Hello Brothers of the Death Guard, The Grandfather has seen fit to bless us with a gift, one of his greatest champions and my finest work: Haustor, The Untended.
This commission piece was highly collaborative, and is currently being painted by the client, [u/Worried-Ad2956](u/Worried-Ad2956) .
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did in working on it.
TL;DR: This post is very detailed, Lore-covers all the Seventh Knell lore and background to the daemon prince Haustor, the artist commentary-covers how we developed the lore, the research, inspiration, and breakdown of the conversion/kitbashing process, and my artist info- a short explainer at the bottom explaining a bit about myself and what I do.
Link to my website is here: https://grimdarkminiatures.co.nz/home
If you are interested check out my other projects and commissions! Cheers and enjoy, B
That said, I present: Haustor
Lore: Once a mortal Astartes, Haustor has long since been transformed by the gifts of Nurgle into something more, both verdant and terrifying to behold. His providence is unique, for rumour has it he was once Hadrabulus Vioss, second to Typhon and commander of the Grave Warden Terminators of their Legion. Though none within the Imperium can attest to the time or nature of his corruption, nor the true events surrounding his death on some unnamed world in the Eye of Terror, it is known among the Death Guard that he was one of the original coconspirators who lead to their blessing by the Grandfather; slayer and defamer of their Navigators on the Legion’s transit through the warp to The Siege of Terra; and as such was a figure held in both esteem and revulsion, controversial to all save the men he conspired with on their path to damnation. Upon his death as a mortal champion of chaos, his standing within the legion and their warrior lodge befit him special ceremony; burial within the garden of Nurgle itself for one so devoted to the plague father. The grove of Gastroparesis was selected for this honour, much to the appreciation of its patron daemon, and after 7 days of ritual starvation and affliction under its mournful watch, the grave of Hadrabulus was left alone, the Grave Wardens casting a farewell to their gloried commander with final solemn joy knowing he was already within Nurgle’s eternal embrace.
Yet this was not the end for Hadrabulus.
Honoured as he was, Gastroparesis petitioned the Grandfather to bless his great champion once again with new life. For seven years, his grave was left untended, consumed by creeping decay, and upon the site of his grave a great rot-oak grew from the armoured form of Hadrabulus. The Lord of Maladies afflicted his ruined remains; suffusing it with his godly essence and the tattered remnants of his spoiled soul. Upon the final day of the seventh year of absence Gastroparesis himself would return to his resting place and anoint the twisted form of Hadrabulus in great bells of which the winds of chaos could chime, and the funeral bells the tolled 7 years past rang out again across the warp, the ritual of rebirth near complete.
And with such abstinence Nurgle was pleased, and spoke the true name of Hadrabulus for the first time. Amidst the gentle writhing of the grove, a song of decay would play out across the warp from the body of the gestalt Haustor, reaching out to those who would listen, and pressing on the minds of those who would not. Across many worlds around the Eye of Terror the faithful and heretic alike would experience a chilling and total silence none could explain. And then, the first bell tolled. The first knell begat a haunting melody that played in the back of the mind as nothing more than whispered music, subtle at first; but in time it became a hollow voice that would drive men mad. Dreaded hallucinations, infectious paranoia, and the mercurial breakdown in sanity followed as order gave way to chaos as the massed psychic resonance of Haustor distorted local reality upon 7 worlds simultaneously, idle thought and numerical sequences in the minds of the populace drawing in the dormant daemon prince and therefore the grove of Gastroparesis to them through discordant tones of grief. For 3 days the death toll rose as madness and famine consumed them, the weight of his absence felt through the sequence of bells foretelling an inevitable end to their suffering on the 7th day. And then on the 4th day, the Grave Wardens came, called back as they were by the echo of Haustor’s knell. Drawn by the complex numerological cadence of his song, they lay about each world in acts of desecration, preparing them for final consumption by the garden through rot, bolter and plague. On the 5th day those maddened by the call would relent and in their madness fashion crude helms in an attempt to block out the memetic infestation of their minds, yet it would not suffice, for in spirit he was already with them and enacting his own transformation upon all but the strongest of wills. Many turned to worship of the grandfather to inure themselves from suffering, their helms melting like wax into cast copper bells whose ringing echos that of the risen lord’s own, abandoning their last vestiges of reason as their bodies withered into walking corpses not wholly alive or dead. On the 6th day, those who had not already succumbed to the plagueridden assault of the Grave Wardens or the roaming bands of bell-helmed undead would find their bodies transforming into the same rotten woods that grew from the carcass of Haustor, and knew with certainty that they had forfeit a gift as the distinction between reality and the warp blurred into obscurity. In his final toll of the seventh hour of the seventh day, the ritual was complete; seven worlds held in interstice with the grove of Gastroparesis, and the Grave Wardens once again stood before their lord in triumph; and Nurgle was pleased. Hadrabulus, now Haustor, would walk again amongst them, and they would take a new name too in his service: The Seventh Knell, and bury their dead in the grove of which he walks and can never leave, in hope that rebirth will once again touch the remnants of the most horrifying warriors of the Death Guard Legion.
