Nobledark Imperium Notable People
This page is part of the Nobledark Imperium, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. See the Nobledark Imperium Introduction and Main Page for more information on the alternate universe
TO DO:
- ask editfag for more things to do
The galaxy has produced numerous notable individuals, Imperial or otherwise, throughout its long and storied history. The actions of these individuals have often shaped the course of history, saving the lives of billions of the galaxy's inhabitants or damning them to perdition. The Ruinous Powers and their followers have their own page, which can be found here
Eldrad Ulthran
The date of birth of Eldrad Ulthran is an event lost to time. Assumed to have been born at most a few thousand years before The Fall the ancient Farseer would have been considered old even as the Eldar Empire died. There are few (if any) surviving records of his early life, and his memory is fragmented at best.
The loss of memory may have been a result of The Fall breaking his mind, a broken mind would explain many of his later antics, or it could simply be caused by living longer than any other biological eldar. His longevity is assumed to not be natural as an unaltered eldar will live for just under two thousand years and even with the best of post-Fall longevity treatments will struggle to reach five thousand. Eldrad is assumed to be potentially three times the upper limit of known eldar longevity treatments. He is therefore either some sort of mutant or the result of now forgotten and lost medical intervention of the Old Empire. He is long lived but he is not immortal. By the dying of the Dark Millennium his skeleton has crystallized, his face is lined, his eyes grow dim and his hair is white.
His earliest coherent memories are trying to warn the general populace of the Home Worlds of the Old Empire to their dangerous folly. By that time they were either too far gone to care or skeptical of his claims. He has memories of trying to organize evacuation fleets and calling in the favours and offering favours to the trader captains to help. The names of the captains, the names of their ships and their faces have dimmed and faded with time. It is possible that they were the origins of many of the craftworlds, but now none will know for sure. It was not a time that records survived well.
With his precognitive prowess he felt the shape of something not unlike the Old Empire rising up across the galaxy but not of his kin. A god but a mortal made of gold and gold did not rust.
Every rune cast, every vision from meditation showed that the remnants of the eldar people would in time come to blows with the men of Earth. Without their gods save murderer and trickster his people would lose their wisdom, what little of it they still had. They would declare war upon the men of Earth and great slaughter would be had. Peace would be impossible.
They needed their gods back. Of them the Harlequins sang only one other yet lived and then in captivity and that rescue would always be impossible.
This declaration of impossibility did not sit well with the old Farseer. The eldar people had gone through too much, survived too much, to be driven to either madness or extinction. For one who dealt with the sliding scale of probability and the twisting threads of possibility it is possible that he saw this great wall as a personal insult and his mind started to wander down stranger paths.
Under normal circumstances none of the eldar people would have dreamed of seeking the aid of the lesser races but these were far from normal times.
And so it was that Eldrad found an unlikely ally, himself a relic from a broken empire whose people had been brought low. For the first time that he could remember the old Farseer felt something approaching a sense of family unlikely as that seemed with the great golden eyed giant.
The greatest warriors of the eldar were assembled and it’s most powerful seers and warlocks and the humans, as he learned his new friends were called, did the same. With great effort and a derelict and unstable webway gate they tore the veil of reality asunder and the human exarch “space marines” and the young Phoenix Lords charged into the very depths of Hell in the wake of the giant called Steward.
Of what they saw in that place none would tell Eldrad though of those that returned all now had the eyes of people who had seen too much and could never look away again. And for an instant, just for an instant, as they stepped back into the world of the living there stood the mother of all eldar for the last time and first time in possibly millions of years. Just for an instant in the flesh and all who beheld her in that moment knew new hope for salvation.
Soon arose again the Priesthood of Isha, the daughters of the Mother, Her disciples and from their venerated ranks the one known as Macha rose to prominence and earned herself the honour of being the avatar of her patron in the world of the living. Eldrad recognized the one known as Macha for she was old and also a survivor of the fall but he could not name her or recall her face. He suspected she was distant kin but she did not carry the name of Ulthran, none besides Eldrad in that time did.
The thread of the eldar people was strengthened and as he looked upon and forwards through the skein of fate the thread would be strengthened still further by being interwoven with that of the men of Earth. So it came to pass that the radiant High Priestess of Isha and the Steward were joined as husband and wife to formalize the union of man and eldar and the protection and inclusion of the true eldar people into the Imperium.
But the theft of Isha had insulted the gods and they were out for blood. Eldrad, as the being who had put forth that plan, felt more than a little responsible. Possibly it was this sense of responsibility that made him refuse to suggest to the craftworlders that they run and let the humans die in their place, perhaps it was the knowledge that the gods would never stop hunting them, perhaps it was that he saw this conflict as a trial by fire for their new Imperium or perhaps he was much like his own people now were. They were no longer a ragged band of refugees surviving off of scraps salvaged from a burned down home, they were Eldar once more. The galaxy had bent to their will once and some stupid upstart gods were now challenging them? They were not so weak as to cower now. Eldar and men were building the galaxy anew. Mortal hands and hearts and heads held high and what mortals had wrought no god would tear asunder.
And so it was that eldar blades met the blades of the enemy and Eldrad was aghast to find that the hands that held those daemon blades were not unlike his own. His fallen people, the ones who danced and sang as trillions died and reveled in the debauchery even to the screams of the dying and the damned still lived, if one could even call it living.
It was with heavy heart that the old farseer fled the Gate Worlds of Cadia and Ulthwe and for many a century to come his kin and kind word decried him a coward and a scoundrel. But the flight of Eldrad to Old Earth, although one of desperation, was not one of cowardice and if any emotion at all still beat in that cold grey heart it was wrath.
Eldrad had looked upon the threads of fate as they shifted and saw one thin strand that led to a lasting hope of victory for his peoples. Just one. He needed to be on Old Earth. He didn't know why but the only way for all to survive was for him to be where that hammer was coming down hardest. Even so it was a hard thing to do. Time has weathered their faces and names but he did now have children of his own upon fair Ulthwe. Their names have gone unremembered, their souls never made it to the Infinity Circuit and ever afterwards long past the point when their faces became blurred and forgotten he knew he had left them to die and worse and he cursed himself for it.
It was a maddening time in Imperial Palace. Eldrad's small ship was shot down by the invading forces and it not so much landed in the Imperial Gardens as crashed. Greenskinned brutes occupied by that point the majority of the Earth's surface, great swathes of the population were slain and they didn't look to be slowing down. In truth the forces mustered against basic sanity on Earth put the forces leveled against the home he had abandoned to shame. But this was Old Earth, keystone of a new Imperium, it's walls were so much higher.
To Eldrad's relief the Steward knew of the Crone World Eldar, his own court seer Red Magnus having divined their presence. But Red Magnus was young. Brilliant but young. Eldrad was old and even then in relative youth none were his equal and he was at the center of the storm. The heart of the web where all the strings met, Chaos had hounded him but he was now right where he needed to be and the manic grin on his face and the fire in his eyes was terrible to behold.
Forces were redeployed and moved under cover of darkness and smoke and illusion, slight of hand was played at an insane level, misdirection and the subtle knife between ribs cost the orks and their puppeteers a heavy price as the line was held with one hand and the knife shoved in the back and twisted with the other. The war had just gotten serious, the Crone Worlders were going to have to work for it and come down and fight for themselves if they wanted this victory.
They tried several times to teleport into the Imperial Palace as its shields weakened, a fact that the turned out to be a trap and all their assassins and berserkers were caught in a withering hail of bolter fire. They tried air dropping Kommandoes and Stalkers and Mandrakes only to find that the Harlequins had been loitering in the place for months waiting for them. They tried digging in with great rock crunching maworms and Digga Krewz and stranger things that slipped between the rocks like impossible smoke. They encountered Magnus' daemons. It is probably better not to know what he did to them though they were never seen again.
In the end the Palace would have to be taken the Orky way with a mass charge. Here was where the Beast approached.
For all his cunning Eldrad had only so many pieces on the board and misdirection and prescience could only stretch that so far. The thin red line before the Eternity Gate was thin and he knew it and they knew it and he knew that they knew it and they knew that he knew that they knew it and they savored his desperation.
For all that the Beast approached he could not withdraw soldiers for other fortifications. Every time he was about to do so he felt the thin strand they all hung by snapping. The Beast had to attack the Eternity Gates and he could offer no help to stop it. Thrice he had to hold the Steward back for rushing to the gate to lend his prodigious strength. The Steward was needed right where he was. No one man could direct the forces across an entire planet and Eldrad knew the Steward would be drowned if left to it on his own.
The calls for aid coming from the gate became shouts of defiance as the defenders made their last stand. The Steward was almost in tears, of all the beings in his Imperium few were friends and one was about to die and he was letting it happen. When the transmissions went quiet so did the Steward. Cold and quiet and very, very still.
Sporadic fire could be heard getting closer and the footsteps of doom like war drums or twin hearts getting closer.
When the Beast finally smashed and tore the armored door out of the Throne Room he did not find a selection of cowering generals and fleeing strategists. What he found was an angry Man of Gold cannoning into his face at a flat trajectory like a murder tipped missile.
It was a hard fight. Perhaps the most brutal and savage that there ever was. The Steward was a Man of Gold, a relic from a lost era when men were as gods. Eldrad was a primordial eldar born at the height of their kind and carrying the flame of it like an inferno. But for all that the Beast was The Beast. Empowered by gods too terrible to contemplate and mighty beyond measure. Later tales will tell of how the fight lasted a day and a night but they are almost certainly lies although the old Farseer as he danced and struck had lost all notion of time.
Fists that could break buildings impacted on the Green Menace that responded in turn with blows that could fell baneblades. Had The Beast been able to concentrate on a single target it would all of been over. He was too durable, too strong and for a creature of such mass hellishly fast and seemingly tireless. The Steward was also seemingly incapable of tiring but Eldrad was beginning to weary. Days upon days of constant battle and sifting through fates trying to divine the least awful were taking their toll. He would tire and then he would die and then the Steward would die and then his Imperium would die and his own people right along with it. It seemed as unstoppable as tide and time.
And then the Farseer noticed an out of place thing buried in the Beast's chest. A broken sword blade that must once of been of elegant design.
With the last of his strength the farseer channeled his fire and his lightning into that blade and grasped it in his mind and drove it deep into the Beast's chest and twisted. The Beast collapsed in agony, spasming on the floor as the agony wracked him, and the Steward joined his psychic might with the old farseer. Together, they looked over the Beast as it fell and stared it straight in the eye, twisting the blade until the struggling stopped and all that was left in that monsters chest was broken up charcoal.
Exhausted the farseer fell to his knees. The last thing he saw before the darkness overtook him was the Steward holding the remains of what had once been an angel. The worst of the fighting on Old Earth was well over when Eldrad awoke once more.
The war was far from over, but the back of it had been broken.
Eldrad returned to his people, much to their annoyance. It was a long time before they would forgive him for abandoning them, although those in authority knew his reason well enough.
Sreta Ulthran
Eldrad Ulthran has used, accumulated, and fought for power. Typically of the arcane, or martial variety, as even a farseer of his reputation and skill can admit that sometimes the best solution is the least subtle. But he never purposely sought political power, or the acclaim of the public eye. In his advanced years, he looks upon the pageantry and political theater as wastes of time burning up what little he has left. If he isn't in the field working at advancing his machinations, he usually can be found in the crystal dome of seers, attempting to forecast the future, and guide the survival of his great work. On very rare occasion, when he feels that the very fate of the galaxy isn't at stake, he visits his family and consorts, communes with the infinity circuit, and if he's feeling very optimistic, has a good cup of tea. All of this combined does not leave much time for Eldrad to engage in politics, except when the need is most dire.
His family is another matter.
Sometimes referred to as "The House of Ulthran." Depending on the speaker, this can be a term of respect, or contempt. Respect, for placing them on such a level as famous houses as Ulthanesh or Arienal, or contempt, for the Ulthrans upstart nature and meddling. A full fourth of the Seer Council is Ulthran, from marriage ties or blood. Ulthran's coffers overflow from monopolies negotiated with unwary Imperial governors, too uneducated to realize that the family and craftworld were not one and the same. With their resources, House Ulthran reinvests these funds into the fleet of Ulthwé, leaving many captains in their debt. At one point, Eldrad Ulthran's ilk held captain positions in the majority of the fleet- though Eldrad Ulthran himself stepped in forced the majority to relinquish their posts for fear of Ulthwé becoming his personal craftworld.
