Kyriel Dammerung

Kyriel Dammerung is a controversial figure in the history of the Obsidian Wyrms Legion due to a number of reasons, but remains nonetheless one of its most influential leaders after its Primarch, whom took to mentoring her personally, as the IInd Legion's first and most powerful Librarian.

Outside of her great psychic potential, Kyriel is also notable as a born survivor, taken by slavers at a young age but managing to survive where countless others had not. Even before her induction as an Astartes, her unbound psychic powers had already been battle-tested. Despite her great abilities as both a psyker and a warrior, Kyriel is often seen as impulsive and too willing to take great risks due to her extremely aggressive and relentless fighting style, which does not mesh well with the methodical and careful mode of operations of the Legion as a whole. That same audaciously brazen aggression, however, is why whenever a seemingly impossible objective needs to be accomplished within a short amount of time and with very little preparation and small odds of success, Kyriel is the first choice even among her detractors to get it done.

Dark Crucible
The nature – and even the very name – of the world Kyriel originally hails from is lost to time and obscurity. Early in her childhood, the child’s whole family was spirited away among many others by the ships of twisted pirates and slavers, and no memories remains within her of the quiet days before, or even of if they truly were serene ones to begin with. Anything prior to the fateful raid was erased by the unrelenting exposure to untold amounts of malice, depravity and pain Kyriel was forced to face while a captive of the nameless curs.

At the time, Kyriel was rather young, and only very few of the prisoners would be lucky enough to see much of the place they were held in by being taken as servants. She was not among those, and yet the small girl was very smart for her age, capable of understanding many things one would consider too complex for one so young. She understood that her and her people had been spirited away to some sort of massive space station, just as she quickly understood that the pirates that had taken her family were not foremost motivated by money, but rather something else; something darker.

They were twisted not just in mind, but body and soul as well, with the uncommon yet regular sightings of crooked mutants being the most obvious sign. The raiders seemed highly religious in the worship of unknowable entities, and it was for this singular purpose that most of the lost souls they captured were used; as human sacrifices in a variety of equally inscrutable rituals where the innocent were either killed outright, slowly tortured, or more often than not: Both. Oftentimes, other slaves were brought to witness the scenes for no other purpose than to bring despair and abject terror as those ‘fortunate’ enough to live another day would do so with the images of what awaited them next burned into their minds, and with nothing else to busy themselves with, it would be the -only- thing there, festering like an infection. Whether there was a purpose to this cruel process, Kyriel would never learn. All that she knew was that she was forced to witness the slow death of just about everyone she ever knew, with the cultist-slavers drinking every scream and every tear.

To say her psyche survived unscathed would be wholly an exaggeration, but she did manage to hold on to sanity, if only tenuously. Despair and sorrows eventually gave way to wrathful anger that could not be contained. To the pirates though, the threats and outbursts of anger of the small child were little more than cute entertainment as they were assured that there was no way that a malnourished kid could ever hurt any of them in any capacity. In fact, the displays amused them so much that the cultist-slavers took every opportunity to goad and taunt her. They entertained themselves seeing how far she would go, only to laugh and beat her whenever she would prove powerless. Eventually, as Kyriel realized that just about every other captive she’d shared a cell with had been murdered, she also came to understand that the only reason her turn hadn’t yet come was because her twisted captors found more value in torturing her like this than otherwise.

At some point amongst it all – when exactly she could not tell – Kyriel began to hear voices. They were but distant whispers and blurred visions at night at first, but the flickering, artificial lights of morning never managed to banish them, and they returned, again and again, clearer and stronger as time passed. With no small amount of irony, these dark whispers would eventually become the only positive company she had left; the only entities that seemed to be on her side and to support her in this voidborne hell of an existence. As such, it was no big surprise that she would be prone to listen to them a little bit more with every passing day, accepting their counsel and trusting them to a degree, until a fateful day where the Voices convinced her to help her take her revenge; to make the slavers pay for the misery they inflicted not only on her, but on her whole family, and every friend she ever had.

