The fall of Cadia was, to put it lightly, bad news for the worlds of the Cadian Gate. Life was already a constant struggle against marauding renegade warbands, and now the Traitors have free rein to bring their biggest fleets in and out of the Eye of Terror. Someone’s going to need to shore up the defences, and with Forge World Agripinaa firmly in Kravek Morne’s sights, that job falls to Thulia Ghuld, Archmagos Terminus of Mars.
All Tech-Priests who rise to the rank of Dominus come to master their particular fields of study, and for Ghuld that field is war. She is a veteran of the Ordo Reductor – the subcult of the Adeptus Mechanicus that reveres the Omnissiah as an avatar of destruction – who has spent hundreds of years crafting herself and her forces into the purest expression of divine wrath, augmenting her aging flesh with blessed steel until she towered over her peers.
She believes that the Machine God himself has made her his instrument for the efficient conduct of war, and scorns those like Belisarius Cawl who waste valuable time and resources on diplomacy and experimentation when they could be blowing heretics to pieces instead. In turn, Cawl and his ilk accuse Thulia of seeing no value in knowledge if it cannot be applied to the blowing up of more heretics – and in fairness, they’re absolutely right.
Not that the Archmagos Terminus would dispute those assertions, as she sees her single-minded obsession with warfare as just another optimisation granted by the Omnissiah. If he didn’t want her to slaughter traitors and xenos by the thousands, why did he make them so easy to kill?
While many of her peers find Thulia Ghuld distasteful company at best, she is beloved by the Skitarii, who view her as the Vox Dei – the living emitter of the Machine God’s word. They adore her for her unceasing pursuit of victory, often seized by unstoppable armoured legions crowned by heavy Hastarii infantry.
Hastarii are a vital element of the Skitarii macro-clades that combine the heavy firepower of much larger machines with armoured cyborg bodies modified to carry such destructive weapons on the front lines. Their right arms are replaced with gyroscopically stabilised gun mounts wired directly into their cortical circuits, giving them uncanny accuracy at the cost of needing advanced backpack generators that are as heavy as they are difficult to manufacture.
Those clades designated Hastarii Exterminators carry vicious eradication casters that project expanding cones of lethal atomising energy at close range, while Hastarii Fusiliers lance through vehicles and scramble their systems with pinpoint shots from their neutron fusils. Both variants are highly effective at their chosen jobs, but complex and costly to create, ensuring they’re rarely deployed when their loss would be wasteful.
Both Thulia Ghuld and her legions of Hastarii will be joining Warhammer 40,000 alongside the terrifying new Defiler, Mutilators, and Iron Warriors. Believe it or not, that’s still not all that will be joining us for the next big expansion, so come back next week and bask in the shadow of armoured glory.
