Ephrael Stern

Few daughters of the Ecclesiarchy inspire such fierce division as Ephrael Stern, the Sister known across a hundred war zones as the Daemonifuge. She has been named saint and saviour by some, heretic and witch by others, and the many titles that cling to her, Thrice-Born chief among them, testify to a life that has slipped again and again beyond the boundaries of ordinary mortality. What is beyond dispute is the power that burns in her: a psychic gift that seems drawn not from the corrupt wellspring of the warp but from the sheer, incandescent strength of her belief.

Promised to the Sisterhood before her birth, Stern was raised in the Schola Progenium and took her oaths among five hundred novices at the Ecclesiarchal Palace on Terra before being chosen for the Order of Our Martyred Lady. Her ascent was swift; her talent saw her raised to the Seraphim in record time and ordained a Sister Superior soon after. Then she was sent to the world of Parnis to investigate a convent of the Orders Pronatus that had fallen silent, and she returned its sole survivor, her mind stretched to breaking by whatever she had witnessed there.

The Screaming Cage[edit]

For four years she was confined and studied, her nature a riddle the Sisterhood could not solve, until an assassin, a Sister puppeted by a daemon, was sent to silence her, and Stern slew her attacker with her bare hands. Taken into the custody of Inquisitor Silas Hand, she became the crucible for a terrible inheritance when the martyred Sisters of the Screaming Cage poured the last of their secrets, and their power, into her, arming her against the daemonic as few mortals have ever been.

Now she walks a lonely road at the side of Kyganil, an Aeldari outcast and former Harlequin of the Laughing God who is himself a Pariah among his own kind, the two of them bound together by fate. Though the Ordo Hereticus has marked her for death, there are Inquisitors who whisper that Stern may be the greatest weapon against Chaos that Mankind has possessed since the age of the primarchs, and who watch her passage toward the forbidden Black Library with equal measures of terror and hope.