Cypher

Cypher is the greatest riddle among the Fallen Angels, those scattered Dark Angels who vanished into treachery and time during the darkest days of the Horus Heresy. The name is in truth a title, Lord Cypher, once borne by a keeper of the ancient rites and traditions of the knightly Order of Caliban, a duty carried over into the Dark Angels when the Emperor reunited primarch and Legion. Which of the Fallen now wears that title, or whether the being who bears it is even a single man, is a secret buried beneath ten thousand years of shadow. He is known only by his silence, his shrouded form, and the aura of mystery that clings to him like a cloak.

In battle he is a marvel of lethal precision, a duellist of pistols without equal in the galaxy. He fights with a bolt pistol and a plasma pistol wielded together, and no matter how furious the maelstrom of war around him, every single shot finds its mark with impossible accuracy. Wherever the fighting is thickest he appears, moving through the carnage untouched, felling his chosen targets one by one before melting away into the confusion as though he had never been there at all.

Across his back he carries a sword he has never been seen to draw. Rumour surrounds the blade without end: that it is a lost relic of the Dark Angels, that it is the fabled Lion Sword, broken and awaiting reforging. Many believe Cypher means to make the weapon whole and bear it to the Emperor upon the Golden Throne, laying it before Him as a token of penance and a plea for the absolution of all the Fallen. For he is ever moving, appearing and vanishing across the stars, but always drawing nearer, by slow and secret stages, to holy Terra itself.

What he intends when at last he arrives, none can say, and it is this uncertainty that makes him so feared. He is counted among the servants of Chaos and hunted relentlessly by the Inner Circle of his former brethren, yet he has been seen to fight the Dark Gods' own champions as readily as the Imperium's defenders. Some name him a traitor bent on the Emperor's final destruction; others whisper that he is the herald of a reckoning that will remake the Imperium, for good or ill. Cypher keeps his own counsel, and follows his long dark road toward the Throne, and the truth of his purpose remains his alone.