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.

Zabaia and Siamak, the Khenetai Twins

Well, they're Khenetai in my version of all this.

Now despite all that talk in the last entry about trying hard to make the Blade Occult squad members all look dynamic and different, I noticed early on that I'd made two of one legs+torso+arms combinations.  Or more accurately, that the only pieces I had left ended up making a double.  I had accidentally made twin bodies.

In the typically fortunate way that things have tended to work out on this project, however, there actually are a set of twins in the fiction: Zabaia and Siamak.  These guys only feature in Ahriman: Exile, and exist just to be a threat to be overcome by the rest of Ahriman's crew.  They're still cool, however, and the idea of my army background means they could very easily be running around in Ahriman's old Circle.

I decided to make both of them look almost identical, but also make them stand out from the rest of the squad.  They got upgrade helmets and some spare old shoulder-pads with huge scarabs on them to mark them out as elite.  The other pad has a double-headed snake on it. 
I also gave them the two feathery-ish cloaks from the Sisters of Silence kit.  To make them further stand out, I decided to avoid the white feathers everyone else has and gave them shiny blued feathers.  I know I said I wanted to avoid random blue appearing on units like the writers keep trying to jam in just because the 40K Thousand Sons are blue, but I figured this was pretty subtle and suited their role as 'bad guys' in their scant fluff appearance. 
Though in taking this photo I noticed I'd forgotten to do a bit of Siamak's backpack.  Siamak is the one with the stripe in his cloak, I decided, as he's got the cooler name.  Sorry, Zabaia.

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.