Khenetai Occult Blade Cabal Sanakht

"By the power of Middle Eastern historical references!"

Batteries recharged a little after messing about with the remembrancers, I dived into these guys, who were great fun.

I'm going to have a separate blog about Sanakht, the squad leader, but I think a lot of my enthusiasm for making this unit was down to a combination of how much I like him as a character and being really tickled that Inferno made a squad of psychic dual-wield swordsmen into a thing. 
A couple Blade Occult upgrade kits were duly picked up at Forgeworld the next time I was passing.

Conscious that I still had twenty or so possible mark III guys still sitting on the very first sprues I bought for this project, I thought quite seriously about using them for my Blade Occult.  Even though it's the 'heavy' armour mark, I thought it might look cool, and imagined the high pauldron rims protecting against return strokes and the like.  However, for an elite squad, I wanted the shoulder pauldrons to have molded detailing on them, so ordered some upgrade bits.  Once they arrived and I dry-fitted a guy, you could see that the big chunky rims just didn't look too good with the thin swords. I thought about switching the overly-stepped khopeshes of the upgrade out for straight swords, of which I had enough various kinds lying about.  But that would kind of dilute the look, even if the khopeshes were a bit cartoony.  I cut up one of them to see about making it look more like a real khopesh, or even a scimitar, but it ended up too short.  So I just settled for using the original khopeshes, and they actually grew on me quite a bit as I built the squad.  I like them a lot now.

So I scrapped the mark III idea and looked to see how many mark IV legs I had left.  Turns out I was a couple short.  But I had all those Dark Angel veteran kit legs left to use up!  The image of the robed legs on swordsmen immediately seemed cool.  A quick rake through my bits, and I decided to use the cloaks from the Sisters of Silence sprues on these guys as well.  Swordsmen have to look badass, right?  To complete the Legion look, I gave them shoulder pads from the 40K Rubric set. 

So, with everyone just armed with two swords, and there only being a few variants of the sword arm position in the kit, I was really concerned with making these guys look as individually cool as possible, which the variant in legs really helped with.  A lot of people I've spoken to kind of want or expect Horus Heresy system armies to have squads that all look identical, and I appreciate that idea. However, modelling infantry is my favourite part of the hobby, and I like them all to have something different about them before the painting.  Especially as my painting is pretty basic. I feel I was able to pull this off, and was so pleased with the assembly that I dared to try and push my quite basic painting a little, and made my first attempt at edge highlighting a few of the squad.  While still quite scrappy and lacking in confidence in the application, I think it did make a positive difference, and intend to try and improve at it.