Perpetual

Ollanius Pius, the most famous Perpetual, the man, the myth, the legend.

"I just want a normal life."
"My friend, you will have as many of those as you wish."

– The beings who would one day be Ollanius Pius and the God-Emperor of Mankind

A Perpetual (Homo Superior) is a person of the grim darkness of the 41st millennium who drew the absolutely shortest straw possible: they are immortal (because Dan Abnett must REALLY love Highlander and can’t let it go.) And nothing of this "age without youth" or "immortality without indestructibility" bullshit: they do not age (after some point in adulthood that isn't clear but seems to be the mid-to-late 30s or early 40s, maybe earlier or maybe later) and can survive the most gruesome deaths imaginable up to and including taking an Exterminatus to the face because they can reassemble themselves from their constituent atoms. They're like Wolverine on steroids like that. And before you suggest throwing them into a sun or launching them out into space, two perpetuals were spaced and just reassembled someplace that was habitable. Which, given the relentless sunshine of the Warhammer 40.000 universe is NOT a good thing: not even death will relieve your suffering. There are only a few things said to be able to kill a Perpetual for good, but these powers and weapons are known to only a few individuals in the galaxy (and even then it's not known for certain how effective they are, or if they even work). Very little is known about the Perpetuals including their origin (but given the fact that Ollanius Persson was around as far back as the time of Greek myth, they've undoubtedly been around for ages), number, purpose or even if those suspected to be them actually being Perpetuals (all that we know is that during the Horus Heresy, there were exactly 3 Perpetuals living in Ultramar; given that Ultramar consisted of 500 planets at the time, we have to assume that they're extraordinarily rare). Of only eight individuals is the status of Perpetual known or confirmed. Another foible they have is their very existence fucks up farseeing to a considerable degree, which lead Eldrad to kill off as many of them as possible to try and find a way to avoid Chaos winning overall.

We do however know, that people could be turned Perpetual by being resurrected. Which, ironically, might imply that Kharn and Lucius at some point became Perpetual too, since they've both came back from dead. It'll explain how Kharn managed to survive for that long despite his suicidal psychotic charges into everything he sees, and how Lucius resurrected without possessing anyone's body after first being outfought by Nykona Sharrowkyn of the Raven Guard, and then subsequently being cut to pieces by an emotionless Rubric Swordmaster (who in any case no longer had a body to possess either).

Recent fluff has revealed that the universe itself (or is it just the Eldar? Assholes that they are.) isn't too keen on Perpetuals as their very existence is a spanner in its gears, because people should die when they are killed each of their revivals end up fucking farseeing over and altering causality. In order to try and find alternatives to the Cabal's plan of letting humanity die to kill Chaos, Eldrad went on a galaxy wide murder tour bumping off other Perpetuals and members of the Cabal, a choice he deeply regretted when he tried farseeing and saw what the future would eventually hold. It also turns out they're capable of resisting daemonic possession, partly due to any warp entity inhabiting their soul gets fucked up when they die (and then come back). It's still implied to be horrifically traumatic but it explains how both Alivia Sureka and Anval Thawn were able to resist. Some fans speculated that they are related to the Men of Gold mentioned in old lore.

Predating the Great Crusade

The Emperor

A great many of the mysteries surrounding the Emperor would be explained if he was a Perpetual: his age, his knowledge in an era where everyone else on Terra was too busy LARPing a crossover of Terminator and Fist of the North Star to learn shit and his massive power (learned over time). On the other hand it would not explain why he didn't just regenerate after his duel with Horus on the Vengeful Spirit. The best explanation for this (besides Horus being able to injure the Emperor permanently through being the virtual avatar of all four Chaos Gods) is that the Golden Throne, while maintaining his life functions, is also keeping him from resurrecting himself- in theory, if it was shut down, the only real effect it would have is that the Emperor would "die" for a day or two at most before fully healing from his injuries. A shame that nobody seems to realize this, as it would end most of the Imperium's problems on the spot at the expense of leaving Terra defenseless to being raped, both literally and figuratively, by hordes upon hordes of daemons, even if for a couple days. (That's assuming he doesn't turn into a real god the moment he "dies" and use his new god-like powers to seal the broken portal). Though it would create some new problems, as quite a few people wouldn't be happy with the return of the original Imperial Truth, especially the Ecclesiarchy. Of course, knowing the Emperor he'd crush them like bugs if they tried to oppose him, or even if they didn't. There is no way he would agree with the current Imperium.

