Editing Nobledark Imperium Notable People (section)

==The High Lords of Terra==

=== Spokesman for the Collective Synod of the Imperium Walden of the Aaldenbergs ===

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Walden of the Aaldenbergs started his ecclesiastical vocation as the acolyte of Hahn of the Aaldenbergs, priest of the old gods, slayer of orks, caller of lightning, forger of blades and all over aging and highly accomplished strong man of the tribe. He was a mere twelve standard years old when he decided that this was what he wanted to do with his life although that his two older brothers had already been earmarked for future leader of Old Mountain tribe and sent off to the army it could be argued that there wasn't much else besides the priesthood for the third son of village chief to do. Not that he resented his lot in life, not by a long way.

He was possessed even in early age of a powerful intellect that suffered only slightly from overly straight line thinking and somewhat Dornian bluntness. As he grew up in the teachings of the faith he learned deep of the gods of blood and wood and bone and ash. He learned the names of the spirits of the deep forest where not even orks would grow and at the tender age of 15 survived the trip from the wooded foothills into the sunless heartlands by the rivers where the trees grow a mile tall. There he met the gods, he claims, though he will not say what they said to him. The gods of catachan can impart wisdom and purpose and those that would speak with them might return changed for the better or driven mad or not at all.

Young Walden came back more driven than ever, a thing old Hahn approved of greatly.

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But the place of a mere village priest was not, he felt, the place where he was needed most. Catachan's children were abroad among the stars and far from home as they were they needed a priest to keep them from becoming lost. It was with heavy hearts that the old chief and his family said fare well to their son and with some annoyance mingling with the pride that Hahn would look for another apprentice.

Walden was now a Chaplain of the Imperial Army attached to the Catachan "Green Specters" 943rd.

There he stayed for a very long time, tending the spiritual needs of his militant and inter-tribal congregation, his crozier was six foot of thornbirch with a stylized shock-maul built into the end and his vestments were a cassock made of kevlar. His regiment were known for their discretion, for the art of killing without being seen; he was not.

His followers found him of much use for the drawing of fire and attention and flushing out of targets that they could then claim. How, some would ask, would he survive more than a few missions? His gods had shown him where and to approximately when he would die in the natural course of things. Although it didn't make him invulnerable and he was never foolish enough to put them to the test outright it did allow him to move with a degree of confidence unmatched by his peers. To the Catachan, from his highest officers to the lowliest of grunts, he was inspirational.

He was also shrewd and it was for this that he started to come to the attention of higher authorities.

By the time his hair was turning grey he was attached as an advisor to Lady General Heilwig of the Uhulis Sector after the events of Velgagrad defense from the Space Hulk Da Iron Wurm and it's cargo of murderous orks. Although he was reluctant to leave his position, as the spiritual health of his fellow countrymen would be at risk until a replacement arrived, he could also see the greeter need that Lady General Heilwig had of her. The Lady General was of Krieg with all the problems that it brings with it. She was brilliant in her way and one of the few in ten millennium to achieve such rank from her world but she was still deeply flawed as a human being, her saving grace being that she knew how flawed she was. She needed someone capable of understanding the human needs and wants of those under her command and blunt enough to communicate it to her effectively. It also helped that Priest Walden was also versed in numerous languages including base-orkish

At this point Walden of the increasingly distant but not forgotten Aaldenbergs started on the rejuvenants and his apparent physical age stopped in mid forties, though in vitality and capability he regained some lost ground. It was in the following years that he truly showed his worth to the Imperium and his powerful and direct intellect was truly allowed to show.

In an empire as broad as the Imperium with a million worlds and a hundred times that many religious faiths and distinct cultures conflicts were inevitable. As a mediator between these factions Walden was peerless. He was a priestly man but he was also a soldier, he was scholar but he was also a man of the trenches, he was an officer but he was also not. Also his gods did not encourage or forbid much strictly and were so unheard of outside of the Catachans that nobody had a grievance with them. Where once had been division he brought a wary unity.

It's hard to say if he became friends with Lady General Heilwig. As a Krieger and one who had seen some horrific things she was maybe too damaged to make friends. It is known that she valued the strange Catachan man greatly. There was nobody she enjoyed arguing with more and nobody she listened to closer.

