Hathor Maat

Hathor Maat was the Captain of the 3rd Fellowship of the Thousand Sons Space Marine Legion during the latter days of the Great Crusade and the beginning of the Horus Heresy in the late 30th and early 31st Millennia. He also served as the Magister Templi of the XV Legion's Pavoni Cult.

Hathor Maat was present during the Fall of Prospero, when the Space Wolves Legion, accompanied by elements of the Legio Custodes and Sisters of Silence, were ordered by the Emperor of Mankind to punish the Thousand Sons Primarch Magnus the Red for his blatant violations of the Council of Nikaea's Imperial decree absolute forbidding the use of psychic powers and the pursuit of sorcery.

Maat was one of the few survivors of the massacre of the the Thousand Sons on Prospero who escaped when their mortally wounded Primarch Magnus the Red teleported them to the Planet of the Sorcerers within the Eye of Terror. He later died during the Horus Heresy.

History[]

Hathor Maat was born on Prospero, and joined the ranks of the XV Legion, newly renamed the Thousand Sons, after they were reunited with their lost gene-sire. He was a member of one of the earliest intakes of potential Neophytes.

His early career as an Astartes is not well known, and he first appeared in recorded history after being seconded to the Emperor's Children in their earliest days as they fought alongside the Luna Wolves.

As Hathor Maat told it, he had caught the Phoenician's eye with his perfectly moulded features, and had fought within his sight on many an occasion. Maat's proudest possession was an Oath of Moment carved by Fulgrim himself, and fixed to his breastplate as he took his leave to return to Prospero.

As part of their training, all Captains of a Thousand Sons Fellowship (equivalent to the Legion formation of a Chapter) undertook a secondment to another Space Marine Legion to learn its ways and further the Thousand Sons' understanding of the galaxy and pursuit of knowledge.

The Great Crusade[]

By the close of the Great Crusade in the early 31st Millennium, Maat had already risen to the esteemed rank of captain of the 3rd Fellowship and served as the Magister Templi of the Pavoni Cult. The members of the Pavoni Cult tended to be the most egocentric of the known cults within the Thousand Sons Legion, as they had developed the psychic discipline known as physiokinesis.

Physiokinesis allowed the Pavoni to manipulate body chemistry and physiology within themselves as well as others, a very useful trait for a group of already superhuman warriors. Skilled practitioners of physiokinesis were able to alter their physical appearance by manipulating the physical characteristics of their facial features at will as well as making themselves immune to the harmful effects of dehydration and other physical ailments.

On the field of battle, the Pavoni were able to generate lightning by unleashing the inherent bioelectricity of their own nervous systems and focus it offensively, as well as cause the hearts of enemy warriors to explode by literally boiling the blood within their veins. When using these abilities against their foes, the Pavoni had a reputation for venality and spite which bordered on the sickening.

The Pavoni were also the designated healers of the XV Legion for as masters of biomancy they were capable of accelerating cellular growth and protein synthesis, which made them extraordinary medics who saved the lives of countless Astartes when even the Apothecaries could not.

Aghoru Campaign[]

Hathor Maat took part in the Imperial Compliance action on the world of Aghoru (officially codified in Imperial records as 28-16). This action was carried out by units of the Thousand Sons Legion who managed to achieve Compliance through simple diplomacy without bloodshed and was thus considered a great success.

Secondary combat operations were carried out against apparent Warp denizen infestation (beings known to the local population as "Elohim") within the subterranean passages of a titanic peak that stood taller than Olympic Mons on Mars. The Thousand Sons forces were further enhanced by a small unit drawn from the Space Wolves Legion during this operation.

At the height of these operations, the joint-Astartes force faced off against a pair of unidentified Chaos-corrupted xenos combat walkers similar to Titans. In an incredible, awe-inspiring display of his powerful psychic abilities, Magnus the Red faced off against one of the Titans alone and managed to bring it crashing down to the rocky ground far below.

