This week, armies from across the galaxy will converge on Warhammer World for the UK leg of the Warhammer 40,000 Grand Narrative, a lore-led weekend-long event of epic proportions.
One of the great things about narrative Warhammer 40,000 is the ability to immerse yourself in incredible stories filled with awesome characters, and the Grand Narrative is a great example of this. We sent our best Infocyte operatives to find out more about the dramatis personae who will be meeting commanders later this week…
Forces will be battling over the honoured planet of Mordian, home of the legendary Iron Guard regiments of the Astra Militarum. Strange portents have drawn many eyes onto the tidally locked planet – forever split into scorching day and frozen night – and those hive cities that exist along its narrow habitable zone will soon feel the touch of war.
Six key characters will descend into Mordian’s sprawl to pursue their own agendas, guiding those players pledged to their cause towards victory for Chaos, the Imperium, or an unlikely coalition of xenos.
None save the players know why they have come to serve these Lords of War, but the fate of the system lies in their hands.
The Forces of Chaos
Magister Khethos Vorsch, Exalted Sorcerer
Khethos Vorsch earned his mantle on the night he stepped through a hand mirror of rippled glass and emerged—a heartbeat later—inside the sealed reliquary vault of Heliosa Secundus, twenty kilometres beneath bedrock. Since that impossible intrusion, the Exalted Sorcerer has treated reality’s seams as invitations. He mapped ley lines across dead moons, unpicked wraithbone gates woven by long fallen Aeldari masons, and once persuaded a planetary governor to surrender merely by letting the man watch every bolt on his fortress doors drift open in perfect synchrony. Yet Vorsch insists these feats are rehearsals: “True power,” he murmurs, “is not walking through walls, but deciding where walls ought to stand.”
As a powerful Exalted Sorcerer of the Thousand Sons, Magister Vorsch wields great empyric power. He specialises in binding magicks, both to entrap supernatural entities and also the entanglement of one place to another. Styling himself as a puppet master of realities and an esoteric scholar of the liminal and hidden, he delights in imposing his twisted will upon all around him and moving without barriers wherever he chooses. After all, no locked door can deny one who can simply open a portal to bypass it, and no being can refuse the commands of he who can shackle its will with sorcery.
With his interests turning ever further toward exploring forbidden places and opening unseen paths, it was perhaps inevitable he would draw the attention of the exile, Ahriman. Forever consumed with his quest to gain access to the Black Library and the forbidden knowledge within, Ahriman has carefully cultivated Vorsch as an eager apprentice, bound by sorcerous fealty and a shared fervor for discovering the unknown.
Drawn to Mordian by a rhythmic shiver only his kind can feel, he now stalks the planet’s night-side marking fault paths with cobalt sigils, intent on raising sorcerous menhirs that will yoke whatever hidden gateway groans on straining hinges beneath the iron world. Whilst he nominally works in service to Ahriman and toils under an unwelcome set of watchful eyes, the Exalted Sorcerer’s true mind is only ever on his obsessions. Vorsch claims every horizon is a puzzle yearning to be solved; those who serve him insist the puzzles are beginning to solve themselves.
The Vessel, Daemonhost
Ahriman is not a complacent creature, and he trusts precisely one being in existence: himself. Thus, while he is more than happy to exploit Khethos Vorsch and his coven to achieve his aims, Ahriman has also left one of his personal familiars to keep a weather eye on the Exalted Sorcerer. This creature is a daemonhost of exquisite and singular crafting that refers to itself simply as The Vessel. Precisely how monstrous an entity is bound within The Vessel, only Ahriman and the creature itself can know, but a sense of crawling power and intense paranoia afflicts all who find themselves in the daemonhost’s presence, as do occasional vivid hallucinations of gruesome mutation and unbound change.
Where most Daemonhosts are grotesque things bound in countless chains and locks, their flesh brutally carved with runes, The Vessel is bound only with trailing links of the lightest silver chains and small – almost elegant – padlocks painted with delicate Tzeentchian sigils. It wears a veil of fine chain that obscures its features, and flowing, diaphanous garb in vivid Tzeentchian hues, and the only hints at its infernal nature are the slender talons at its fingertips and the occasional hint of a needle fanged smirk behind its tinkling veil.