He served in this capacity for nearly seventy years until a Mandrake killed his Lady General and took her severed head. After that he felt he couldn't serve another, the pain of it was too close. He also felt by then that he had forgotten his roots somewhat and needed to be a priest again rather than a generals assistant. He didn't know what gods, if any, lived on Krieg but he gave her the Catachan burial rites and fuck any god that objected.

No sooner had he packed his bags and booked passage on a ship traveling somewhere near Catachan Space did he receive a great surprise; a letter from Old Earth demanding his presence before the Collective Synod.

The Collective Synod had, for the thirty or forty years previous, been going through a tumultuous and uncertain time. Due to the advancing ages of quite a lot of the heads and representatives of the faiths there had been delays on decision making and the voting of a new spokesman since the last one died. To this end, with Walden being of sound mind and body, centuries the junior of many and accomplished and proven capable his name had been put forth to represent the voice of the Imperium's people to the High Lords on matters of faith.

Also, they assumed, some yokel village priest from Catachan with no real power would cause them no problems and be easy to remove should the need ever arise. They were not quite right about that. Walden proved initially very unpopular, too connected to remove and seemingly unkillable.

And so by the closing of the year 999.M41 the Collective Synod endures under the less then gentle ministrations of Spokesman Father Walden von Aaldenbergs. For all that they might grumble the old men and women of the Synod have never functioned so well. It takes a special mind to organize such a fractious and mutually hostile bunch of people and by great good fortune they have one and they have nobody else to blame.

As the time of trials grows closer, prophesies are fulfilled and the Imperium is whipped into a religious fervor as the faithful rise up to meet Judgment Day. It is by the efforts of the Synod that the passion is set to the long simmer rather than the full boil and made manageable and it is the direction of Walden that is is done so.

Of the man himself? He is not where he saw himself, those many years ago at the foot of Old Mountain, but the gods work in mysterious ways. Especially Catachan one, bastards as they all are.

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=== The Speaker for the Merchant Navy and Rogue Traders Abdul Golberg ===

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The current representative of the Merchant Fleet is a Tallarn. Ot at least very strongly Tallarn influenced. Rumors abound about him. He is not the least known of the High Lords. In fact he his the most known and everyone has extensive information on him, sadly quite a lot of the information everyone has is contradictory.

His mother was Tallarn, that is almost certain. A beautiful princess of one of the city-kings most suggest although which of the grey-haired old women he has as advisors is his mother he will not say and neither will they. His father less is known about other than was an inter-stellar trader. He was of the Goldberg family, a trader dynasty on hard times somewhat reversed in recent years and as such beneath the notice or care of the other old-blood families.

One of his eyes is green and the other is yellow and nobody is sure which is the artificial/graft one. One rumour has it that his father was a Fenrisian tradesman from one of the younger colony worlds, yellow is a "normal" eye colour for those people. Some say his princess mother was married off to his father to secure an off-world trade contract, others that she ran away with him for adventure among the stars. Or the yellow is a graft and the green one is natural, green is an extremely common eye colour on Tallarn.

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Others say that he isn't Tallarn at all but from one of the Seven Sanctuary Cities of Nocturne. Certainly he in fluent in the City-Nocturne language, among about a hundred other languages, and is well versed in the Promethean Creed though he does not follow it.

The Writ of Trade he carries the Emperor remembers signing twelve and a half years after the Unification of Sol officially became the Great Crusade. It was to a man called Horatio Jeffers of Gredbritton, which is not to say that the family hasn't legally changed it's name at some point down the long years or indeed it could have passed to another family perfectly legally.

Of the man himself? He is a family man, that is known. He has at least one wife, always referred to as a singular and carefully never by name, though who among his entourage it is is not known. It is known that he has plural in both sons and daughters but again it is not known exactly who among his extended and extensive family they are. It is known that his mother is still alive but his father is not, though not who they are. Unless he's been intentionally and subtly giving consistent "slips" of information down the years that have no basis in reality. It's possible.

He is naturally hideously intelligent and further augmented by minor cerebral augmentations of dubious legality across the Mechanicus legal jurisdictions. It is known that he can speak at least a dozen languages fluently in addition to High Gothic and claims to be able to speak over a hundred with varying degrees of mastery though the extent of this is unverified.

He has sworn to, at and by god and gods of any number of faiths. It is unknown which if any of them he follows the creeds of and which he believes in. It could be none or it could be all of them somehow. In much the same way he has celebrated the festivals of many faiths although it's more than likely that he just likes celebrations.

