The taint of Chaos has permeated the worlds of Warhammer from its earliest days, and the four Ruinous Powers are a foundational aspect of every setting. Not content with ruling over the empyrean realms, each God sends forth fragments of themselves out into the mortal world to conquer and corrupt.
Among the most powerful of these warp-spawned monstrosities are the Greater Daemons, and none are as terrifyingly or as iconic as the mighty Bloodthirster.
Red, mad, and wearing scorched brass armour, Bloodthirsters are the furious expression of the martial might of Khorne, the god of war, blood, and skulls. This metal miniature was Khorne’s exemplar for more than a decade, bestriding the battlefields of the Old World and the 41st Millennium, its nightmarish bovine/canine features twisted into a horrendous visage of exquisite apoplexy.
With an intimidating profile stacked with 10s across the board, these incarnations of carnage have always been terrifying to face. Once upon a time, a Bloodthirster’s Axe of Khorne would even contain another, presumably much angrier Bloodthirster, that could be summoned forth to fight with its bare hands.
Each Chaos God is able to manifest their own Greater Daemons. Nurgle got his jolly and corpulent Great Unclean Ones, Tzeentch conjured a court of avian Lords of Change, and Slaanesh unleashed the grotesquely alluring Keepers of Secrets. All four Greater Daemons have evolved with the times, retaining their individual essences as they became the truly spectacular centrepieces of today’s Chaos collections.
If one is to believe the arcane scribblings in the archaic tome Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness, the Bloodthirsters are arranged into eight hosts with eight tiers.* At the top are the Exalted Bloodthirsters, of whom only eight exist. Beneath them are eight further Bloodthirsters, who each command a further eight Bloodthirsters, and so on. Some daemonologists believe that this means there could be a total of 19,173,960 Bloodthirsters.** Each wielding a giant axe and a cruel whip, and clad in their ancient panoply of war.
In all, nine Bloodthirster*** models have been made by Citadel: the original metal miniature from the late 1980s, today’s featured daemon from the mid 90s, an Epic scale Bloodthirster, a towering Exalted Bloodthirster from Forge World, Skarbrand the Exile, the current kit which makes a Bloodthirster of Unfettered Fury, a Bloodthirster of Insensate Rage, and a Wrath of Khorne Bloodthirster, and Ka’Bandha the Daemon General.
As the pinnacle of daemonhood, the Bloodthirster’s aesthetics went on to inspire a multitude of other winged and muscle-bound horrors, creating a lineage that can be traced through the Daemon Prince to the duplicitous Be’lakor.
After 10,000 years under the brass yoke of Khorne, even the Daemon Primarch Angron has more than a touch of the classic red-winged daemon to him. Where next? Only Khorne knows.
* Eight, of course, is Khorne’s sacred number.
** Others, who might have a higher understanding of maths, claim the number is closer to 88^8, which is such a large number you have to write it like this: 6.2771017e+57.
*** Sacred numbers can be a moveable feast…