At each Grand Narrative event, influential and charismatic characters known as the Lords of War command each of the player factions and use the support of their followers to achieve their goals, be it the salvation of an Imperial world or the summoning of a great daemon.
Let’s find out who our intrepid commanders will be fighting for this year as we head to Ferrum’s Wake.
Kaelen Voss, the Free Captain
Kaelen Voss first knew freedom in the moment he abandoned duty and death amidst the ranks of the Executioners Chapter to follow Huron Blackheart. He embraced the Tyrant of Badab not out of love for the Dark Gods, but because rebellion opened his eyes to a cold, inescapable truth. The Corpse-Emperor’s Imperium gifted him genetically enhanced might, eidetic memory, limitless brilliance, and an artificially long life with which to enjoy it, yet demanded inevitable death amidst eternal war as payment. Its oaths had bound him. In Huron’s revolt, Kaelen believed he had found the freedom to choose his own fate.
He was not alone in that belief. Many Red Corsairs sustained their treachery with simple vices: vengeance, ambition, blood, plunder, survival. Kaelen chose philosophy. He spoke of the lie of service, the corruption of thrones, the slow murder of duty, and the cowardice of men who named obedience virtue because they feared the void beyond it. Amidst an unapologetically traitorous band, Kaelen saw himself as a bastion of nobility.
Then Huron’s rebellion became a kingdom. It acquired rites, hierarchies, sorcerers, daemonic bargains, whispered devotions, and all the old shapes of servitude wearing the new, vibrant colours of the Maelstrom. Kaelen watched warriors who had spat on the Imperial Creed bow their heads to warp-born things. He saw free captains become courtiers. He saw rebellion harden into another chain.
So he rebelled again.
Renaming his strike cruiser Unbound Horizon, with a core of his oldest battle-brothers in tow, Kaelen abandoned service to Huron and escaped the Maelstrom. Drift, design, or damnation took him to the world of Ferrum’s Wake, where philosophy became proselytisation. Naming himself liberator, he shattered command spires, cut noospheric networks, armed underhive districts, and broadcast a promise through every vox-channel on the planet: no gods, no masters, no chains.
The people of Ferrum’s Wake believed him, and expressed that belief through the song of civil war.
In the aftermath of its liberation, billions sing Kaelen’s name as that of a conqueror. They offer him tithe and worship in equal measure, begging him to ascend to mastery of their world. At every turn, the Free Captain denies their offerings. His only demand is absolute devotion to liberty, no matter the cost or chaos it incurs.
As the Maelstrom swells bright in the void, Kaelen Voss’ fervent commitment to freedom only strengthens. He prepares the world, its fleets, and all those who share his cause for the inevitable vengeance to come. He will not kneel to the Emperor. He will not bend to Huron. He will not bargain with the gods. Upon Ferrum’s Wake, the Free Captain will make his stand.
The Warrant
The thing called The Warrant sits upon a brazen throne on a benighted warship. Commanding a fleet of heretics, renegades, oath-breakers, and blood-mad supplicants, it approaches Ferrum’s Wake with undeniable purpose.
The Warrant approaches Ferrum’s Wake for the head of Kaelen Voss.
It claims to be Huron Blackheart’s punishment wrought in adamantine and iron-hard muscle: an executioner and warlord whose existence is less a state of being, more a passage of judgment. Among the Red Corsairs, deserters whisper of it in sealed compartments and dying vox-bursts. They say no writ is needed where The Warrant walks. None have ever seen the Tyrant of Badab acknowledge the creature, much less command it, but who would dare doubt its provenance beneath the shadow of an axe?
Its armour bears old Corsair markings beneath layers of ritual scoring, brass kill-runes, and tally marks cut too deep to be mere decoration. Its helm is smooth where a face should declare identity. Whether the Warrant was once a failed Red Corsairs aspirant, some daemon-thing given shape by the Maelstrom, an assassin-priest of the Blood God, or some composite nightmare assembled from all three is a matter for those with the luck to survive their curiosity. Its voice emerges through multiple channels at once, sometimes as a judicial monotone, sometimes as a drowning man’s laugh, sometimes as what sounds like Huron’s own displeasure rendered in red static.
Its purpose is larger than murder. Kaelen’s death must instruct. His followers must understand that freedom is fiction. The world he stole must either be dragged into the Maelstrom’s orbit of terror or ruined so completely that no future captain mistakes desertion for destiny. And so the Warrant comes not as mere killer, but as a warlord, garbed in the raiment of command and accompanied by a host of the Maelstrom. Daemons, Chaos Space Marines, and red-handed zealots march in its wake, slaved to its whim or eager for the spoils of a fallen Imperial world.