The Vessel is, seemingly at least, Ahriman’s creature through and through. He sets the Vessel loose as both familiar and failsafe: its glassy black eyes can become his, its voice his precise burr when he chooses. Yet when Ahriman does not ride its senses, the Vessel murmurs in a softer register— seductive, coaxing, hinting that the bindings tying it to its master are themselves…negotiable.
On Mordian it serves as silent herald, observing Magister Vorsch, nudging events with an almost courtly grace: a whispered nightmare here, a hallucination of impossible futures there. Cultists posted to watch it report creeping sensations of their bones rearranging; many request reassignment, a few beg for confession. Whether the daemon within pursues Ahriman’s purpose or its own subtle escape, none can say—only that wherever the Vessel lingers, reality seems just a touch more fluid.
The Imperium
Watch Captain Azkarion, Deathwatch
Azkarion’s first war as a Dark Angel ended beneath the broken banners of Piscina IV, where he learned that chivalry without relentless resolve is vanity in heraldic colours. He carries that lesson like an honour scar: beneath his gleaming black plate lies a knightly heart steeled against all compromise. The Watch Captain’s austere bearing, monastic silences, and sudden bursts of decisive ferocity echo the chapels of the Rock more than they do any parade ground.
He has been a Watch Captain for some years now, serving out of Doombreak Watch Fortress, and has seen every manner of xenos threat imaginable. These years of brutally pragmatic bloodshed and sanctioned hatred have done nothing to soften Azkarion’s disposition or improve his temper. He is all too aware of the dire straits that the Imperium is in, and his response is to inexorably tighten his grip on anything he can control while mercilessly destroying anything that he cannot. His originating Chapter’s culture further inclines him to rigorous secrecy: he tells those who serve him only what he believes they need to know, expects absolute and unquestioning loyalty from all true Imperial servants, and is quick to deem anyone expendable if he feels they have seen or learned forbidden things.
He comes to Mordian not as an inquisitor of facts but as a deliverer of verdicts. The planet’s disciplined march through the void now rings with the discordant subtones of the alien and the heretic; someone has drawn breath where none should be able, and Azkarion intends to inter the interlopers in ceramite coffins. Reluctantly, he bears an Aeldari way sextant—an artefact sequestered in Doombreak’s reliquaries for the day an honourable knight might require dishonourable tools. To wield xenotech gnaws at his Lion-born pride, yet the Watch Captain cloaks that shame in unbreakable vows and relentless commitment to the Imperium.
With kill teams fanning into Mordian’s shadowed manufactoria and the sextant’s alien runes casting baleful light onto his helm, Azkarion hunts the hidden wounds of the world—intent on cauterising them with righteous fire before they suppurate into something far worse.
Somnolence Vayl, Assassinorum Master Adept
Disguises and personas peel from the being presently called Somnolence Vayl like parchment from an auspex roll; rank, gender, accent—each can be swapped between corridors. What cannot change is the calm, ledger mind within that tabulates outcomes in blood. Vayl pursues the targets on his kill roster with cold pragmatism and a patient commitment to each successive piece of evidence— evidence that most recently drove his execution force to the shadowed hellscape of the Segmentum Obscurus. Doing so placed many high profile victims far out of reach, but for good reason. For chief amongst the names on his ledger is that of none other than Ahzek Ahriman.
Initial intelligence suggested Ahriman might pass through Mordian space. What Vayl found instead were overlapping reports: phantom vessels, vox black psyker screams, augur blurs shaped suspiciously like doors. The patterns are inconclusive—but to a Master Adept, inconclusive data is simply the start of a hunt. A portable hololith glows at Vayl’s belt, its queue of target sigils jittering as fresh sensor ghosts feed in. Some icons wink out when deemed false, others burn brighter with each corroborating scrap.
Vindicare rifles and Callidus poisons are already on the move, guided less by certainty than by Vayl’s knack for positioning blades where truth is most likely to appear. If Ahriman surfaces, the kill order lies ready; if he does not, other high value threats will surely stray into the crosshairs before Mordian’s night finishes unfolding.