Though she never knew of it, Kyriel had been a powerful psyker with great latent potential, and the entity that offered her tis help did not only mend her broken, famished body, but also infused her with choice knowledge of that dormant power, and how to use it most devastatingly. Thus empowered both physically and psionically, the very bars of the mass cell in which she was held suddenly melted to viscous slag under the shocked and horrified eyes of both the guards and the other captives alike. But a moment later, baleful flames consumed the guards with the same, all too satisfying screams as they had themselves inflicted upon the innocent times and times again. This would mark the beginning of a warpath of devastation as the child, barely a few years above ten escaped and began to systematically stab or immolate, any pirate she found with extreme prejudice, making use of her small size and knowledge of the station to hide and sneak through small confines whenever necessary.

A Chance Given
Yet, indiscriminate slaughter was not the only thing the child sought, as her dark benefactor also informed her that ‘outsiders were coming’. Outsiders who had ships she could use to get away from the damned station forever. Little did Kyriel know that these ‘Outsiders’ were nothing less than an expeditionary fleet of the Legiones Astartes, come with the very same goal as her: To purge and cleanse the cultist-pirates’ presence until naught so much as a memory would remain. The sheer ferocity of the initial assault of the Legionnaires shook the massive void stations and threatened to rend it apart right there and then.

Perhaps ironically so, the freshly-minted Daemonhost had no idea of this fact, and initially believed the shock was due to some sort of explosion within the station itself. She did not slow nor did she hesitate, as there was much, much work left to do, and it was a task she now found immense amount of pleasure and satisfaction in accomplishing as the Daemon’s thoughts and her own became increasingly synchronized. Yet, and to –its- surprise, her body did not change nor mutate. No, Kyriel’s will – tempered to an extremely honed instrument – and her psychic powers combined to allow her to maintain a very firm hold on her physical form, even as said form fleetingly turned into flames itself, whole salvos of kinetic ordnance phasing through harmlessly.

The first sighting between Kyriel and the Legionnaires was less than friendly, but that very same psychic manifestation allowed her to avoid being turned to gory smears by concentrated Bolt fire, a wall of incandescent flames shooting up next to act as a wall of death to deter pursuit as she once more made use of her small size to disengage. The deterrence only bought a second at most, but that had been enough. Though the Daemonhost was running high on the wholesale slaughter of the cultists at the time, her hatred was very precisely channeled, and she had no real desire to try and fight those mysterious giants, especially once she learned by stalking them that they seemed to be killing the slavers with just as much prejudice as she had. This was the first point of contention between herself and the Daemon within her, which tried to incite to kill them all as well.

The extermination was greatly sped up by the arrival of the Legionnaires, and before long, both of them converged towards the last bastion of the leaders of the raiders-cult, who, it seemed, had various blessings of their own. Grotesque yet powerful mutants that looked more like spawns of nightmares than humans and a few other psykers also capable of unleashing havoc confronted the Legionnaires, and it was only then that their inexorable advance seemed to find real resistance.

Resistance that Kyriel could not abide. Bursting from a vent, the warp-infused child rebuked and negated the powers of the unbound psykers for a moment, which was enough for the Legionnaires to riddle them with Bolts. But a second later, Whychfire danced in a great inferno, consuming many of the abhorrent mutants, and their ranks were broken and annihilated in the crossfire, leaving an uneasy standoff between the her and the Outsiders. As both sides looked for the first sign of aggression from the other, a giant even more imposing than the others slowly approached, watching her closely from the visor of a horned helmet reminiscent of a dragon of legends old.

The Daemon within her screamed out to strike and to continue the slaughter, but Kyriel refused. Her goal had been achieved and judgment had been rendered. There was none left to take vengeance upon and she was certainly not about to strike down innocents indiscriminately, let alone those that had helped her much like it did. This enraged the entity, and it tried to forcefully assert its control upon her body rather than continue its subtle manipulations. To its utmost surprise, however, not only was the young child able to maintain her own will, but she rebuked the Denizen so strongly, and so primally, with powers unbound and amplified, that she was able to banish it back from whence it came. The feat was not without its cost, however, as Kyriel found her very life energy sapped as the power of the warp infusing her left her body, leaving her almost as weak as she had been prior.

