Abaddon Raising His Sword in Hellfire — Print & Oil Painting

There is a dead man in the left fist and the picture is not about him. He hangs head down in pale lilac-grey plate with the shoulder opened up and the contents of it trailing, held out to the side the way you hold something you have finished with, and the composition gives him a corner and nothing else.

What holds the centre is a slab of Terminator armour so dark it is nearly black, greened where the light catches it, bronze at every edge. Set into the chest is a heavy roundel with a screaming red face worked in relief at its middle, the one clean note of colour on the whole canvas. Skulls run along the belt, the knee, and the spikes at the shoulder.

Two poles rise from the backpack, each strung with skulls threaded on like beads, with a heavy chain slung in a loop between their tops. It is a piece of design that would look absurd on anything smaller and looks entirely reasonable here.

The weapon goes up at the right. The gauntlet holding it is a cluster of long curved blades rather than a hand, and out of it rises a ragged white blade that throws no reflection anywhere and reads as a tear in the picture rather than as metal. Everything around it is the same burnt orange smoke, with ranked figures dissolving into it on the right and a black arch standing behind.

Those claws are not standard issue. The lightning claw Abaddon carries was taken from the body of the primarch he served as First Captain, and he has used it for ten thousand years to prosecute a war his side already lost once. Nearly everything about the figure in this frame is inherited from a corpse. From our Warhammer 40.000 collection, next to his bare face amid purple lightning and the same warlord wielding the Talon of Horus.