked, nodded, uncertain of how to respond.

Ahriman/Ctesias yaoi for the whole 5 of us Ahriman enjoyers. Mwah! I love my mutuals

I think fundamentally, Ashirra Malkavians aren't that much different from others. West Asia wasn't backwards when it came to mental health at all, scientists of Islamic Golden Age wrote very extensively on the topic. Ibn Sina and Al-Razi described what we would call mania, depression and psychosis today, and distinguished between melancholia and madness. The oldest manuscript on bipolar disorder, "Treatise on Melancholy", was written in 10th century by Ibn Imran. If anything, Golden Age Ashirra should be better than Camarilla, not worse. The stygmatizing, institutional model we know today comes from Western colonial powers.

The first archetype that comes to my mind when thinking of Ashirra Malks is a dervish who appears to be mad, yeah. The Malamatiyya are a perfect fit, they cultivated blame ("malama") as a spiritual discipline and broke conventions to humble their ego and root out hypocrisy. But that can't be all ofc.

I think a good angle for an Ashirra chronicle is the question whether vampirism, and therefore Malkavian affliction, is a physical sickness or a test from God. The region has strong arguments for both positions, since it's deeply religious and has a history of scientific discoveries that were centuries ahead of Europe. Islam as a whole is less hostile to the supernatural, the Quran and Hadith very explicitly recognize the Jinn as sentient creatures who are capable of both good and evil, so it is not a stretch to think of vampires who don't want to part with their Muslim identity. Yet, even those of Muslim identity understand the importance of scientific method. A potential story hook is a Golden Age scientist trying to study the supernatural and cure a Malkavian of their affliction. Characters don't know that they're characters in a ttrpg and that the affliction isn't gonna go away. I'm always against giving characters too much info about the world, there is no worldwide understanding of vampiric condition, clans and the patriarchs in my headcanons. Everything is regional and viewed from the lenses that sound the most normal to the time of somebody's embrace. There's another post about Ashirra as a whole if you're interested.

There's a very interesting but often ignored religious concept of predestination, and I speak about Malkavians as much as about vampires as a whole bc they are linked in this. Keep in mind that this is a Sunni belief. Think of God like someone watching a movie for the second time, He already knows exactly what will happen on screen, but the characters are still making their choices for the first time. Nothing about this belief is evil, it still assumes that individuals have free choice. But in certain people, this belief sometimes becomes very ugly. A vampire might attribute everything bad that happened to them to God, that He already knows that the vampire in question is irredeemably evil and is punishing them accordingly. It must hit Malkavians harder bc they have been punished twice, with vampirism and mental illness. This is not a mainstream Sunni belief, this is actually a major sin (despairing of God's mercy), but it might be a belief some characters genuinely hold. It is also possible for an individual Malkavian to seek purification and even martyrdom, if they believe their condition to be a spiritual test.

Modern nights should be especially bad for Malks bc they often treat religious and scientific as incompatible. OCD-like compulsion could create a lot of inner conflict because of the concept of waswasa, the whispers of doubt. They really could think Shaitan is talking to them. Or other characters who know about their compulsion might think this way. Though once again, this is not the opinion of the majority. I just think it's a great theme to explore.

VtM doesn't understand how history works, my biggest gripe is with Kindred having a unified opinion on themselves, their clans and progenitors, when realistically, people shouldn't know shit about Malkav. A Kindred from 8th century Baghdad might believe that Malkav was a man of black bile and extreme humours disbalance, and a Kindred from a 13th century Persian Sufi order might believe Malkav was a saint who cloaked himself in madness to protect his station from worldly fame. And a Salafi Kindred might believe that Malkav is Dajjal, the false messiah who will be slain by Prophet Isa at the end of times. The pragmatic view from any rural area of any time and place might be that Malkav is a powerful Jinn who was bound by a sorcerer or a saint, and his madness is simply his nature bleeding into his host. I think WoD's lore about the Jinn is cringe and irl Jinn are more interesting and do more justice to the region. A modern secularist Kindred might think Malkav was a man with a severe neurological condition mythologized by pre-scientific age, and that vampirism itself is a virus. Any esoteric Kindred might think that Malkav witnessed the cosmic truth of the world and had his mind shattered. This type of Kindread will certainly treat ravings as coded revelations.

The best Ashirra companions for a Malkavian character, imo, are Banu Haqim, Toreadors and Lasombra. BH can be both compassionate scientists and extremists wanting to destroy them, Toreadors are more likely to treat them as humans and not a walking proof of any philosophical concept, since their main concern is beauty, and Lasombra have great potential for an esoteric approach. Zahir/Batin dichotomy (outer and hidden meaning) works very well with Lasombra's theme of darkness, also black is a Shia color, and the color of Abbasid court.

Canon and fanon love to depict friendship between Malks and Nosferatu, and I would strongly advise against that. Nosferatu being an Ashirra leader is honestly laughable in itself. Inner virtue compensating for outer deformity is a Protestant trope, it has little place in Ashirra. In Islam, especially so in Persianate world, beauty isn't a mask for virtue, it's virtue made visible. The Sufi tradition held that divine beauty manifests in the physical world, and ugliness, by contrast, was seen as a sign of spiritual ugliness and a distance from God.

Nosferatu look like shit, it would make more sense for them to be called najis, ritual impurity, than respected for inner virtue. If a Nosferatu has permanent wounds festering with pus, they're perpetually unclean and exiled from religious community. Their prayer doesn't count bc they can't perform wudu, ritual ablution, this is much darker and existential than western "woe is me, I'm ugly". A Malamati-like Malkavian might be friends with a Nosferatu, but that would be a minority stance. I think most would rather not make their social position worse. Btw Nosferatu are better to be associated with the ghoul, the actual middle eastern "vampires". They're the Jinn that haunt deserts and graveyards, feed on corpses and turn into hyenas or young and attractive men and women to lure people to their deaths. Works well with their animalism and mask of a thousand faces.

If you want darker stuff, check the monastery of St Anthony of Qozhaya in Lebanon and its cave of the mad (people were chained in a cave in expectation that the saint will come and cure them). Also you can check mad caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah for inspiration, he's called the Fatimid Nero for his insane decrees. You can even make him a vampire or related to supernaturals in any other way since he disappeared under mysterious circumstances. For a time he forced Cairo to sleep during the day and work during the night. Holy fools are called majdhub, they were very common in Syria and Egypt between 16th and 18th century, a holy fool Malkavian might be an advisor who is allowed to call out the local leader on their bullshit and survive that only because of their holy fool status. But perhaps the most interesting idea is to divorce Malkavians from the western idea of mental illness altogether, and to make them truly Islamic by basing their affliction on stories like the one about the love between Majnun and Layla. Majnun literally means "madman" and "Jinn-possessed". He is a man consumed by emotion so vast and overwhelming that it breaks the frame of ordinary human existence, his madness is a state of transient divine ecstasy he can't contain. So a Malkavian can be Majnun, whether in love with his Layla, God, an idea or a place, and the love unmakes them in a way that looks like madness to others. There are several degrees of love in Sufi tradition, ishq is the one that overwhelms all reason.