Abaddon the Despoiler in Terminator Armor — Print & Oil Painting

No weapon appears anywhere in this picture. Not a blade, not a barrel, not a haft entering from an edge. For a figure whose entire reputation is violence that is an unusual amount of restraint from a painter, and it changes what the image is doing. This is a likeness, not an event.

The crop is close and the head sits up at the right, bald but for a small braided topknot, jaw set, eyes narrowed under a heavy brow. A cabled collar rings the neck and rises behind it. Everything below is Terminator plate in a dark violet-brown, banded and riveted, with gold along every raised edge and a scatter of small red gems.

Across both shoulders lies a great mantle of cream and grey fur, and it is the only thing in the frame that was ever alive. The painter has given it more variation of touch than any of the metal, dragging light along the guard hairs and letting the underfur go soft, which is precisely why the eye settles there before it settles on the face.

Two devices carry the meaning. On the chest sits an oval plate with a red eye motif at its centre; low on the right a shield-shaped panel in dark red carries an eight-pointed star picked out in gold. There is no other insignia and no background at all beyond warm brown shadow.

The colour deserves a word. This armour reads violet and old bronze here rather than the black the Legion is named for, and the name came late. After their primarch died at Terra the survivors of the Sixteenth repainted their plate black, in grief for him and shame at having failed, and took the word as their title. They have been the Black Legion ever since, whatever any given painter does with the light. It sits in our Warhammer 40.000 collection, alongside the same commander wielding the Talon of Horus and the Despoiler holding a dead marine and a burning blade.