Be'lakor

Be'lakor is the First Daemon Prince — the original mortal creature to be elevated to daemonhood through the combined power and blessing of all four Chaos Gods — and he is one of the most ancient, most powerful, and most embittered entities in the galaxy. His story stretches back to the earliest ages of the universe, before the rise of the Empire, before the great civilizations of the Aeldari or the Necrons reached their zenith, to a time when Chaos was still young and the Dark Gods were still learning to interact with the material world. Be'lakor was their first successful experiment in mortal corruption — a being of such ambition and such power that all four gods agreed, for the only time in their eternal existence, to elevate him together, each contributing a portion of their essence to transform a mortal warlord into something far greater and far more terrible.

The ascension that should have been Be'lakor's ultimate triumph became instead his greatest torment. The Dark Gods, having created the first Daemon Prince, immediately began to regret their generosity. Be'lakor's power was too great, his ambition too vast, and his independence too threatening to the cosmic order that the gods maintained through their endless competition and mutual antagonism. A Daemon Prince owing allegiance to all four gods and none of them — a creature whose power rivaled that of the greatest daemons and whose will was not bound to any single patron — represented a variable that the Dark Gods could not control and would not tolerate. They punished Be'lakor for the very qualities that had earned him his ascension, stripping him of much of his power and cursing him to exist in a state of diminished potency that mocked the heights he had once achieved.

The curse of Be'lakor — the punishment that the gods imposed and that has defined his existence for millennia — manifests in his shadow form, a state of being in which the Daemon Prince exists as a creature of darkness and immateriality, able to influence the material world only through shadows, whispers, and the corruption of those mortals weak enough to serve as his instruments. Be'lakor can manifest physically, but his corporeal form is unstable, flickering between solidity and shadow, and the effort of maintaining a physical presence drains his power in ways that limit the duration and effectiveness of his interventions in the material world. This cursed existence — able to see and desire but unable to fully grasp, powerful enough to destroy armies but unable to maintain his presence long enough to conquer worlds — has driven Be'lakor to a state of rage and resentment that has only intensified over the millennia.

Yet Be'lakor is far from powerless, and the mistake of underestimating him has been made by countless adversaries throughout galactic history, invariably to their permanent regret. Even in his diminished state, the First Daemon Prince commands sorcerous abilities of terrifying potency, can call upon daemonic legions that owe him allegiance from debts incurred in ages past, and possesses a strategic intelligence that has been honed by millennia of experience. His shadow form, while a limitation, is also a weapon — he can appear anywhere that shadows exist, can eavesdrop on conversations and spy on military preparations from the darkness itself, and can corrupt the minds and souls of mortals through the dreams and visions that he projects through the shadow realm that is his prison and his domain.

In the current era, with the Great Rift tearing the galaxy asunder and the barrier between the material world and the Warp thinner than it has been since the Fall of the Aeldari, Be'lakor's power has surged. The opening of the Great Rift has created conditions that allow the First Daemon Prince to manifest more fully and more frequently than at any point in millennia, and he has seized this opportunity with characteristic ambition and ruthlessness. His campaigns across the galaxy have grown bolder and more devastating, and his schemes — always complex, always patient, always aimed at the eventual restoration of his full power — have taken on a new urgency that suggests the Dark Master believes his moment of triumph may finally be approaching.