His age is difficult to say as it's possible that his predecessors as head of the family, not necessarily his father, was also called Abdul Goldberg. Or he has inherited the name upon becoming head of the family. Or he really is as old as he claims (which varies quite a lot) and is just really well preserved. Given the way in which rejuvenents vary in effectiveness between people it's not totally outside possibility that he is in fact just shy of 800 and only physically of early middle years.

He is not psychic. That much if nothing else is certain, he's just really good at reading people and lies so well that he can fool or outright block a casual weak surface scan.

He always keeps a loyal psychic around with him at all times to detect and trace if anyone tries to scan him. These psykers, all sanctioned and legal, are also invariably part of the family though whether they are married into the family or there is a strong psychic gene in the Goldberg is hard to say. Certainly if they married in there is now so it's probably pointless to wonder in any case.

Of the man's rise to power what can be said? He managed to appear on the record books of as many of his competitors and fellow traders as possible so that the name was never too forgotten, positioned his family to appear big enough to fill the vacant shoes as the previous holder of the position started to look ill but still looked small enough to bully around and it didn't hurt that his family were old money. Or at least old IOUs.

It also helped that he had enough ships under his name and the name of his family to appear like a large but broad dynasty rather than a tall and rich one that nobody else wanted or the small and forgettable one that they actually were. Most of these ships were bought exactly to appear exactly as that and the mortgage is still being paid on most of them, high millage old buckets that they are.

And so the Goldbergs got he job. Not because anybody wanted them to have it but because they all wanted each other to have it far less. An ineffectual, weak and poor house would be easy to ignore if they got a position among the High Lords of the Imperium. They would have all the theoretical authority but no power to use it, the other Trader dynasties and meg-corps would have a new era of unregulated greed unbeholden to any so long as they didn't do anything to incur the wrath of the notoriously hands-off Royal Family.

For the most part they have been right though they are not worried and maybe they should be that the Goldbergs are not squandering their new position. From that ever so lofty position Abdul Goldberg can see the overt web of trade across the width, breadth and depth of the Imperium and has access to reports that can strongly hint at the more hidden web of undeclared trade. More importantly he can spot the gaps that his family can fill with their freshly acquired ships. Gaps that are being filled methodically.

The Goldbergs are setting the groundwork to be on the rise again for the first time in possibly thousands of years.

But what do the other High Lords and Ladies know of this? Fedor Jiao of the Navigators has just been deposed under suspicious circumstances, presumably Hector Rex of the Inquisition knows or at least someone in his employ knows, Merelda Pereth of the Navy probably suspects a power shift due to her contacts across the Void Born and Abdul knows that Irthu Haemotalion knows because Haemotalion generally knows or at least suspects everything. But they don't care, the business of business is not their business. The only ones who would care are the other big trader companies and they are habitually dismissive of the Goldbergs.

But what of it? Old Uncle Abdul has seemingly no real personal ambition beyond seeing his family prosper as all good patriarchs do. And professionally he is fiercely loyal to the Imperium as it is the greatest bastion of civilization that is and ever has been and trade is the backbone of it and trade is what flows through his veins as much as blood.

Indeed if you want something, he has it, or will have it soon or can introduce you to someone who does. Usually a nephew of some description, he has seemingly and endless supply of nephews. But always remember to have exact change.

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=== Lady High Admiral of the Imperial Navy Merelda of House Pereth ===

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Merelda of House Pereth, Lady High Admiral of the Imperial Navy, is the only abhuman serving on the High Council of the Imperium. She is a Void Born and quite typical of her kind; Abnormally tall and thin, skin unhealthily pale bordering on translucent, long dexterous fingers, bone white hair and big dark eyes. She is the descended from a line of space farers that have served in the Imperial Navy since the days of King Horus and much further into the inky black before that. Her list of victories in the name of the Imperium is legendary having seen heavy action in innumerable Chaos Incursion around the Maelstrom and the Gates of Fire and also a War for Armageddon.

She knows Empty Space, that realm to which dear Horus was once king, and to her it is home. Indeed it is so much her home that like most of her kind she can't set foot upon Old Earth without a full body harness to take the weight.

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Her understanding of trajectory, gravity, light speed delay and three dimensional theatres of battle is in the very top of what the Imperium has to offer. Eldar and Demiurg who ply the starry seas for a living do not understand it as she does.