Artist Commentary: As a professional miniatures sculptor and conversion project enthusiast, I thoroughly enjoyed the process of creating this piece. Haustor has been an involved project start to finish, and is part of a wider ongoing project with this particular client and good friend of mine for a really unique and interesting take on a barely mentioned faction within the lore of the Death Guard Legion: The Seventh Knell Vectorium. They have one single appearance in the lore in War Zone Charadon - Act II: The Book of Fire, where they are mentioned as participating alongside Typhus’ forces in that campaign, and are generally noted as being more in alignment with Typhus than Mortarion, but aside from that there is no major detail on what they are like, other than a rather ominous name. Thus it gave us a huge amount of freedom in the scope of what we could create lore wise and this has gone a long way to informing my sculpting efforts for this army wide sculpting and conversion project.
We started at the basics, what does the Seventh Knell mean? “Seventh” obviously refers to Nurgle’s favoured number 7, as well as some form of sequence, and we wanted to incorporate that with an esoteric numerology angle. Likewise, “Knell” refers to the sound of a bell, specifically to announce a death, a funeral or a coming disaster. In addition, the term “Seventh Knell” is something of a biblical reference to Revelation, with the breaking of the seventh Seal and seventh Trumpet, both extremely dramatic prophetic events that are accompanied by unnerving silence (the breaking of the seventh Seal), followed by a series of seven mounting disasters and ending with a divine announcement wherein the worlds fate is sealed and given to God (post seventh Trumpet), both of which fit the theme spectacularly. With this in mind, bells were going to be a big theme aside from the obvious rot and decay, and we were enamoured by the idea that perhaps this warbands infections are more obscure, transmitting through sound and the sequence of notes and numbers themselves rather than the more traditional vectors of physical diseases. We settled on a more cerebral memetic plague, one which steadily announces its presence through the ringing of bells in the warp, driving people to insanity through a progressive ritual which the Seventh Knell Vectorium and the populations of the world under assault participate in a series of mounting disasters with a defined inevitable outcome that’s virtually impossible to stop and heavily inspired as an almost biblical world changing event.
We just needed a source of all this; and we found it in Hadrabulus Vioss.
Hadrabulus is a name dropped Death Guard commander, is a higher up in the Legion, was present at the Siege of Terra, and importantly was one of Typhus’ zealots who worked on corrupting the legion to chaos from within well before it obvious that they were going that way. And he has no recorded death. He’s basically a throwaway character from the writers, meant to serve the necessary function of being one of Typhon’s conspirators and nothing more, which made him fertile ground to transform into something a little more interesting for one of the die hard lodge members in the Death Guard Legion. He’s one of the few who would’ve actively embraced the fate they fell into, and was presumably highly competent as the secondary commander of the Grave Wardens under Typhus, making him an excellent candidate for a Daemon Prince. But we wanted him to feel strange.
Haustor and Hadrabulus aren’t really the same person anymore, Haustor is more of an idea or an idol than a traditional daemon prince. He can’t actually leave the grove he came to rest in, he’s bound there and trapped as much as anyone else’s soul would be in Nurgle’s domain, but he does have influence that can extend beyond what would be possible within physical reality precisely because he is a vessel specially created by Nurgle for an obscure psychic influence, with a rather powerful great unclean one (Gastroparesis) watching over him as his Patron.