Recent revelations from the Horus Heresy books also suggest that his godlike powers were actually stolen from the Chaos Gods themselves instead of being wholly his own. Needless to say, the Ruinous Powers still have a grudge.

• Note: This is what the Chaos Gods told Horus (since the initial Horus Heresy trilogy, though Vengeful Spirit had them stick with the story), and we all know how trustworthy they are. Not to mention that this "explanation" is precisely what Horus himself wanted to hear. The most plausible explanation is that Emperor either tried to destroy them but failed or he infiltrated their compound to learn the secrets of the warp so he could divide fragments of his souls and make Primarchs from them. Or possibly, the original "gods" in the portal may also have been referring to Eldar pantheon (or what remains of it), who may have given the Emperor his powers, and possibly an easy way back home (via the webway) since the Emperor didn't need a ship to get back home.

Recent fluff from 7e suggests that the Golden Throne is not a life-support, but a pain engine, better than any Dark Eldar Haemonculus could possibly dream of, sapping his strength to keep the seal intact, and that Malcador, also stated by Erda and Jaghatai Khan to be a Perpetual, crumbled into dust without resurrection after several hours. Apparently, it damages the soul itself, and even with his psychic gestalt status and powers stolen/bargained from Chaos Gods it has taken a heavy toll on the Emperor.

Welp, as of October of 2018, any ambiguity as to whether or not the Emperor is a perpetual has since been removed, with GW itself stating it outright in an FAQ post. And as of 2020, with the release of Saturnine in the Siege of Terra series... Well... While it too makes it damn clear that Big-E's status as a perpetual is confirmed, it does so in a way that raises a metric fuckton of further questions.

Malcador

The Emperor's right-hand man is confirmed to be a Perpetual himself. He claims to be over 6700 years old by the time of the Horus Heresy. Despite being a Perpetual, he manages to die twice during the Siege of Terra. First, Magnus accidentally barbecues him while throwing a psychic tantrum in the Hall of Leng deep beneath the Imperial Palace. Alivia Sureka (see below) sacrifices her own Perpetuality to resurrect him. His second and final death, as we all know, comes from taking the Emperor's place on the Golden Throne so that Big E could go deliver the mother of all bitchslaps to his wayward son.

Erda

Big E's waifu, mom to the primarchs Erebus 2: Menopause Boogaloo. A female Perpetual who donated her egg cells and genetic expertise to the Primarch Project, making her their mother minus a lot of her genes. It turns out that she, not Horus or Argel Tal being sent back in time by the Chaos Gods, scattered the Primarchs (specifically, she helped The Four do it by making a warp vortex). This makes her a race traitor extraordinaire. What a TWEEST! The Emperor was of course slightly cross about this, so Erda fucked off to live quietly in the deserts of Afrik with a specially designed Space Marine bodyguard. Her ultimate fate remains unknown, although there's a big hint the slimy motherfucker extraordinaire perma-killed her when she refused to help him.

(The Valdor novel states that Chaos energy was detected in the room signifying that the Chaos Gods were still involved in the scattering of the Primarchs. It's possible that what Erda did was to disturb the wards around the primarchs' gestation capsules, which let the Chaos gods snatch them up.)

Ollanius Pius

AKA Oll Persson (Old Person...seriously? Fucking really, Abnett? Truly swung for the fences with that one, didn’t you?)

A confirmed Perpetual. By the time of the Horus Heresy, Ollanius reckons his age to be around 45,000 (give or take) and he is fully aware of the connection between the Imperial and the Gregorian calendars, putting his birth at around 15,000BC (or in layman's terms, somewhere around the end of the early stone age) in Biblical Nineveh. Oll Persson is quite reasonably older than the Emperor, considering that big Emps was born in Anatolia around 8000BC. At some point in time he became a Christian, and maintained his faith until, well, forever. Even once the word "Catholic" was somehow corrupted into "Catheric." This has interesting implications given his service to the atheistic Empire of Terra.