In her time, to the disbelief of many, she has fought everything from orks to chaos to strange hostile things without name beyond the edge of the maps. She has been from one ragged edge of the galactic disc to the other and fought from Hub to Rim. Most unbelievable to most are her claims of boarding action battles. How, they ask, could a creature incapable of standing up for extended periods of time possibly fight in any meaningful way? It was this suspected dishonest that almost had her rejected for consideration of her job when her predecessor retired.

It wasn't until the Emperor himself confirmed that he believed her. He had seen Void Born in anti-boarding actions, scuttling in the zero and micro-gravity like great pale spiders across the walls. Void Born ships have no floors or ceilings and are built by shipwrights without a concept of "down" and "up". Even to veteran Chaos Marines, brains addled by centuries on Deaomn Worlds, the notion of attack from 6 cardinal directions was too much to instinctively know unless raised in it from near infancy.

Indeed there is something unsettling about watching Void Born swim through their ships of almost inhuman design, it is not a way man was meant to be but it is so.

Since assuming her job as Lady High Admiral of the Imperial Navy there has been nothing if not a mild resurgence in overall capability. She was Void Born born and raised and for a thousand generations and more the people of the deeps have not suffered incompetence well or often at all. Traditionally the greatest virtue of the pale-folk was always considered to be thrift, space is big and empty. Those that waste, be it fuel of lives or (horror of horrors) ships typically are the first to be disposed of in extremis.

This abhuman hardness got a lot of people worried, very worried, and not without cause. Although Merelda is not a cruel woman she is also not a forgiving one and although she holds no one to standards that she would not hold herself she holds herself to very high standards. This is the Navy, she would remind her critics, the first and most formidable line of defence of this Blesséd Imperium. It is not a social club for high society fops and inbred fools appointed for notions of nepotism.

There has been in the years since her appointment a notable increase in the number of Void Born transferring from the Merchant Navy to the Imperial Navy, all fairly and above board with not favour shown to them.

But Void Born are innately and instinctively better than normal men when it comes to the finer points of void warfare.

Much as the Fabricator-General the majority of her time is not spent upon the surface of Old Earth, visiting only when needed or when called for. Most of her time she spends in the ancestral capital of her kind, the Earth Luna Lagrange Point.

There in the dockyards once called home by Horus, Home still of House Lupercal among many other venerated names, she holds office. There she marshals her kind and orchestrates the training of generations of officers to captain ships as yet unbuilt to. Horrors lurk between the stars and she takes pride in that she commands the worst of them. Though she will never wear the Corona Nox, will never be the Queen of Empty Space, she is as near as any can be. The responsibility is greater as the Imperium sails to Judgment Day than in any days before.

The dockyards at thunderously busy and so are her people. As they scuttle and glide through the hallways, habs and foundries of the Lagrange Sprawl she sits at the centre of it all dictating the turning of the wheel.

The Sons of Horus have taken note of her. She is one of their faithful, adherent of the Old Gods of Empty Space. The secret faith known only to the pale-folk and shared with no outsiders save a few and most trusted.

Of the woman herself? She is hard to read. Often her people are compared to spiders, pallid, with long limbs and big dark eyes. She is if anything an exaggeration of this. When people look up into those dark eyes they see nothing but the bottomless deeps of space looking back at them. She seems to look upon her fellow lords and ladies dispassionately in the extreme to a degree considered unnerving even to the Navigators. She speaks when spoken to or when needed and never else. It is suspected that she is almost as unnerving to her fellow countrymen as she is to everyone else, abnormal even among abhumans.

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=== Lord Commander Militant of the Imperial Army Lukas Bastonne===

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Lukas Bastonne, the Lord Commander Militant of the Imperial Army, is a man both blessed and cursed with a supernaturally good memory. Or at least he is cursed and the Imperium is blessed.

He is the youngest of the High Lords by a good hundred and fifty years but that one remaining purple Cadian eye has long ago waved goodby to notions of youth or innocence or joy. He was bright enough to have skipped the duties of Whiteshield in the Cadian Army and could have transferred straight to officer school with all the perks this would bring, such people considered near as nobility on Cadia. He refused this honour on principle, a man without perspective is not a good officer, a man who hasn't started at the the bottom has no right to ask of those people to do that what he could not have been asked.

