Every time the Chaos Gods anoint a new Everchosen, somebody has to do the crowning. Somebody carries the Crown of Domination out across the wastes, kneels, and settles it onto the chosen champion’s skull. That somebody is Be’lakor. The first Daemon Prince ever made, the only creature in the whole grim setting to be raised up by all four gods at once, and his standing appointment is handing the biggest prize in Chaos to whatever mortal the gods happen to fancy this century. Right now that mortal is Archaon. Be’lakor sets the crown on Archaon’s head and would give almost anything to be strangling him with it.
He can’t, and that’s the part that makes him. The compulsion is welded into him by the combined will of Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch and Slaanesh, and four gods who agree on absolutely nothing managed to agree on this. So he kneels, every single time, and has done since before there was an Imperium around to notice.
One thing up front, since this is a 40K site and Archaon is a Fantasy and Age of Sigmar character rather than a 40K one. The Crown of Domination and the Everchosen belong to that half of Be’lakor’s existence. He lives in both settings at once, which I’ll come back to, and the curse travels with him across the gap. There’s no Everchosen waiting for him in the 41st Millennium, but the leash is identical: the same resentment, the same itch to undercut whoever the gods are favouring this week.
The origin is deliberately fogged, but the shape of it stays consistent across every telling. Somewhere back in the prehistory of the old World-that-Was, long before the 41st Millennium, Be’lakor was a mortal warlord. A conqueror. Name lost, world lost, the usual. He was good enough at it, and cruel enough at it, that all four of the Chaos Gods fixed on him at the same moment and each poured a portion of themselves into him. That had never happened before. It has basically never happened since. He became the living expression of Chaos Undivided, four powers balanced in one body, and for a while he was the most dangerous thing the Ruinous Powers had ever put on the board.
And then it went wrong, because of course it did. The gods couldn’t share him. They bickered over whose turn it was to point him at something, and he started doing what he wanted instead, which is the one thing a weapon is never supposed to do. There’s a line I keep coming back to from the background, that he was a piece on the board that moved itself, which is flattering to him and a genuine headache for the four beings who thought they owned him.
Killing him wasn’t really an option. Properly unmaking a daemon means erasing its essence back in the Realm of Chaos, and that would take all four gods cooperating again, and they will never trust each other enough to do it a second time. So they went pettier. They left him alive and took his freedom. From then on his one fixed duty would be to crown the Everchosen, over and over, forever, knowing the title would never once be his. If you’ve ever trained someone up at work, watched them get promoted past you, and then been handed the job of writing their acceptance speech, you’re roughly in the right postcode.
The origin GW won’t nail down
Nobody knows why he actually fell. One version has him rebelling against the gods outright, reaching to keep their power as his own. Another has him losing a duel to some ancient hero of the light and getting condemned for the failure. The sources contradict each other, and they’re meant to. The Dark Master, of every being in the setting, is the one whose backstory you aren’t allowed to trust, because deception is the thing he’s genuinely best at. I honestly don’t know if there’s a “true” version filed in a design document at Nottingham or if they decided decades ago that the fog is the character. Probably the second, going by how GW tends to handle the mysteries they actually care about keeping.
So yeah. Be’lakor. First of the Daemon Princes. Been kicking around since, what, the old Realm of Chaos books at the tail end of the 80s? He’s older than half the factions people argue about online. The point is he predates Archaon, he predates the whole Everchosen system, and he has never got over having to hand the crown to other people.
What the first Daemon Prince does with his time
In the 41st Millennium, Be’lakor mostly doesn’t fight the Imperium. He fights other Chaos. That’s the tell. Give a being unlimited spite and a curse that guarantees he always places second to whoever the gods prefer, and the spite goes looking for targets close to home.
He does have an army of his own, which is its own small act of defiance. The Legion of the First Prince, it’s called, and it’s stitched together from daemons of all four gods, bound or coerced or tricked into serving him instead of their actual patrons. He’s known to leash Greater Daemons by learning their true names, which is the daemonic equivalent of having someone’s bank details. A Bloodthirster of Khorne taking orders from Be’lakor is a small insult aimed squarely at Khorne, and Be’lakor collects those the way other people collect grievances.
The cleanest example of the pettiness is the Arks of Omen mess, when Vashtorr the Arkifane laid siege to The Rock, the Dark Angels’ mobile fortress-monastery. Vashtorr is a newer daemon, an industrialist, all binding contracts and soul-debt, and Be’lakor cannot stand him. So when Vashtorr’s assault was actually going well, Be’lakor’s legions turned up. Functionally on the Dark Angels’ side. He tangled Vashtorr up long enough for Imperial reinforcements to arrive and wreck the timetable. Vashtorr clocked what was happening, hacked into the fortress guns with his own scrapcode, and blasted Be’lakor on the way out, and Be’lakor took the hit and left happy, because he’d already got what he came for, which was simply that Vashtorr didn’t get a clean win out of it.
