Ahriman

About the Ahriman series

John French's Ahriman series follows Ahzek Ahriman, the exiled former Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons Space Marine Legion, whose ancient ritual to save his brothers from a slow psychic death instead froze most of them into living statues -- the "Rubric" that has defined the Thousand Sons' tragedy for ten thousand years. Cast out even by his own kind for the act, Ahriman wanders the galaxy as a sorcerer of Tzeentch, obsessively hunting the knowledge to finally undo his own greatest mistake. Ahriman: Exile (2012), Ahriman: Sorcerer (2014) and Ahriman: Unchanged (2015) form the original trilogy charting that hunt; a decade later, Ahriman: Eternal (2022) and Ahriman: Undying (2024) continued the story as Ahriman attempts an even more audacious gambit -- bending time itself to reach back and prevent the Rubric from ever being needed.

French writes Ahriman not as a straightforward villain but as a self-aware antihero whose intelligence and guilt are inseparable from his monstrousness -- a character who understands exactly how much horror he's caused and is still willing to cause more to fix it. The series is widely regarded as one of Black Library's most psychologically complex takes on a Warhammer 40,000 "villain protagonist," and its narrative influence extends into other 40K fiction exploring the Thousand Sons and the Eye of Terror.