Orphan to Commissar – Early Life and Education
Ciaphas Cain’s origins were as unassuming as they come. An orphan from an unnamed hive world, Cain was raised in the Schola Progenium – the Imperium’s unforgiving boarding schools for orphans of Imperial servants. According to Cain’s own (somewhat dubious) account, his parents had been Imperial Guard troopers killed by alien Kroot mercenaries, a tale he offered to explain how he ended up in the Schola’s care. (Inquisitor Amberley Vail later noted dryly that this claim may be one of Cain’s more creative embellishments, as the Schola usually fostered officers’ offspring, not common troopers’.) Whether or not Cain remembered his true home, life in the Schola taught him one crucial lesson: keep your head down, blend in, and survive.
Cain’s academic marks were middling at best – consistently “low end of average” in most subjects – but he excelled in physical training and combat drills. Under the tutelage of a notoriously strict fencing instructor, he became an exceptional swordsman, a skill that would serve him far better than reciting Imperial scripture. He managed to graduate with a spotless disciplinary record (or rather, as he later quipped, he was clever enough not to get caught when he did break rules).
Upon graduation, young Commissar Cain looked to secure a safe first posting, far from any front-line horrors. With cautious ambition, he arranged an assignment he assumed would be cozy: the Valhallan 12th Field Artillery, an Imperial Guard artillery regiment well behind the front lines. Cain envisioned a quiet career lobbing shells from a safe distance, “a lifetime of rear-echelon obscurity” as he later joked. Little did he know, the Emperor (and fickle fate) had other plans for him.
First Battles and the Birth of a Reputation
Newly minted Commissar Cain arrived at the Valhallan 12th dreaming of boredom – only to be rudely awakened by the reality of war. His very first taste of combat came on Desolatia IV, where the 12th Artillery found itself under direct assault. What began as a defensive action against marauding Orks soon turned into a nightmare when a Tyranid splinter fleet descended upon the planet.
Cain, who had hoped never to see a xenos up close, suddenly faced two of humanity’s worst enemies at once. In the thick of the chaos, Cain did what he does best – survive. The regiment held out against waves of greenskins and chittering Tyranids long enough for an Imperial relief fleet to arrive. By the battle’s end, Cain’s uniform was bloody and his nerves were rattled, but his superiors noted that he had stood firm (in truth, Cain confesses, he was mostly trying to find a safe hole to hide in that unfortunately kept moving with the retreat). This baptism by fire taught him that even an artillery post wasn’t truly safe – especially when the enemy refuses to stay at arm’s length.
After Desolatia IV, Cain’s hopes for a quiet life evaporated. He was next thrust into a counter-insurgency on Slawkenberg, where he accompanied forward observers to direct artillery fire. The mission took a turn for the macabre when a Slaaneshi cult emerged. Cain and a pair of gunner Guardsmen were captured by a heretical priestess who attempted to enthrall them with dark sorcery.
For a moment, Cain felt an unholy bliss tugging at his mind – “Emperor, what a way to go,” he thought – but salvation came from an unlikely source. Trooper Ferik Jurgen, Cain’s malodorous aide and factotum, barged in at the critical moment. Jurgen was as loyal and bland-faced as a man could be, but he also happened to be a psychic blank (a fact Cain hadn’t yet realized). His mere presence disrupted the witch’s foul ritual, breaking her hold on Cain.
Snapping free of the daze, Cain didn’t hesitate; he directed an artillery bombardment onto the cultists’ position, burying the Slaaneshi priestess in righteous fire. It was an ignoble victory – Cain insists he was simply trying to escape, not play the hero – but to the soldiers who witnessed it, the commissar had stared down a daemonette and prevailed. Cain walked away with a new scar, a splitting headache, and the nagging worry that his superiors might start expecting such heroics from him.
That worry proved well-founded. In the very next campaign, Cain’s knack for surviving “impossible” situations turned him into a reluctant legend. While attached to an Imperial battle group in transit, Cain’s ship was ambushed by Ork pirates en route to the backwater world of Perlia. In the frantic evacuation, Cain and Jurgen ended up packed into a tiny escape shuttle that launched down to the planet rather than away from it.
Their pod crash-landed deep behind enemy lines on Perlia, and in the confusion Cain was listed as “presumed killed” in action. This was, unfortunately for Cain, far from true. Stranded on a world overrun by Orks, Cain found himself responsible for a ragtag band of survivors. With no other choice, he assumed command of the local PDF stragglers and refugees who flocked to his side.