For all its dread authority, there is a brazen hunger in the Warrant’s actions. It gathers skulls not merely for the gods, but as petitions. It takes heads as evidence. Every oathbreaker slain, every deserter butchered is offered upwards: to the Blood God, to the Maelstrom, to Huron Blackheart, or perhaps only to the empty place where their approval should be. Some suspect that this fanatical entity has neither met nor been sanctioned by the Tyrant at all, though they are careful never to let such whispers reach the Warrant or its followers. Such distinctions matter little to its victims. Whether servant, pretender, or masterless revenant, the Warrant lives to enforce one irresistible truth: no oath to Huron Blackheart is ever broken cleanly.
Commander Orestes Morn
Orestes Morn has never needed to raise his voice in prayer. He believes that the God-Emperor hears discipline.
That, at least, is what those who serve under him assert. Morn is not theatrical in his devotion. He does not weep before icons, thunder scripture from balconies, or decorate every order with pious excess. His faith is colder, harder, and more dangerous: an absolute internal architecture by which the universe remains bearable. The God-Emperor endures. Humanity obeys. Treachery is punished. Sacrifice has meaning. The dead are accounted for. The chain of command is as unyielding as auramite.
To see Ferrum’s Wake as it now stands is, for Morn, to witness heresy of the highest order. Anarchy, corruption, and chaos, garbed in the false promise of freedom.
He approaches at the head of an Imperial reclamation force bearing soldiers, ships, priests, Astropathic relays, Adeptus Mechanicus envoys, the bureaucratic machinery of restored allegiance, and the essential simplicity of Orders of Execution. He comes as the return of law. He comes as the hand that steadies the drowning.
Morn’s own faith has endured because it has never truly been asked to bend. His certainty is immense. The God-Emperor’s will must be coherent. Obedience must matter. Loyalty must be answered. Ferrum’s Wake threatens the certainty of the galaxy. Its people, if they can be called such, have committed the gravest of sins. But this world of iron can be returned to the Emperor’s grace. Across the hundreds of ships of his reclamation fleet, more than a million devout citizens of the Imperium wait at rest. They wait in prayer.
They stand ready to replace those who traded the God-Emperor’s love for the lie of freedom.
Mara Venn, Reluctant Saint
Mara Venn was born beneath Ferrum’s Wake in a district where children learned three rules before numbers: do not trust clean water, do not sleep near vents that hum, and do not speak loudly when the machines stop.
She was not raised to be a soldier or a saint. The God-Emperor had other plans.
Before Kaelen Voss came, Mara’s people belonged to quotas, guild overseers, ration clerks, enforcer sweeps, sump debt, and the slow arithmetic of underhive survival. With the arrival of the Free Captain, they belonged to whoever could keep the oxygen shrines running and the guns loaded. Liberation changed the names on the boots. It did not keep them off anyone’s throat for long.
Mara became important by accident, which is the only way she would have tolerated it. She knew ductways others had forgotten. She could bargain with gangers, lie to warlords, steal from armouries, restart dead lumen grids, and talk frightened people into moving when staying still felt safer. She made bad deals and better escapes. She lost friends. She made bombs out of devotional fixtures. She laughed at the wrong moments and cried where no one could see.
Then the impossible began accumulating around her.
A hab-stack collapsed seconds after she pulled a refugee column through the wrong door. A corrupted servitor pack froze at the sound of a hymn she did not remember learning. A sniper round struck the aquila charm at her throat and left only a burn.
Crude graffiti of her haloed visage began terrorising her from the walls of the underhive.
Some call her a living saint of the God-Emperor. Mara herself says saints do not steal medicine at knifepoint or shoot men in the back while they reload. Yet still they come: loyal soldiers cut off from command, broken priests, repentant rebels, and every desperate soul still praying the God-Emperor will send angels to save them.
Mara is not trying to save Ferrum’s Wake. Mara knows its doom was brought by just such an angel.
But even an unwelcome burden can spark a glimmer of heroism. Mara does want to save her people. Deep in her heart, she shares their faint hope in the God-Emperor’s salvation. If only there weren’t quite so many to save.
A very interesting line up, imo.
We have a rebel Space Marine, Kaelen Voss,* who joined the Red Corsairs, only to rebel again. Deeming himself a philosopher, he preaches total freedom (even if reality can never live up to this...) Definitely interested to see how his story develops. Hopefully he doesn't just succumb to Chaos in a very cliched way.
We have the possibly daemonic, and at the very least weird and mysterious, being, The Warrant, sent to hunt down Voss for his betrayal.
We have a harsh true believer in the Imperial Faith with Orestes Morn.
And a reluctant hero, who denies she is either a hero or a saint.
There is the potential here for some interesting dynamics. Let's hope they are used to their potential.
It's nice to see the Maelstrom continue to get developed, too - and in a bit of a different manner.
As always, any thoughts on this? And details worth focusing on, or any interesting references I missed?
*(Presumably no relation to our favourite chunky Imperial Fist gymbro Maximmion Voss, aside from both being son of Dorn).