In spite of Eldrad's efforts, the House of Ulthran continues to grow in influence, mostly due to his reputation. And the efforts of Sreta Ulthran.
At 2300 years old, she's technically a grand daughter of the famously tangled and expansive Ulthran family tree. When she was born, the family of Ulthran was just that- a family. No strong bonds between them- Eldrad's nomadic nature and hands off approach combined with the rigors of their Paths left them little time to consider dynastic issues. For Sreta's part, it took her three hundred years on the path of the servant to realize that as well. In a short stint serving at an ambassadorial party, a particularly curious (And slightly intoxicated) Lord Militant Adrana had inquired if she had seen Sreta anywhere before, and rather coarsely asked if Sreta wanted to come back to Adrana's place for a good time. Once Sreta overcame her disgust at the mon'keigh (Sreta doesn't hate humans. She just considers them lesser beings that insult her with their very existence) and engaged in conversation, it led to her family name.
Lord Militant Adrana was flabbergasted and shocked that the grand daughter of the famed Eldrad Ulthran was serving drinks at a glorified cocktail party. Much to the humble servant Sreta's surprise, the Lord Militant apologized, and begged for a chance to make things right before "Eldrad heard about this." Sreta Which led to Sreta seeing an opportunity- to better serve all of Ulthwé of course. Over the next two hundred years, Sreta used her family name to secure meetings with important, easily impressed mon'keigh, and to secure leverage enough to establish standing and influence. She approached her relations- only the ones that mattered. She offered her assistance. Though they were skeptical about the value of the Ulthran name, the prospect of resources and manpower from the mon'keigh intrigued them. Using human mercenaries meant less eldar warriors had to die, and the only thing better than a war hero returning with victory, was a war hero returning with victory and no casualties. Well, none that mattered to Ulthwé at least.
At first, Ulthwé welcomed the trade. Though every thing that humans can do, Eldar can do better, it was good sometimes to be able to get a blanket NOW rather than waiting for the Mistress of the Seams to complete her twelve year meditation to produce the finest silk covering that would be spoken of for centuries to come. With the farseers and autarchs supplemented by human resources, this freed up skilled eldar warriors for the fights that REALLY mattered. And craftsmen that might have been put out by the competing low quality mon'keigh crap coming in were soothed by the extraordinary prices that humans would pay for eldar quality. Entire Imperial families would make themselves paupers for a chance to touch a wraithbone hilt. The traditionalists scowled, but the results were indisputable as the other craftworlds played catch up, and Ulthwé's power and influence grew and grew.
Until they realized that it was Ulthran's power. Sreta had made very sure to benefit only members of her family- and only ones she was certain belonged to Eldrad's lineage, none of his bastards or might-have-beens or the ones that never made anything important of themselves. Many confident great great great great great great nephew's cousin's brother's sister's great great uncle twice removeds approached Sreta confidently only to be rejected with icy words and a narrowed eye. In point of fact, the modern 'House of Ulthran' only has fifty four members that are considered and recorded direct family by Sreta, hand chosen by her.
To mon'keigh, this state of affairs might seem perfectly natural, but to eldar, the notion that 54 people bound only by their name should control so much of a craftworld's resources left them aghast. More than that, that it was a lowly member of the Path of the Servant that had suddenly and quietly placed themselves into this much power rankled those that felt that their paths sacrificed far more.
For the time being, the star of Ulthran continues to rise. Despite Eldrad's pronouncements and warnings, the damage has been done. Even without the unfair contracts Sreta negotiated, too much money and talent has been concentrated in the Ulthran family's hands, and humans invariably put too much value in the Ulthran family name. Ulthwé itself prospers from this, but there is opposition now to Sreta and her cartel. Even some members of the Ulthran clan (Typically those that Sreta snubbed or otherwise left out in the cold) have been speaking up against her.
Within the House of Ulthran itself, there is rumors of a schism- favored Taldeer, a talented farseer and one with much promise has left to serve in the Imperium's military, perhaps to get away from the rivalries, or her own fate to be married off for political advantage. Sreta herself, when she appears in public appears ill- graying, shrunken, with a lingering cough. Some speculate she's been poisoned, or cursed by the gods for her greed. Not that anyone can get an answer from Sreta. She's lost on her own path, a strange path of greed and power. Most of the time, she mumbles, and doesn't wish to talk to any. But talk business, and her eyes brighten, her voice steadies, and she's a steel trap again.
Eldrad does not engage in politics. But, some speculate, Eldrad does still have need. If he's tired of trying to bargain and cajole and manipulate and plan around the petty needs of those he's trying to guide to a brighter future, might he have perhaps left that duty to another? When Eldrad has need of a fleet, the House of Ulthran can build one. If he needs an army, the House of Ulthran can buy one. If he needs the votes for Ulthwé to go on a risky mission, the House of Ulthran can summon them.
If Eldrad or Sreta know, they aren't telling. For now, Sreta focuses on the business, and Eldrad will only lament with a smile that the family's life is its own.
Jubblowski
- Human born on Cadia - Born during intervals of "peace" between Black Crusades - Assigned to backwater agri-world to defeat resurgency orks - After war stayed on to help garrison and help with the training of a new PDF - Always upset at her own figure being politely described as "boyish" - prayed to Isha - over next few days grows epic rack - officially it's a miracle. Eldar protest at her being on the front lines as she is now one of their religious icons - Imperium can't take her off of duty for religious reasons as this would set a bad precedent - transferred to commissairiant. Tasked with making recruitment posters, "moral improving reading material" and the background for official issue calendars - becomes preganant with the child of ██████████████████████████████████████████████████ of the Vanus Temple assassins. - starts to have extremely accurate prophetic dreams as her condition brings her closer to the Isherite ideal - transferred to Inquisitorial jurisdiction primarily but remains on loan to commissairant - at completion of pregnancy visions stop. Inquisition deems it imperative that she regain her precognitive capabilities - Adeptus Biologicus magi assigned to monitor her health at all times. Magi determines how often she may carry child without serious risk reguardless of the Inquisitons need for future knowledge. - Inquisition provide Jubblowski with best rejuviantion drugs and treatments to prolong her usefulness to Imperium - Due to new found fame as the Cadian Prophetess Jubblowski starts to mingle with high society - Adopted by a Famulous order of the Adepta Sororitas and given the title of Venerated Mother - As she has to bear children to receive her visions it is deemed prudent that these children be the children of royalty so as to stabilize the genetic lines of prominent families and help keep imperial politics stable - Jubblowski gradually becomes the most sought after courtesan and concubine in entire western half of Imperium. Continues to work for the Inquisition and Commissairant - Fringe religions on Tallarn start to include her in their scriptures - Face starts to appear on the coinage of Cadia - Jubblowski, although has very little official authority, becomes a most politically powerful woman rivalling even sector governors. More than a hundred billion would die for her, they would certainly kill for her. - By 999M41 Sister Jubblowski is a ~400 years old and has ~200 children and has provided prophetic instruction to the Imperial Army and Inquisition that has saved the lives of countless billions.
Prince Yriel
Savior and Scourge of Tanith. An Eldar trader and privateer who has traveled the Imperium from Old Earth to the fringe. Any fringe.
The story of prince Yriel begins in the dockyards of Craftworld Iyanden in 248M37. This is not to say that that wads the day or the place of his birth or, as many detractors have claimed, that his mother was a whore who spent her nights with dock worker. It is merely that this is the first time he appeared on any official records. His craftworld of origin has never been reliably determined but given the possession of a soulstone it is probable that he has one.
Despite intentionally covering his tracks "Prince" Yriel claims to be a descendant of the folk hero Ulthanash and thus permited to take his aristocratic title. The authenticity of this claim is dubious at best.
Circumstances that led him to Iyanden in that year, how he obtained the aptly named ship Hoec's Grace or the origins of his motley crew is also unknown.
What is known is that since that day the mad bastard has cut a swathe of mayhem a light year wide down the millennia from one end of the Imperium to the other. His name is spoken with detestation by dockyard official on a hundred thousand worlds and reverence on at least as many others. His antics have been a bane to the Imperium down the ages saved from disgrace and condemnation only by the times his antics have been a boon to the Imperium. All he claims in search of the snazziest hat, as befits the heir of Ulthanash.
Of all his deeds the most brazen and greatest was the supply of aid in the defense Iyanden during the war of the Great Kraken. It was he who marched at the head of a half million strong host of Krieger soldiery, each eager to stick a bayonet in his back and held in safety only by an official commissars hat and a document form the Emperor himself with a genuinely forged signature upon it.
Best not to mention that he may or may not have had something to do with the agri-futures fiasco of the Ulthran Cartel.
Of the Prince himself little is known. Rumors abound that he maintains a harem of the most exiting beauties upon Hoec's Grace, now flagship of the Eldritch Raiders "Trader" fleet. Some say that his holds are stuffed to the rafters with rare metals, or bound and tortured captives, a small pocket dimension of Necrontyr manufacture, the preserved and still living brain of a Tyranid hive ship and a hundred other somehow even less plausible things. The one about a surviving member of the original Ordo Chronos admittedly turned out to be true, but only by complete coincidence.
Actual witnesses who have seen, for whatever reason, the inside of his ship tell a very different story. They tell of meticulous order, neatness and professional conduct that would seem no out of place in the old Void Born Navy families and completely at odds with the character of the Prince. Every item in the hold accounted for and noted, ever speck of dirt expunged and every crew member busy and happy about their duties. Possibly this is more in part to do with Kasahkrv the First Mate. He is of the demiurg people and they are known to love orderly conduct. How or why he is present on the Hoec's Grace is unknown, maybe it was a penance.
The other incident that lands squarely at the feet of the Prince is the loss of the planet Tanith.
In the harrowing time of the 12th Black Crusade great fleets and armies were mobilized and war was done on a scale seldom seen. What is remembered less are the more insidious assaults upon the Imperium. The words and deeds that slipped in sideways with smiles upon their friendly faces that infected worlds and stole the souls of the people from the light of civility and lead them down the paths of barbarity and selfish indulgence. On of the worlds afflicted was Tanith, that strange and verdant paradise.
The exact events leading up to the loss of the world are not easy to decipher and many accounts are contradictory in nature. When a world is on fire and neighbors turn on friends and kin in cannibalistic abandon documentation of social and political trends tends to be less of a priority than staying alive.
What was known is that the election of the Governor was called into question and numerous claimants arose although it is unknown who many if any were unclean. A strange new fad for very modest habits arose in the population, primarily at Tanith Magna and spreading out wards from there, a fashion among the aristocracy of wearing as little as possible became evident and then what appeared to be a military coup happened. Society more or less broke down at that point. When it became clear beyond reasonable doubt that the military was not marching to the same drum as the rest of the Imperium a not insignificant chunk of it broke away and mostly hunted down in the forests one unit at a time. And then a Bloodpact armada turned up intent on making what was left of the planet theirs.
Into this shitstorm came the Eldritch Raiders "Trader" fleet. It was clear from the radio transmissions, encoded with subliminal (to baseline humans) Dark Hymnal Choirs as they were, that something was a little off. Also the fleet of warships in orbit bearing the blasphemous Marks.
Eldritch Raiders were officially a trader fleet and as such any identification broadcasts automatically sent out from the fleet would have identified them as such and been completely genuine. Which is not to say that they were entirely true. At least half the ships in the fleet, Hoec's Grace among them, were armed to the teeth. As pirate deterrents they would often claim. Hoec's Grace tore from the ranks of the fleet at full burn, shield up and glowing red, weapons crash charged and a fleet of almost equally mad ships trailing behind it, a pack of mad jackals charging into the midst of wolves. Prince Yriel, never the most stable of creatures, was out for blood.