He was one of the Argonauts of Greek myth and fought at Austerlitz (described as Napoleon's greatest victory) and Verdun (infamous as one of the bloodiest battles in all of World War I, which is saying something), as well as the First Gulf War, implied to have been fighting on the side of Saddam Hussein. In fact, in all of the references to his military history, which is extensive—having been apparently a soldier in all his documented lives, if not all of them, period—it's also implied that he tends to fight on the losing side, or even exclusively has, whether as some sort of curse or by some sort of design. It also explains how he managed to survive boarding Horus' flagship during the Siege of Terra. It is unknown if Horus actually managed to kill him: while CHAOS MINDBULLETS certainly sound like they could do the trick, it still is quite possible that he reassembled himself and walked off, not giving a fuck. A man with true balls of steel, especially as it's implied that he's never died once in his whole lifetime (at least until Calth), and most of the time he has come back and back again to fight wars in the (literal at times) trenches. He does not want to be bothered one single fuck with John Grammaticus or the Cabal, but gets suckered in to galaxy saving adventures once and again. Such is the lot of a Perpetual.

At some point in Earth's early history, he also served as the Emperor's first-ever Warmaster, but this ended badly during a war in East Phoenicia. They defeated a cult which had been building a tower [the literal fucking Tower of Babel] that contained a complete lexicon for Enuncia, the weird transcendent language that fucks reality sideways when spoken and which is capable of causing permanent [meaning it isn't fixed once back in the warp] damage to daemons; what this editor henceforth refers to as "Space Thu'um". Ollanius wanted to destroy the tower, regarding Enuncia as an existential threat, but the Emperor wanted to preserve it as a doomsday weapon, and/or a repository of knowledge for their own use. Oll expressed his concern with this decision by shanking the Emperor and wrecking the tower before then running away... By Christ, this is a flashback where nobody comes out looking pretty.

St. Ollanius Pius: Old Lore and New

Before Perpetuals were introduced in the Horus Heresy novels, specifically in Legion by Dan Abnett, and more on Ollanius is elaborated in the some particularly good stories by Abnett set on Calth stories, especially Know no Fear and Unmarked (a short story anthologized in The Mark of Calth), St. Ollanius Pius was just a regular old balls-of-steel Guardsman whose balls turned to adamantium as he threw himself in front of his emperor during the most epic duel of all time, and thus was sanctified in lore and the Imperial cult from then on down. He was later revealed to be a Perpetual, in a somewhat controversial change. From the point of view of the average Imperial citizen, or indeed, in fact just about anyone perhaps save the Emperor himself, he was that adamantium-testicled Guardsman and remains that holy Saint who is highly revered by the Imperium (the highest decoration in the Imperial Guard, for instance, is named for him.) In fact, of course, he may still be wandering around, probably from what we all know trying to live this all down modestly. Ollanius, no doubt, would prefer the ambiguity as to whether his existence was utterly obliterated in the horrendous space kablooie surrounding the duel between the Emperor and Horus to remain as such. Although, in Fury of Magnus, Magnus was able to permanently kill a Perpetual via the power of sorcery and plot convenience [though it STILL didn't quite stick], which perhaps makes it more doubtful that Olly is still alive. But Fury of Magnus, while an enjoyable read, poses so many questions and contrived plot points, while answering so few of them, that attempting to deduce any larger implications from it is hardly a sturdy prospect.

