Librarian Consul Ctesias

Who?

With a squad and a minor character under my belt, it was time to chance my arm at something a little more important.  I decided to make a Heresy-era version of Ctesias, the Summoner.

I love this guy.  A creation of John French, he appears in the Ahriman series, narrating a half dozen short stories and acting as a main viewpoint character.  He's got a bit of a mysterious background as neither Prosperine nor Terran, and Ctesias isn't even his birth-name.  Hell, I'm not even sure he was rolling with the Thousand Sons during the Great Crusade.  Despite perhaps not technically existing during the era of the game, I'm including him in my force anyway, because he's great.  The level of uncertainty around him also tickles me, because the historical Ctesias (an ancient Persian historian) is considered a grade-A liar.

The Build

The beneficiary of a flashback scene when he's in crimson armour, Ctesias' distinguishing feature is a black cloak and robe, lined with white and gold markings.  As will become clear with most of my models, I've stopped before getting to the point of applying transfers, highlights and fine detailing, so he doesn't have any of that past the black part.  He will one day, though.

I didn't own any models with cloaks, of course.  So one trip to the Warhammer store later, I could now add a Dark Angels veteran squad box to my rapidly growing collection of sprues...which by now also included the newly released 40K Rubric marine and Scarab Occult kits, as well as a bunch of Forgeworld upgrade options.
Originally intending to use one of the full cloak affairs, complete with hood, I quickly realised this wouldn't look that 'Thousand Son-y'.  The knife came out, and the striding forward body got halved, the legs being attached to a Legion upgrade torso.  Ctesias is physically frail (for a Space Marine) and uses a staff, so one from the Rubric kit was added, with the Chaos stuff replaced with a blade from the Scarab Occult box.  I was going to use some eagle wings from the Dark Angel box to make an axe at first, but settled on the more obvious Thousand Son route after some thinking.  In A Thousand Sons, Ahriman's khopesh has an extendable haft, allowing it to attach to a staff and become a polearm, so I used the same idea here.  With that modelling and background, this means I can kind of get away with 'counts-as-ing' the staff as pretty much any kind of power or force weapon, though I'd never actually claim it as a sword.

For his other arm, I really wanted him to be holding a book or a scroll (something he was poring over in his one flashback scene), so a standard Rubric bolter arm seemed to work, the open hand being prime to hold something.  I made a scroll out of some paper and it actually looked good, so it sat in his hand for months.  However, I eventually fell victim to wanting him to look both cooler and a little eviler, and came up with adding a translucent plastic 'magic flame' effect.  I got quite hung up on this idea and hunted through all my stuff to try and find something.  Unable to locate what I wanted, I eventually gave in and carved something out of a bigger lump.  Painting it was trial and error, but the finished result is good enough for now.

As for the head, I struggled over that for a while.  For a Thousand Sons obsessive, I'm not that into the giant headcrests.  I keep thinking of them banging their heads on doors.  However, as a character I wanted to stand out and look cool, with a big tall spear, it became clear Ctesias had to have one.  Fortunately, I managed to get my hands on one that I think looks fitting for a 30K force, over the more sorcerously styled Rubric ones.  I want to add more to him, but not too much.  Maybe that scroll, or a book, can hang from his belt.  Perhaps I can get one of those sorcerer cloaks and attach it to his back.

 Painting

As to painting...well, when I was planning my army, I wanted all my guys to have silver trim.  The books all say they're silver, early pictures show various shades of ivory and white...and then the brand new interpretations say they're gold-trimmed.  I struggled with this for a while, before deciding I'd make Veterans and officers have the white trim.  I also decided I'd also go for a shiny look on the white, so grabbed some pearlescent paint.  So when it came to Ctesias, I was all ready to give him white trim.  But, looking through my shoulder pad box for something cool, I settled on the idea that I could use a lot of the typical winged icons in my force, but instead of painting them as black raven feathers, I'd make them the additional white element.  There are several white-feathered birds in Egyptian natural history, including the sacred Ibis.  That seemed fitting.

The Crunch

I made Ctesias with no idea what I was going to use him for.  A squint into the rulebook, and it seemed natural just to make him a Librarian.  Inferno hadn't come out by the time I finished him, so if I wanted psychic powers, that was the way to go.

After Inferno landed, I wasn't sure that a Librarian was still the best use of him, considering you can throw powers and a force weapon at any old Consul now.  However, I didn't see making Ctesias anything else to be especially fluffy.  He doesn't really do anything else except truck with daemons. Ahriman uses him as a kind of herald or delegate at one point, but Ctesias seems to dislike most of his brothers, so I didn't go down that route.  Librarian it would be.  Granting him the correct Cult Arcana and powers, however, is a lot more difficult, and I still think about it.  I just contacted John French to ask his opinion, so hopefully he'll have the answer.

Ctesias in the series is a binder and summoner of daemons.  At first, my thinking went along the lines of "Well, he'd have to be telepathic to do that, so let's make him Athanean".  The idea of jumping out of a Rhino and firing off a Psychic Shriek does appeal, rather.
While him being Athanean is okay, overall, using those powers didn't sit well with me in terms of his fluff, and so in the end - as fluff conquers all - I've decided there really is no other way to run Ctesias than with Sanctic Daemonology.  I know this is nerfing myself, but it just feels right.  I only really foresee getting one power off with Ctesias a game (after the aforesaid jumping-out-of-a-Rhino), so with Arcane Litanies attached to his belt, he should hopefully manage to do it and not damn himself in the process.