Drach'nyen

The Atlas Infernal

The Atlas Infernal is the prophetic tome carried by Zaraphiston the Sorcerer, Abaddon's senior Tzeentchian advisor across the first nine Black Crusades. Whether the Atlas is itself a daemon, a Tzeentchian artefact, or a paper-and-ink book whose ink writes itself, is a question the Atlas declines to answer. What is recorded is that the Atlas indicated, sometime in the early Black Crusade cycle, the existence of a blade hidden inside a Tzeentchian construct called the Maze. The Atlas named the blade Drach'nyen — "the Sword of Endings" — and named a path through the Maze that no other source confirmed.

Abaddon assembled an expedition. The expedition entered the Maze. The expedition's records, where they survive, were kept by Iskandar Khayon of the Thousand Sons in the cycle of memoirs the Imperium later catalogued as the Black Legion testimonies. They do not agree with each other on what the Maze looked like, or how long the expedition lasted, or who died first.

The Maze of Tzeentch

The Maze of Tzeentch is a region of the warp shaped like a city, like a library, like a circuit-board, like the inside of a skull — depending on who is asked and when. Tzeentch's lesser daemons direct travellers through its corridors with deliberately false signs; greater daemons watch from above and adjust the maze in response to what the travellers learn. The maze is, by Inquisitorial doctrine, an instrument designed to extract value from the desperate by making them pay a price they have not understood until they leave.

Abaddon's expedition lost members at every gate. Some were taken by other daemons. Some chose to stay. Some, more disturbingly, were lost in transit — present in one chamber and not in the next, no body, no breach. The Atlas's path proved correct in the sense that it led where it had promised. It did not promise the cost.

I am older than the Imperium. I am older than your father. I am the patience of a god.

— Drach'nyen, attributed Abaddon's recovery

The Recovery

Drach'nyen was found in a chamber the Khayon memoir calls "the Last Room." It rested point-down in a pedestal of black glass, lit by no source the visitors could identify. The daemon bound inside the blade had been speaking for an unknown duration to whoever entered. It is not recorded what the previous visitors decided.

Abaddon's confrontation with the blade was, by Khayon's reconstruction, a negotiation rather than a duel. The daemon offered the sword. Abaddon accepted on terms. The terms, like most things Tzeentch attaches to his gifts, were partly disclosed and partly withheld. Whether the disclosed terms were honoured and whether the withheld terms have come due is the open question of the Black Crusades.

The Daemon Within

The daemon bound within Drach'nyen is, by the Ordo Malleus' restricted classification, a Greater Daemon of Tzeentch of an order that has been catalogued only three times in the Imperial archive. Banishment by force-weapon in single combat has been achieved twice in ten thousand years, both times by Grey Knights Grand Masters and at appalling cost. The daemon's true name is not recorded in any Imperial document; whether Abaddon knows it, and whether knowing it would matter, are theological questions the Ordo Malleus retreats from.

The blade's cuts pass through Astartes power armour as if through fabric. Ceramite, adamantium, and prayer all fail equally. Only force-weapons of equivalent grade can parry Drach'nyen; conventional power-weapons shatter on contact, their disruption fields collapsed by the warp-temperature differential at the moment of impact. The Imperial counter-doctrine, established after the Third Black Crusade, is to never engage Abaddon at arms-length when the blade is drawn.

The Voice

The sword speaks. Abaddon does not always answer. The daemon's suggestions during engagements are recorded by the Word Bearer scribes who travel with the Black Legion command staff; the suggestions are not always taken. When they are taken, the engagement's outcome is — by the Word Bearers' own discomfited observation — usually disproportionately decisive. When they are refused, the engagement is merely won.

The blade's voice is, in the testimony of two captured Word Bearer scribes whose accounts the Inquisition has cross-referenced, the same voice in both their experiences: a man's voice, conversational, occasionally amused, never raised. The blade does not threaten. It suggests. The scribes who recorded its suggestions found themselves making decisions they had not intended to make. Both eventually requested reassignment.

The Edge

Drach'nyen is recorded as having cut the following in combat: Astartes Terminators of three loyalist Chapters; a Custodian Guardian in the Third Black Crusade and a second in the Thirteenth; an unknown number of Grey Knights at the Battle of the Fang and the post-Cadia engagements; the Cadian Pylons themselves, in the moment the planet broke. That last cut is not confirmed by Imperial witnesses — the only post-Cadia witness statement is Abaddon's own, which the Imperium dismisses on principle. But the pylons fell on the engagement's timeline at the moment Abaddon would have been within strike distance, and no other Black Legion weapon is known to be capable of severing an anti-warp construct of that age.

If the blade did sever the pylons, the implication is significant beyond the immediate tactical: an artefact handed to Abaddon by Tzeentch was the proximate cause of the Cicatrix Maledictum's opening. That argument, the Ordo Malleus has not formally adopted, but neither has it formally refused.

The Final Question

Whether Abaddon ultimately controls Drach'nyen or Drach'nyen ultimately controls Abaddon is the question Imperial Inquisitorial pathologists have been asking for two thousand years. The kill count rises regardless. The Black Crusades succeed, fail, and continue. Abaddon does not appear to age. The blade does not appear to grow restless. The Inquisition's restricted-access reading is that the question itself is the wrong one — that the relationship is not control but partnership, and that partnership's terms were signed in the Last Room before any Imperial witness existed to record them.

The Ordo Malleus' standing instruction, classified at a tier the Inquisition does not name aloud, is that Drach'nyen is not to be recovered. Destruction in place, if engagement permits, is preferable to any custodial outcome. The instruction has not yet been tested. The blade has not yet been lost.