John Grammaticus

Former officer of the Emperor's armies during the Unification Wars on Terra and later agent of the Cabal and a lesser psyker; John Grammaticus WHO WAS GORDON GRAMMATICUS' BROTHER WAS ONE DAY AT AN OFFICE TYPING ON A COMPUTOR is an interesting case: after he died at Anatol Hive, an Eldar Autarch called Slau Dha found his body and made him into a Perpetual. This signaled that it is possible for humans to become Perpetuals; or, Slau Dha was the equivalent of Ramirez and John was Connor MacLeod from Highlander. If this were the case this would make John and Slau Dha at least eight times more awesome. Grammaticus' skills gained over the course of a millennium of life were instrumental for recruiting Alpharius to the cause of the Cabal, but he felt bad about this and stepped out of an airlock in the faint hope that it would kill him. (It did, but then he just came back to life again). After the Drop Site Massacre, he spent some time digging up an old relic spear that was actually made from cast-off lightning of the Emperor's divinity, reputed to be able to kill anything, even other immortals. After the apparent failure of the "Alpharius Gambit" (two choices, two primarchs, go figure) the Cabal had intended to use it to stop Vulkan from reaching Terra and interfering with their future plans. Unfortunately such a powerful relic made Grammaticus into a big giant target, and he ended up getting captured, killed and recaptured by the Word Bearers and the Shattered Legions before eventually finding his way to Macragge.

On the way he was contacted psychically by this dick who told him that he could strike back at the Cabal by stabbing Vulkan himself, since if another immortal did it it would work differently, and in this case it would somehow heal the primarch who was mentally broken after years of torture by Konrad Curze. Because of reasons. So after seeking Vulkan out on Macragge he stabbed him, investing his own immortality into the strike, and sucking it out of himself and making him mortal... also apparently killing Vulkan properly this time and therefore doing what the Cabal wanted in the first place. Also at some point during the invasion of Calth he found Oll Persson and tried to recruit him to the cause, though that didn't go too well as he was only half-hearted in his attempts anyway, plus Oll couldn't be bothered. He was mindwiped after the Vulkan thing, but Eldrad restored his memories and asked him to make sure Oll reached Terra.

Damon Prytanis

Alex Krycek in space. Another agent of the Cabal, though unlike John Grammaticus, Damon was more of a soldier/assassin than a spy and got all the killy jobs. It is heavily implied that he was the one who killed Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as other important figures throughout human history. No, really. The novels specifically mention he was responsible for the death of "the good man in Memphis" and "the brother in the City of Angels".

He was apparently more comfortable with his position in the Cabal, even though it meant working against his own species, as seen during his meetings with John Grammaticus, which made him more trustworthy in the eyes of the Cabal. During John's last mission Damon was sent to watch over him and make sure that he didn't falter or chicken out and try to derail their plans. Though he sort of failed to contain Grammaticus, he does kill Vulkan once, shredding him with a pair of shuriken pistols, but it's worth noting the primarch was already pretty shattered after having died a couple of times by that point.

He was the individual who brought Cyrene Valantion into the Cabal's fold, having to die once or twice on board the Word Bearers' starship just to prove a point to her. He's now definitely dead for real after Barthusa Narek shot him in the head with a fulgurite round at point blank.

Alivia Sureka

Another female Perpetual and empathic psyker. Unlike most of the others though she has no apparent connection to the Cabal at all, and in fact is much more closely linked to the Emperor. She had traveled with Him and undisclosed "others" to the planet Molech where the Emperor somehow travelled directly into the Warp and stole portions of the Chaos Gods' powers (or so the Chaos Gods claim).

She was left behind on Molech to guard the gateway to stop anyone else from passing through and doing the same thing. Which apparently she did dutifully for a few thousand years... meaning that she is the only other Perpetual in the Emperor's peer group who is actually loyal to him at the time of the Crusade. When the Great Crusade arrived on the planet, the Emperor fortified the shit out of it, leaving detachments of Blood Angels, Ultramarines, Imperial Knights, Titans and Imperial Army to guard the gate. This made her somewhat redundant, so she just settled down and got married. At least until Horus arrived during the Heresy and laid waste to most of the Imperial forces in a bid to follow in his father's footsteps and take the same power for himself. Alivia tried to seal the portal, but wound up getting killed before she could complete the ritual. She resurrected, escaped Molech, and headed for Terra with her adopted daughters.

Humorously, Alivia has several affectations brought over from the third millennium; she has a tendency to use "modern-day" phrases such as "Okay", which do not actually exist in the 31st millennium. She also carries around a book of Hans Christian Andersen stories (probably one of the most priceless artifacts in the Imperium, if anyone knew what it was) which she reads to her adopted children.

