Saint Celestine

Saint Celestine is a Living Saint of the Adepta Sororitas, associated above all with the Order of Our Martyred Lady, who is held to have died and returned to life many times in the Emperor’s service. She appears on the battlefields of the faithful at moments of great peril and has repeatedly vanished again afterwards. Her manifestations do not form a settled chronology, and the Ministorum has not resolved how literally her continuity from one life to the next should be understood.

One account places her earliest life on Terra during the Horus Heresy, as a citizen killed in the orbital bombardment of the planet during the Siege of the Emperor’s Palace. Little is recorded of her lives before she was proclaimed a Living Saint.

In a later life she fought as a Sister Repentia of the Order of Our Martyred Lady in the Palatine Crusade, waged to free the worlds of the Palatine Sector from secessionist rebels; the crusade’s commander, Ansgar, is styled variously Lord, Lord Militant and Inquisitor Lord. On Eurytion, where the war had stalled, she fought in the first wave of Repentia against the defences of the capital and is said to have killed more than a hundred schismatics before falling with the rest of that wave. Her sisters found life still in her body among the dead, free of any wound once cleansed, and the next day she led the renewed assault that took the capital within hours, becoming the crusade’s figurehead. She then insisted that the crusade turn aside to the backwater shrine world of Sanctus Lys, where she entered alone a hidden crypt beneath a shrine once visited in secret by Saint Katherine of the Order of the Fiery Heart. She emerged at dawn in the golden Armour of Saint Katherine, bearing the Ardent Blade wreathed in petals. Ansgar and a conclave of Thorian priests declared her a Living Saint; hailed as the Hieromartyr of the Palatine Crusade, she went on to reclaim the sector and lead further Wars of Faith. The date of the crusade is not recorded.

She was lost on Forrax fighting the world’s Renegade Warmaster, who triggered the meltdown of the atomic pile at the heart of his fortress and reduced an area many kilometres across to ash; none survived to give a true account of the battle’s end. The Tower of Heroes on Terra tolled once, and the Sisters of the Convent Prioris took comfort in the belief that she sat at the Emperor’s side. A manifestation is recorded on the Cardinal World of Heletine in 980.M41, during the Promethean War against the Black Legion, where she appeared without warning, killed the Daemon Prince Lord Gralastyx and vanished once the battle was won; whether this came within her lifetime or after her presumed death on Forrax is unclear.

During the Thirteenth Black Crusade she appeared above Kasr Kraf on Cadia with companies of her order long thought lost in the warp, raised the canonesses Genevieve and Eleanor as the Geminae Superia, and wounded Abaddon the Despoiler with the Ardent Blade in the catacombs beneath the Elysion Fields. After Cadia’s destruction she led its survivors, the Celestinian Crusade, to the ice moon Klaisus and through the webway to Macragge, where she fought while Roboute Guilliman was revived, and then accompanied his Terran Crusade to Luna and Terra. Early in the Indomitus Crusade, with Inquisitor Katarinya Greyfax and the Custodian Longinus, she protected Ecclesiarch Decius XXIII on San Leor and fought in the Ophelia System against the Tyrant of Blueflame; possessed as the daemon’s intended vessel, she was killed by Longinus and at once reborn, and she later slew the Ecclesiarch when the corruption was traced to him. She was killed by Khârn on Tsadrekha after entrusting a beacon psyker to the Alpha Legion captain Kassar, and again on Kophyr when a corrupted Inquisitor turned Guardsmen against her. On Vigilus she fought at Hive Mortwald during the War of Nightmares, and on Sangua Terra in the Nachmund Rift War she helped evacuate Urbanosprawl Alpha before Haarken Worldclaimer’s advance.

One account holds that after each death she wakes on a mountain of bones in the warp without memory, and regains herself through trials in which she meets aspects of her own soul before returning to life. The Ministorum reads each return as a sign of the Emperor’s favour, though whether she is one person enduring across her lives or a recurring instrument of the Golden Throne remains disputed.