Arvann Stern

Arvann Stern numbers among the longest-serving and most highly honoured Brother-Captains ever to fight beneath the banner of the Grey Knights. Nearing his fourth century in the Emperor's service, he still leads warriors of the Third Brotherhood, the Wardmakers, and his name is spoken with reverence across the Chapter as one of its foremost hunters of daemons. Few living knights have banished more horrors back into the warp, and fewer still have paid so dear a price for the honour.

Stern first won renown as a newly ennobled knight during the First War for Armageddon, fighting alongside his brothers Caddon Varn and Dhark Tegvar against the daemonic hordes that sought to drown that world in blood. It was a baptism of fire that marked him for greatness, yet it also set him upon the path that would come to define, and to torment, the whole of his long life.

For Stern's fate became chained to that of M'Kachen, a Lord of Change and the architect of the twisted Cult of the Red Talon. When the Ordo Malleus moved to annihilate that cult, Stern faced the greater daemon and cast it screaming from realspace for a hundred years and a day. But the creature's malice outlasted its banishment. From that hour a curse settled upon the captain, so that every act of valour he performs is answered by some cruel and inexplicable misfortune, and again and again across the centuries M'Kachen has returned to twist the strands of his destiny.

Even so, Stern refuses to yield to despair. During the bloody days remembered as the Season of Blood he served under Grand Master Aldrik Voldus, leading the Third Brotherhood to war-torn Armageddon in the hope of reinforcing the beleaguered Fifth Brotherhood of Rothwyr Morvans, though fate saw him arrive only in the battle's closing throes. Cursed he may be, but Arvann Stern fights on, certain that his suffering is a price worth paying to hold the daemon at bay.