What followed has gone down in Imperial history (much to Cain’s lasting embarrassment) as the March of the Liberator. Over three harrowing weeks, Cain led his makeshift army across a continent teeming with greenskins, harrying the Orks and rallying more survivors as they went. He resorted to every trick in the Tactica Imperialis (and quite a few not in the book) simply to keep himself and his followers alive.
By the time Cain fought his way back to friendly lines, his small force had swelled into a veritable crusade of liberated settlements. In the final push, Cain even found himself face-to-face with the Ork Warlord leading the invasion. Blinded by smoke and panic, Cain swung his chainsword in a desperate bid to save his own skin – and by sheer chance decapitated the massive Warboss in single combat. The entire Ork horde fell into disarray at the death of their leader, giving Imperial forces the opening to rout the xenos remnants. Cain had accidentally saved Perlia.
When an exhausted Cain was finally “rescued” by Imperial troops, he was shocked to be met with cheers and salutes. Within weeks, the story of the Hero of Perlia was spreading across the sector. Much to Cain’s dismay, people spoke of his courage and leadership – attributes he was certain he didn’t possess in the slightest. Cain privately maintained he had been motivated only by fear (indeed, he admits he nearly fled in the opposite direction more than once, before realizing the safest path lay through the Orks rather than away from them).
But the Imperial propaganda machine cares little for a hero’s inner thoughts. Cain’s name began to feature in uplifting newsreels, and posters on Perlia showed his stern visage with the caption “Our Liberator.” It was the last thing he wanted. In his memoirs, Cain recalls looking around nervously after the victory, half-expecting some Commissariat official to realize the mistake and arrest him for impersonating a hero. Instead, he received the highest honors and heartfelt thanks from Perlia’s citizens. Commissar Cain had become a living legend – and that, he mused, was certain to make his life far more dangerous in the future.
Between Duty and Survival – A “Hero” on Detached Service
Cain’s newfound fame proved to be a double-edged sword. On one hand, it got him off the front lines of the Valhallan 12th; on the other, it attracted the attention of high command in the sector. After the First Siege of Perlia, Cain was “promoted” (or as he saw it, kicked upstairs) into a staff role, serving as a roving troubleshooter attached to a Lord General’s headquarters.
Officially, this second phase of his career made him a liaison commissar reporting directly to senior officers. Unofficially, it meant every time a particularly nasty assignment arose, someone would say: “Send the Hero of Perlia – he always gets the job done!” Cain’s cynicism proved spot-on; his superiors seemed determined to throw him at one deadly crisis after another, as though testing just how lucky one man could be.
Over the next few years, Cain was dispatched to a litany of hotspots that read like a catalogue of the Imperium’s worst nightmares. He barely had time to unpack his kit at headquarters before he was bundled onto a Navy transport and sent to investigate the loss of contact with a remote colony.
That world, Interitus Prime, turned out to be a Necron tomb world awakening from aeons of slumber. Cain had the dubious honor of being one of the first Imperial officers on the scene as legions of undying Necron warriors emerged from beneath the colony’s soil. By Cain’s account, it was “the most horrific experience of my life”, one that still gave him nightmares decades later. He witnessed disciplined Guard infantry melt into panic against the Necrons’ inexorable advance; all Cain could do was organize a fighting retreat and pray for evacuation. He survived by the skin of his teeth (and Jurgen’s prodigious ability to fire a melta gun very accurately in a pinch).
Inquisitor Vail’s annotations dryly note that Cain’s reports from Interitus Prime left out many details – possibly a result of trauma, or possibly Cain sparing the reader the description of him screaming in terror as metal skeletons shrugged off las-fire. Regardless, Cain’s efforts helped alert the Imperium to the Necron threat, even if he claimed no credit beyond “running away faster than everyone else.”
No sooner had Cain recovered from that ordeal than he was sent to assist the Space Marines of the Reclaimers Chapter in purging a space hulk. This mission was, in theory, even further from Cain’s job description – but try as he might, he couldn’t wriggle out of it. A derelict space hulk named Spawn of Damnation was adrift in the warp, and the Astartes requested a commissar to liaison with some Guard detachments in their task force.
Cain found himself aboard a Strike Cruiser, surrounded by power-armored giants he privately likened to “heavily armoured supermen”. Initially, Cain felt a spark of hope; surely nothing could threaten him when flanked by the Emperor’s finest warriors. That illusion was promptly shattered. The heart of the hulk was infested with a Genestealer brood, and Cain’s luck dictated that he and Jurgen would stumble right into a nest of the four-armed horrors. The ensuing running battle through the hulk’s dark corridors was enough to turn Cain’s hair grey.