Formidable as the ships were they were still no warfleet of the Imperial navy and no real contest to an armada of the Bloodpact in a prolonged slugging match. The course of action was questioned by his demiurg First Mate and long time accomplice/friend as this was well outside what he deemed wisdom;
"WISDOM! We have gone well beyond the bounds of wisdom! I say no more. They attack and we hold the line. They invade and we fall back. They take whole sectors and we fall back. Their type took our whole [untranslatable profanity] Empire and we fell back. No more! No more. Here I am drawing [untranslatable profanity] line in the stars! Here, I say! Here! No Further!"
Hoec's Grace slammed into the lead ship at a truly excessive relative velocity, all weapons firing at any available target and it's armored prow plowed through the marauder ship and emerged from the inferno dragging hellfire behind it. Still firing, still killing, scarp and flame and bodies coating it's hull, boarders on half the decks, the control room knee deep in dead chaos... creatures and The Prince himself down to one good eye and more tragically having to resort to only his second snazziest hat.
For what it was worth the attack on the marauder fleet was never meant to destroy them so much as it was a diversion.
The cargo haulers had slipped round the other side of the planet and with the help of mercenary warlocks were scanning the surface for pockets of uncorrupted people. Using the extremely rare (and unlicensed) imperial telelporters a little over fifteen thousand of the helpless were snatched from certain death. By the time what was left of the Marauder fleet realized what was happening it was too late, the hauler fleet was already too far away and accelerating to the systems edge, fleeing with time bought by the escort fleet. Something of Tanith had been saved, the gods had been denied.
But of Tanith itself there was nothing more that could be done. Nuclear warheads were detonated in sequence to cause vast firestorms that scoured the planet clean of the taint of Chaos. Sadly, the warheads also of robbed the planet of most complex life. They say, the men in robes or reds and of dark greens, they say that one day it may bloom again. The Great Nalwood trees might be resurrected to wander again. Tanith Magna might be rebuilt in all it's glory. The children might return home. One day.
It was a pyrrhic victory for both Chaos and The Prince. Chaos wanted a new world to raise cannon fodder on and were handed a holocaust, The Prince wanted to save a world and was forced to burn it as a mercy kill.
The surviving Tanith, such a ragged bunch as they were, were ferried to the unsettled maiden world known as Lileath's Briar Patch in the High Speech. The rather unimaginative refugees rechristened it New Tanith. The world had been claimed by Biel-tan, who had been intending to start colonization any century now and had been for at least the last five thousand years. Their complaints were met with a curt response that boiled down to: It's a big planet. It's a small number of humans. Find another island. Biel-Tan could have contested the settlement but their representative took one look at Prince Yriel and saw that it would not be in anyone's interest to push the issue, if only because Yriel was crazy enough to not back down. To save face, the Craftworld claimed that they had gifted Lileath's Briar Patch to Prince Yriel as a reward for his bravery. If Yriel wanted to give the planet to a bunch of mon-keigh refugees, well, that was his prerogative.
There were a few soldiers that were saved, slightly more than a regiments worth. The nearest they had to a commanding officer was Commissar Gaunt, later Colonel-Commissar. From the remnants of the military of a dead world enough were left behind to form a PDF adequate to the meager population and an undersized regiment that could be used as the core upon which to build with offworld recruits and taught the Tanith way of war. Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt never forgot what Prince Yriel had done for his adopted people and swore an eternal oath to the Corsair Prince. An oath the Corsair Prince was mostly indifferent to.
For this service to the Imperium Prince Yriel received an official Writ of Trade, hand signed by the Emperor himself and presented to him by a senior priestess of Isha. What more, they gave him a new hat and it was a good day.
Ciaphas Cain
Cain still did many of the same things he is known for in canon. As of the last few decades his most recent assignment is to act as the ambassador from the greater Imperium to Craftworld Biel-Tan. This is less a permanent position and more like the latest clusterfuck Cain has found himself in his long history of clusterfucks. Ciaphas Cain and the Warriors of Biel-Tan, if you’d like. Jurgen is currently travelling as part of Inquisitor Amberly Vail’s retinue, since you would have to be crazy to take a blank onto a Craftworld full of psykers. Jurgen came to the attention of the Inquisition all on his own in this timeline, but Jurgen and Cain still end up working together quite often because Amberley likes to drag Cain along on her merry adventures and she never goes anywhere without Jurgen. Cain still ends up ploughing Amberley Vail after a joint eldar-human gene-stealer hunting trip and extermination campaign. Vail tends to spend way too much time around Biel-Tan than would be expected of an Inquisitor, though if asked she’d claim she was afraid Cain had gone native and it was her duty to remind him he was human.
Because Cain was unable to take Jurgen with him onto Biel-Tan, the job of ambassador's assistant is taken by a prim and proper Alfred Pennyworth type person from the Scholar Progenium. Alfred was not in that most august of institutions learning to be a diplomat. He was in there learning to be a Storm Trooper. He has done work for the Inquisition and occasionally tells of some of the things he has done. Unbeknownst to Cain or most of Biel-Tan is that he used to do crazy shit like hunt dark Eldar slave takers through the underhives and eliminate ork kommandoz. He has in his closet a necklace of ork trigger finger bones that looks more like a bandolier. To everyone that works with him man and xeno he is just a neat man with grey hair and a fussy little moustache.
A large part of Ambassador Cain's job is to keep Biel-Tan calm to stop them from going all out total war and dragging the rest of the Imperium into conflicts it can't easily afford. Indeed, Cain’s strong sense of self-preservation in spite of his war record is probably one of the main reasons (besides fate’s sick sense of humor) he was assigned to Biel-Tan in the first place. The Biel-Tan autarchs are also old and wise enough to want some brakes on the war train, but they’re also smart enough to let Cain voice the unpopular opinion and take the blame for it. This venture is not helped at all by the presence of Abbess-General Miriam Cain, Ciaphas’ daughter with Jubblowski. Everyone assumes that Cain met Jubblowski at party and used his legendary charm to get into her bedroom. He did not. As slayer of a warboss, butcher of tyranids and general all around Hero of the Imperium his presence was requested/demanded by the Sororitas high ups.
Abbess-General Cain is a hardcore Katholian Sister of Battle that has close ties to a group of about ~150 Word Bearers or Word Bearer successor chapter whose fortress-monastery is in the same patch of the galaxy as Biel-Tan. Miriam Cain was directly responsible (first came to prominence?) for the victories against the ork horde of Warboss Fangjaw during his assault on Necromunda. Her rhetoric, promises of redemption and threats of retribution turned the gangers into a loose collection of ad hoc militias with her own soldiers acting as officers, advisors, tutors and commissars as needed. Of course she was also directly to blame for the sudden increase in competence of the gangers in Necromunda post-war but at least everyone was alive enough to bitch at her.
Years pass and Miriam Cain becomes Abbess-General Cain, and becomes leader of entire chapter of Word Bearers, some regiments of Imperial Army and a small fleet of ships tasked with patrolling section of space not far enough away from Biel-Tan for her father’s liking. Her military authority is derived from the second part of that title despite her standing in the Katholian Church due to the Imperium’s official ban on militarized religious institutions. A power armoured, foul mouthed, belligerent crusader who takes the existence of Orks as a personal insult. Refuses to use any equipment not made by an ordained tech-priest and sanctified. Willing to tolerate eldar and such xenos but won't use their stuff. Has a meat cleaver of power sword in one hand and plasma pistol in the other. Her physique is surprisingly short and broad given how tall her father is. She is not conventionally beautiful. Her face has seen too many blunt impacts to be pretty and her shoulders are too broad and her musculature too developed to be feminine, even compared to other Sisters of Battle.
The Eldar of Biel-Tan quite approve of her despite the fact that she has no real love for them. However, while Ciaphas Cain’s job is primarily to calm Biel-Tan down, Miriam Cain on the other hand spends all of her time bullying the Word Bearers she is assigned to into fighting harder and is more than willing to extend this into whipping Biel-Tan into a war-frenzy. This being Biel-Tan a lot of Miriam’s rhetoric resonates with them and it's incredibly easy to get them dreaming of conquest. This was perhaps at its worst after Dorhai’s failed assassination attempt on Jubblowski, which had both Miriam and Biel-Tan frothing at the mouth ready to declare holy war.
Ciaphas Cain and Miriam Cain do not get along. Despite it all he is proud of her.
Void Dragon
In the darkness of the 41st millennium, it is generally assumed that everyone is keeping secrets. However, few are as tightly guarded or as potentially disastrous to the Imperium as the one held by the Adeptus Mechanicus. In the days before the Unification of Sol, during the Martian civil war, the Adeptus Mechanicus was but one faction vying for control of the red planet. As the Mechanicus gradually unified the nations of Mars, they came across an unusual structure in the far outlands of Mars. Upon further investigation, they discovered the structure was a prison, with one solitary prisoner. Mag'ladroth, the Void Dragon, the self-proclaimed last of the C’tan. The Void Dragon claimed to have been watching over mankind ever since humanity first set foot on the Red Planet, and humanity’s expertise with technology had impressed it. It claimed to have subconsciously influenced the Mechanicus into finding its prison, and offered them knowledge in exchange for its freedom. The Mechanicus, to their credit, were not stupid enough to unhesitatingly open the prison of an ancient being several times older than the entire history of humanity. They promptly buried the prison of the Void Dragon, and swore to each other that they would never speak of what they had seen in the Martian outlands ever again.
But this was not enough. The Void Dragon still reached out to them, whispering to them in their dreams through their implants, giving them visions of inspiration and promising so much more if only they would loosen its shackles. This, in part, is the reason why the Mechanicus is so fanatical about the invention of new technologies. They fear that any new development in technology, however small, may really be a “Trojan gift” on behalf of the Void Dragon, even if it is really just mundane human inspiration. What experimentation is tolerated by the Mechanicus is tolerated on the condition that it be done far away from Mars, in the hopes that the sheer distance of space would be enough to protect any would-be inventor from any influence from the Void Dragon.
In the years since the Void Dragon was discovered by the Mechanicus, more information has come to light. The Void Dragon claims it was the only one of the C’tan to actually take the job of being a Necron “god” seriously, as well as being the C’tan to adapt the best to having a physical form made of necrodermis. The Void Dragon saw the benefits of having a mechanical body, particularly when its followers were able to trade their diseased flesh for the immunity of metal. However, it drew the line at the other C’tan treating the Necrons as their slaves and cannon fodder. According to the Void Dragon, upon being made aware of the treatment of its followers by “the Laughing One of the Eldar”, it turned on its kindred on behalf of the Necrons. The Void Dragon was overwhelmed by its brethren and crippled and imprisoned for the crime of kin-slaying, its body broken and its solar sails slashed. Some parts of this story have been independently confirmed, such as the fact that the Void Dragon did turn on its own kind and was apparently taken out of commission before the C’tan began to fight among themselves and were shattered into pieces by the Silent King. But many parts of this story remain unverified, except of course by the word of the Void Dragon. The only people who could ever verify the Void Dragon’s story are Cegorach, the Necrons, and the remaining fragments of the C’tan, none of whom are particularly inclined to talk and would be unlikely to confirm the Void Dragon’s story even if it were true. The closest anyone has come to validating the Void Dragon is the Silent King, who claims the Cadian pillars were “the conception of Mag'ladroth, the only one who cared for us, for our protection”.
The Void Dragon is a strange entity, known of only by the innermost circle of the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Guardians of the Dragon, the division of techpriests assigned to guard the Void Dragon and ensure that it never escapes. These are some of the only people in the Imperium who know the horrible secret that the Adeptus Mechanicus’ “devil” is really the same being as their Omnissiah. The Guardians of the Dragon are known by other members of the Mechanicus to be highly respected yet easily irritable and short-tempered, a trait they have developed through continual interactions with the Void Dragon. After several attempts at trying to bargain with the Mechanicus to free it (38 by its own reckoning), the Void Dragon appears to have given up trying to get the Mechanicus to free it of their own volition, and instead appears to offer information freely, saying “it is better that something is done right rather than never be done at all”. The Void Dragon claims that it has adopted the Mechanicus, or perhaps even humanity as a whole, as its new followers. However, at the same time, the Void Dragon seems to have developed a twisted sort of humor, spending its time taunting its would-be jailors, staring them down like a looming cat with its mechanical, unblinking eyes.