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Brilliant as he was this state of affairs was only temporary and he quickly climbed the ranks on merit and aptitude, his merciless memory serving him and others very well. But that perfect memory came at a price and that price was that it was a perfect memory. He remembers the face of every corpse that was once a friend, every horror shat out by the Eye of Terror, tortures beyond counting, lifetimes of death and destruction. He used to tattoo the name of every soldier that fell under his command. He ran out of skin a very long time ago.

Lukas Bastonne as of 999.M41 is not a happy man. Gone are the days that he doesn't wake up to the sound of his own screaming and he drinks like a fish. Rumor has it that he has gone through eight livers. Unsightly as his drinking habit is none can deny his competence at his job and even pickled in gin he has not lessened in his diligence. His job is all that keeps him getting up in the mourning.

He is a man of no humour or good cheer. He is a man who knows the value of life though knows that for the Imperium to survive that life must be spent, spent but never wasted. He will not ask others to do what he would not, but he is Cadian and they live on the doorstep of Hell. The worst nightmares of other worlds are the every other day on Cadia.

He does not wear the full ceremonial garb to the meetings of the High Lords, or any other meetings. He is from a world where pomp and ceremony go to die. He wears a field uniform at all times, he feels naked without it. He carries his las-rifle at all times because he's a soldier damn it. He rose through the ranks for fear of the incompetence of others. those names tattooed belonged to people to whom he owes it to ensure that the lives of his people are spent, not wasted. That was his driving ambition to get where he is. Now there is nobody above him bat the Emperor, now he can maybe comfort himself a little knowing that lives that are lost mean something, that his friends weren't just discarded.

Under his less than tender command the Imperial Guard is operating at a level of performance as efficient and powerful as it ever has done. He would see all worlds, not as copies of his homeworld, but as strong as it in their own way. Different worlds forge different men and different men slay different monsters and no matter what Chaos and Orks and Necrons and Ffucked up intergalactic Locusts throw at the Imperium somewhere is a soldier that can kill it.

Of his family nothing is known, Cadia has no shortage of lost war orphans. Lukas Bastonne was on some birth issued dog tags about his neck though Lukas isn't a normal Cadian name although his purple eyes are a native trait so it's possible that one parent or grand parent was an off-worlder stationed on to the Gateworlds. Not that it matters, not that it matters at all.

The other High Lords endure him with either hostility, pity or fear but he does not care for their friendship or approval. They know their job, he knows his. And under his command the Guard and the Imperium will march on.

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=== Master of the Administratum Irthu Haemotalion ===

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Irthu Haemotalion is the Master of the Administratum and, at lest believed among his fellow scribes, primus inter pares of the High Lords. Maybe there is some truth to that as the Administratum does generally know the overt doings of the other High Lords and their business and is best suited to draw the attention of the Emperor to things that could be of interest.

High Lord Haemotalion is a man who genuinely did start in gutters. He never knew his parents and was raised by his guardsman veteran uncle in a two roomed tenement in the Gethsemane capital hive, Gothic Sector.

His uncle intentionally pushed him for that career due to Irthu finishing his education as a nine stone flat footed asthmatic with a slight case of near sightedness. Had Irthu turned out to have been a prime specimen of vigorous masculinity he would probably have still been encouraged in that direction as it was a s far from the Guard as possible. His uncle had seen some terrible things in his time and had no desire to let his nephew wake up screaming every 3AM.

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Low Scribe Haemotalion's first job as an acne spotted teen was assistant to the pipe maintenance overseer for the sewage transport and treatment system in the lower rent districts of his hive. It was a far from glamourous job that necessitated him being in close proximity to human waste as pipe inspection note taker was one of his many and varied duties.

And it was a duty he excelled at. He loved his job and found no shame in it's low status. Six months into his duties and he was pointing out old and persistent problems with the organization of the maintenance team organization and presented his superiors with solutions.

Those solutions were works of simple genius. By the end of the following year, to his aging uncles pride, he was Master of Sheet Street Time Tables.

His duties expanded and his competence grew ahead of his elevation. By the time he was 30 he was the Sewer High Forman (Shit Lord) of the entire hive, practically aristocracy. But down to earth aristocracy, a Commoner Lord feared by the nobility and loved by the plebeians. A man of such elevated status so young and with such minimal formal education was unprecedented on the records.