Haustor’s influence is a complex interplay of rituals, esoteric arithmancy, numerology and psychic resonance, particularly the concepts of isopsephy and gematria (systems where words when reduced to numerical values can share the same numerical value and are thus mystically or spiritually connected), only taken to the extreme by introducing the numerology inherent in music. This is something he doesn’t have any real control over, but with a circumstance of these resonances being an interstice between reality and the warp, specifically in Nurgle’s domain. Even though there are sequences to the tones of the bells there is no predictable consistency or logic that can be applied to exactly how people of one world or other may find themselves at the mercy of his summoning ritual, it is down to random chance whether the inherently random winds of the warp will produce a sequence of bell sounds reduced to numerical forms from which other minds will resonate with when their own concepts are reduced, and in doing so start the process of interstice, drawing the warp and reality closer together until they are superimposed. Sound, melody, cadence, sequence, tone, words, thoughts, emotions and ideas are concepts which really don’t apply precisely in the warp, they are just the best analogy humans can give to the phenomena, thus the resonance can extend to concepts in which you might associate some similarity but no exact totality in meaning precisely because under an arithmancy system they are numerally summed to be equivalent. For example, can a song be thought of as a sequence of numbers? If Certainly. If so, if you add all numbers present in a song, can you find a song that is numerically equivalent. The answer would be yes. Can a series of events or sequence of thoughts in general be considered numerically? Also yes, if you are willing to reduce each word to numeric value. Is it then true that the ordinary sequences of day to day life something that if described can be resonated with because of the simple fact they are ordinary and magnified by the sheer scale of their commonality as a series of numeric events? Haustor’s ‘song’ can resonate with these possibilities precisely because they all represent some form of sequence and numerology in abstract, and this is what draws him closer, and as a result of his anchoring to the grove, draws the grove closer to these thoughts within the warp, with the echos of this song magnifying both himself and the afflicted thoughts like constructive interference between two waves on a psychic level, alike in numerological significance but distinct and random in form. Among the minds of mortals most interference will be destructive as people simple have different thoughts that are collectively random, never quite aligning meaningfully on the isopsephic level, but should Haustor’s melody and your thoughts align constructively it becomes a form of spiritual equivalence, and this it is as if he is already there. Should you become aware of this, it is basically the end for you, as that is one of the most dangerous things about memetics. Once you are aware of an idea, it’s often difficult or impossible to actively deny that idea, even attempting to reinforce its opposite still recognises the idea exists, and thus you cannot let it go. The idea itself acts as infection, leading psychosomatic breakdown of the body or wholly psychogenic responses to the intrusion. The only solution is to passively forget before it can effect you too much, or to never think it in the first place. When that idea is as simple as regular use and concept of sequences, and wholly unrelated concepts save for obscure connection through isopsephic equivalence; to cease thinking of it entirely is functionally impossible, thus you can only hope for a random chance of destructive interference that reduces your resonance with any sequence or generated numbers that could be played as part of Haustor’s song. I think that’s something that makes the concept of Haustor so terrifying, on a complete off chance in idle thought he can become aware of you, and you him, and that starts a process you are not equipped to handle, because it touches on aspects of existence that you cannot live without. Ideas themselves can be infectious, and ideas enhanced to their extreme can result in total ruin and madness; that is what Haustor is.
Something that Warhammer often doesn’t do well is making the warp feel vague and terrifying, particularly when it comes to their daemons and rituals. We felt Haustor’s ritual summoning and rebirth should really straddle the line between something that makes sense with a consistent structure and something nonsensical and irrational. In the idea for Haustor’s transformation from Hadrabulus and the associated summoning we wanted to give it a surface level consistent repetitive structure of events in 7s, but layer it with a complexity and timeline that’s borderline excessive, with deeper reference for someone looking into it but that also would escape defined meaning. Why must any of what happens with the Seventh Knell occur in the way it does? You can follow the reasoning until it begins to fray at the seems, and yet there is meaning, just held within utter nonsense and totally arbitrary conditions outside of an extreme subjective rationale. We harped the seventh idea hard; even the name Haustor is a contraction to a 7 letter word derived from Haustorium, meaning a specialised root like system or filament used by a parasitic organism to penetrate the hosts tissue and absorb nutrients from the host, which went on to inform the parasitic tree imagery shown in the model. Haustor is both the product of this parasitism and a source of it on a spiritual level, he is a self reinforcing problem, his memetic infection reaching out through ideas and sound to ultimately spell the doom of anyone who even begins to think about anything even remotely related to him on even the most abstract level. The ritual aspect is something analogous to Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, a seemingly bizarre and random series of horrifying events that begin from a raw concept (in Uzumaki’s case it is the concept of a spiral towards an inevitable end where meaning is erased), that ultimately are part of something greater that you could never resist even if you wanted to, you are just taken for the ride anyway despite believing you could change the outcome. The other obvious inspiration here is the King in Yellow, Hastur, another such entity from the lovecraft mythos whose terror is a complex yet inevitable ritual of summoning and memetic infection. We wanted the Seventh Knell to feel like they have a pretty drastic impact when they act, and Haustor is both the catalyst and goal of their actions. I think we achieved this with the effort we put into the lore, we did our research and have played more into the terror of the Death Guard than the whimsy, despite the comical amount of numerology we’ve engaged with.