Weakened and severely exhausted by the effort, the remaining Titan took the opportunity to strike at Magnus with its primary lance weapon. Had it not been for the heroic efforts of his fellow Captain Phosis T'Kar erected an invisible barrier of psychic force, known as a "kine-shield," around both himself and the Primarch, they would both have been killed. But extraordinary effort nearly drained T'Kar to the point of death. Only through the careful administrations of Hathor Maat was T'Kar saved from certain death.

Ark Reach Cluster Campaign[]

The Ark Reach Cluster had been discovered by the Word Bearers Legion's 47th Expeditionary Fleet; it was a group of binary stars occupied by a number of belligerent human planetary empires that rejected the Imperium's offer to become part of the Emperor's growing demesne.

This Imperial Compliance action of the Great Crusade was carried out through the combined efforts of the Thousand Sons working in concert with elements from the Space Wolves and the Word Bearers Legions. The first four star systems fell to the Word Bearers and Space Wolves. But the fifth and sixth proved more difficult, especially on the world of Helios, the cardinal world of the Avenian Empire.

The Avenians were graceful and fine-boned, their facial features sharp and angular, like the mountains in which they lived. Their bodies appeared weak and fragile, but that was a lie. Autopsies had discovered bones that were flexible and strong, and their armour was augmented with fibre-bundle muscles not dissimilar to those within Astartes Power Armour.

Ark Reach Secundus was the Imperial Cartographe designation for this world, a convenient label that began the process of assimilation before envoys were even despatched or shots fired in anger. Its people called it Heliosa, but the Imperial Army had another name for it, a name synonymous with the razor-beaked killers that were the bane of soldiers forced to assault the aerie fortresses. They called it "Shrike."

The Thousand Sons soon proved to be instrumental in breaking open the defences of the Ark Reach Cluster, their additional weight of force tipping the balance of war in favour of the Imperium. While the Word Bearers quelled the civilian population of outlying mountain cities, the Thousand Sons cleared a path for the Space Wolves to deliver the deathblow to the heart of the Avenian Empire. Only the settlement of Phoenix Crag remained and the world would be brought into successful Compliance.

The Primarchs had met the previous evening to discuss how best to assault Phoenix Crag, Leman Russ and Lorgar were both eager to utterly eradicate the city, though for very different reasons. Russ simply because it stood against him, Lorgar because its ignorance of the Emperor offended him. It would be hard to imagine three more different brothers: Russ with the bestial mask he thought fooled everyone with its bellicose savagery, and Lorgar with his altogether subtler mask that hid a face even Magnus could not fully discern.

They had spoken long into the night, each of his brothers vying for the upper hand. Phoenix Crag would not be like the other mountain cities of Heliosa, its records destroyed, its artefacts smashed and its importance forgotten. Magnus would save the history of this isolated outpost of humanity, and reclaim its place in the grand pageant of human endeavour. This world had survived the nightmare of Old Night, and deserved no less.

The following day both the Thousand Sons and Space Wolves Legions, each led by their respective Primarchs, assaulted the final bastion of resistance. Ahzek Ahriman's 1st Fellowship linked with Hathor Maat's 3rd Fellowship in a gorge of artisans' workshops, and scout elements of the Prospero Spireguard joined them in a region of hollowed-out silo peaks. Leman Russ and his 1st Great Company had dropped directly onto the silver mountain's highest peak, extinguishing its eternal flame and toppling the symbols of rulership.

The Hearthguard of the Phoenix Court valiantly opposed the surging, unstoppable force of the Space Wolves, but they had been torn to scraps and hurled from the mountaintop. The defeated Avenian kings offered terms of surrender, but Leman Russ was deaf to such pleas. He had sworn words of doom upon his Legion's Grand Annulus, and the Wolf King would never break an oath for something as trivial as mercy.

The Space Wolves tore down through the mountain, an unstoppable force of nature, their blades and bolts gutting the defenders' ranks like a butcher with a fresh carcass. Nothing was left in their wake, the mountain city, a work of art, utterly vandalised by thoughtless brutality and wanton savagery. Behind the warriors of Russ was only death, and before them was their next target for destruction: the Great Library of the Phoenix Crag, where Magnus the Red and Phosis T'Kar's 2nd Fellowship stood in ordered ranks. Finally, the Space Wolves rampage was halted.