By age 40 he had handed over his job to his most capable apprentice and traded his job of managing the waste of the hive to the management of the storm drains and the rain collection.

By the time he was 50 he was Master of Waterworks. It was at this time he started on the rejuvenants.

When it came to managing complex, interconnected, half understood systems and beating them into some semblance of order he had no peer. It was a peculiar sort of genius, and inglorious greatness and one much needed by the maddening complexity of lofty Imperial High Office.

By age 200 he was managing the requisition forms of the Merchant Navy for the entire Gothic Sector and haggling with the most prestigious of the old 'Trader Dynasties, not as a lower creature that they must deal with but as an equal. And maybe, it was whispered by the veteran Quartermaster Masters who knew of him, as a natural superior.

His rise to prominence, his hyper competence, his tirelessness and seemingly infinite patience won him promotion after promotion. Always he rose to the occasion and did not settle for being merely capable at his job but for being masterful at it. Scribes apprenticed to him were only the most promising and they left his tutelage feared by whatever branch of the Administratum they were settled in. Many of his old apprentices became Dark Clerks and Grim Statisticians of whose names and deeds are spoken of in fearful whispers were ever professional quill pushers gather to drink away their frustrations.

Irthu Haemotalion was a mere 560 when he was given the Big Chair, the padded swivel office chair with the adjustable backrest and padding even on the armrests, the Big Chair of the highest scribe in all the Imperium.

From his point of view his career has gone full circle. He started his career wading through shit and now he's knee deep in shit once more. A fact that he has let his co-workers know.

He only wished his uncle wasn't over five centuries dead. If he could see him now he hopes he would be proud.

Of High Shit Lord Irthu Haemotalion as a person; he is still a weedy manlet with his acne swapped for a hairline in full retreat. His breathing problems have cleared up by having had his lungs removed and replaced with mechanical improvements. His hands and wrists are also cybernetic due to arthritis but other than that he remains mostly human.

His personality is what one would expect of a scribe of his rank and years. Dour at first but with a dry and deadpan humour so practiced that none can tell if he is taking the piss or not, he invariably is. His patience remains infinite and the other High Lords mark it on a calendar the occasion he has been observed to blink. Some claim that he is some sort of reptile in an immaculate suit. He is also the only person capable of equaling Inquisitor Hector Rex at common card games.

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=== Fabricator-General Oud Oudia Raskian ===

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Fabricator-General Oud Oudia Raskian began his life much as the famous [[Nobledark_Imperium_Primarchs#Ferrus_Manus|Gorgon Primarch]] in the days of yore but unlike the aesthetically displeasing primarch he was crafted with an actual purpose in mind beyond "we need more bodies".

Oud Oudia Raskian was commissioned by his predecessor in Fabricator-General's twilight years. He was not alone as the Fabricator-General Tataraskiv was unwilling to leave anything up to chance at that stage. Raskian was the the brightest of his class and as he matured learned well and deep of the Omnissiah's mysteries and scriptures, doctrines and rituals. As a mere technotheologian this would have been enough but as an exemplar he must excel at all matters. The training regime was brutal, inhuman and inhumane. Many of his hundreds of classmates failed. The brighter of them were shuffled off to other areas of the Olympus Mons Brotherhood, those who were found truly wanting were made useful as servitors. Of those that reached maturity and were deemed at least acceptable they were taken to hallowed and forbidden ground.

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The young men and women, terrified and disgustingly organic as they were, stepped across the pale into the place where no map could be made or mind comprehend the twisting of the pathways. The place where Old Night was kept. Deep in unknowable depths the Noctis Labyrinthus, in the halls of things that should never have been born of mans folly and hubris ███████ ████████ ████████████ ██████ ████████████ ████ █████████ ███ █████████ ████████████ ██ ███████████████████ ███ ████ ███████████████ ██████████ ███████████████ ███ ███████ █████████ ██████████████

And of those that approached and of those that recoiled none were permitted to live. The galaxy was not for the incautious and it was not for the timid and those of both wisdom and authority that were either would only lead humanity to ruin.

Of those little more than children only Raskian survived. It is not enough, for the greatest position in the Imperium and the Mechanicum, to have merely possess the physical manifestations of the blessings of the machine. A true leader must have steel unrusting in his very soul, he must look upon damnation and not be damned himself.

