Ciaphas Cain
Ciaphas Cain, commissar of the Officio Prefectus, attached to the Astra Militarum, rose, step by reluctant step, into the Empire's pantheon of heroes. He served through the closing century of M41, was recalled at over two centuries old for the 13th Black Crusade, and endured well into M42. Posters named him "Hero of the Imperium." His own pages paint a leaner truth: a man intent on survival who refused to waste the lives under his charge. Where other commissars ruled by terror, Cain hoarded his troopers' chances like rations, spending them only when it kept them, and him, alive. He dodged battles when he could, only to be dragged toward them by the legend he'd earned. Each attempt to find safety cornered him in darker places, where excuses ran thin, dangers thickened, and the path of least risk led straight to the heart of the fight.
Opening
Welcome, lore-lovers, to Liandrug, a place where the legends of the Imperium, the mysteries of the Warp, and the echoes of forgotten heroes come alive. Today, we dive into the tale of Commissar Ciaphas Cain, the reluctant hero who survived where few ever did.
The Chronicle
In the early 42nd Millennium, a private trove of notes surfaces inside the Inquisition, scraps of field recollections, half-finished reports, and margin scrawls by Commissar Ciaphas Cain. Ordo Xenos Inquisitor Amberley Vail gathers them before they vanish into silence, orders them sequestered, and shapes the chaos into the "Cain Archive." She edits, annotates, and cross-references with other sources, among them the memoirs of her self-proclaimed protg, Valhallan officer Jenit Sulla, then circulates select first-person accounts for Inquisitorial eyes only. Cain's voice remains plain and unadorned, frank about his missteps, sometimes evasive, often modest in the moments others would have embellished.
Cain's private pages are never intended for history. He writes to order his thoughts, convinced that a future Inquisitor will burn the lot. He leaves the public-facing narrative to To Serve the Emperor: A Commissar's Life, a careful text far less candid than the archive that Vail preserves.
He speaks little of origin. A hive world, unnamed; a knack for navigating tunnels by instinct. He claims parents in the Astra Militarum, slain by Kroot, and also calls them petty criminals who enlisted to outrun the law, an account that sits oddly beside his admission to a Schola Progenium. At the Schola, his marks hover near average, except where sport and combat pull them higher. Discipline files stay clean; he implies only that they never caught him.
Service fixes him to Valhalla. He learns the slang, not the love of cold or ice-water showers. Aides and allies gather around him: Ferik Jurgen, a Valhallan Guardsman whose Blank presence will bend battle's tide again and again; Jenit Sulla, a junior officer who will climb the ladder through captain and on to major. Cain begins with the Valhallan 12th Field Artillery in 919.M41, a commissar attached first to a battery and soon to a whole regiment. On Desolatia, Orks fall upon the guns, and then Tyranids. In the landing's panic he seizes a Salamander to escape, runs headlong into a flanking force and a Hive Tyrant, staggers back with a breathless contact report that others read as daring reconnaissance. Reputation takes its first shape in that misunderstanding.
Quiet years follow on Keffia through the 920s, broken by a Genestealer infestation unmasked with the aid of the local Enforcers who style themselves "Custodes." In 924.M41, Perlia pulls him down, escape pod wrecked behind Ork lines, he and Jurgen written off as dead. He rallies freed slaves and scattered PDF, marches the "Liberator's" road through greenskin-held country, and cuts down an Ork warlord. The wider Imperial line surges as the Orks reel.
Campaigns stack quickly. Nusquam Fundumentibus, an ice world, sees Orks beaten back with Valhallan allies who will later be merged into a new regiment. On Slawkenberg, a Chaos sorceress nearly turns a patrol; artillery answers instead. Commissariat Command follows: a desk in name only. Interitus Prime reveals a Necron tomb; Viridia, Sanguia, and Archipelaga demand purges; a space hulk needs cleansing; Aeldari raids must be answered. He calls the Necron brush the darkest of these passages and requests a return to regimented service, where the odds feel less skewed by fate.
By 931.M41 the fractured remnants of the 296th and 301st Valhallan Regiments, one all-male frontline, one all-female rear-echelon, boil into a deadly riot aboard a transport. Cain petitions to fuse them into the 597th Valhallan Regiment, a number born from their sum, a symbol cut to enforce unity. Squads are mixed by design; rewards and standards bring discipline into habit. The 597th becomes home for many of the archive's best-known episodes.
Their first trial together is the Gravalax Incident of 931.M41. A Genestealer Cult manipulates Imperium and T'au toward a needless war while a Tyranid hive fleet drifts closer. Cain meets Inquisitor Vail for the first time. Jurgen's Null aura turns the duel with the Patriarch. Governor Grice, cultist unmasked, dies by Vail's hand. T'au forces withdraw; Cain receives the Order of Merit of Gravalax, Second Class.
In 932.M41 he stands on Simia Orichalcae, guarding a refinery while Orks and a Necron stir beneath the ice. In 933.M41 Periremunda burns with civil strife that masks another Genestealer taint and a rogue Inquisitor's schemes. He helps break the infection and brings the heretic to heel.