Both Ahriman's and Maat's forces linked up with their fellow Battle-Brothers to assist in forming a line of defence against the battle-crazed Space Wolves. Enraged at what he perceived as his brother's betrayal, the Wolf King let forth with a howl of pure rage, cold jagged and merciless. It was the rage of a hunter's fury denied.

The force of psychic might was too powerful for any normal mind, and killed many Battle-Brothers within the ranks of the Thousand Sons. This psychic shockwave killed almost every member of the Athanaean Cult in the 2nd Fellowship, and most of the Athanaeans who weren't killed outright were reduced to drooling lackwits.

The Great Company of Amlodhi Skarssen charged the implacable and immovable bulwark formed by the Thousand Sons, their charge unstoppable, elemental power. Enraged by his feral brother's shortsightedness, Magnus was more than willing to kill every last Space Wolf in order to preserve the knowledge within the Phoenix Crag. For though the Thousand Sons had not started this fight, they would more than be happy to finish it.

Magnus ordered Hathor Maat and the Pavoni of the 3rd Fellowship to take the Space Wolves down. The captain of the 3rd Fellowship hammered a fist into his chest and directed his ferocious will to aiding his Battle-Brothers. Brother Hastar stood next to him as his fellow warriors of the Pavoni unleashed the full force of their bio-manipulation.

Unseen currents of aetheric energy sliced into the Space Wolves, blocking neural transmitters, redirecting electrical impulses in the brain and rapidly deoxygenating the blood flowing from their lungs. The effect was instantaneous. The Space Wolves' push faltered as their bodies rebelled. Limbs spasmed, heart muscles fibrillated and warriors lost all physical autonomy, jerking like the maddened dolls of a demented puppeteer. Chief Librarian Azhek Ahriman tried to talk some sense into his gene-sire, before the situation spun out of control.

The fighting only ceased when Hastar, an Astartes of the 1st Fellowship, underwent the cursed mutational "flesh-change" during the battle. Ahriman and one of his fellow captains fought to hold Hastar's body down, but the changes wracking his body were as apocalyptic as they were catastrophic. With the gurgle of wet meat and the crack of malformed bones, Hastar's body was suddenly upright, though any semblance of limbs was impossible to pick out in his erupting flesh.

Swelling bulk and crackling energy patterns writhed across his flesh, and his screams turned to bubbling gibbers of maniacal laughter. The Thousand Sons scattered from Hastar's terrible new form, horrified and terrified in equal measure. This was their greatest fear returned to haunt them, a horror from their past long thought buried.

A dreadful, wracking sickness quickly seized all the other Thousand Sons present and their innards began to rebel against their fixed shapes, their entire bodies trembling with the desire for a new form. A surging wave of power erupted as Magnus the Red stepped towards the hideously transformed Hastar. Unchecked energy had destroyed the warrior of the Pavoni, but it empowered Magnus.

The creature Hastar had become reached out to Magnus, as though to embrace him, and the Primarch opened his arms to receive him with forgiveness and mercy. But before the Crimson King could help his stricken son, a thunderous bang sounded and Hastar's body exploded as a single, explosive round detonated within his chest.

This was one of the first ever recorded incident of an Astartes killing another and the first known time a member of the Thousand Sons Legion was killed by a member of the Space Wolves Legion. Only through the timely intervention of Lorgar did the two Primarchs not come to blows. This act of calculated brutality was the first wedge to be driven between Leman Russ and Magnus the Red.

Council of Nikaea[]

As one of Magnus' senior captains, Hathor Maat had the honour of escorting his Primarch to the Council of Nikaea, and stood resolutely at his Primarch's side during the Emperor's pronouncement against the further use of psychic abilities or the pursuit of forbidden knowledge in regards to the Warp, such as sorcery. Following the Emperor's Decree Absolute, Magnus and his Thousand Sons could not depart Nikaea fast enough. The bulk of the XV Legion returned to their homeworld of Prospero, and unknown to them, events would soon transpire that would prevent them from ever leaving it again.

