Variel

Variel is a Night Lords Apothecary of the Traitor Legions, serving in Talos Valcoran’s First Claw warband in the Eye of Terror during the 41st Millennium. He is recorded under the epithet the Flayer, which reflects the Legion’s long association between the Apothecarium and the surgical removal of flesh, and he is the warband’s principal medical and gene-seed specialist.

Variel fought beside Talos, Xarl, Cyrion and Uzas in First Claw’s raids from the dead world of Tsagualsa, the squad’s refuge in the Eye of Terror, against rival Astartes, xenos corsairs and Imperial agents; the human thrall Septimus served the same warband, and Mercutian was an earlier member lost in its first encounters. His duties were to tend the wounds of his battle-brothers and to recover and preserve gene-seed, and accounts describe him practising the same anatomical craft on captives in the Night Lords’ characteristic manner. His standing within the squad rests on that role rather than on command, and the lore that survives does not record him leading warriors or holding rank beyond First Claw.

Variel is significant as the surgeon on whom the survival of a small, isolated Traitor warband depended, an unusual position in a Legion that regarded Apothecaries as instruments of fear as much as of healing. His contemporaries are Talos Valcoran, Xarl, Cyrion, Uzas and Septimus, and his activity is bound to the Eye of Terror and Tsagualsa in the centuries after the Horus Heresy, under the shadow of the Legion’s primarch, Konrad Curze. His ultimate fate is not established in the accounts available, and his status is therefore given as unknown.