She is now definitely dead, having pulled a Grammaticus and sacrificed her Perpetuality to resurrect Malcador after he was killed by Magnus during the Siege of Terra. This is a shame, as she was probably one of the smartest, toughest, and most well-adjusted people in the Imperium.

Surfaced during and after the Great Crusade

Vulkan

Like his dad, Vulkan of the Salamanders was a confirmed Perpetual. This was put to the ultimate test by none other than the goddamn Night Haunter himself the little emo goth kid on super-steroids, who captured Vulkan during the Drop Site Massacre and proceeded to perform the most depraved tortures and murders on the Lord of the Salamanders in an attempt to break his will, and had to invent several new ones just for the occasion. Whether he was shot with bolters at point-blank range, cut apart, decapitated, eviscerated, impaled, dismembered, evaporated, getting his throat torn out with a rusty fork, being quite literally mindfucked, or being tossed naked into an active warp drive, Vulkan would neither break nor stay dead, pissing Curze right the fuck off. Eventually, Curze locked him in a maze courtesy of Perturabo where he would hunt Vulkan himself. Curze's mistake was to place Dawnbringer at the center of the maze. When Vulkan got to his hammer, he proceeded to hand Curze a helping of it straight to the face, then he activated a built-in teleporter that sent him right over to Macragge where he promptly burned up in the atmosphere like a human meteor, killing him again in the process.

Here things get complicated: Vulkan regenerated on Macragge but lost his mind, so Guilliman kept him locked up until he could figure out what to do with him, even concealing his presence when the Lion arrived. However, when Konrad Curze arrived on Macragge after stowing away on the Lion's flagship, Vulkan escaped in a moment of lucidity and tore his way across the planet (while naked) hunting Curze down and almost defeating him in a one-on-one duel. Shortly afterwards John Grammaticus found the broken primarch and stabbed him with the fulgurite, a stone spearhead charged with the psychic essence of the Emperor himself. He could not regenerate from this and neither Roboute Guilliman, Sanguinius, nor Lion El'Jonson could remove the spear from their brother's chest. Given that he was sent back to Nocturne for burial, we are forced to assume that his casket included a long tube-shaped appendage at least several feet long sticking out at an unusual angle, making this (while tragic) at least eight times more amusing (assuming that he was ever stabbed in the first place[though it was only the head of a spear not the shaft itself]).

Guilliman was hopeful that Vulkan would resurrect himself in time and insisted that the coffin was a preservation capsule, which Guilliman dubbed "The Unbound Flame". Some Salamanders who maintained a vigil of mourning thought they could hear a heartbeat. After an even more convoluted series of events surrounding the return of Vulkan's remains to Nocturne, the Primarch was found alive and well once more, which is even more confusing given that the fulgurite, which was supposed to kill him permanently, was still sticking out of his chest at the time of his entombment.

What raises an interesting question in Vulkan's case is regarding the source of his powers. If it was given to him by the Emperor, it begs the question why the Emperor did not give all of his sons this ability (though it sort of answers itself with the thought of Angron becoming the Juggernaut (bitch!). If it was not the case, it would suggest that the Perpetual trait can be passed down one's bloodline, or at least transferred by cloning. Big E certainly knew that Vulkan was immortal and depended on that fact in order to get him to bring the Talisman of Seven Hammers back to Terra. This couldn't have been the Emperor's "ultimate plan" for Vulkan, and seems more of a last ditch contingency considering how badly the Golden Throne got fucked over by Magnus; if he had planned to put a self-destruct on it all along, he probably could/should have done it before he got stuck sitting on it. (Granted it is implied that Artellus Numeleon's sacrifice brought back Vulan from his permanent death. The first but not the last time Human sacrifice is used to bring back Perpetuals from certain death.)

