Ephrael Stern

Ephrael Stern, called the Daemonifuge and the Thrice-Born, is a Sister Superior of the Order of Our Martyred Lady within the Adepta Sororitas. Raised from infancy at a Schola Progenium and promised to the Sisterhood before she was even born, she seemed destined for an unremarkable life of faithful service — until a single mission unmade and remade her into something the Imperium has no doctrine to explain.

Dispatched to the world of Parnis to investigate the silence of a lost convent of the Orders Pronatus, Stern discovered that a Keeper of Secrets, one of the greater daemons that serve Slaanesh, had already slaughtered nearly seven hundred Battle Sisters and fused their bodies and minds into a single abomination the survivors came to call the Screaming Cage. Stern herself died in that charnel confrontation. She did not stay dead: the merged, martyred minds of her Order reached back across the threshold and returned her to life, investing her with the strength to banish daemons and an unbidden, encyclopedic knowledge of the Warp and its horrors that no living theologian could match.

What Stern became afterward defies easy classification. Some among the faithful venerate her as a living saint, touched and remade by the Emperor's grace; the Inquisition and many of her own Sisterhood instead brand her witch, heretic, or worse, and hunt her with the same fervor Chaos itself reserves for her destruction. Exiled and allied with a renegade Harlequin, she has since vanished into the webway more than once, only to resurface when the Imperium's need — or the Warp's hunger — calls her back. Ephrael Stern remains one of the great enigmas of the 41st Millennium: neither wholly of the Emperor's Imperium nor of the darkness she was reborn to fight.