Buri Aegnirssen

Buri Aegnirssen was born to the Emberg-Aegnir Bloc, a League that no longer exists. When Hive Fleet Leviathan fell upon its hold worlds, the Kin fought to the last in defence of their Ancestor Core, and Buri, then a warrior of the Einhyr Hearthguard, stood among the retinue of High Kâhl Ugnÿr in that final, hopeless battle. The League was devoured whole. Its Core, flooded with the death-agonies and grief of countless Kin uploaded in their last moments, was driven irrevocably insane, and is remembered now only as the Mad Core.

The defence ended in horror. Ugnÿr was impaled upon the claws of the great beast that led the swarm, and Buri himself was seized and swallowed alive. He should have died in its gullet. Instead, in a welter of ichor, he hacked his way out through the creature's throat, emerging scarred but living from a death that no one survives. It was the first of three such devourings, for in the wars since he has twice more been taken whole into a monster's maw and twice more carved his way back into the light, until his own people named him the Thrice-Devoured.

What the Tyranids left of Buri, the Kin have remade. The Arkanysts of the Greater Thurian League fashioned him a bionic arm to replace the one he lost, and the Silver Mere Kindred, whom he saved from the horrors of Hive Fleet Jormungandr, gifted him the mask that now hides his acid-ravaged face. He bears into battle a relic darkstar glaive and the salvaged armour of his fallen lord Ugnÿr, and with these he hunts. For Buri is no longer a soldier of any League but a wandering apex predator, moving from warzone to warzone in search of the largest leader-beasts the great swarms can field.

His is a grief that has curdled into single-minded purpose. The Tyranids did not merely kill his kindred; they annihilated his entire people and condemned the ancestors he was sworn to protect to an eternity of raving madness, alone in the dark. That wound will never close, and so Buri does the only thing left to him, hunting down the monsters that lead the swarms and slaying them one by one, a lone survivor exacting a reckoning no ledger could ever balance. Wherever the Kin make war upon the Great Devourer, the Thrice-Devoured is welcomed, for there is no deadlier hunter of monsters among all the Leagues of Votann.