Greta Vern
Greta Vern, also known as Serina Malus, was a Scribe in service to the Adeptus Administratum of the Imperium. Although seemingly just another of the endless faces working for the soul-crushing bureaucracy, she harbored a sinister secret.[1]
Biography
Born on the Administratum world of K4, Greta worked in the system her whole life. One day, however, she made a mistake: she misfiled numerous requisitions resulting in faulty equipment being sent to units of the Astra Militarum, leading to the death of almost one hundred men. Panicking, knowing how the Imperium punishes failure, she took her alias. However, she had a horrific epiphany: not only did her mistakes simply become lost amidst the Imperium's endless red tape, but she realized how much damage she could inflict with only her pen, and she reveled in the power she felt in doing so. She began to regularly misfile requisitions, becoming sadistically creative such as sending food shipments set to spoil only days before their arrival. Hidden in the hopeless, complex, stagnant Imperial system, she caused untold death and destruction unchecked for over a year.[1]
As a warpstorm began to converge on K4, however, something malicious laid its eyes on Vern and the weight of her sins, watching her from the corners of her vision. This warp presence became clearer and clearer as the planet became engulfed in endless torrential rainfall, and as the storm was set to envelop K4, she attempted to flee with the rest of the populace. However, she was finally caught by an agent of the Inquisition: Interrogator Stefan Crucius, who was investigating her with suspicions of a cult. Although ignorant of the true scale of her crimes, he was set on extracting her confession. The entity fixed its eyes on Crucius as well, forcing the two to find a way to escape when they missed the final transport off-world.[1]
Although the Interrogator was distrustful and certain of Vern's guilt, the two worked together, traversing the flooding city looking for a shuttle hangar. All the while the entity followed them, taking a toll on the agent's mind. Passing through an abandoned asylum, they almost fell afoul of a cult of lunatics who gave the entity a name: The Watcher in the Rain, a daemon that stalked those whose souls are burdened with the weight of grievous sins, preying on their guilty minds. As Crucius began to fall into insanity, Vern dragged him into a shuttle which they flew into orbit. Hearing his dead mother in the void, he nearly vented the ship to space, but Vern took his laspistol and mortally wounded him. During their struggle together, the agent had come to believe her to be innocent and offered to vindicate her with his dying words, but Vern finally confessed in grim detail the scale of her misdeeds: she had willfully killed untold billions of people. It was because of this that the Watcher, drawn by sin, was following her, and why she would never confront the being, because even she could never truly face the weight of what she had done.[1]
As she thanked the now-dead Crucius for hearing her confession, an Imperial Navy vessel hailed their shuttle. She rejoiced in her good fortune, but her crimes had finally caught up with her: unbeknownst to her, the ship's crew were starving because of a rotten food supply (likely due to her misfiling) and would be forced to cannibalize her.[1]
Sources
- 1: Black Library - The Watcher in the Rain (Last accessed 22/10/2022)
