Duke Traevelliath Sliscus

Duke Traevelliath Sliscus, called the Serpent, is a Corsair Duke of the Drukhari, commanding the raiding fleet of the Sky Serpents from Commorragh. Among the Corsair princes of the Dark City he is reckoned one of the oldest and most successful, his standing resting less on martial dominance than on an unmatched network of intelligence: contacts, informants, and obligations spun across Kabals, Wych Cults, and the wider galaxy over millennia of raiding. Lady Malys, an Archon of Commorragh who has dealt with him at length, has described him as amoral, despicable, and impeccably dressed — a judgement the Dark City broadly accepts without diminishing its regard for his company.

Sliscus’s reputation rests as much on conduct as on conquest. He is recorded to have ordered the death of an entire hive city’s nobility after an envoy mispronounced his name, and governors seeking parley with him are advised, as a matter of practical survival, to learn its correct pronunciation beforehand. His wardrobe is itself a chronicle of his career: he is said never to wear the same garment twice, and each is worked with some part of the last person to have bored him. He eats deliberately poisoned food to keep his body’s defences primed against Commorragh’s endless intrigues, and passes the resulting convalescence carving epics into whatever surface — flesh or otherwise — remains to hand.

His trade in secrets draws him into contact with figures well beyond his own fleet. Archons of the Kabal of the Black Heart are among those recorded to have bought his information at a price, and his dealings with Lady Malys — by turns transactional and adversarial — span her own rise through Commorragh’s factional wars. Such negotiations are said to take place aboard his flagship, met in the neutral reaches of the webway beyond Commorragh’s gates rather than within the city’s contested precincts, a habit that has kept the Serpent alive, and useful to all sides, for longer than most Archons reign.

The Sky Serpents remain active into the present era, their raiding routes reaching from the webway approaches of Commorragh out into Imperial frontier territory and Ork-held space, wherever plunder and information can be gathered in equal measure. Sliscus answers, nominally, to no higher authority than his own fleet and his own ledger of debts, a position that has let him outlast rivals who mistook his manners for weakness. He remains bound to Commorragh as home port and to the Drukhari as his people, but his true domain is the corsair routes themselves — the webway and realspace lanes alike along which the Sky Serpents’ raids, and the Duke’s information, continue to move.