The Void Dragon speaks in terms of probabilities and certainties, though its language is twisted. It never seems to tell a direct lie, but can still omit information or say something has occurred based on “one’s perception”. Even a simple “yes” or “no” cannot be taken at face value. The Mechanicus learned this the hard way when they decided to ask the Void Dragon directly whether the inspiration of a new recruit was its doing. The Void Dragon responded “this invention is novel to me”, which the Mechanicus took as a sign of denial in its involvement. Only later did they realize the Void Dragon’s words really meant “this is novel to me, because I came up with it last night”. It knows things that it should have no perception of in its prison, likely by spying on the Mechanicus using their own implants. Worse yet, according to the Void Dragon, all the inadvertent worship by the Mechanicus has given the Void Dragon its own shadow in the Immaterium. Unlike the other C’tan, the Void Dragon can perceive of the existence of the Warp, and find the phenomenon highly interesting. The Void Dragon appears unfazed by its imprisonment, claiming the Mechanicus will eventually see reason and let it out of its own accord, something that concerns the higher echelons of the Mechanicus greatly.
These fears have only gotten worse with the widespread availability of the Starchild prophecies. A significant number of these prophecies contain the line “at the Time of Ending the Dragon shall throw off his chains and arise from the halls of the Forge Lords to make war upon those in his kingdom”. Many have puzzled over this apparent non sequitur in the lines of these prophecies. Some have suggested it is a metaphor for the Adeptus Mechanicus themselves. One Black Dragon techmarine was convinced that this line in the prophecy referred to him, and generally proceeded to make an ass of himself as he let everyone know he was the Omnissiah's gift to the Imperium until he was unceremoniously trampled by an ork gargant for his stupidity. But the upper echelons of the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Guardians of the Dragon know the truth. Worse yet, the way the prophecy is worded implies that rather than breaking free from its prison, somebody might actually let the Void Dragon out. Now no one would ever consider releasing the Dragon from his prison, for even if the Void Dragon means what it says, no one wants to be the one responsible for an event that potentially kicks off the apocalypse. Others in the know point out that in no way does the prophecy say the event is a good thing, a bad thing, or simply an act of desperation, the situation being so disastrous that someone is willing to unleash one monster to fight another. However, the prophecies raise the possibility that the Dragon may have been telling the truth all along, and that in the Imperium’s darkest hour, the Void Dragon might have the Imperium’s back. Might, my child.
Aun'O Da
The origin of the Tau concept of a “Greater Good” can be traced back to a man named Aun’O Da (at least that is the translation in modern Tau), otherwise known as “the Great Philosopher”. Da was born during the Mont’au, in an age roughly analogous to the late middle ages of Earth. Da was a member of the calligrapher’s guild, acting as a court stenographer to one of the petty empires that controlled much of the river basins and fertile lands of T’au. Throughout his career, Da transcribed virtually every decision made by the emperor he served under, with his own annotations on its usefulness in addition to its effects on the populace, as well as all the commands made by previous emperors.
Unfortunately, the winds of political fortune change, and the emperor that Da served under was replaced by a new ruling family. The first thing the new emperor did is order the entire court of the previous emperor to be arrested and executed, feeling that they would be too sympathetic to the old order to be trustworthy. Like many others in the court, Da fled in political exile to the mountains in the desert on the outskirts of the empire. It was there, sitting in a desert cave musing over his old writings, that Da came to a sudden realization.
In Da’s mind, life was full of misery, often driven by the selfish ambitions of others. Yet when people set aside their individual ambitions to aid one another, not only did Tau’s grievances against Tau decrease, but it reduced the net misery of the universe in general. Da put these ideas in writing, in what would eventually become known as the first known version of the Tau’va, or “Greater Good” (perhaps most literally “spiritual good of Tau”, “va” meaning “that which benefits the spirit”, and “Tau” meaning, well, “Tau”). Much of this manuscript has been misinterpreted in the years since it was written, both by Imperials and Tau. Da did not say that Tau should not have individual goals, or take personal enjoyment in life. However, he did stress that when duty conflicted with personal goals, one was obligated to put duty first. Nor was there any mention of Tau superiority over other races, since at that time the Tau believed they were alone in the universe.
Da’s new ideas brought him numerous eager converts. In particular, eight of his brightest disciples, all of the calligrapher’s guild, were sent in pairs in the four cardinal directions of the compass, to bring the word of the Greater Good to the general public. Da did not live to see T’au unified, he was already an old man when he came up with his ideas, but he did live long enough to see the old empire where he once served come to embrace the Tau’va. And yet the campaign continued onward. In a watershed moment in M37, two of Da’s disciples were able to broker a peace treaty between the plains barbarians and the fortress city of Fio’taun. This event essentially signified that the ideology of the Tau’va was going to become the dominant force on the planet of T’au.
As the Tau’va became the dominant ideology among the people of T’au, so did the students of Da become rulers in their own right. This led to the development of the traditional Tau caste system, and the taboo of fraternization between the castes. The warriors and plains barbarians became the Fire Caste, the merchants became the Water Caste, the workers and peasants became the Earth Caste, and the messengers and rangers became the Air Caste. The scribes and scholars, particularly the disciples of Da, already somewhat detached from the physical world, became the Ethereals. The Tau caste system was less about bringing order to the people of T’au, and more about codifying a system where the disciples of Da and their descendants were always at the top of the socio-political heap. Da would not have been happy if he could have seen this. Thankfully, the Ethereals tend to rule as some sort of bizarre combination of theocrats and philosopher-kings, utterly ascetic and with little desire to abuse their power yet haughty and loathe to social change.
However, now the revolution has come full circle. Now it is the Ethereals who represent the old establishment, rather than the bright-eyed young revolutionaries with new ideas, and they know it. It remains to be seen whether the Ethereals will be able to reform themselves to keep up with the evolving Tau Empire, or whether the Tau Empire will undergo a change into a new form of government for a new era.
Kharn the Oathsworn
As a champion pit fighter, Angron was often given his pick of the slave pens for concubines or servants. However, he would find the most downtrodden child slaves and claim them, raising them as his own children. Even after his Thunder Warrior augments and the ensuing madness and instability, he never raised his voice or lifted a hand at any of them. Kharn was the first and eldest of Angron's adopted children, and against his father's wishes he bullied his way into receiving the Mk III MP Astartes augments. They would continue to butt heads even as Kharn rose through the legion, but Angron was privately fiercely proud of him. One of Kharn's most treasured memories was when his father surveyed the order and control Kharn brought to the savage legion, and turned to him and said simply "You've done well. In this, and everything else."
Most historians agree, Kharn the Oathsworn was a pretty magnanimous guy. Whereas Angron commanded the War Hounds through his charisma and willingness to be first in, last out, Kharn led the War Hounds by being a father to his men. He would do anything for them, no matter the cost, and they knew it. When Kharn first joined the War Hounds, he essentially started out as the beleaguered assistant to Angron, albeit one with a lot more proficiency with a chainsword. Whereas Angron was the face of the legion and kept morale high, Kharn was often the one who dealt with actual logistics and kept the wheels greased from day to day. As Angron’s health gradually deteriorated, Kharn found himself increasingly taking on more and more of the responsibilities of running the War Hounds, until he was essentially the leader of the legion in all but name.
This is not to say Angron was stupid, or Kharn was not a ferocious warrior. Indeed, the two men were more similar than they were different. It is just that the two men tended to play to their strengths when Angron was in command of the legion. Indeed, Angron could actually be rather insightful, it’s just that he tended to be rather straightforward; no need to plan some grand, circuitous strategy when it is possible for you to just go straight from point A to B. In fact, in one instance Guilliman is said to have said of Angron “it was a true pity that the galaxy had wasted such a mind on such a simpleton”.
But there is another name used to describe Kharn, one that is spoken in whispered in hushed tones. The Berserker. The World Eater. Although he never lived it down until the end of his days, the tale of Kharn’s secret shame is a story of how easy it is for men to become monsters, and monsters to become men.
The world was a recently pacified one, one that had seemingly welcomed the Imperium with open arms. Kharn had been dispatched to the world alongside ten other members of what were at that time the most advanced model of Astartes developed. It was supposed to be a simple training exercise between the new Astartes and the local PDF, to see how well marines could operate alongside conventional forces. It turned into a disaster. After setting up camp, Kharn was invited to drink and party with the other members of the Astartes unit. Kharn politely turned them down, preferring to keep his mind clear for the task at hand the next morning. He awoke to a tragedy. His men were all dead, having been poisoned in the night by a technorganic venom specifically designed to work in spite of Astartes physiology.
Kharn went apeshit.
For the next few days, PDF forces were terrorized by an incredibly angry space marine, armed with just a chainsword, a bolter with two bullets in it, and a single-minded desire to know who did this to his men and where to mail their body parts to their next of kin.
The planet had been secretly manufacturing illegal techno-organic monstrosities, and believed the arrival of the contingent of space marines represented the beginnings of an Imperial investigation, rather than an exercise in friendship. Kharn found this out the hard way, when he was led into a trap surrounded by an army of these creations, an accompaniment of traitorous PDF, and the military commander who had overseen the poisoning of his men. The soldiers demanded Kharn’s unconditional surrender. Kharn simply raised his chainsword, and flicked the switch.
It is not clear what happened in the aftermath of that battle, as there were few survivors. The only person capable of walking off the battlefield was Kharn himself, yet given his mental state his testimony is probably not the most accurate. According to the War Hounds, who claim to have heard this story from Kharn himself, Kharn stayed on the battlefield in a daze, muttering the names of his lost men to himself over and over again. According to Kharn, he only snapped out of his trance when he noticed there was a child on the battlefield, a girl who could not have been more than twelve. Seeing the girl made the gears in Kharn’s head start moving again, and slowly he pulled himself out of his daze. He approached the young girl, taking off his helmet when he realized its visage frightened her, and asked where her parents were. She said she was lost, she had wandered through the woods curious about the noises coming from the battlefield, but she couldn’t find her way back. “Well,” Kharn supposedly said, “let’s see if we can do something about that”, and the two of them walked off the battlefield.
The planet at first tried to claim Kharn had gone AWOL, but Kharn only had to point at the bodies of the technorganic monstrosities and the bodies of his dead comrades and let the evidence speak for itself. Having single-handedly brought an entire army to its knees, the planet threw itself upon the mercy of the Imperium. Kharn had in effect conquered an entire planet in a single day. Thus, the World Eater. Kharn was not proud of the nickname, as it was a reminder of how easily his control had slipped his leash, and he had almost lost himself. The War Hounds existed as a unit longer than most Space Marine legions, but eventually it came time for them, too, to break apart into chapters, most naming themselves after some famous appellation or event in their legion. When that happened, Kharn had one simple request.
“In the years since the incident had taken place, some of the more impressionable members of our legion have taken the wrong message from my story, using the term ‘World Eater’ as a badge of pride. That is not what I intended. As warriors, we must be passionate, yes, but we must also be well-trained and disciplined, or else we risk becoming the very thing we fight. We are War Hounds. Not World Eaters.”
Despite being Terran-born, Kharn only visited his old homeworld a few times after the beginning of the Great Crusade. Like all Old Earthers he and his fellow soldiers held Old Earth in reverence. When they left it a new golden age was starting. Earth had never been so lovely as when he left it. The next time he saw his home was when he returned to defend it during the War of the Beast. It broke his hearts. Shortly after that Kharn had to return to bury his foster father Angron. At that time Perturabo was rebuilding and although it was at the midpoint of the project Earth was starting to know beauty again. But it wasn't the same.
Kharn the Oathsworn never came to Earth again in life, although his body was buried beneath the orchard that now stands where the village he grew up in once was.