The Emperor also told Vulkan plainly that his son's "humanity" was his single greatest trait and also his proudest achievement, and that he hoped that Vulkan would eventually teach it to his brothers. Certainly Vulkan was probably the nicest of the Primarchs and as such would probably have been the best bet for an undying son, especially if you were relying on him to tone down the more extreme traits of his brothers after the Great Crusade was finished. When Empy was looking over the petri dishes for which one to add the immortality to he had to choose between (in order): a snooty inscrutable jerk, a [RECORDS LOST], a preening katty egotistical asshole, a genocidal sociopath with poor impulse control, Genghis Khan, a dick with a viking furry fetish, a stubborn joyless masochist, a schizophrenic serial killing terrorist with bipolar mood swings between fatalism and nihilism, a guy with a terrible terrible secret, a Social Darwinist nerd who'd rather be talking to a toaster, a [RECORDS LOST], an explosively violent psychopath with silly hair, a patrician jerk with a heart of gold, a bitter aspie maniac with an unhealthy love of toxins, a massively powerful arrogant psyker who can't take orders, a spoiled insecure egomaniac, a petulant zealot with a pathological daddy complex, an emo bird, and two people obsessed with secrets and lies. On the other hand, a lot of those traits were nurture rather then purely nature. Even so, if he did do it deliberately, he made a decent choice.

Dalia Cythera

Dalia Cythera is a former Administratum Transcriber and a latent psyker during the Great Crusade/Horus Heresy (specifically during the Death of Innocence). While she was at one point at risk of unemployment due to her insatiable desire to learn and actually read the tomes she transcribed, she was soon protected by Adept Koriel Zeth and delivered to Magma City, her forge on Mars. Dalia has three wow factors going for her: one, she was somehow not a braindead thrall after all that indoctrination; two, she possessed an eidetic memory and could read noospheric data without augments due to her latent psyker abilities; and three, she had a connection to a cold dark thing that gave her bad dreams and intuitive knowledge about technology.

Zeth involved her in the development of the Akashic Reader, her pet project to tap into the the sum of all knowledge, which was the hypothesized source of Dalia's ability. Using an array of a thousand sanctioned psykers as a surge protector and another, Jonas, strapped into a gold throne-like device (the Akashic Reader), the plan was to siphon the energy needed to pierce into the aether from the Astronomican, shove Jonas' perceptions into the Akashic Records and somehow get that fool enough paper to jot it all down for them before his brain liquefied. Dalia forgot the first rule of engineering which is to overengineer (not helped by faulty data and assumptions on her part); naturally it went tits up, but it would have anyways.

Such a feat would have been a great leap forward for a rapidly booming age of technology in this wonderful time of development and progress! Unfortunately, the project was utterly annihilated during the Martian Schism due to Koriel Zeth's last stand, in which she chose slagging the entire forge city over allowing the Dark Mechanicum and Kelbor-Hal to plunder the miraculous technologies she had uncovered. Absolutely everything was reclaimed by magma, resulting in Mankind's last hope for a golden future dying in hellfire.

Meanwhile, Dalia and friends are off on a merry adventure to seek out that thing that's calling her out to join it in the void of the Noctis Labyrinth. They meet some jolly characters along the way like Kaban-chan and later Semyon, just a normal (if rather unhinged) unaugmented 10,000 year old dude with a pet servitor living at the bottom of a pitch black chasm. Dalia could relate, having a pet Protector of her own, Rho-Mu 31. Semyon was blessed by the Emperor himself to fulfil the role of 'Guardian of the Dragon,' protector of secrets and warden. Semyon talks about how he is 'running out of time' which implies that Dalia's Perpetuity either has a time limit of 10,000 years, or will begin to wane when her replacement is found. It is clarified that it wasn't the Void Dragon initiating, turns out it was Big E all along (at least in part)!

Dalia is The Chosen One (plus her pet too, I guess), and is destined to rot in a hole where her innate abilities will be absolutely useless to everyone. Her job duties include somehow keeping folks from releasing the Dragon of Mars, and thwarting any attempts to steal a tome (which immediately gets swiped, implicitly by one of her surviving friends) which makes sure to explicitly impart the lesson that the Dragon was put on Mars so jerkoffs would make whatever wacky shit it dreamed about in captivity later, without any of the requisite explanations of why he made the book explicitly impart such a damaging secret, so that's not bad or anything. As soon as Semyon passes his Perpetual status to Dalia he and his servitor go the way of Malcador, collapsing into dust.

Come the present day, it's unclear whether or not she's still around, though as the end of the novel indicates that her successor as Guardian of the Dragon is currently being drawn to the Labyrinth of Night, her chances of surviving into the age of the Great Rift seem slim in the extreme, if at all.