Ancient Opposites
Rillietann, Great Harlequin, Masque of the Midnight Sorrow
An obsidian stage, a single spotlight, and the whisper of razored silk: graced with the role name Rillietann, the Great Harlequin of the Masque of the Midnight Sorrow alights upon the rock of Mordian. Rillietann’s motley flares from void black to starlight turquoise with every pirouette, each colour shift like pages turning in a cosmic script only they can read. They stride into Mordian’s tension soaked avenues offering alliances laced with jest, truths hidden in rhyme, and warnings wrapped in riddles finer than spirit glass.
They have come to tell the tale of a catastrophe that has not yet come to pass. Their story is for any who would bear witness, any who would play along, save those slaved to the will of the Dark Gods. To soldiers unnerved by failing lumens, Rillietann dispenses calm with a flourish; to cultists muttering praise to the Ruinous Powers, they deliver a flourish followed by severed silence. Yet beneath every act coils an oath sworn to Cegorach: the unravelling harmony twisting through heaven above Mordian must be set right—or, failing that, made into a spectacle so unforgettable even gods will wince.
Overlord Serevakh, the Star-throned, the Glorious, the Endless
Few dynastic lords can match the pageantry—or the ledger of victories—claimed by Overlord Serevakh. He razed the crystal bastions of Zephon Trinary with synchronized trans dimensional strikes, then rebuilt them brick for brick as his personal observatory. He outflanked an entire Aeldari war host by calculating their assault vectors three epochs in advance, engraving the prediction on his command dais for all to see. His court chronicles linger on the day he chained a renegade C’tan shard in an infinite recursion prism, forcing it to power the stasis galleries that display his triumphs to any who dare an audience. In every tale, Serevakh sits upon a meteoric throne, sceptre aloft, and the stars themselves seem to dim in deference.
Rumour now whispers of an impending upheaval on the fortress world of Mordian—a disturbance in reality’s fabric that could prove invaluable to any Necron who masters it first. Intrigued, Serevakh dispatches spearhead cohorts toward the planet’s night hemisphere. His arrival ceremonies are interrupted by the appearance of a singularly ornate Cryptek. Serevakh’s ocular arrays mark the newcomer as anomalous, and recognition flares. Serevakh raises his arm to cast a Tachyon Arrow at this uninvited interlop—
—Metal flows. Regal form reshapes. Serevakh’s proud sigils sink beneath a tide of shifting alloy, replaced by helix-etched sigilla older than the fortress world he came to plunder. In the span of a breath he does not need, the Star-Throned Sovereign ceases to exist. The Endless becomes the Infinite.
Trazyn … the Infinite
Curator of Solemnace. Thief of histories. Archivist who classifies wars the way lesser beings catalogue insects. Trazyn has pried relics from the surface of a dying world, bartered for the gene sire of an entire legion, and once traded a dynasty’s worth of phalanxes for a single data crystal said to contain the first sunrise. A self-styled historian of the Galaxy, Trazyn’s services are ever desired but never trusted. To other Necrons, he is both venerated scholar and nefarious pariah.
Mordian’s growing anomalies shine to his acquisitive senses like a beacon. Their happening reached him through a lattice of sub reality picket drones and “exhibit acquisition” wraith constructs seeded across Imperial space. When those reports echoed with the voice of Overlord Serevakh boasting of a power soon to be claimed, Trazyn acted at once. One proxy body, exquisitely prepared, one deft application of phase reversal transference—and the Star Throned became the latest addition to the Solemnace collection, even as Trazyn appropriated his armies, authority, and a flawless alibi.
Why Mordian? Officially, the newly minted “Serevakh” will declare he seeks to safeguard dynastic interests and reawaken lost Tomb Worlds. Unofficially, Trazyn’s private index hints at artefacts scattered beneath the planet’s austere surface, and a yet-unseen mechanism rumoured to tether distant horizons together. Perhaps he wants a single specimen. Perhaps a thousand. Perhaps the secret is to be sealed in hard light so no one may ever wield it. With Trazyn, certainty is the one exhibit no gallery displays. Should Mordian’s mystery bloom into something grander, Trazyn will be there first—museum label pre-etched and waiting.
