Editing Nobledark Imperium Notable People (section)

== Anval Thawn ==

EDITOR'S NOTE: May need some adjustments. Malan'tai was said to be steered into a star and it's not clear if the Grey Knights would have been around to help since Malan'tai was anti-human. Additionally, there was talk of going into more detail on Thawn's deaths and how it has affected him.

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Anval Thawn of the Grey Knights was born to perfectly normal parents in one of the Sunless Cities deep in the crust of Old Earth called Kal Darihm, down in the deeps and just above the lightless seas and the geothermal shafts and surrounded on all sides by the winding tunnels of night eternal where no man lived. Here his father provided for his family as a humble and honest fisherman of the strange pale fish that were found so deep. He attended the local branch of the Rhetor Imperia, Paragon Cuthbert’s School For Good Citizens, which was present in the outskirts of south Kal Darihm at that time.

He received a simple but well-rounded education. He learned a little of history both recent and ancient, he learned a little of geography both local and galactic, he learned a little High Gothic in a sort of rough and ready way and then went to be a fisherman like his father as was expected. In a fair and just universe that would have been his life, a life on the water doing honest work for honest pay knowing nothing of war or the horrors beyond name and number. But the galaxy is not just and the galaxy has no notion of fairness.

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On his fifteenth birthday, three years after finishing his formal education, a pale-grasper of unusual size plucked him from his father’s boat swiftly and with barely time to scream but rather than sure death in the briny deeps in the maw of a great Cephalopod he rose from the darkness like a missile bathed in light and bolted across the surface of the sea like it was sound rock of the tunnels. Tests confirmed it, Anval of the family Thawn was a psyker. His mother and father and brother and sister held him close that night as they knew that they would not see him again for a long time if at all, he held witch-fire in his heart and the Sisters of Silence were ever efficient in their duties.

Sure enough in the early hours a knock of armoured fist on their door was heard. Father Thawn opened the door to the sister in her brass-trimmed robes and with tears in their eyes the family was divided and Anval was taken to the Schola Psykana and the distant land of the surface. It took some time for melancholy to pass as he had left behind all he knew and it took longer for the agoraphobia to subside as he had never seen sky or sun or moon before and was quite expecting to fall from the face of the Earth with no cave ceiling above him.

He studied hard in the hallowed halls of the Schola Psykana and although his tutors felt within him a great roaring furnace of potential ability they couldn’t teach him of any way to harness it beyond simple telekinesis and a little light illusion. None of their techniques worked but then the primary purpose of the Schola Psykana was to make people safe for their own good and the good of the people and with this they did succeed. The whispers of things to dark and terrible to contemplate found no purchase in his mind and soul and were ever frustrated. By age seventeen Anval was brought to the attention of other eyes. His stature was sturdy and his limbs strong, he had great stamina and had maintained his physique from his fishing days through his further education.

It was bitter sweet when he returned home again for proud though his family was of him his new journey would take him to the fabled halls of Titan. On Titan he was torn apart and remade in the image of the legends of ancient days, a Grey Knight and a warrior without peer. The training was hard, but he rose to the challenge of it and surgical modifications were brutal but he endured them and the flesh of the artificial organs took root in his own.

Anval of the family Thawn returned home only a few times, though he wrote often. He was not the same person he had been when he left and with each passing year in the service of the Imperium he grew more distant from them and had seen things out in the wars on distant worlds and stranger places that he did not wish to see. He outlived his family by many generations and in the end it seemed he met his doom on the bones of the craftworld Malan'tai. The craftworld was being disassembled carefully as none would dwell in so sorrowful a place but much was still to be had for salvage and such value had attracted the damned and forsaken. The battle was short and intense and almost a defeat but the neverborn and their fallen eldar pets were dispatched. Of the casualties was Brother Thawn who fell with the spear of N'Kari, Keeper of Secrets. With great solemnity his body and the bodies of his fallen brothers were taken back to Titan to be laid to rest in the fields of the dead beneath the dense and dark atmosphere.

It was then that the legend of Thawn really began to get told. Just before the procession made it to the airlocks the almost interred Brother-Knight pushed the stone slab from his sarcophagus and sat upright, removing the linen shroud from his confused features. Commotion was an understatement. It was determined, after extensive testing to ensure freedom from corruption, that he mustn’t have been dead when they laid him out to rest. The Apothecaries emphatically denied this. He was dead as Pius, a spear in his chest the size of a small tree punched a hole right through his chest and took most of the contents of the ribcage with it. His resurrection was not the work of mundane recovery.

Whatever the cause he was given a clean bill of health and returned to service after another six months of testing. Seventy years of the Long War later and he was longitudinally bisected from collar to hip by an orkish worshiper of Khorne. On the way back to Titan his comrades were more than a bit startled to see him sit down in the ship’s mess hall for a bite to eat and a cup of tea with nothing more untoward than confused memories of the last few hours. He was tested again and again, after some time, returned to service.

In his three thousand year career Anval Thawn has been;

Crushed by a Gargant - full recovery in just under 48 hours

Decapitated by a Fallen Champion of Slaanesh, flesh melted from the head and the skull taken as a trophy - head reappeared on shoulders in less than a month

Atomised by necron gauss flayer - awoke in his bunk on Titan seven weeks later

Direct hit from a nuclear warhead, body unrecoverable - was next seen walking on to the bridge of the ship that he had departed from earlier that day.

Mobbed and torn apart by Meatweaver constructs - Reappeared in the Titan dockyard nearly a year later. Longest absence on record.

Burned to the bones by Defiler in 12th Black Crusade - Appeared in a nearby forest naked less than an hour later and started sprinting towards the Defiler to get even.

And many other terrible fates. There is no describable pattern to manner of death to time spent dead or any reliability on where he will return. As to why he returns at all? Some say it's his natural immense psychic talent finding an outlet. Some say he has been chosen by the eldar's future god of the dead to be it's herald, reaching backwards through time to bless him. Some say it's a prank by Chaos to drive him to despair and show him that there is no hope, not even in death. If it is a prank of Chaos it's backfired hideously. Thawn has had thousands of years to see the beauty of the Imperium he fights and dies for and if he must die he will die a thousand times a thousand and a thousand more again.

He has been around long enough now to see the shape of things and note the number of prophesies reaching fruition. He has seen the face of the enemy and it is getting worried. The Imperium marches to Judgment Day and what the gods maybe don't appreciate is that they are just as much on trial.

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