Macharius
Excerpt from “The Warmasters: Their Lives and Their Legacies,” by Remembrancer Vinnstan von Krausvitz “…The rare few individuals elevated to the exalted rank of Warmaster were all famed leaders of great talent, and thus invariably invite comparison to their legendary predecessors, the Primarchs. As the greatest of the Warmasters, Macharius is the one most often held up to the Primarchs’ as an equal, and the Primarch Vulkan (with whom Macharius worked very closely) once said that Macharius possessed Lion El’Jonson’s idealism and tactical acumen, Roboute Guilliman’s eye for detail and planning, and Mortarion’s single-minded stubbornness. However, it is also said that Macharius had Angron’s temper, and on occasion Fulgrim’s love of carousing and drink. Other Warmasters, such as Joanna of Aarkius, have been compared to…”
Fig. 1: A portrait of Marshal Macharius shortly after his promotion to Segmentum Obscurus Command at the young age of 78. Famously austere in his everyday life, Macharius shunned the elaborate uniforms and symbols of office of his peers, seen in the simple officer’s uniform he wears in this painting. Note the Star of Terra, the highest military commendation of the Imperium, pinned on his left chest, won for his actions as a colonel in the Battle of the Melas Gulf where he took command of a few broken regiments of guardsmen and a Navy cruiser wing after their commanders fell and set up a brilliant trap that destroyed a marauding Dark Eldar warband that was threatening the integrity of the entire-subsector.
Fig. 2: A late portrait of Warmaster Macharius, painted at the age of 437 towards the end of the Macharian Crusades and his life. The second Star of Terra pinned on his right chest was won during First Macharian Crusade at the Battle of Granicor VI, where Macharius personally led the tank line in a surprise attack on the Khrave lines, breaking the bulk of their gathered army, which would lead to the eventual defeat and destruction of the Khrave Empire and the extinction of this particular species of Xenos Horrificus.
Tankred
The unstoppable force that is Tankred began his march through the ages on the perennial shithole of Nuceria on the periphery of ancient Ultramar. Like many on that blighted world he had little to love of his home. He was born some forty or fifty years after the War Hounds tore through the place and imposed at least some notion of law and order, a time when Nuceria had become merely shit rather than it's previous state of fucking intolerable.
Tankred's mother offered him one piece of advice for his future life as she lay dying of Raggy Lung in an AdBio hospice on the outskirts of Desh'ea "get off this shit world. Run to the stars, never come back". They were words he took to heart and after he buried her he sat about pondering exactly how to do this, penniless street urchin that he was. In those days the War Hounds had set up a recruitment station in the semi-derelict palace of the previous corrupt planetary ruler. They were Tankred's ticket to a new life, hopefully one with less pestilence and famine in it.
The recruitment master was unimpressed by the malnourished gutter oik and although he did hand over his sandwiches he would not let him through the door. This was in the latter half of the Great Crusade when supply lines were being crisscrossed and rearranged and resources were being reallocated as the Imperium expanded on all sides. Nuceria was on the list to be substantially rebuilt after the Red Angel expended much enthusiasm knocking it down. Due to positioning of major Imperial assets and the ever shifting and retreating nature of the frontier the planet was soon to shift jurisdictions from being Angron's responsibility to coming under the tender mercies of Mortarion. Grim as the prospect was the locals, those that knew anything of what was going on, did consider their future prospects improved by this change. Tankred certainly did.
The War Hounds all throughout their history have had a somewhat tenuous relationship to paperwork. In the confusion of the switch over it was easy enough for the young Tankred to slip into the ramshackle fortress and pretend he had always been there. Either he was convincing enough or the Dusk Raiders just didn't care, they were less picky than the War Hounds and would conscript anyone who could be trained to hold a gun right way around best out of three. The war effort was always in need.
The man given command of the Desh'ea post was an astartes captain by the name of Calas Typhon. For a super soldier he was remarkably scholarly and a veteran of the Imperium backed Barbarus Uprisings and a native of that toxic world. To him Nuceria seemed quite pleasant.
Tankred endeared himself somewhat to the grizzled old captain for his almost Mortarion levels of levels of endurance and dogged determination, qualities that the Legion put great value in. For Tankred's part he just wanted off the planet and if becoming part of the Legion was his ticket out he would hold back no effort.
Years past Tankred grew to be a young man. Scared from hard training and as enduring as a mountain. He was deemed worthy. He would not join the Legion as a mere Imperial Army soldier, he would become an astartes.
The transformations were not gentle. Most of the glaring flaws in the process had been long since ironed out by then, this was not the Unification Wars, but there is a limit to how kindly you can disassemble a man and stitch him back together with extra parts buried in there.
Tankred did survive to the surprise of many though not himself, Tankred endures all things. For his tenacity he was granted his greatest desire. He was loaded onto a ship and he left cursed Nuceria. He never looked back and eventually the bleak world became nothing but a bad and fading memory of another life. His early career as a Space Marine was unremarkable when compared to those of his peers, which is to say it was a constant meal-storm of glorious combat, conquests and victories of the sort that other men would talk about for generations and some becoming legends that would reverberate around a world for centuries.
His brothers in arms thought quite highly of him. He was quick to laugh and quick to forgive. His face was much accustomed to smiling, which given the scars was not pretty, and his only really annoying flaws were a degree of irreverence and a "fascination" about ordained women.
It wasn't until the awful days of the War of the Beast that Tankred really showed just how awfully tenacious he could be. They were dark days. he could kill a thousand orks before dinner and there would be ten times that left to butcher and although his arm would not tire he couldn't kill them fast enough. But he did kill them fast. He exemplified the teachings of Captain Typhon; Not one step back, march and kill and never stop moving forwards. Where he strode forth they fell back, their lines twisted and buckled and broke and the only thing that slowed his pace was having to step over their cooling bodies.
One battle blurred into another as he fought and fought, his wounds sustained were grievous and he was practically rebuilt several times in transit between battles but always he would rise from what should have been a deathbed itching to satisfy his ire against something wretched.
One misadventure of carnage after another and Tankred ended up upon the Eisenstein as it burned it's engines out to get to Old Earth. It is difficult to say how fast the ship was going when it slammed into the flank of an Ork Killa Krooza in low Earth orbit as by that time the surviving crew had abandoned ship and all Space Marines were screaming through the atmosphere in drop pods.
But they were far too late to save Sanguinius. The Angel of Baal was dead and mutilated beyond all recognition and The Beast was slain. Some level of frustration was relieved upon the surviving orks and the Chaos scum that still crawled upon the irradiated and ash blacked surface of Old Earth but it was not all that satisfying.
Tankred served in the Wars of Reconquest as the Imperium was painstakingly rebuilt. It was a bitter task to walk upon worlds the Imperium had failed or had failed the Imperium and it was a long time before Tankred would again feel the same joy in his work as he once did.
That time was a time a time of rebuilding for the Imperium and the Legions could not stand apart in this. Calas Typhon, now Marshal Typhon the Pilgrim, was a source of much of that change in the Death Guard. He was at odds with the Primarch in Legion doctrine. Mortarion wanted a measured march in the long war to rebuild and bolster defenses, Typhon believed that only in preemptively decapitating potential threats could time for others to rebuild be granted and no other Legion had the stamina for the job. Unable to reconcile the schism and resigned to the fact that the Legion would have to be divided soon anyway Typhon became first High Marshal of the Black Templars. In a touching display of generosity and proof that no lingering ill will was held Mortarion gave them the aptly named Eternal Crusader for a flagship. High Marshal Typhon, now Typhus due to Administratum typo when the ships paperwork was transferred, attracted many battle-brothers to his side who shared his beliefs of war
Tankred served in the Black Templars, founder order of the Templar movement, with as much ferocity and tenacity as he did in the Death Guard but tempered with hard won experience and the wisdom of painful lessons. More scars were had, more mending, more new recruits marveling at his insane endurance and more Apothecaries baffled at his continued survival.
It continued like this for centuries. Tankred never never achieved the rank of officer, he lacked the temperament or the willingness to be educated and he tended to intentionally annoy outsiders a lot. He was there in the Malagant campaign when the old Pilgrim died to Fallen hands, his last living link to Nuceria finally cut.
It was in the war of Sanctia that Tankred came closest to finally meeting Death. A Dark Eldar Kabal were in alliance with Fallen Marines and they were dragging people out of their homes and off of the streets. All women and children, the Dark Eldar weren't interested in men, they were of no use to what was the earliest incarnation of the Daemonculaba experiments ████████ █████████████████████ ███████████████████████████ ███████ █████████████ ████████████████ ████████ █████████████ █████ █████████ ███████████████ ██ and better to have died by their own hand, the Fallen Raven Guard had much to answer for.
With false radio signals and staged refugee convoys the Imperial forces made it appear as though a very rich target was heading for the old nuclear fallout shelters in the arid wastes, there Tankred and his forces placed their feet squarely upon the ground and sold their lives for misdirection's sake. So tempting and real the target seemed that all descended upon it like vultures. They had to fight. It had to be "real". Real enough to die for to catch them all. Tankred was the last to fall, a serrated knife shoved under and up his ribcage, neatly bisecting both hearts. As he slumped to the ground and the lights dimmed from his eyes he had time enough to see the Fallen Raven King turn and try to flee. Then the nuclear warheads went off.
A fisherman found Tankred or at least what remained of him twelve miles away on the bank of a meandering river. A chunk of burned meat and charcoal so badly ruined it could not be said where the distinction between his armour and his flesh was.
When a novice Apothecary reached down to see if his primary progenoid had survived in a salvageable state he discovered to his horror and pity that Tankred endured. The one remaining arm with the bloody stubs of fingers grasped the apothecary by scruff of his neck and drew him close and with a death rattle and blood speckled whisper imparted these words "I'm not going out like this you workshy little shit, lash me up and strap me into a Dreadnaught or by The Old Gods I will give you such a kicking".
When Tankred next saw the light of day he weighed several tons and couldn't be hurt by anything short of anti-tank weapons. Since that dy his legend has only grown. He is Tankred, he endures. He epitomises the truth that to win a fight you have to be the last man standing. And he is, oh he is. He is a wall that moves forwards, as inevitable as Death.
Although he has always claimed to be in the Long War only for the beer and the bitches his deeds have been noble and he marches onward, forever. Tankred endures.
Trazyn the Infinite
See Solemnace
The Swarmlord
The Swarmlord was first sighted in 745.M41, during the Third Tyrannic War. At that time the Hive Fleet was referred to as Hive Fleet Jormundgandr, though it has since been recognized in retrospect that this force was merely the immediate herald of the main Hive Fleet itself. Although the Imperium had not been prepared for the appearance of Hive Fleets Behemoth, Kraken, and Leviathan, this time they had a strategy in mind. The idea was to direct and funnel the movements of the tyranid hive fleet, hoping to break the brunt of the swarm against the most fortified world in its path. Unfortunately, the nearest world that fit that description was Macragge, capital of Ultramar and homeworld of the Ultramarines. Eldar aspect warriors and bonesingers, Earth Caste engineers, and the Ultramarines themselves did everything in their power to turn Ultramar into a veritable fortress, hoping to turn the tyranid’s own strategy of attrition against them. After Hive Fleets Kraken, Behemoth, and Leviathan, the Imperium believed they knew everything the tyranids could throw at them.
Then the Swarmlord showed up.
Within hours of its arrival the tyranids went from a disorganized horde of extragalactic locusts to organized soldiers of nearly human cunning. Worse yet, despite this increase in intelligence, they seemed to lack any of the survival instinct typical of a being of that level of sentience, acting more like the appendages of a single being than separate organisms.
Marneus Calgar thought he could take the Ultramarines First Company, decapitate the head of the beast, and the tyranids would go back to being disorganized, if fearsome, beasts. Right up until the point where the Swarmlord hacked off all four of his limbs and beat the Ultramarines' Chapter Master into a coma. The only reason that Marneus Calgar even managed to survive his encounter is due to the heroic sacrifice of Aloysius and the remainder of the First Company and Second Company Captain Cato Sicarius managing to drag the Chapter Master's prone body away from the huge tyranid. The Swarmlord was eventually killed, but only by being shot. Several times. With a Baneblade. To this day, Marneus Calgar remains in a medically induced coma, and the Ultramarines fear for his health. In Calgar's absence the Ultramarines have been led by Tribune Titus, who was unanimously elected to lead the chapter by the captains of the nine remaining companies until such time as Calgar can return to duty.
Since the Battle of Macragge, the Swarmlord has been sighted a precious few times around the galaxy, and each time the Imperium has learned precious new information about this dangerous foe. Although the Imperium first believed the Swarmlord to be nothing more than an overgrown Hive Tyrant, in truth the Swarmlord is something much worse. Much like how Macha is the mortal avatar of Isha and the Nightbringer and Void Dragon have become avatars of themselves, the Swarmlord is essentially a physical avatar of the tyranid Hive Mind.