If you're enjoying this dive into the grim darkness of Warhammer 40k lore, don't forget to like and subscribe! It helps the channel grow and lets me bring you even more stories from the galaxy's most fascinating corners. Every click keeps the lore alive.
Adumbria, 937.M41: a Chaos ritual uncovered, a Daemon Prince denied its daemon world. A court-martial follows at the instigation of Commissar Tomas Beije, Cain's departure from the front interpreted as dereliction. Evidence clears him; Beije is briefly charged, later acquitted when Cain testifies that the man meant his duty, however poorly.
On Lentonia in 938.M41, a plague raises the dead. Laboratory cures fail until Jurgen's quick healing marks the missing factor: the Warp's imprint. Blessing the vaccine brings a remedy; artillery shells carry the sacrament into the ranks of the revenants. The cult behind the contagion is found and broken.
Nusquam Fundumentibus calls again in 942.M41. The 597th rides a tramp freighter, Fires of Faith, that dies in the Leeward Barrens, its molten hull carving a lake in the permafrost. Orks come to loot the wreck, only to vanish into decreasing numbers as something wakes beneath the ice. Ancient Tyranids, entombed for millennia since a hive ship fell from the void, claw themselves free. Cain finds the frozen bioforms, traces their history to a crater long thought meteor-born, and learns that the brood is feeding biomass to rekindle the dead ship. The bioship's full waking lies hours away when he contrives its destruction and ends the signal that would have drawn a fleet.
Along another thread, the space hulk Spawn of Damnation drifts into the 920s and 930s. Cain boards with the Reclaimers Chapter in 929.M41 after Viridia's purges. Genestealers stalk the dark, Orks burrow in elsewhere, and Cain stokes war between xenos predators to clear a path. Archeotech is salvaged to Fecundia, along with captive Genestealers.
Years pass. Cain joins Lord General Zyvan's staff as Commissarial Liaison. In 990.M41 he stops a Deepwater System plot that would have destroyed Zyvan's flagship. He fights Asuryani raiders on volcanic Pyria. In 991.M41 he rides to Quadravidia against the T'au, watches a truce form when Hive Fleet Kraken looms, and travels to Fecundia to coordinate defenses.
Fecundia becomes the junction where old ghosts meet. At Regio Quinquaginta Unus, Tech-priests and Reclaimers study the Spawn's Genestealers and the Nusquam Tyranids. Containment fractures: a Genestealer rampage, Brood Brothers in disguise, a compromised jailer. Frozen Nusquan specimens lie in a cavern; chief among them, a bioship cortical node. Kraken bioforms fall from the sky with a crashed bioship. Cain notices landings clustered around the research cadre, an oddity that proves omen. Introduced to each other, Hormagaunts of Kraken and of Nusquam do not merge into one mind, they tear each other apart. The survivors hurl themselves at the cryo-cavern to destroy the Nusquan node, and the traitor tries to finish the task. The node survives. Revived as Kraken's second, greater assault begins, it broadcasts a psychic snarl that jams the Hive Mind's local command. At Cain's urging, the station astropath amplifies and projects the pattern system-wide. Kraken's synapse collapses across Fecundia. Imperial guns do the rest. A report to Vail follows: Hive Mind disruption is possible, even if hard to repeat.
Meanwhile, Perlia returns to him across decades. In the 930s, he uncovers the Shadowlight, an ancient device that stirs latent psykers, hidden within a Mechanicus shrine in the Valley of Daemons. A rogue Inquisitor, Killian, and the tech-priest Metheius steal it, luring Tyranids with a captive Lictor to mask their escape. Jurgen's Blank field turns the artefact's bite against Killian; an orbital strike ends the Tyranid cover. The Shadowlight goes back to its shrine.
By 999.M41, Cain has retired to Perlia, teaching at a Schola near Havensdown. Rogue Trader Orelius brings word of a Chaos host under Warmaster Varan, two systems already overrun and Perlia next. Militia are raised; broadcasts call citizens to arms. Cain leads strikes, meets Varan, and kills him. In the aftermath, Necrons seize the Shadowlight and depart. He and Vail judge that the device's origins lie with the Old Ones and that the Necrons' fear of it exceeds any plan to wield it.
The archive tracks a final oddity: the Munitorum's ledgers list Ciaphas Cain as "never to be considered dead." Too often he reappears after being marked as fallen, beginning with the First Siege of Perlia; a ruling ossifies the contradiction, and even burial with honors fails to close the record. In Tallarn ranks, a small sect keeps a text called the Book of Cain, born from a trooper's witness on Adumbria when a Daemon Prince fell and Jurgen's Null gift went unseen.
After the 13th Black Crusade, he teaches and writes, one book for the public, another for Vail's vaults. Sometime in the first or second century of M42, his life ends. The papers he never meant for history remain, ordered by the Inquisitor who knew him best, and within them the long trail of worlds where his path crossed xenos, heretic, and the quiet machinery of the Imperium.
Closing Words
Thank you for joining me, lore-lovers. If you enjoyed this story, don't forget to like, share, and subscribe to Liandrug. And join our Discord, a cozy corner of the galaxy where lore-lovers like you gather to discuss theories, characters, and the endless tales of the Imperium. Until next time... keep your lasgun ready, and your curiosity sharper still.
Back to Home