Asurmen

Before he was Asurmen, he was Iliathin, an Aeldari of no special renown who dwelt upon the world of Eidafaeron in the last days of the old empire. He gave little credence to the prophets who warned of the doom gathering over his decadent race, and so the Fall took him unprepared, as it took almost all his kind. When Slaanesh was born in a scream of psychic agony and the heart of the Aeldari empire was consumed, Iliathin survived, cast adrift in a galaxy suddenly overrun with daemons.

Amid the ruin he and his brother waged a desperate struggle to endure, but despair gnawed at Iliathin until he withdrew alone into a temple, contemplating an end to his own suffering. He was drawn back from that brink by a feral child, Faraethil, a fellow survivor who rekindled his will to live. When she was set upon by the cruel kin who would become the Drukhari, Iliathin took up arms in her defence, and in that moment of resolve he cast off his old name and named himself Asurmen, the Hand of Asuryan, after the greatest of the Aeldari gods.

From this beginning Asurmen became the first of the Aeldari to make war a disciplined art rather than a surrender to madness. He gathered survivors about him and led them to a barren world they named Asur, and there he raised the first Shrine of Asur and founded the Dire Avengers, earliest and most widespread of all the Warrior Aspects. In its rites he encoded a way for his people to unleash their inborn ferocity in battle and then set it aside once more, sparing them the fate that had doomed their ancestors.

His greatest students, the Asurya, learned the Path of the Warrior at his side and went out to found Aspect shrines of their own, becoming Phoenix Lords in their turn. Asurmen himself has travelled to more craftworlds and raised more shrines than any of them, teaching all who would learn, so that his influence runs through the whole of the Aeldari war-tradition. In time he passed out of sight, but he has never truly gone.

For Asurmen is a Phoenix Lord, and death cannot hold him. His suit of armour carries within it the imprint of his soul, and when a wearer falls another Aeldari is drawn to don it, their identity gradually subsumed until Asurmen lives again in a new body. So he has died and risen many times, once even at the claws of the Keeper of Secrets N'Kari, only to return. Wherever his people stand upon the brink of destruction, from the fires of the Eye of Terror to the far Eastern Fringe, the Hand of Asuryan may yet appear to turn the tide.