Lotara Sarrin

Lotara Sarrin was the mortal shipmaster of the Conqueror, the World Eaters Legion’s Gloriana-class flagship, serving under the primarch Angron. She rose to command at a young age and bore the Bloody Hand, a mark that set her apart from other mortal officers of the Legion and signalled Angron’s recognition of her. Her crew kept the ship’s guns firing even as Angron killed his way through its decks in the black rages the Butcher’s Nails induced, and the Legion came to regard her, a mortal among transhuman killers, as someone who could not be disregarded.

As shipmaster, Sarrin dealt directly with Khârn, Angron’s equerry and later the World Eaters’ Champion, who served as an intermediary between the primarch’s fury and the ship’s command. The Conqueror’s course brought it to Nuceria, Angron’s home world, during the reckoning the primarch exacted there, and the vessel carried the Legion through the wider campaigns of the Horus Heresy as its condition, and its crew’s, grew steadily more marked by the warp. Over the course of the war Khorne’s touch settled more deeply into the ship’s hull and systems, and Sarrin’s command became as much a matter of holding the Conqueror together as of fighting it.

By the Siege of Terra, Sarrin held the ship with a greatly reduced crew, the Conqueror by then a vessel touched openly by Khorne. She was party to a conspiracy conducted from her own bridge to teleport Angron away during the battle, an act aimed at the primarch himself rather than at the Imperium’s defenders. In the course of these events Sarrin became fused with the Conqueror’s hull, her mortal life ending as her identity passed into the ship she had commanded.

Ten thousand years later, a wraith of Sarrin persists within the Conqueror’s corridors, known as the Mistress. She disputes for standing within the ship against Kossolax, and pledges the vessel’s loyalty to Angron should the primarch return. The Conqueror has had no later captain of comparable standing, and required none, since the ship retained her presence in place of a living successor. Sarrin therefore holds a distinct place among the mortal officers who served the World Eaters, her name bound to the one Legion vessel that outlasted the Heresy still carrying her within it.