Lady Virelia Mornhalde

  • Faction: Imperium of Man
  • Status: Noblewoman of House Mornhalde, a minor noble line in the Drusus Marches Sub-sector, Calixis Sector
  • Role: Strategist, Bioaesthetic Artisan, Rogue Social Operative
  • Personality: Elegant, sharp-minded, and relentlessly composed. Believes in punishment that lasts longer than death.

Backstory:

House Mornhalde is a modest but respected noble house tied to void-station operations and frontier logistics in the Drusus Marches. Not a great house, but with just enough ancient lineage and chartered trade routes to be politically useful.

Virelia’s older brother, Cadran Mornhalde, now wears the family signet. Their father, Lord Heptor, once stern and unyielding, was covertly removed—not through violence, but bureaucracy: a falsified Servitor Reassignment Writ, signed and executed by mid-tier Administratum proxies.

Lord Heptor was taken during a scheduled medicae renewal and lobotomized into servitor HM-0047 aboard his own orbital refinery. Cadran blamed “a tragic clerical error.” But the true author of the act was Silexa Veir, his ambitious consort — a woman of distant blood to the Great Houses of the Calixis Sector, whose rise within Mornhalde has been sudden and deliberate.

With the patriarch now legally dead and stripped of identity, Cadran’s claim to the house passed unchallenged.

Virelia’s Plan – “Their Skin Will Testify”

Virelia cannot assassinate her brother. To do so would risk dissolving the family’s fragile alliances, drawing the watchful eyes of the Arbites and endangering their limited protections from the power games of the greater Calixian nobility.

But she can speak truth in flesh.

“Pain fades. But the face endures. So let it carry memory.”

She has commissioned a tool of poetic retribution:
A bioluminescent regenerative nanoink, synthesized illegally by Mechanicus genetor from abyssal xenoalgae.

The Technology:

  • Nanoink – “Voxcut Resonant Strain”
    • Integrates into the dermis.
    • Glows subtly under low light, particularly visible at feasts, court gatherings, and ecclesiastical observances.
    • Any attempt to burn or flay it results in full regeneration of the script.
  • Tattoo Mechanism – “Ebon Eremite’s Calligraph Gauntlet”
    • Former penal branding tool, repurposed by Virelia’s agents for aesthetic precision.
    • Encodes the crime in High Gothic epigraph: “We unmade our father for a throne we did do not deserve.”

Consequences:

The pair may:

  • Hide behind cybernetic facial masks, branding themselves as reconstructive cowards in noble society.
  • Attempt full facial replacement, which would only further stigmatize them among the flesh-proud Calixian aristocracy.
  • Do nothing, and bear glowing guilt in every public appearance.

Virelia’s Inner Monologue:

“Cadran thinks the house bends for him. That Silexa’s blood-ties to the great houses grant him immunity. But even among wolves, scars matter. So let me give them one they cannot conceal.”