Anval Thawn

Justicar Anval Thawn of the Grey Knights is the biggest mystery of them all. All that is known is that he can walk away from the most gruesome Daemon-inflicted deaths one can imagine, much to the chagrin of his brothers and bewilderment of the Brotherhood's Librarians. It also begs the question of why him being a Perpetual was not detected during his induction into the Grey Knights, either during the tests or abnormal recovery from the involved surgeries or the speed at which he accepted the nineteen organs. Perhaps the Perpetualness is undetectable by normal science or it manifests after a person's first death (much like in Highlander or the Planeswalker spark of Magic: The Gathering). Another option is that he might be Ollanius Pius or John Grammaticus, who were tired of dicking around for another 10.000 years and wanted a shot at becoming a Space Marine and then went all in to kill the Chaos bastards as a Grey Knight. And an even better question is how the fuck the Eldar were able to recognize him for what he was after only a short period of interaction with them.

Cyrene Valantion

Cyrene Valantion was a common woman from Khur, a planet conquered by the Word Bearers during the Great Crusade, until the Ultramarines blew her home city of Monarchia to ashes to send a "Stop Worshipping Me!" message from the Big E to Lorgar. Since the smurfs weren't complete assholes they evacuated all civilians first (only BLAMing those who didn't want to in the process). Well, except Cyrene and a couple (hundred) of others. She decided to stay out of the city borders and watch as the orbital bombardment erased her home. Apparently watching an entire city being nuked was not the best decision, since she lost her eyes and almost died due to the extreme flash of light and from radiation burns. When the Word Bearers arrived they rescued her and figured that she was the only surviving witness of their punishment, because smurfs couldn't be bothered helping civilians whose city they just destroyed. This turned her into some kind of saint in their eyes, so they offered her a position of Confessor/Holy Relic, aka "The Blessed Lady" in their fleet. During the few decades of her service to the Word Bearers she became close to Argel Tal and guided him on his path to becoming the first Possessed Marine and overall awesome guy who kills loyalists and doesn't afraid of anything. Everything was fine and dandy until the Heresy, when during the Drop Site Massacre she got herself killed by some Custodes assholes for just being in their way who thought they'd have an easier way obtaining answers out of her than from any Word Bearer. Needless to say Argel Tal cried manly tears of rage over her corpse and swore revenge on the Custodes, which he delivered just a few hours later, butchering them all amidst the ashes of Istvaan V.

Fast forward one year to Erebus resurrecting her to facilitate his machinations with Argel Tal, because he's a dick. Mind you, while she was dead for a year, he had her soul torn apart and eaten by multiple daemons, whom Erebus "persuaded" to give the pieces back. Being the badass she was, Cyrene recovered from the shock of being mutilated and tormented in hell surprisingly fast, until the battle for Nuceria, wherein her ship was blown up and she got rescued by none other than Damon Prytanis who told her that being resurrected had turned her into a Perpetual. And then... cliffhanger. During the Siege of Terra, she resurfaced as a blind seer who renamed herself as Actaea associated with Damon Prytanis and Alpharius. Actaea claimed to be part of Cyrene Valantion's cult in the Word Bearers, but Zardu Layak did some digging and found that no record of her existed. It is also possible that she became Moriana.

Joaqhuine Desdemondra

Joaqhuine Desdemondra is a Living Saint and a secret lover of Inquisitor Bronislaw Czevak. Formerly a blood-drinking Death Cult assassin from the Path Incarnadine, she was an associate of Czevak. Other names she was known as include Saint Joaqhuine the Renascent - Living Saint of the Imperial Creed, or The Idolatress. She was identified as a form of immortal called a Reanimate upon being introduced in the "Atlas Infernal" novel. Unfortunately for her, she was later captured by Ahriman and was tortured repeatedly by being incinerated to death in front of Czevak in order to break the mental wards placed on his mind so Ahriman can extract knowledge about the Black Library from him. While Czevak was later taken from Ahriman's hands, she remained in captivity. Which is a point of motivation for Bronislav to confront Ahriman again.