Cyrene Valantion

Cyrene Valantion is a blank human associated with the Word Bearers Legion, recorded as the ward and confidante of the captain Argel Tal. A blank, or null, is a person whose presence suppresses warp-based powers and unsettles those who rely on them. That made her an unusual figure in a Legion whose leadership was turning towards the worship of the Ruinous Powers. She is linked to Colchis, the Word Bearers’ home world, and to the years of the Legion’s search for religious truth that followed the razing of Monarchia.

Accounts place Cyrene in Argel Tal’s company during the pilgrimage that Primarch Lorgar led after Monarchia, when the Word Bearers moved from devotion to the Emperor towards the doctrines of Chaos. She is described as guiding him in part through that search, and the two are recorded as close. It was during the rites of that period, at Cadia, that Argel Tal was bound to the daemon later named Raum and became the first of the Gal Vorbak. Her exact role in those events, and her later fate, are not clearly established, and accounts differ on the detail.

Cyrene’s significance lies in what she shows of Argel Tal, one of the Legion’s most prominent captains, and of the human cost of the Word Bearers’ turn. Her contemporaries include Lorgar, Kor Phaeron and Erebus, who shaped the Legion’s direction, and Khârn, Argel Tal’s friend from another Legion. On the Orrery timeline she belongs to the period between the fall of Monarchia and the Shadow Crusade, with her setting anchored on Colchis and on the Word Bearers’ wanderings beyond it. Her status in the current era is unknown.