Eliphas

Eliphas the Inheritor is a Dark Apostle of the Word Bearers, later serving the Black Legion, whose story centres on the daemon-haunted world of Kronus. Born on Colchis, he took the crozius arcanum that marks his rank by killing its previous bearer rather than earning it through the Legion’s ordinary rites. The primarch Lorgar Aurelian is recorded as regarding the act as one of inheritance rather than merit, a judgement he did not forget and one that gave Eliphas his epithet.

During the Shadow Crusade, Eliphas raised the Templum Daemonarchia on Kronus, a sanctum built to bind the world to the Ruinous Powers. Lorgar’s response to the undertaking was muted, leaving Eliphas to pursue his design on Kronus largely unsupervised while the wider Word Bearers crusade turned elsewhere. The temple endured for millennia after his own presence on the world lapsed, a dormant seed left in the fabric of Kronus.

Ten thousand years later, a cult on Kronus performed an eight-pointed sacrifice at the Templum Daemonarchia and summoned Eliphas back into the material realm. In the Dark Crusade that followed, he sought to complete Kronus’s transformation into a full daemon world, contesting the planet against the Blood Ravens under Gabriel Angelos and a field of rival Chaos, Ork, Eldar, Tau, Imperial Guard, and Necron forces. He lost control of the Deimos region to the Blood Ravens, and accounts of the campaign hold that he was ultimately destroyed by the verdict of a daemon prince he had hoped to command. Abaddon the Despoiler, watching the Kronus war from a distance, nevertheless found use for what remained of him.

Eliphas later returned on Aurelia, now bearing Black Legion armour rather than the war-plate of his old Legion, where he served Abaddon’s wider design against the Blood Ravens. There he betrayed the Chaos Lord Araghast the Pillager, continuing to promise Abaddon the souls of the Blood Ravens Chapter as the price of his own restored standing. Whether this second Kronus-and-Aurelia arc ended in Eliphas’s ascension to greater daemonic status or in a second death is a point on which accounts differ, leaving his ultimate fate unresolved.