The Imperium-facing work he does tends to happen through other people’s hands anyway. Across the Black Crusades he’s been quietly steering Abaddon for ten thousand years. He manipulated a lesser Daemon Prince into aiding the assault on Cadia during the Third Black Crusade. Later he fed Abaddon a tip-off about a traitor in the ranks that got an entire rival warband annihilated. By the Thirteenth, the Black Crusade that finally cracked Cadia open, he’d worked himself into the Warmaster’s inner circle. He isn’t leading the crusade. He’s the voice at the shoulder of the throne, making suggestions, letting Abaddon carry both the credit and the risk.
My favourite one, though, is Magos Kyber. There’s a Mechanicus tech-priest who spent his entire life assembling the history of some ancient alien overlord out of ruins and relics scattered across the galactic wilderness. Winged statues carved from fossilised psyker bone. Scrolls of cured human skin showing thousands of tiny figures bowing to a dark winged shape. Kyber has spent decades assembling what he’s sure is the biography of a lost alien overlord. Be’lakor planted the first clue himself. Every relic Kyber lovingly recovers is one of the Dark Master’s own objects of power coming home, and every note Kyber files puts the story under “one alien overlord” where nobody will ever connect it to a Daemon Prince. Decades of careful scholarship, quietly running Be’lakor’s errands.
He doesn’t win them all, mind. The one that sticks with me is Ahriman. Ahzek Ahriman, the Thousand Sons sorcerer, actually out-schemed him. Be’lakor was certain he was luring Ahriman into a trap, and Ahriman had already flipped it and bound him. To buy his way free, Be’lakor had to surrender his claim on another sorcerer’s soul. The first Daemon Prince, older than the Imperium itself, out-lawyered by a sorcerer whose own Legion spends most of its time scattered across the warp as dust.
I came to Be’lakor backwards, through that story. I’ve got a Thousand Sons army, fully painted, and a few years ago I was grinding through a wash-and-base session with the Ahriman: The First Prince audio drama on in the background, mostly for company. Wasn’t really listening. Then I knocked a full pot of Nuln Oil across three of my objective markers and spent the next ten minutes swearing and dabbing at tiny tombstones with a bit of kitchen roll. But I’d caught the Be’lakor thread by then, went “hang on, who is this”, put the brush down, and read about him until about two in the morning. Got nothing else done that night. Kiran, who plays Death Guard and thinks my Thousand Sons are pretentious, still points out that I know more about Be’lakor than I do about half my own codex. He’s not wrong.
His rebellion was never really his
The part that turns it slightly tragic, and I don’t reach for that word lightly around Chaos, is that Be’lakor believes he’s free. He thinks the scheming and the spite and the endless quiet war on everyone the gods favour is his own will asserting itself against the beings that leashed him. It probably isn’t. The background is fairly blunt that his so-called free will is mostly just the rivalry between the four gods expressing itself through him. Khorne wants to undercut Tzeentch, Be’lakor feels an urge, he acts on it, and he calls the whole thing defiance. None of it started with him.
Although. I’ve half-argued myself out of my own point here, because you could say that describes every Chaos character ever written. Mortarion thinks he’s managing Nurgle. Every ambitious Warmaster reckons he’s using the gods rather than the reverse. Maybe Be’lakor isn’t special at all. Maybe he’s just the oldest run of the same con, the first one to fall for it, the template everyone after him got stamped from. I like that reading less and I suspect it’s the more honest one. The gods have been running this exact play since before the Imperium existed, and he’s just the first one it worked on.
The genuinely odd thing about him, structurally, is that he’s in two games at once. Be’lakor is one of a very small number of characters who exist in both 40K and Age of Sigmar, because the two settings share the same Realm of Chaos, and a daemon isn’t nailed to one reality the way a mortal is. Over in Age of Sigmar he got a whole campaign book with his name on it, Broken Realms: Be’lakor, where he came close to pulling the usurpation off for real, blotting out the suns with a shadow ritual and building toward toppling Archaon. In 40K he stays more of a lurker, the same being carrying the same grudge into a second setting that mostly hasn’t clocked him yet.
The current model is the 2021 plastic sculpt, and it’s a monster in the plain sense of the word, an enormous wingspan and a little humiliated Primaris officer pinned under one clawed foot like a hunting trophy. GW share it across both systems, which is why your local store might file it under Slaves to Darkness or Chaos Daemons depending on who stocked the shelf. Secondhand ones go for genuinely silly money now. I looked, idly, the morning after the rabbit hole. I did not buy one. The grey plastic mountain at home is already tall enough.
If the write-ups doing the rounds this month get more people digging into him, good. He’s one of the rare corners of Chaos lore where the interesting part is the punishment itself, the specific bureaucratic cruelty of keeping a being alive purely so it can keep hand-delivering crowns it will never get to wear. Too powerful for four gods to safely destroy, and put to work as an usher. GW has never told us his real name in all these years, and I’d put money on them never doing it.