Tataraskiv had found his one worthy disciple, his apprentice. Tataraskiv survived another two centuries before the meat parts of his brain degraded beyond usefulness and he had to be brought to termination. In those years Raskian learned much. He didn't consider his master a friend, given the people and the circumstances friendship was never an option, but he did respect the old man-machine greatly. Tataraskiv was disassembled and his salvageable components distributed amongst the Olympus Mons Brotherhood according to need.

In the yeas that followed Fabricator-General Oud Oudia Raskian, despite his relative youth compared to the ancient once-man he was replacing, proved to be every bit as wise and ruthless as his position demanded. As he became burdened with ever increasing secrets he was uplifted by the most beautiful augmetics from the staggering breadth of his great realm. Weariness of spirit and frailty of the flesh were replaced with mechanical resolve and technological strength.

For the last 700 years Oud Oudia Raskianhas been present at the gathering of the High Lords. He considers himself their better thought he would never admit it, the Mechanicum an equal partner in his mid to the Imperium rather than a member of it. Although they can request of him, and out of mutual benefit he often agrees, they have little that he needs from them. The Mechanicum could survive easier without the rest of the Imperium than the rest of the Imperium could survive without his people though he knows that both would be diminished without the other.

To put it another way he's an arrogant condescending twat and although his accomplishments are great he is not the center of the universe as he seems to think.

But for all that he is more than competent at his job, so he is tolerated even if the grinding of teeth he can cause is a genuine health hazard.

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=== Grand Provost Marshal Aveliza Drachmar ===

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Grand Provost Marshal Aveliza Drachmar started life as a graduate of the Schola Progenium of Hive Ferax of Thracian Primaris. Her parents that she never knew were killed in the cannibal uprising of 071M41. It was a nast, brutal little war that saw an astounding number of people killed, mutilated and consumed, the half gnawed bodies then twisted into grotesqueries until put down by a force spearheaded by the Sons of Midnight.

Her life in the Schola Progenium quickly saw Aveliza Drachmar earmarked for the Adepta Securitas due to her fervent loyalty and belief in the rightness of the Imperium as a whole.

She would have made a fine sister of battle, she was fast, athletic and possessed of a quick mind. But her path took a different turn as her schola tutors found that her mind was exceptional. She could read an entire page of text in mere moments and retain and process all the information and when they gave her access to the library she devoured it's contents with a reckless appetite.

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Her favoured subject, the words that settled hard and left a deep impression, was the Law and matters relating to it. It confirmed her childhood beliefs and proved the rightness of the Imperium to rule the galaxy. Only from just Law and the adherence to it could true civilization be derived. By the time she was 17 she had been given the genetic alterations of the Securitas battle sisters, a considerable investment, but by the time she was 18 her tutors had demanded of their superiors that she be transferred. They did not do this lightly as she would indeed have been a boon to that order but she would have been settling for second place to the benefit society would have gotten out of her as a Judge.

Accepting a Rookie for training at such late age was not unheard of but it was unusual and normally would have put the student at a considerable disadvantage. It was a pleasant surprise then that her tutors found her already word perfect in The Law, major precedents and many minor and obscure precedents of interest and curiosity. Also her physical training was excellent and made magnificent by the costly genetic augmentation she had already undergone.

Due to a somewhat aggressive nature, blamed sometimes without real proof on her genetic alterations but more often on her training, she was deemed too volatile to send to the Imperial Lawyers to administer Law in a court room but to the Street Judges to bring the Law to the Lawless.

In only a mere month she was handed over to a Senior Street Judge for training.

From there onward Aveliza's rise was nothing shot of legendary. From overseeing extermination raids on gene-stealer nests to courtroom prosecutions her victories quickly became uncountable. He became a full Judge in only five years and Senior Judge in only a further ten. She became the face of The Law on Ferax from the Warrens to the Spire Tops, she was in her duties without fear or favour showing equal levels of courtesy to the lowest beggars and Spire Lords by age 120 she was Lady High Justice of the Thracian system and surrounding sector commanding over a thousands of Imperial Lawyers and Judges across thousands of jurisdictions.

Her fire had been tamed as her years and wisdom increased, from the hot headed youth full of passion and fury to the rumbling storm whose lightning struck with precision those who thought themselves above or beyond The Law.

