The Avatar of Khaine

The Idol in the Shrine

There is a shrine at the heart of every Aeldari Craftworld that no farseer enters lightly and no Guardian enters at all. Within it stands a great idol of black iron, cold as the void between stars, and within that idol sleeps a sliver of Kaela Mensha Khaine, the Aeldari God of War. He was whole once, in the elder days of the War in Heaven, before the birth-scream of Slaanesh — the Dark Prince, the Chaos god of excess — shattered him in his final duel and scattered his murdering soul across the wandering worldships. Each fragment cooled into iron and silence. So the war god waits, frozen mid-stride, until the Aeldari have need of slaughter so absolute that only a god of slaughter will answer it. The idol does not pray. It hungers.

The Young King

To wake the god, the Aeldari must give him a life. Before a great war the warriors of the Craftworld choose a Young King — a champion of the Aspect Shrines, often a son of the Striking Scorpions or the Howling Banshees — and lead him in solemn procession to the Shrine of Khaine. There he is sealed within the iron idol and offered to the sleeping fragment. The metal drinks him. His will, his memory, his name are burned away as fuel, and the warrior becomes the living core around which the Avatar takes shape. What rises is no longer the Young King and not quite a god, but the two fused in fire. On Biel-Tan, the war-craftworld whose every voyage is a crusade, this rite is performed without the hesitation other Aeldari show; the Swordwind hosts wake their Avatar as readily as a soldier draws a blade.

He goes into the iron a man, and the god comes out. There is no third thing. There is no return.

— Exarch of the Striking Scorpions, on the rite of the Young King

The Shape That Rises

The thing that steps from the shrine towers over the tallest Aeldari, a figure of blackened iron through whose joints and wounds runs molten metal like blood that has not yet learned to cool. It weeps fire. Its eyes are furnace-mouths. Where it sets its tread the deck-stone and the battlefield earth alike are scorched to glass, so that the path of the Avatar can be read in the ruin behind it long after it has passed. In its grip it carries the Wailing Doom — Khaine's own weapon, which the Aeldari name the Suin Daellae, the Doom that Wails — a blade that howls as it falls and can shift between sword, spear and a gout of dragon-fire. No armour devised by mortal hands has been proven against it.

The Blessing of the Bloody-Handed

The Avatar's gift to its kin is not protection but transcendence. Aeldari are a people who feel every emotion with ruinous intensity — it was that very excess that birthed Slaanesh and damned them — yet in the presence of the war god something colder descends. Warriors who fight in the shadow of the Avatar fall into the Khaine-trance, a focused battle-calm in which fear, grief and hesitation are burned out of them as surely as the Young King was burned away. Aspect Warriors fight harder and farseers steady; the host moves as a single edged thought. The Aeldari call this state the blessing of the Bloody-Handed God, and they pay for it dearly, for the same trance that makes them invincible for an afternoon leaves the survivors hollow when the iron lies down again.

The Death That Does Not Hold

The Avatar can be brought low, after a fashion, though it is a labour that has broken armies. When it takes a grievous wound it does not bleed red but pours molten iron, the glowing metal of its veins running out until the figure stiffens and goes dark, the borrowed fire sinking back toward sleep. When Hive Fleet Kraken fell upon Craftworld Iyanden, the Avatar strode out to goad the great Tyranid into single combat — only to be set upon by a press of Carnifexes, and it was the corsair prince Yriel, with the cursed Spear of Twilight, who at last struck the beast down. For an Avatar's death is never the god's death. Every Craftworld idol holds the same shattered sliver of Khaine, and a fragment laid low on one worldship can wake again at another when the next war demands it. The Aeldari mourn the Young King who is gone forever; the god they merely lay to rest, knowing he is patient.

What the Iron Dreams

What, then, does the molten god dream of in the long dark between wars? The Ynnari — the rising death-cult gathered around Yvraine and the nascent god Ynnead — preach that should Ynnead one day devour Slaanesh and free the stolen Aeldari dead, Khaine's scattered slivers will at last be drawn back into one whole and terrible war god, restored to the reborn pantheon. The Craftworld orthodoxy answers that ten thousand years of solitary killing have made each fragment its own thing, and that no power could reassemble them without unmaking what they have become. Until that argument is settled, the iron stands in its shrine on Biel-Tan and on a hundred worldships besides, weeping its slow fire in the dark — a buried thunderstorm, waiting for the blood that will tell it the hour of murder has come round again.

We do not worship the war god. We endure him, the way one endures a wound that has not yet been struck.

— Spiritseer of Biel-Tan