At one point, an overeager young Space Marine actually ushered Cain forward – “After you, commissar” – as if Cain were eager to lead the charge! By the time the Reclaimers detonated the hulk’s reactor (with Cain safely and accidentally evacuated onto a Thunderhawk by Jurgen’s quick thinking), our reluctant hero had learned that being surrounded by Space Marines was no guarantee of safety. He emerged from the mission physically unharmed but psychologically convinced that the universe truly had a vendetta against him.
Other assignments during this period were scarcely less harrowing. Cain’s “roving” duties saw him embroiled in a skirmish against Eldar raiders on one frontier world, and in the cleansing of a Chaos-tainted city on another. In one particularly grim operation on a planet called Sanguia, Cain ended up as the sole survivor of a plague outbreak that mutated its victims into rabid killers.
By sheer fortune (as Cain tells it), he was away from the main force when the contagion hit, and thus avoided the fate of his comrades. Incidents like these only magnified his reputation: time and again Cain returned from missions as the last man standing, with some vital piece of intel or success to his name. The brass began to regard him as nearly indestructible – a man who could walk into hell and come out whistling a tune. Cain, on the other hand, was growing desperate to get away from such special attention.
Eventually, after several years of being the sector’s catch-all crisis solver, Cain pulled the necessary strings to be assigned back to a frontline regiment. In his memoirs, Cain wryly notes that nothing is more absurd than seeking the relative safety of an active warzone – but compared to facing Necron tombs or soloing space hulks, blending into the ranks of an Imperial Guard unit sounded positively restful.
His request was granted: Cain received orders transferring him to a newly formed unit on a transport ship bound for the frontier. Hoping for anonymity and a return to routine commissarial duties, Cain stepped aboard the troopship Righteous Wrath and met the officers of his new command: the Valhallan 296th/301st Infantry. He would soon discover that this assignment came with challenges of its own – not alien horrors or daemonic cults this time, but a regiment tearing itself apart from within.
The Valhallan 597th – Building a Regiment, Finding a Family
On paper, Cain’s new post looked promising. The 296th/301st was an amalgamation of two battle-depleted Valhallan regiments being merged into one. Valhalla was Cain’s favorite regiment-world – ice-world troops who brewed strong tanna tea and had a straightforward soldierly ethos. Cain figured that with his prior experience alongside Valhallans, he might fit in and quietly ride out the rest of the war attached to a “fresh” unit.
Reality, however, was far messier. Aboard the Righteous Wrath, Cain walked into a storm of rivalry and resentment: the two halves of this proto-regiment absolutely hated each other. The Valhallan 296th was an all-female infantry regiment, led by the fiery Colonel Regina Kasteen, while the 301st was an all-male outfit under the curmudgeonly Major (formerly Colonel) Ruput Broklaw.
Both units had suffered horrendous losses in a recent Tyranid invasion of Corania and were forced to combine to survive. Instead of unity, though, the survivors clung to their old identities. Clashes between the 296th and 301st were frequent – and lethal. Within Cain’s first day, a full-blown brawl in the mess hall left three Guardsmen dead and dozens injured before he could even intervene.
Faced with this powder keg, Cain saw that his survival now depended on knocking some sense into the bickering Valhallans. If the 296th and 301st didn’t learn to fight together, they would surely die together – and likely take their new commissar down with them. So Cain did something unusual: he stepped up and took charge of forging the two mistrustful battalions into one cohesive regiment.
Displaying a talent for leadership he never claimed to have, Cain imposed discipline and forced integration at every level. He broke up cliques and reassigned troopers so that each squad and platoon mixed men and women from both former units. Grueling training exercises were introduced, during which Cain (to his own surprise) personally led mixed squads on mock missions to build camaraderie. He even worked out the mathematics of a new regimental designation: the Valhallan 597th, simply the sum of 296 and 301, symbolically uniting the two histories into one.
Cain’s efforts were not without resistance – there were plenty of sullen stares and a few fists raised in protest (quickly put down with a commissar’s icy glare). But bit by bit, the regiment began to gel. Colonel Kasteen and Major Broklaw overcame their initial hostility and became Cain’s firm allies in the integration process.
In fact, Cain developed a personal friendship with both officers. With Kasteen, he shared many a late-night strategy session (often over cups of that strong Valhallan tea Cain had grown fond of), while Broklaw’s dry wit played off Cain’s own, forging mutual respect. The rank-and-file Valhallans, too, came to appreciate their new commissar. They found that unlike other Commissars, Cain was not eager to execute troopers for minor infractions or throw away lives in vain glorious charges – he genuinely wanted to keep them alive (if only so he could stay alive). This earned him immense popularity among the soldiers.