There she fell, passing out in short order defenseless. At this point, she had expected swift death from the armored giants, and she accepted it. Her family and friends had been avenged, and those who visited horrible torments upon them could no longer hurt anyone else. She was at ease and at peace. Yet, death never came, and instead the giant among giants brought her back to its ship, where she was nursed back to health and questioned about everything she had witnessed, and what had happened.

Stars Beyond
As Kyriel recovered, she learned much about the Legions and their crusade to liberate humanity from the numberless threats that infested the galaxy, much like the slavers she had herself been victim to. She learned of the Emperor, and that the giant whom had rescued her was Elias Dammerung, his only daughter. Intrigued and compelled, the young Kyriel – too young to be asked to fight again in all due conscience – followed Elias across the stars, watching her many campaigns and being treated by her as an adoptive daughter of her own. It quickly became obvious that Elias’ interest stemmed from resemblances between the two of them, as the Emperor’s daughter was also a formidable psyker, but perhaps more important than that, Elias confided having also heard the ‘Voices of the Beyond’ and saw kinship in her for that reason.

Years passed, and as Kyriel grew, she became of age to integrate the Legion of her adoptive mother – the Obsidian Wyrms – and was quite eager in the fact. The former Daemonhost took up her herald and her name to become the Wyrms’ very first – and most powerful – Librarian. Kyriel’s master of pyromancy proved to be with very few peers despite her young age and lack of experience, as only the veterans of the Thousand Sons able to match her. Though the Daemon was long gone, the knowledge it had imparted her remained and was a treasure trove of information and secrets. Still, it was a poisonous gift, as some of these secrets involved the primordial nature of the galaxy itself…

As she actively joined the battlefield with the IInd Legion, Kyriel immediately became a force to be reckoned with, ascending through the ranks rather quickly thanks to her mix of deadly abilities and indomitable will, though there were some that viewed her presence with distrust and suspicion. This was not due to her past, nor due to the attention the Primarch gave her, but rather because of the very nature of her fighting style. While the IInd was careful and methodical in its battle strategies, Kyriel was extremely aggressive and ruthless, which her critics often saw as careless impulsiveness at best and outright bloodthirst at worse.

Yet, the results that the former slave provided were not something that could be argued against. Though her way of doing things was different, Elias encouraged this rather than repress it, stating that it was only a boon for their Legion to be capable of mastering as many different styles of warfare as possible, for every challenge was best solved by a different tool. Before long, Kyriel achieved the rank of Praetor, the highest rank within the Obsidian Wyrms outside of the vaunted Council of Wyrm Lords.

Wargear

 * Nightflame - A deadly combination of technology and psychic power, the Nightflame is a massive, two-handed Force Greataxe fashioned out of Coruscoan Compression Alloys tougher than even Adamantium via psychic forging as if it were clay. With the entire length of its blade coated in stellar diamonds, Nightflame is as lethal as any power axe even without Kyriel actively channeling her psychic might through it. The black metal of the weapon seems to radiate out light, as if a dancing fire was caged within it, and the notion is further reinforced by the fact that it often becomes wreathed in dark flames when actively used.
 * Pulsar-Pattern Artificer Armor - Outwardly not looking too different from any Artificer suit of armor made of Mark II Crusade pattern power armor, Kyriel’s armor was modified to carry the same short-range teleporters as Pulse Riders, while not being confined to the slow and ponderous bulk of Terminator armor. Using this – and often in conjunction to Jump packs – Kyriel is an extremely elusive target to strike and an even more relentless foe on the offensive. The suit of armor is also ornate with a great number of sigils and runes, which are said to either act as a further psychic foci, or as wards against hostile psychic manifestations.