Khenentai Blademaster Sanakht

Who?

One of the main characters in the Ahriman series, who's taken to also popping up in the Horus Heresy, making a Sanakht miniature was one of the main reasons I took on this whole project.  The very first mini I put together, he remained unpainted for around six months.  This was due to a combination of my hesitance about messing up the model with my painting, and then settling on where he should be in the army list became a pain.

Sanakht is a Legion Champion, and so I was pleased that such a unit option turned out to exist in the rulebook.  However, seeing as his only mentioned gear loadout is having two swords, and multiple re-readings of the Centurion Champion option of 'exchanging their default pistol and/or blade for one sword' didn't make that seem likely, I was a bit disappointed to learn I would have to tell people that one of his swords was just cosmetic.  I modeled on a pistol as well in case I was misreading everything and because it's weird not having a pistol.  WYSIWYG players please don't beat me up I'll only ever play him rules legally.

Anyway, you can see where I replaced his default weapons with the two swords and tilted the hand positions.  The swords are from the Sisters of Silence kit, which (ironically?) turns out to have provided quite a few bits for my witches.

Sanakht is specifically stated to have one power sword and one force sword, so I wanted to differentiate them beyond the hilt details.  When I decided I wanted the Ctesias model to have a magic flame in his hand, it was easy to jump to Sanakht's force sword having a similar effect.  I eventually found a model by, I think, Wizards of the Coast, that had clear plastic flames with it, so I cut them up, stuck them to his sword and tried the blue paint.  It stands out nicely, like all my stuff I wish I painted better, but it'll do for now.  I like it.

As one of the first models I built, I didn't have any 40K Thousand Sons parts or anything to make him look a bit different from the base Praetor model.  So I went looking for a helmet, and dug up this sweet jackal helm.  I immediately decided to use it because jackal iconography is cool and I like saying Annubis.  Annubis.

So you can imagine my delight when Inferno was released and revealed that the Thousand Sons have a thing called the Order of the Jackal, which includes a cadre of psychic swordsmen who sport two blades.  I pretty much picked the best possible helmet months in advance, and so now I like this miniature even more.

With this development, and the Khenetai Blades becoming a thing, it became clear to me that Sanakht would be best served in my army by taking a drop in rank and becoming my Blade Occult squad leader.  This gives him his two-swords-one-pistol thing legally.  I'm not averse to running him as a Legion Champion or Praetor mandatory HQ in smaller or more themed games and saying both swords count as a single weapon (like a Paragon Blade), but it feels great to be able to put him with the Khenetai.  I mean, it seems likely that they were based on his character to begin with.

The final pleasing part about this miniature was that the colour choices on the helm were mainly based on feel, I decided to give him the white faceplate just because I think it's cool and a great contrast to the gold jackal.  Even though the pealescent paint looks a bit rough.  I guess I was doing this subconsciously, as the next time I reread the Ahriman books, I realised that it's stated that he has a silver deathmask faceplate.  So while the paintjob is pretty low quality for a miniature I'm kind of invested in, it's my miniature and my painting and I'm fond of everything to do with this guy and how it all came together.  I love Ctesias, but I think Sanakht is my boy.