The Swarmlord only ever appears when the tyranids encounter a significant barrier to their expansion, necessitating the direct attention of the Hive Mind itself to circumvent the problem. Creating a Swarmlord is not without its risks, as it requires a not-insignificant amount of synaptic resources that could be devoted to other tyranid lifeforms, and if the Swarmlord is killed the psychic backlash can actually harm the Hive Mind itself. Nevertheless, the costs of a Swarmlord are more than outweighed by its benefits, as the presence of the Swarmlord exponentially increases the efficiency and tactical adaptability of any tyranid lifeforms on any battlefield it sets foot on. Despite representing a significant cost, the tyranid Hive Mind is large and fractious enough This was at first only theorized by the Ordo Xenos, but later confirmed by three simultaneous sightings of the Swarmlord on three totally independent battlefields later in M41.
As of late M41, the main tyranid hive fleet has arrived and is besieging the eastern rim of the galaxy on multiple fronts. It is said that the visage of the Swarmlord has been spotted on the front lines.
Arik Taranis
Unlike many of the people who served the Warlord during the Unification Era, Arik Taranis came from the Terrawatt Clan, much like Malcador and the Warlord himself. As a result, Arik knew the Warlord back when the Warlord was merely Oscar, the two of them having virtually “grown up” together. Like most of the people in the Terrawatt technocracy, Arik was quite tech savvy. In fact, Arik was one of the better geneticists in Terrawatt, and was one of the people who helped the Warlord design the first model of Thunder Warrior augmentations. A design which, shortly after, he then used on himself.
The Warlord was taken aback at the idea that Arik would subject himself to the Thunder Warrior treatment. The design for the Thunder Warriors was untested and Arik was worth more for his brain than as a super-soldier, and the Warlord told him as much. Arik rebutted that the very fact the Thunder Warrior augmentations were untested was the reason Arik needed to undergo the procedure in the first place. Oscar needed someone he knew to be competent to lead the Thunder Warriors, and Arik was one of the few people who fit the bill.
Arik Taranis proved to be unfailingly loyal to the Warlord and his ideals of Unification, serving as the Warlord’s personal bodyguard in the years before the creation of the Adeptus Custodes. However, his service was not without controversy. Taranis had a bad habit of doing things behind the Warlord’s back, some of which went for centuries before anyone even discovered he had done them in the first place. Perhaps the greatest example of this was the large number of experimental modifications he made to his own augmentations, all of which were done behind the Warlord’s back. This was largely due to Taranis and the Warlord’s shared upbringing, leading him to see the Warlord as an equal rather than a messiah or a figure of admiration.
This was far from Taranis’ only flaw. Taranis could be rather arrogant and impetuous, and sometimes overestimated his own abilities. He often liked to show off both in terms of intelligence and his physical ability. He had a flashy fighting style and liked to let his opponents know they were completely outclassed, though he would often drop it and fight seriously when the situation demanded it. He was a bit of an adrenaline junkie, and enjoyed a good fight more than anything else.
However, Taranis’ initiative was also a good as well as a bad thing. Although Taranis was often too independent for his own good, he was also one of the few people who the Warlord could rely on to tell him the honest truth, even if it was one he did not want to hear. The Warlord saw Malcador as a father figure, and any argument between them tended to be resolved in the latter’s favor. By contrast, the Warlord tended to inspire near-mythical levels of awe in many of his followers, which made debate rather difficult. Taranis knew the Warlord had feet of clay and was willing to give him a second opinion, but because the Warlord knew Taranis only had the Warlord’s best interests in mind and was (usually) willing to defer to his better judgement he was willing to hear him out.
Arik Taranis lasted on the front lines much longer than almost any of the other first-generation Thunder Warriors. This was in part because he understood how his augmentations worked, and therefore knew the right combination of diet and drugs to keep himself healthy, and partly because of the large number of experimental add-ons he performed behind the Warlord’s back to make himself more stable, many of which later floated down to later super-soldier designs. However, all of this was merely prolonging the inevitable, and Arik’s body eventually failed him just before the end of the Unification.
Oscar came to his old friend shortly after Unification, finding Taranis sullenly sitting in a wheelchair in the hospital. Taranis had been fortunate enough that it was his body that had failed him, rather than his mind. The Warlord, now Steward, reiterated to Arik what he had said decades ago. Arik was worth more to humanity for his brain than his brawn, and he needed to stop pushing himself before he got himself killed. Arik had been a fine soldier and a loyal bodyguard, but what Earth needed now were scientists and doctors, not soldiers.
Arik was put to work rebuilding Old Earth with the rest of the scientists. As a geneticist, Taranis was one of many who were tapped by the Steward to work on the Mark III gene-seed project. This was primarily where Taranis’ secret modifications to himself made their way to the later super soldier designs. Although the primary movers in the Mark III gene-seed project were the Merikan gene-hippies and the Ducht Jermanic genesmiths, Arik provided his own contributions to the project, mostly in the form of modifications which he had field-tested himself and therefore knew would work.
It was at some time during this period that Arik realized that he could use the results of the gene-seed project to fix his old, broken augmentations. And so it was that once again, with the help of a few other intrepid helpers, Arik Taranis once again decided to tamper with his own augmentations. Arik was excited about the possibilities. Being able to fight once more on the front lines with the Steward. What’s more, if the procedure worked, he could then apply the results of his research to the other Thunder Warriors and heal them of their woes. And why would it not? He was the one who had done the theoretical calculations, after all, and since when had he been wrong?
It was the biggest mistake of Taranis’ life. The procedure went disastrously wrong and had to be aborted, and Taranis nearly died. It was only at this point that the full extent of Arik’s modifications to himself became known. Indeed, the only reason Arik even survived the procedure was that he had several additional organs in his system wasn’t even supposed to have. If it had been anyone else on the operating table, they would have died. Taranis’ dream of using the procedure to fix all of the other broken old Thunder Warriors had died on the operating table.
The Steward, for his part, was furious when he found out what Taranis had done. Taranis was in better health this time, a bitter consolation from the few augmentations that had been installed before the operation had to be aborted. Although before it was Taranis who provided an outsider’s perspective on the Steward’s actions, this time it was the Steward who saw his friend’s flaws. The discussion between the two was short and personal. Taranis said he was fit for duty. The Steward disagreed. He had seen the medical reports, and he had heard what Taranis had done to himself. Additionally, the Steward personally thought that Taranis was nowhere near as stable as he claimed, given the issues that had plagued many of the other early stage Thunder Warriors. Between his mismatched physiology and the fact that no one but Arik knew how his augmentations worked, he was a liability in the field. He would not let Arik put himself in danger like that. According to the Steward, if Taranis wanted to be his guard so badly, then so be it. But Taranis forgot it was the job of the Steward’s bodyguards to protect the Imperial Palace and humanity’s capital just as much as it was to guard him. Taranis would be staying on Old Earth. And if Oscar ever found out that Arik had been experimenting on himself again, he would put his old friend back in that wheelchair personally.
And so, despite his turnaround in health, Arik found himself doing much the same thing he had been doing before he had attempted the procedure. The only difference was that he found himself assigned to the Steward’s new set of bodyguards, the Adeptus Custodes, albeit with explicit orders to remain on Earth guarding the Imperial Palace and training the next generation of Custodians. Although Taranis was not as physically strong as the new Custodes, he made up for it with the years of fighting experienced he had gained by surviving some of the toughest battlefields of Unification-era Earth. Nevertheless, Arik had mixed feelings about his pupils. One the one hand, he was proud of them, both as the product of both his genetic expertise and the students of his teachings. On the other hand, he knew that eventually his students would reach a level he could not attain. Skill could only take him so far and, more than likely, his body would break down once again. Even Constantin Valdor, who he considered his brightest pupil despite his dour, no-nonsense attitude, would one day surpass him.
Like everyone else on Old Earth, Taranis was shocked at the news of the War of the Beast. As the horror stories from the front began to trickle in, one terrible fact began to become clear. The Beast seemed to be making a beeline for Old Earth. Many of the legions were already on their way back to reinforce the planet, but it was highly likely the Beast would get there before all of the legions did. If Old Earth was going to survive it was going to need a standing army, and fast. And Taranis knew just where he might find one.
Taranis put out a call to all of the remaining old, retired Thunder Warriors using the old Unification-era codes to congregate at the Imperial Palace. These were not first-generation Thunder Warriors, who by that point were all dead with the exception of Angron, who lay on his deathbed within the Imperial Palace. They were late-stage Thunder Warriors, who had been removed from active duty for one reason or another. Most were too broken to respond to his call, but quite a few felt they had one fight left in them. They would need a few days to assemble, but they would be there. Taranis needed one last thing, a symbol to inspire them, one that would to appeal to both Unification-era soldiers and Astartes alike.
So he took up the old flag of Unification.
The Siege of Terra was one of the most intense experiences of Arik’s life. Orks, daemons, Dark Eldar, and Crone Eldar seemingly coming from all directions. A perpetual struggle just to survive. Old friends and new students fighting side-by-side in the name of humanity. Taranis had never felt more alive.
Taranis’ greatest personal victory of the battle came when he defeated Zarakynel, the Slaaneshi Keeper of Secrets. As Taranis crushed a Chaos Eldar’s head with his gladius, its flawlessly beautiful features exploding into a bloody paste, a flash of silver in the corner of his vision caught his attention. He had only the slightest moment to spin away from the attack as two blades whistled past, sparks flying as they tore gauges into his golden breastplate. The Blood Angel veteran beside him was not so fortunate: locked in combat with a Bloodletter, the twin blades sliced through the two combatants with only the slightest of resistance, daemon and Astartes alike falling into three neat pieces.
Taranis looked up at his attacker. Before him stood a lithe monstrosity surrounded by screeching Daemonettes, a looming figure of purple skin and whipcord flesh. Its features were male and female, animal and human, beautiful and grotesque, all at once, and at the end of its four slender arms wicked swords and claws gleamed malevolently as they spun and danced in the daemon’s hands.
As the battle raged around them, the Keeper of Secrets looked down at him and grinned, wet purple lips splitting to reveal rows of black teeth. “I have heard of you, Arik Taranis. The old custodian. The cripple. The freak. Trying so hard to reach perfection as you watch the rest of the world leave you in the dust. Take heart, though, for to die at my hands will be a beautiful death.”
Behind Taranis, several Custodes stepped forward to join him, fanning out in an arc beside their Lord Commander. “Perhaps you’re right,” said Taranis. “Perhaps I am only a old mass of mismatched parts and refuse stitched together.” His hand tightened around his gladius, and beside him six halberds rose in unison. “Still, better to die a freak than to live as filth such as you. My body may be weak, but an old friend of mine always said that my brain was stronger than my body. Let us see if that’s true.”
The Keeper of Secrets screeched with rage, and as one the Custodes charged, two splitting off to hold off the Daemonettes and four joining Taranis against the greater daemon. Immediately the daemon’s arms sprang into deadly motion, its blades and claws quicksilver flashes as the four arms attacked, parried, and riposted the attacks of the Custodes. Taranis had never faced an opponent so fast; fighting the daemon felt like fighting ten opponents, as its blows rained down from all sides. Slowed by the great banner in his left hand, it took all his skill and cunning to defend himself from the daemon’s attacks, and for the hundredth time that day he envied the augmentations of the younger Custodes around him.
Yet they were not faring much better. For all their speed and strength, the Custodes could not seem to find a gap in the daemon’s defenses, leaving only glancing blows even when their halberds managed to connect. All the while, the Keeper of Secrets arms were a blur of motion, blades whirling around its body in an impenetrable defense and lashing out in blindingly quick strikes. The daemon’s attacks eventually found their mark. One Custodes fell, his head cleanly decapitated from his body, and then another fell, cut in two from shoulder to hip as he reeled backwards from the loss of an arm.
Taranis glanced down at their corpses. Taleos, Karwenn. Two boys he had personally picked from a crowd of aspirants. He had placed their first practice swords in their hands and taught them how to swing a blade, lectured them on the meaning of loyalty and duty, and placed the golden, crested helms upon their heads when they were inducted in the ranks of the Custodes. Two more corpses among mountains. Perhaps Oscar is right, he mused. I have grown old and worn from battle, my heart hardened and blasted smooth by war and death. My time is over. He deserves a better man at his side.