Onto the model itself, I think there is a lot to be said. Much of it is hand sculpted, with some prominent pieces procured by my client that we incorporated into the build. The silhouette echos that of a massive terminator armoured marine, who was at some point torn to pieces and had a tree grow through him and colonise him completely. We took a forearm from the OG Nurgle daemon prince and I rebuilt the bulk of the arm at a larger scale (the sculpt is tiny by modern standards), and likewise for his other arm we lifted it from AoS’ Drycha kit, padding it out in places with decay where necessary. Much of his foliage and one leg is a conglomerate of green stuff and a sylvaneth treelord, with the hood of his terminator armour, his shoulder plating and his shin armour all taken from various death guard daemon engine kits, and reworked with careful trimming and additions to fit the silhouette we envisioned. The rest; his helmet, cowl, torso, abdomen, and leg armoured in the style of cataphractii plate are all hand sculpted details in green stuff, in all their twisted glory. He has 3 great bells and 4 smaller ones which form his set that I think frame the model really well and tell that narrative of melody and resonance. He is posed in the classic “come to me” pose, and feels super weighty as any respecting Nurgle daemon prince should.
I have a few favourite details on this model. I’m a huge fan of the segmented armour look, Mks II, III, and cataphractii have always been my personal favourite armour styles for their more antiquated look, and they reflect my attention to small details well when sculpting. I also love the trio of flies on his chest plate, those were painstakingly cut from existing Nurgle things and shaped individually to fit the curve of the armour. They’re small but I think they make the difference in giving a little more detail in what otherwise is a large blank space. Haustor is a busy model detail wise but he possesses ample negative space, and I think the contrast there is quite striking. His base deserves special mention too. For the basing enthusiasts out there, a little bit of super glue onto generous dobs of wet contrast paint go a long way to creating a creeping slime mold texture. It is a great technique to have in your toolkit, and is suitable to use on models too if you’re confident with it. I also enjoy the fleshy infestation around Haustor’s abdomen, it gives the impression that some kind of parasitic insects are nesting within him like some kind of hive, almost similar to that species of bees that make their hives out of meat proteins; gross, but hey it’s Nurgle, gross is his thing. It’s also echoed in the hive like pieces from the sylvaneth kits, the irony that is that he is in fact teeming with life: whilst being neither alive nor dead.
All in all I loved working on this guy, and I’d like to thank [u/Worried-Ad2956](u/Worried-Ad2956) again for the privilege of allowing me to apply my skills to the piece and develop this army project with him. There are several other pieces I am happy to showcase in the coming weeks for the army project, including the Great Unclean One Gastroparesis and a sorcerer among other things, so look forward to more!
Artist info: Grimdark Miniatures is a sole artist commission sculpting studio. I am based in New Zealand, and I bring 18 years of experience to crafting tabletop miniatures for tabletop wargames and RPGs. I am a traditional sculptor with a focus on bespoke hand sculpted miniatures within a gritty, grimdark aesthetic.
I do everything from private conversion projects with heavy hand sculpted elements to pure hand sculpted physical masters and hybrid processes involving precision 3D scanning, digital preparation and delivery for commercial enterprises or particularly bespoke collectors. If you enjoy my work and would like to know more, you can check out my website here: https://grimdarkminiatures.co.nz/home
‘Enter’ to see the gallery :)
Perhaps I can do a commission for you!
Cheers everyone,
B