Despite the Emperor's decree, Magnus continued his forbidden pursuit of knowledge into the arcane. Meanwhile the other Legions continued to earn glory in battle; the Emperor's Children on Laeran, the Luna Wolves on One-Forty-Twenty, the Ultramarines at Mescalor. It had been over two standard years since the Ark Reach campaign and yet the Thousand Sons sat idle while their brothers made war. The Primarch has had all his warriors buried in their cults' libraries after their return to Prospero.

Magnus had been keeping a monstrous secret from his captains while he worked feverishly and alone in his private library and the vaults beneath the Prosperine capital city of Tizca. Amon and Ankhu Anen, Guardian of the Great Library of Prospero and member of the Corvidae Cult, had shared Ahriman's knowledge that something was wrong, but even their combined power was unable to pierce the veils of the future to see what so concerned their Primarch.

Gathering the members of the Rehati within his private sanctum, Magnus revealed to his sons that he had foreseen a terrifying vision of the Warmaster Horus falling from grace and dragging the burgeoning Imperium of Man into a war more terrible than any of them could imagine -- an Age of Darkness that had been prophesied tens of thousands of standard years before by the ancient Aegyptos of Old Terra.

Though he did not exactly know the means by which Horus would fall, all he could perceive from his vision is that something primordial and corrupt would take root in his soul. Magnus had foreseen that the Luna Wolves Legion would soon be making war on a moon of the world of Davin, and the fates were conspiring to fell Horus with a weapon of dreadful sentience. In his weakened and blinded state, the enemies of all life would make their move to ensnare his warrior heart.

Without the intervention of the Thousand Sons, they would succeed and split the galaxy asunder. The works that Magnus had Amon researching since the Council of Nikaea held the key to Horus Lupercal's salvation. With the help of his Fellowship Captains, Magnus projected himself across the Warp and attempt to shield his brother from his enemies. Unfortunately, the Primarch failed and Horus' soul was corrupted by the Ruinous Powers.

Fall of Prospero[]

Hathor Maat participated in the defence of Tizca during the Fall of Prospero to the Space Wolves and their Imperial allies at the start of the Horus Heresy.

He was one of the Thousand Sons to survive the battle and to be transported through the Warp with Magnus the Red to the Planet of the Sorcerers in the Eye of Terror.

Death[]

Maat was one of the Thousand Sons captains who Ahzek Ahriman knew would be easy to sway to his cabal of sorcerers who had sworn to stop the flesh change after the Thousand Sons fled into the Eye of Terror.

Maat later accompanied Ahriman on his quest to track down the Shards of Magnus, the various psychic facets of Magnus the Red's personality that had been created when Leman Russ had nearly killed him at Prospero.

However, during the journey, he began to suffer from the flesh change. Striking a bargain with the Greater Daemon "Aforgomon" and the Emperor's Children champion Lucius who were accompanying Ahriman's cabal, Hathor Maat learned to hold off the flesh change by sacrificing captive humans. Aforgomon further manipulated Hathor Maat into altering a single line of the Book of Magnus.

However when Ahriman's cabal finally discovered the Shards of Magnus on Nikaea, the change finally overcame Maat. Paying the price owed to Aforgomon, Ahriman sacrificed Maat to allow the daemon to possess the Thousand Son's body and manifest as the Daemonhost known as the "Fatewoven," which actually served as a mortal shell for Kairos Fateweaver who had masqueraded as Aforgomon.

Sources[]

The Horus Heresy: Collected Visions, pg. 170
A Thousand Sons (Novel) by Graham McNeill, pp. 9-11, 15, 19-20, 22-23, 26-28, 49-50, 58-59, 62, 65-67, 71-72, 75, 87, 89-91, 106-110, 122, 124, 175-177, 199-201, 227-228, 233-234, 239-241, 244, 249-252, 254-255, 258-260, 262-264
Battle of the Fang (Novel) (Digital Edition), pg. 47
The Crimson King (Novel) by Graham McNeill, Ch. 23