As they fought, Taranis noticed the daemon was slowing its attacks just as they neared him, giving him just a hairsbreadth of room to parry or dodge away from its slashes. It is taunting me, showing me just how much faster it is, he realized. Beneath his helm he smiled grimly. Perhaps we are more alike than I thought. I can work with that.
Taranis feinted backwards, feigning a stumble, and the Keeper charged, shrieking exultantly as it sensed victory. However, its greed and bloodlust left it overextended and the other two Custodes pressed the attack, forcing the daemon to throw out its arms to both sides to fend off assault. In that moment, Taranis saw his chance. Digging in his back foot, he reversed his momentum and charged the greater daemon with a burst of speed, closing the gap in the blink of an eye. Caught without time to prepare a proper defense, the daemon could only howl as it desperately stabbed forward with its two free arms towards Taranis’ chest.
There was no way to block both attacks, the daemon was too close and too swift. So Taranis chose. His sword arm swept up, knocking aside one of the daemon’s silver swords. The other sank deep into the left side of his chest, grinding and scraping as it pierced first his breastplate and then his interlocking ribcage. Taranis grunted and lurched forward, blood spilling forth from the wound. The daemon grinned, for it knew that it had just pierced the Custodes’ primary heart, and it would be a trivial matter to finish the weakened human.
Or so it thought. Taranis savored the flash of surprise on the daemon’s face as his charge continued unslowed, its gloating pleasure becoming shock. Who would have known that the last ditch surgery that moved his heart to his right side and saved his life on the operating table would save him once again. And now he was within the daemon’s guard. It could not defend, it could not run.
The Banner of Unification clenched firmly in his left hand, he hacked down at the monster’s leg, severing it at the first joint, and as the Keeper of Secrets fell forward screaming Taranis spun and lifted his gladius to meet it in a great, flashing arc. The power sword sparked and crackled as it bisected the daemon at the waist. Purple blood and steaming ichor spattered Taranis’ helm as the top half of the daemon sailed past, its soul sent back to the Immaterium to grovel before the Prince of Pleasure and explain how his greatest champion had fallen against a freak.
Arik Taranis died spitting defiance into the face of the Beast and his nobs, even though he had not managed to do any lasting damage to the great grot. If one had been able to speak to Taranis after the battle, he would have probably said it was the way he would have wanted to go.
Arik Taranis’ body was laid to rest in a now forgotten graveyard in the old nation of Terrawatt.
Jenetia Krole
After the fall of Ursh, the Warlord was surveying the situation with the remaining Urshii insurgency first-hand along the Sibar front, when he heard a small clink against his armor. Looking down, the Warlord saw a small, malnourished eight-year-old girl dressed in rags trying to mug the unifier of mankind with a steel knife. After winning over the child’s trust with some food, the Warlord convinced her to show him where she lived. The Warlord was interested in where she came from. He was more interested in the fact that he was seemingly unable to read her mind in any way.
The child led the Warlord back to a bunker, torn apart by the clear signs of Urshii marauders and further weathered by years of time. It seemed that whoever had lived in the bunker had fled into the wilds to escape detections from the Empire of Ursh, only to be discovered when the Urshii themselves were forced into the hinterlands. It was there that the Warlord discovered the name of the feral child, the only survivor of the small bunker-settlement. Jenetia Krole.
The Warlord brought Jenetia back to the Imperium, where she was provided with proper food and medical care. She was able to learn how to comprehend Gothic, but she would never be able to speak it. Her throat was damaged at some point before the Warlord had found her out in the wilds of Siber, and her vocal chords would never be able to recover from the harm that had been inflicted upon them. Although the Unification Wars had produced many orphans, and the Warlord had personally made sure that many were sent to the nascent Imperial Schola, he wanted to hold onto this one. The fact that she had managed to elude both his guards and his own psychic senses intrigued him.
Jenetia would be one of the first of what the Imperium would come to know as blanks. Indeed, much of the Imperium’s early research on the physiological and behavioral effects of the Pariah gene came from studies on Jenetia. Though she was merely recessive for the Pariah gene, and did not suffer from its effects as strongly as some later blanks, it was through her and the few others like her on Old Earth that the Imperium was even able to know what blanks were.
Jenetia spent much of her formative years being shuffled around from adept to adept and primarch to primarch. She could never stay around one person for too long, as eventually her blank aura would cause them to become nervous and uncomfortable. In particular, Jenetia was completely unable to be around anyone with even the slightest hint of psyker powers with the exceptions of the Steward and Magnus, whose psyker abilities were so powerful as to even eclipse Krole’s blank aura. Even then Magnus tried to avoid Krole whenever possible, both the woman’s personality and lack of presence in the warp making him uncomfortable. Jenetia also had trouble building relationships with rank and file soldiers, as her aura and her inability to talk made many uncomfortable or gave her the impression of aloofness. At some point, Krole decided to embrace this reputation and together with her battlefield prowess deliberately cultivated a reputation of dreadedness. Some ironically went so far as to call her The Soulless Queen, despite not knowing her true nature.
Jenetia gained a reputation as the Steward’s resident monster slayer. Before the Grey Knights, when daemons or any other warp-reliant monsters were terrorizing a planet, or when a psyker was found to have brainwashed the inhabitants of a planet to their will, Krole was the one called in to set things straight. To any daemons or witch-kin, her aura and combat prowess made her essentially untouchable. On top of this, when faced with more conventional foes, Jenetia was able to turn her blank aura up to overwhelming levels, causing vertigo or panic attacks in just about anything with a soul.
Despite her success in such matters, the Steward was rather uncomfortable about Jenetia’s role on the battlefield. Having been raised by the rather traditionalist Malcador, the Steward was uncomfortable about repeatedly putting a woman in harm’s way, especially one he had known since she was a child. However, before the Grey Knights and the Culexus Assassins, Krole was for many years the only well-trained anti-psyker weapon the Imperium had. Indeed, it is possible that many aspects of Jenetia’s personality, including her abrasive nature and her attempts to deliberately cultivate a terrifying reputation in friend and foe alike, were in response to this treatment by the Steward, trying to convince the closest thing she had to a father that she was just as good of a warrior as any other member of the upper levels of the Imperium’s impromptu family.
The Steward ended up assigning her to the Black Ships, believing that the job of rounding up psykers to be sent to places like Prospero and Old Earth would be a good way to keep her safe and off the front lines. Krole was not happy with this decision, but eventually relented on the condition the Steward grant her one request. If the Steward wanted her to perform this job she would need an elite task force to get the task done. All female, and all blanks. By that time the Imperium had expanded far enough that there were just enough blanks to fulfill Jenetia’s request, three hundred in all. Jenetia taught them to fight as she did, moving in silence and putting down their foes with utter, brutal efficiency. The Sisters of Silence travelled around the galaxy, bringing untrained psykers to the relative safety of the Black Ships and still being called in on the rare occasions that the Imperium needed some extra help in dispatching warp monstrosities. Although many young psykers found the Sisters to be unnerving and often painful to be around, they soon learned the Sisters were supposed to be scary to the monsters, not them.
Although the Silent Queen might have been soulless, she was not heartless. Her personal journal, found only after her death, showed she actually did care about many of the people she spent her life around, even if she was not able to say it in words. Jenetia Krole was killed in the opening battle of the War of the Beast, having been sent to the far reaches of the Imperium to collect psykers aboard the Black Ships when the Beast and his hordes first roared across the Imperium’s borders. She and her warriors died in a valiant last stand to buy the now refugee-laded Black Ships, filled with mostly children, enough time to escape and bring back news that the Imperium was at war.
Years later, when Sebastian Thor and Alicia Dominica argued with the Steward, now Emperor, about making the Sororitas an official institution, Jenetia Krole was one of the people who was brought up to support their argument.
Alith Anar
EDITOR'S NOTE: May need name change
An insane reformed Dark Eldar that goes on raids, sometimes solo because nobody else is stupid enough, into the Dark City and the Crone Worlds because FUCK THOSE PIECES OF SHIT!
He is a vat grown, one of the legions in the Dark City. Massively underdeveloped psychic powers for an eldar of his age. Like holy shit small children are better psykers than him. To speak the High Tongue properly you need to have at least some psychic talent for the inflections. He can't hardly speak High Tongue.
On the positive side this does make him far better at passing for the Dark Eldar he used to be. What made him change sides? Nobodies sure. He just took a look around one day at his shitty gang of half-withered in one of the low towns. Looked up at the towers of High Town, saw the procession of Chaos Eldar walking his street like they owned it, looked back up at High Town, looked again at his gang, remembered the traveling Harlequins and the things they told him and then lost his mind.
Next thing he knows he's sprinting through the webway with angry scum behind him.
Technically he is on the Path of the Outcast. He can't adapt to Craftworld life properly, he's too old to change easily now. He is only allowed in the periphery and visitors sections of the more tolerant Craftworlds, the others have banned him outright for being what he is. He wholeheartedly approves of this because he would do the exact same in their shoes.
He has gone full monk. He eats only simple food, drinks only water, spends much time in meditation and contemplation, hones his martial skills and as far as anyone can tell he is totally celibate. He is about as far away from Dark Eldar psychologically as it is possible to get.
He has more friends among humanity than his own species, if only because humanity is notoriously and tragically bad at telling Dark and Craftworld eldar apart without training. Also humanity tends to be slightly more forgiving, he considers them to be a bit stupid in that regard.
He is not charismatic. He is not some dashing anti-hero or pantie moistening Dark Knight type figure. He's a deranged fuck up with weaponry that probably isn't safe to be left with alone. He has done terrible things and they don't trouble him as much as they should. He isn't motivated by some higher purpose, his motivation is "kill as many of the fuckers before one of them gets lucky and kills me". His one real redeeming feature, if such it is, is that he is predictable in what he wants if not in how he goes about getting it.
Yvraine the Scarred
It is one thing for a righteous man to stand up against evil. It is a far harder thing for one to recognize evil when evil is all one has ever known. Such is the story of Yvraine, better known as Yvraine the Scarred. Yvraine started life as a vatborn Dark Eldar, born in a lab with no mother or father, at least, none that would ever claim her as her own. Even at a young age, her talent at combat was notable despite her half-born status, which eventually resulted in her being inducted into a Wych cult. Although she would never escape the stigma of being a half-born in Commorragh, Yvraine was young, talented, and capable. She should have had a bright future.
That is, before she had to face Lelith Hesperax in the arena. It was clear that Yvraine was meant to be little more than a warm-up kill before the main performance, but Yvraine fought to her limits anyway. Yvraine put up an entertaining enough fight to be spared, but not before Lelith inflicted a deep laceration across her face and the eye beneath it. That should have been a death sentence. Few Dark Eldar would want to see a fight with a wych scarred in such a manner fight, and most wyches who were as scarred as Yvraine was were often forced to fight against unbeatable odds just to watch them die. What’s more, the fact that Yvraine had been spared was an insult to her wych cult, one that the Succubus felt compelled to rectify. Yvraine was indeed forced into an unwinnable fight, but her performance impressed the Succubus enough that she was willing to grant Yvraine a pardon. The “pardon” in question being the cruel mercy of being expelled from the wych cult to live out her days on the streets of Commorragh.
Then came the unholy union between Vect and Lady Malys. At that time, Yvraine was living as a vagabond on the streets of the Dark City. Despite being a former Wych, no Kabal would want her, as her former Succubus had made it very clear that Yvraine was meant to suffer, and any who tried to defy this edict would receive her full attention. Yvraine had never had to make a moral decision before in her life. She was young for an Eldar. She had been involved in a few raids, but the banality with which the other Dark Eldar had treated it meant that she had never really questioned the morality of the situation. However, despite all this, she knew that there was something simply something wrong with Vect’s marriage to the Croneworlder, even by the standards of Commorragh. And so Yvraine did something she would have never considered beforehand. She found a poorly-known entrance to the Dark City and, after killing the guard, fled from Commorragh into the Webway.