Cain would often downplay it, but the men and women of the 597th came to view him as “one of us,” a comrade in the Emperor’s service rather than a distant political officer. In later years, one Valhallan officer – Lieutenant (later General) Jenit Sulla – would cite Cain’s example as her greatest inspiration for staying brave under fire. (Cain always found Sulla’s adulation awkward; the eager young woman wrote her own memoirs praising Cain to the heavens, much to his chagrin.)
Regardless, by the time the Righteous Wrath reached its destination, the Valhallan 597th was a real regiment: disciplined, united, and ready for battle. Cain had forged a family out of feuding siblings, and in doing so found a place where, for the first time in years, he felt at home.
Hero of the Imperium – Campaigns with the 597th
Cain’s long tenure with the Valhallan 597th would become the most storied chapter of his career – the period from which most of the famous “Cain tales” arise. It began almost immediately upon deployment, when the 597th was sent to the backwater world of Gravalax in 931.M41. What should have been a minor peacekeeping mission on a distant Imperial planet turned into an intrigue-laden adventure that tested all of Cain’s wits.
The situation on Gravalax was tense: the planet was caught in a cold war between Imperial authorities and an encroaching Tau Empire force. Civil unrest and propaganda had brought the two sides to the brink of open conflict. Cain, smelling the potential for disaster, tried to keep his head down at first – the assignment looked political, maybe even diplomatic, which for a self-professed coward was much preferable to a firefight. He was content to let Colonel Kasteen handle meetings with the planetary governor while he played the polite attaché.
However, a series of mysterious murders and attacks on Gravalax drew Cain into a web of conspiracy. To his astonishment, an old acquaintance revealed herself in the middle of the chaos: none other than Inquisitor Amberley Vail of the Ordo Xenos. Cain had no idea Vail was on Gravalax until she chose to “bump into” him in disguise, cleverly enlisting his help. Together – though Cain would insist Vail did most of the clever work – they uncovered the real threat on Gravalax was neither the Imperials nor the Tau, but a hidden Genestealer cult.
The cultists had been orchestrating atrocities to pit the Imperium and Tau against each other, hoping to weaken both so that when a Tyranid hive fleet arrived, the planet would be easy prey. Cain’s luck (or misfortune) placed him at the crux of the climax: deep in the underhive of Gravalax’s capital, he stumbled into the cult’s lair and found himself face-to-face with the Genestealer Patriarch – a hulking alien monstrosity, leader of the cult.
With fangs, claws, and hypnotic psychic powers, the Patriarch was an enemy far above Cain’s pay grade. Cain recounts that he nearly blacked out from the alien’s overwhelming psychic presence, but it was Jurgen’s moment to shine. Jurgen’s untapped null aura blunted the Patriarch’s powers at the critical moment, giving Cain the chance to emptily his laspistol into the beast at point-blank range.
By the time reinforcements arrived – including Amberley Vail with a team of stormtroopers – the Patriarch lay dead at Cain’s feet. Inquisitor Vail coolly verified the kill and even allowed the ever-humble Cain to take the public credit for stopping the cult. In truth, Cain was simply relieved to be alive (and trying not to vomit from the stench of the Patriarch’s corpse and Jurgen standing next to him).
For his “crucial role” in preventing Gravalax’s secession to the Tau, Cain was awarded the planet’s Order of Merit, Second Class. Cain later joked that if he’d let the Tau assassinate the planet’s buffoon of a Governor, the grateful citizens might’ve given him the First Class medal instead. Jests aside, Cain’s actions on Gravalax solidified his standing as a true Hero of the Imperium – much to his own bewilderment.
It was also on Gravalax that Cain’s partnership with Amberley Vail truly began in earnest: the two worked seamlessly (if covertly) to solve the crisis, and a close personal friendship grew from their mutual respect and perhaps a spark of something more. Inquisitor Vail would remain a constant (if secret) presence in Cain’s life from that point on, sometimes arriving to pull him into another mission, other times discreetly helping him from the shadows.
Cain, for his part, was happy to have a powerful friend – especially one as witty, resourceful, and charming as Amberley (not that he’d admit the charming part to anyone but himself). The duo’s private camaraderie – and rumor has it, romance – became one of the worst-kept secrets in certain circles of the Inquisition.
After the Gravalax incident, the 597th barely had time to breathe before the next deployment. In 932.M41 they were sent to the ice world Simia Orichalcae, ostensibly to guard a vital promethium refinery from marauding Ork warbands. For Cain, this assignment was miserable from the outset: endless frozen tundra (he never did get used to Valhallan-level cold) and an abundance of Orks – smelly, violent, and far too numerous.