When the Grand Provost Marshal retired from ill health in 674M41 the Law Master Moot held not for the usual months but for only a single afternoon before all agreed upon fearsome Drachmar, cleansing flame of Scarus Sector.

For long centuries no in the dying days of 999M41 she has served unwavering, unbending and diligent in service to the Imperium. She has forsaken all ties of friendship, all hope of love, all possibility of a real life for the good of the Imperium. For the rightness of it. Some of her critics have been dismissive of her, thinking her as a stereotypical overly-aggressive Sister of Battle, unaware that her fiery passion is her own because if the Law does not stand for something then nothing does.

In her time she has stared down Space Marines, Autarchs and far more terrifying things though none that have met her suspect that anything could be much more terrifying than her.

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=== Master of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, Astronomican, Schola Psykana and the Black Ships Lady Ina Kissa ===

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The current High Lady of the Psykana, Adeptus Astra Telepathica and The Black Ships is known by the name of Lady Ina Kissa. The woman herself stand at a little over five foot tall, though holds herself taller, her face is lined with age and her hair is closer to white than grey now. She might have been considered moderately pretty in her youth although distinctive would probably be more honest. Her eyes were orange or yellow as would betray a Prosperan heritage but such a thing is of historical records now centuries old, her eyes have long since greyed and dimmed into blindness. In truth she is not much more powerful than a Primaris Battle Psyker but she has in her long, long years mastered the use of her abilities and is feared by many creatures that should have no normal cause to fear her.
 
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She was born, many years ago, to an Old Earth family and she did enter the Scholar Psykana at the age of fifteen. Records of her life between this age and her service to the Imperial guard at age four hundred and twenty are sketchy at best. There was an incident at the time she would have been at the Scholar of someone trying to summon the Chaos Eldar of the Court of the Winter Touch and the attempted atrocity being violently aborted by the actions of a belligerent student with seemingly no sense of either fear or self-preservation. The identity of the student and indeed the (presumed) tutor summoning the thrice damned has never been confirmed.
 
The gap in the records is irretrievable but bears the authority of the Inquisition.
 
When the much older Ina Kissa returned to the light of society she was very much a different woman. Gone was any semblance of youth or innocence and in it’s place a hard won wisdom and a withering and severe attitude to the general state of her fellow psykers. Her reasons for leaving the service of the Inquisition have never been confirmed. It is suspected that her unknown master retired or possibly died although many secretly believe that she was just too much of an insufferable bitch to endure and she was “persuaded to seek purpose elsewhere”. What ever the reason she seems to bear no ill will to the Inquisition although she has never once given hint to either who her master was or what they did in those centuries.
 
What is known is that she cultivated a broad and deep wisdom of all things relating to warp-craft. Things that should be known and things that, the wise and the mad would both attest, should also be known but less happily. She knows of may true names of the never-born and the damned and the lore surrounding them. She knows and seems fluent in the black speech of the warp, the very tongue of the gods themselves, and has cursed out deamons and the damned in it. It is a speech that cuts through the air like silver knives, lacerating and burning the tongue and lips of mortals foolish enough to speak it and causes bleeding in the ears of those who hear it. How she became so proficient in it is known now only to her.
 
In centuries prior to her rise to prominence there was some attempts to “modernize” the Scholar Psykana. To move away from the master and apprentice systems of the past and give rise to schools and collages with formal curriculum and standardized teaching methods. In the years of her rule this has been strongly discouraged. The schools her predecessor set up stand now mostly empty as the would be students gather in covens and coteries, learning the old ways from old masters as the conscious drive to hold on to the old traditions is pushed. Her critics claim that she is a primitive and a regressive idolizing some romanticized time that never was but she does not despise new knowledge, it’s just that she holds it in no esteem only because it is new. Old fashioned as her promoted methods and policies are none can deny that they are effective no matter how much they might want to.
 
For all that she is a fairy tale witch (an image she may have intentionally cultivated) none can claim her jurisdiction is found wanting or her duties shirked. Her presence as a High Lady of the Imperium is both comforting and worrying though thankfully for the peace of mind for many she does not take a real interest in anything that doesn't interfere with her work or the running of her branch of society she don't much care but heaven help those that trespass on what she sees as hers.

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=== Paternoval Envoy of the Navigators ===

See [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#The_Saga_of_Fedor_Jiao|The Saga of Fedor Jiao]]