Sekhmet Terminator Cabal Ignis

Oh, boy

These guys took forever.

Every other unit I've mentioned previously was either finished, or as good as, between the launches of the Burning of Prospero boxed set and the Inferno book.  This Sekhmet squad were my first thing after Inferno, and it wasn't just the intricate detailing of Scarab Occult models that made it take a while.

I wanted to make Ignis, another character from the Ahriman series. A cold-on-the-surface, hot-on-the-inside master calculator and numerologist who rolls about with a pet giant robot, how could anyone not love this guy?  I'd been trying to work out how to include him for months, debating between a Praevian or a Forge Lord, working out how I could get the combination of Terminator armour, boltgun, lightning claw, and unlocking a battle-automata into a legal army, how to represent the Order of Ruin, and worst of all, how to make a guy with orange and black armour fit into a Thousand Sons Heresy-era colour scheme.

Eventually I made my first Ignis out of the Cataphracti Praetor plastic model, figuring I'd work out how to fit him in later, like I had with Ctesias.  I figured a Legion Terminator squad could be an Order of Ruin unit, and painted one up.  It was okay.

Then Inferno dropped and well...Sekhmet.  Extraordinarily fluffy and cost-effective, I struggled with making Ignis one of them or keeping him as an ordinary Terminator, as well as what cult arcana to give him...I ended up just starting on the Tartaros unit and left the sergeant to last, hoping my ideas would crystalise.  Maybe it could be Gaumata or Gilgamos?  But they weren't Terminators.  Ugh.  Ignis deserves his own project entry, basically.

These Sekhmet Terminators were made from the obvious - surely intended - Scarab Occult plastics from the 40K range.  I gave them ordinary Tartaros combi-bolters, as the 40K ones are overly ornate.  The 40K kit also doesn't have a lot of flexibility in the statue-like poses, which works great for Rubric terminators - and in some ways for the infamously unflappable Sekhmet - so I made small effort to get them posed somewhat non-statically.

As always, my painting is quite thick and missing edge highlights and transfers, but I felt a learned a lot while working on these guys and believe me, they're better than I would have managed at the beginning of this project.  It sounds like a plead for mercy, but the red looks better in the...plastic...than it does in photographs.  In reality, the red is the same shade all over the models, with a natural blend of shadow and highlights depending on the lighting conditions in the room, as well as being uniformly, visibly metallic.  In photographs, it turns into a jumble of almost artificially distinct different tones, most of which appear flat. 

I kept their loadout as stock, mostly for the fluff image of advancing Terminators blazing away with bolters, force swords at the ready...but also because Sekhmet seem easy to make a little broken if you give them some of the better weapons.  I'm not even going to go into the whole arguments about whether they can choose powers or not.

As for their cult arcana, well, while Raptora seemed like a good idea to get the better invulnerable save, I'd ended up convincing myself that Ignis needed to lead this squad.  I could make the Tartaros sergeant look way cooler than the Cataphracti guy.  And if Ignis was to end up leading the squad, well...with a name like that, he'd have to be Pyrae, right? I'd always known that, but as the pyrokines are normally portrayed to be the aggressive and bellicose legionaries, my mind kept sliding off the idea of Ignis being one.  But I think anything else would just feel extremely weird.  I'll show more of Ignis, as well as him together with his squad, in the next post.