Abaddon's Bare Face Amid Purple Lightning — Print & Oil Painting

Run a finger over this picture in your head and almost all of it is rough. Pitted bronze, scored plating, ribbed cable, the cast edges of skulls, a collar built out of segmented rings, blades ground back to a burr. The single smooth surface anywhere in the frame is a bald human scalp.

The head sits inside an enormous ring of a gorget, cabled at both sides and thick enough to hide the neck entirely. The face beneath is broad, jowled, and furious in a settled way rather than an active one: brows down, mouth turned. From the crown of the skull a dark red hank of hair rises and falls back over the shoulder.

Count the skulls and you reach five without effort. One at the throat, one large on the chest, one at the belt, two more worked into the pauldron at the lower right beside an eight-pointed star. None of them are trophies. They are cast into the armour as ornament, which is worse.

At the lower left a gauntlet enters the frame carrying four long curved blades, hooked and unequal in length. Behind everything a violet sky is being broken open by lightning that forks across the whole left half of the canvas and lights nothing, since the figure is lit from the front by a source the picture never supplies.

The hair is the detail worth knowing. Horus raised his Legion from the gang worlds of Cthonia, where the fighters shaved their heads and kept one tall topknot, and the style went up through the ranks until the Legion wore it as a uniform. Ten thousand years and one change of allegiance later, the man in this picture still has his gang haircut. Part of our Warhammer 40.000 collection, beside the same head in Terminator plate under a white fur and the Despoiler holding a dead marine and a burning blade.