Be'lakor

The First

Be'lakor was the first mortal to be raised to Daemon Princehood by the Chaos Gods. He served all four Powers during the long shadow-wars of M30, was favoured beyond any of his peers, and was promised — by his own report — supremacy over every subsequent Daemon Prince forever. He led the Chaos forces of the era. He won battles whose names no surviving Imperial record contains.

Then the Chaos Gods cursed him. The specific transgression is not agreed upon even by Chaos theology. The punishment was perpetual stasis at his current rank — promotion to greater divinity forever denied, but death also forever denied, leaving him to watch every subsequent Daemon Prince surpass him.

The Shadow Master

Be'lakor's response to the curse has been ten thousand years of patient, manipulation-based work to engineer his eventual elevation past the gods' restrictions. He has appeared as an advisor to multiple mortal Chaos warlords, offering schemes whose long-term beneficiary is always himself. He has betrayed each warlord he has advised, generally several centuries after the advice was given.

He is, by Chaos politics, the most consistently unreliable Daemon Prince active. He is also, by Imperial intelligence, the most strategically capable.

I was first. I will be first again. The wait does not diminish the certainty.

— Be'lakor, attributed Heresy era

The Vashtorr Campaign

In the Era Indomitus Be'lakor has been the senior daemon-coordinator behind the Vashtorr the Arkifane campaign — the late-Indomitus Chaos drive to seize the Dark Angels' Rock and breach the Imperial Webway sections it conceals. The campaign is, by Imperial intelligence reading, a Be'lakor scheme: the immediate beneficiary appears to be Vashtorr, but the long-term beneficiary is the First Daemon Prince.

The Lion's recent return has, by Be'lakor's preferred trajectory, complicated the campaign. Be'lakor is, by chaos theology, patient enough to wait the Lion out.

Status

Be'lakor is currently active in the Era Indomitus. He coordinates with no single Chaos warband formally. He coordinates with all of them informally when the long-game requires it. He is — by his own assessment — closer to breaking the gods' curse now than he has been at any prior point in ten thousand years.

The Imperium does not have a doctrine for engaging him. The doctrine is, in functional terms, to identify whichever mortal warlord he is currently advising and remove that warlord.

The Mortal Conqueror

Be'lakor was, by the surviving Word Bearers theological archive and the Aeldari pre-Imperial records, the most-decorated mortal warlord in the pre-Imperial era. He commanded a series of campaigns across the human-inhabited regions of the galaxy during the Long Night, defeating Imperial precursor-states and assembling under his rule a polity larger than any pre-Crusade Imperial holding.

The Chaos gods, then newly aware of mortal capacity for greatness, observed him collectively. Each of the four offered him patronage. Be'lakor accepted all four. He thereby became the first mortal to be rewarded with daemonhood by the unanimous decision of the Chaos pantheon — and the first to discover that simultaneous patronage by four mutually-antagonistic gods is a curse rather than a gift.

The Curse

Be'lakor's reward — daemonhood without the patronage of a single god — produced an immortal Daemon Prince of unparalleled raw power and exactly zero institutional support. He has neither Khorne's hordes nor Tzeentch's plots nor Nurgle's gifts nor Slaanesh's allure. The four gods watch him; none acknowledge him.

The other Daemon Princes, who hold their thrones through god-specific patronage, treat Be'lakor as a cautionary precedent and avoid contact with him. Be'lakor's millennia have been a single sustained attempt to engineer a position in which one or more of the four gods will be forced to publicly acknowledge him as a vassal — at which point he can begin the long process of acquiring institutional support. The attempt has not succeeded. He continues.

Vashtorr and the Arks

Be'lakor's recent M42 campaigns have aligned with Vashtorr the Arkifane — a Chaos forge-power who has emerged from the warp as a new daemonic entity not aligned with any of the four gods. The alignment is opportunistic on both sides. Vashtorr needs Be'lakor's experience navigating four-god politics; Be'lakor needs Vashtorr's manufacturing infrastructure for whatever campaign he is preparing.

The Arks of Omen campaign — Vashtorr's M42 attempt to claim the Dark Angels' fortress-monastery the Rock as a forge-relic — was Be'lakor's testing ground for the partnership. The campaign was inconclusive. The partnership continues. Imperial Inquisitorial reports on Vashtorr's intentions invariably end with the same line: "The Shadow Master is involved."