It is unknown what Yvraine had meant to accomplish by fleeing into the Webway. She had barely spent any time outside the Dark City before; much less have any idea how to navigate the byzantine passages of the Webway. Perhaps she merely believed that any place, no matter how hostile, was a better place to be than the hellhole that had once been Commorragh. Nevertheless, Yvraine’s naiveté with the Webway was almost her doom. She was only saved from death by a passing troop of Harlequins, who found her curled in a fetal position half-starved to death. Having been saved by the Harlequins, Yvraine travelled with them for a few months as they took their performances to several worlds. However, it was not long before Yvraine discovered the Harlequins’ true destination: the Craftworld Biel-Tan.
Being in the wake of the dark marriage, the eldar of Biel-Tan were naturally skeptical of any Dark Eldar trying to flee Commorragh, but they were certainly interested in what Yvraine was willing to offer in payment: access protocols to an obscure entrance to the Dark City. The codes were somewhat old, but between all of the Dark Eldar who had fled the Dark City, the eldar of Biel-Tan were able to gain access to some of the obscure and half-forgotten entrances of Commorragh (at least until the Dark Eldar changed the codes yet again). As a result of the information gained by her defection, Yvraine was given a soulstone and admitted into Biel-Tan, though not without some reservations. In addition, the healers of Biel-Tan were able to restore Yvraine’s eye to some degree of functionality, though they were unable to do anything about her deep scar.
For a while, Yvraine took up the Path of the Warrior, the only thing she knew how to do, serving as a Dire Avenger in Biel-Tan’s aspect shrines. Yvraine fought with a ferocity one could only have learned from living on the streets of the Dark City, something that impressed her instructor to no end, yet Yvraine was never truly satisfied with herself. It seemed too much like her old days in the wych cult to truly feel comfortable. Eventually she decided to leave Biel-Tan and the Aspect Shrines to become an Outcast, something that broke the heart of her exarch, who had hoped she would eventually succeed him.
Yvraine travelled the worlds of the Imperium for many years, sometimes as a Ranger, other times as a simple traveler. For a few years she even served as a corsair in part of a Rogue Trader’s retinue. Yet no matter what she tried, Yvraine never truly felt satisfied. It was not that she was becoming bored of a task after many years like many other Eldar, it’s that nothing ever felt truly satisfying to begin with. Eventually, her travels took her to the Exodite world Halathel, where she finally found her calling. On Halathel, Yvraine discovered the joys of agriculture, and found that it was a lot more satisfying to make something grow than to cut it down. It was a truly strange tale, after travelling much of the galaxy and having experienced most facets of Eldar life, Yvraine the Scarred had found purpose in simply tilling the soil.
However, the strangest part of Yvraine’s story was yet to come. In recent years, Eldar farseers trying to observe the Shadowpoint, the point where the Threads of Fate seem to simultaneously break down and spread out in every conceivable direction, have noticed the recurrent mention of a previously unknown being, a being called Ynnead. Perhaps even more unusually, many of these visions seem to refer to Yvraine, or at least “an Eldar who both is and is not of the light”. As a result, many Craftworld Eldar have come to Halathel, trying to figure out what possible connection Yvraine could have to this entity. Yvraine, on the other hand, just wants them to get the hell off her property before they trample her potatoes.
Colonel-Farseer Rommel
He was an Eldar who had the fortunate to grew up with a minor archeocultural database that basically held Girls In Panzer, a shitton of heavy metal, and the cultural context articles for the entire thing. He grew up obsessed with tanks, and even changed his name to the ancient tank commander of Rommel. And his local farseer said he needed training as a seer, despite not showing a lick of ability for it, then said his second lesson would be found in the IG as a tank commander.
It was when war came to his homeworld that his destiny truly showed. His Leman Russ wrecked outside his home town, he looked at two equally trashed tanks: a Baneblade and a Cobra. His until then hidden gift flared up, and he gave a fateful order to the local technicians and bone singers. Merge those tanks. 12 hours of work later, it was ready. His old mentor then said "the second lesson ends. Now begins the third."
Rommel called him a dick.
Rommel's foresight is extremely accurate, but severely limited. He can only see events that he will be present at, and occasionally get flashes of needed tactics (such as when he gave an Earthshaker precise firing angles and times, before kneecapping a chaos titan, putting it in a position for the Earthshaker round to hit an unprotected spot and detonate its power core). He also loves music, and often sounds his charge into battle with his Carnedanian bagpipes.
His tanks make the orthodox Mechanicus scream in horror, send most Eldar into shock, and makes the average Tau cream their panties.
Cobra/scorpion armor on a baneblade chassis, its ground pressure reduced by grav tech, triple pulsers on the turret and a D-cannon secondary weapon, an advanced power plant, Tau stabilizers for even more accuracy, capable of 115km/h, the entire assembly is a masterpiece of combined engineering. And hard to produce, with only 10 per year (or less, depending on how often he needs spare parts).
It also lead to the Unifier class battlesuit, which is almost exclusive to his support infantry because production can barely keep up with said infantry's tendency to wreck enemy tanks by ramming.
50 tanks are under his command, as are 1000 battlesuits, and a support corp of quartermasters and technicians that count as an army in their own right.
Rommels has discovered the third lesson: he can push fate, but at the cost of his own soul. Farseers say he has 500 years before he needs to retire to the infinity circuit. He told them to piss off. He'll die before 500 years has gone by, and when he does...
There won't be enough of a soul left for any god to fight over. He knows the time of his death is coming, for he has seen it every night since his gift showed. Every night, a different version. 150 years to plan the perfect last battle. He will fall, his legacy will live, and chaos will be dealt a major blow. Soon, his doom will come, and he will do what the Guardsman does - Hold The Line.
There is a joke that Rommel is Creed's secret alter ego, as they never seen in the same place. All jokes aside, every attempt to get the two of them in even the same sector has been sidetracked by the sudden appearance of threats they had to deal with.
The one time it worked, they stumbled onto a major cult of Tzeentch via a tank dropping through a sinkhole. Which answered every question of what force was preventing them from working together.
Then everything went back to normal and they were never on the same planet ever again.
Gutsmek Wazdakka
Gutsmek Wazdakka began life as but a simple Mek and Speed Freak, tearing about the galaxy on his kustom warbike under one Warboss or another or none at all, upgrading his bike and getting into fights, and he was content.
Then, while chasing a retreating Eldar kill-team, he somehow managed to chase them into the Webway itself. He chased them down, killed them, then looked around and realized he had no idea where he was and no idea how to get back.
For over a year he rampaged around inside the Webway, getting into fights with with Craftworlders and Croneworlders and Dark Eldar and Inquisitors, somehow always managing to evade pursuit, vanishing into the most tangled and gnarled parts of the Webway. It took him a year to find his way back out, winding up on the Ork-held world of Vesp Vi.
When he came out, he was an Ork changed- an Ork inspired. He had seen, in the Webway, his vision of a perfect battleground, of Kults of Speed tearing their way from one end of the galaxy to the other without once having to slow down. He promptly sought out the nearest Kult and challenged their Warboss to a battle for supremacy. The Warboss was bigger, but Wazdakka had the better bike and a holy vision, and when the dust settled he was Warboss Gutzmek Wazdakka. He promptly led his new warband right back into the Webway, trusting in the whims of fate and the will of Gork and Mork to lead him to the next fight.
The method and degree by which Wazdakka navigates the Webway is disputed. At first, it was suspected he was getting by on blind luck, but this seemed increasingly improbable as his rampage continued. Some suspect he is a latent Weirdboy on top of being a Mek, and uses some sort of subconscious psychic talent to navigate. Others believe that Gork and Mork are in fact leading him to good fights. A few suspect he is subtly empowered by Chaos, probably Tzeentch. Some even whisper that he is guided by the subtle hand of Cegorach, shaping Wazdakka and his WAAAGH into a weapon to be rammed into the rotting heart of Commorragh.
Whatever the case, he is a consistent thorn in the Imperium's side. Although his WAAAGHs have been defeated on multiple occasions, each time Wazdakka has escaped, popping back up on the closest Ork world to raise another horde so he can have another go. His astonishing good luck in survival is yet another mystery, one that lends further credence to the idea that he is somehow aided by a higher power. Worse, other Orks have occasionally been finding their way into the Webway independent of Wazdakka's guidance, apparently simply drawn by the WAAAGH energy of his Webway Wars. Only a few, but the number seems to be increasing.
The Imperium's sole consolation is that Wazdakka poses as much a threat to their enemies as to them, with entire Dark Eldar Kabals or Croneworld slaughter-parties wiped out to the last man when they had the misfortune to stumble across his warbands. However, this is small consolation in the face of his raids against Imperial worlds, Exodite worlds, and occasionally even minor Craftworlds.
As the failed assassination attempts pile up and the galaxy grinds closer to its final cataclysm, it seems likely that Warboss Gutsmek Wazdakka will have some role to play in the confrontation- but what, nobody can say. At least, nobody willing to talk comprehensibly.
Fyodor Karamazov
Fyodor Karamazov, the Despoiler, the High Proctor of Salem, or more commonly as the Butcher of a Thousand Worlds is a man whose name is whispered in hushed tone across a million worlds, and rightfully so.
His career had been a legendary one, his mind, charm, determination and zeal rivaling even that of the great Sebastian Thor himself, with him rising from a small Arbiter in the middle of nowhere to an Inquisitor of Ordo Malleus and then, for a short time, the High Lord Inquisitor during the 12th Black Crusade over his specialty in spotting heretics and cultists. But still, however great his mind and wit, his paranoia and psychopathic tendencies dwarf them all, rivaling even those of the Primarch Perturabo. Still, however brutal his deeds were, they bring results and with extreme bitterness did the Emperor allowed him the free rein to do what ever he willed to keep the Imperium intact from the Black Crusade. And thus, on his Throne of Judgement Fyodor crusaded across the millions of planet of the Imperium, leaving alive no heretics nor cultists in his wake - for all he suspected, he burns and his paranoia is great indeed.
He is also said to be a psychopath that enjoys the suffering of people, the smell of burning flesh and snatching candies from babies. Fortunately, only two of those facts are likely to be true.
However, as expected, power corrupts, and the greater the power the greater the corruption. It is unknown where and how did he begin to fall, but it is undeniable that it was seeded with his deep paranoia, and was completely undeniable at what was known later as the Salem Witch Trial, where he condemned Saint Salem and her crusaders who had liberated an entire system and the people who were liberated as heretics and witches and committed Exterminatus on every last planet in the system and all those nearby. The Emperor, as expected, when heard of this had flipped his lid in pure rage and ordered Ordo Sicarius to get Fyodor, allowing them to use whatever resource needed (and may be more) to get it done. Burning innocents, that may be slightly acceptable in the direst of circumstances (which the 12th Black Crusade was, to the eternal grievance of the Emperor) but that many for no reason? On an individual basis? Some could have wondered why hadn't the Emperor went after the now-sacked-and-put-on-most-wanted-list-High Lord himself if not for the event that had transpired next.
Fyodor, even before becoming an Inquisitor, had secretly viewed the Imperium as being too soft and was determined to 'fix' it. He, with his unparalleled charm had won over (and built his power base on) the more orthodox factions of the Inquisition, with many if not most monodominants being members of the upcoming Coup and Inquisitorial Civil War (which he called the Crusade of Change) that aims to bring the Imperium to his wanted direction.
Now, at the end of the 41st millennium, in the heart of the 13th Black Crusade, the tyranid invasion, and the Fifth Armageddon War, the dreaded man is at the head of the dreaded Judgemental Crusade Fleet, burning and enslaving all in his way and waging a shadow war against the Emperor and the Inquisition. Despite the best efforts of the Imperium, he is yet to be caught, for his fleet is equipped with some kind of 'experimental' Warp Drive capable of achieving speeds twice as fast as that of the fastest Imperium craft (the design was scrapped because it required people to be burned, but Karamazov has people to burn in abundance) and armed with weaponries and equipment never seen before outside the halls of the Inquisition... the future seems dark indeed.
"I will repeat this for the one last time: that thing is no man but a vile Genestealer infiltrating our ranks that. Needs. To. Be. Purged!"
-Inquisitor Boaz Kryptman on Fyodor Karamazov to the High Council, one year before the Salem Witch Trial.