Cain led from the front as usual, which in his mind meant finding the front less dangerous than being anywhere else. The 597th clashed with the Orks in a series of brutal tunnel fights beneath the refinery, where the greenskins sought to loot fuel. Cain’s chainsword hummed and Jurgen’s melta roared; together they dispatched many an Ork in the dark. Just as the situation seemed under control, a new threat emerged – one far more terrifying than Orks.
Deep under the permafrost, ancient machines began to stir. The Valhallans had unwittingly awoken a Necron tomb beneath the ice. An army of metallic skeletal Necrons rose from the frozen caverns, cutting down Ork and human alike with gauss-flayer beams. In Cain’s own words, “I thought I’d seen fear in the eyes of men facing Tyranids or Chaos, but nothing compared to seeing battle-hardened Orks panic at the sight of those Necrons.”
For once, the Orks and Imperial Guard found themselves aligned – equally happy to shoot at the new, soulless intruders. Cain coordinated an impromptu alliance of convenience; under his direction, Guard and even a few Orks (who were too stupid to run away) fought the Necrons in the tightening ice tunnels. It was a losing battle until Cain ingeniously ordered the promethium valves open and set off a chain of explosions throughout the refinery’s underworks.
The simultaneous detonation entombed the Necron forces in rubble and flame, sealing the majority of them back under tons of ice (and incidentally roasting the remaining Orks). Cain escaped the inferno by the slimmest margin, dragging an unconscious guardswoman out of a collapsing tunnel moments before it iced over.
When it was done, Simia Orichalcae was safe – albeit with its refinery badly charred – and Cain had another legend to his name: the Savior of Simia Orichalcae, the man who defeated not one but two xeno armies by pitting them against each other and exploiting the planet itself as a weapon. Naturally, Cain insists he hadn’t planned any of it in advance; he was simply improvising to save his own skin. As usual, none of the grateful miners and adepts on-world believed his self-deprecation. To them, Cain’s victory was proof that the Hero of the Imperium could triumph against even the most ancient evils.
After the ice and fire of that campaign, Cain was more than ready for a quiet assignment. Fate, again, had other ideas. Not long after, the Valhallan 597th was rerouted to the planet Periremunda, where widespread rioting threatened a complete collapse of order. Periremunda was a bizarre world of towering plateaux above toxic fog seas, and its populace had begun rebelling against Imperial rule.
Cain suspected there was more to the unrest than simple discontent – and he was right. Shortly after arrival, he survived an assassination attempt by what turned out to be Genestealer hybrid infiltrators. The infestation of Periremunda went far deeper than anyone knew, and Inquisitor Amberley Vail herself appeared on the scene to investigate. Cain suddenly found himself swept into another of Vail’s covert operations, this time amid a brewing Genestealer cult uprising and whispers of heretical cults taking advantage of the chaos.
To make matters worse, augur readings indicated a Tyranid hive fleet was drawing near the subsector – meaning the genestealer activity was a harbinger of full-scale Tyranid invasion if not stopped. As riots and uprisings rocked Periremunda’s tiered cities, Cain battled in the streets, putting down cultists and trying to keep the 597th from being overwhelmed. Inquisitor Vail, working undercover, used Cain as a figurehead to draw the cultists’ attention away from her investigation.
She encouraged rumors that Cain was a specially appointed “witch hunter,” personally tasked with purging the cults. This made Cain a prime target – a fact Amberley did apologize for later, though with a mischievous glint in her eye. Cain endured multiple attempts on his life as a result of this ruse, including a near miss with a purestrain genestealer that he only survived by trapping it under a collapsing archway.
Despite the danger (or because of it), Cain’s presence rallied Periremunda’s defenders. Ordinary citizens took heart that the legendary commissar was rooting out the enemy within. Together, Cain and Amberley uncovered that a rogue tech-priest and a deranged Inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus were secretly complicating the situation – they had stolen an ancient xeno artifact called the Shadowlight from Perlia, hoping to use it to empower human psykers against the coming Tyranids.
Cain only got glimpses of this shadow war; he crossed paths with the heretic Inquisitor Killian inside a dam facility and witnessed the man’s demise in an explosive confrontation, but the true import of the artifact would not become clear to him until much later. In the immediate term, Cain’s actions (blowing up part of the dam to flood a valley crawling with cultists and Orks – yes, Orks had shown up too by some Emperor-forsaken coincidence) quelled the worst of the rebellion.
The Genestealer cult was exposed and burned out, and the remaining Chaos plotters were eliminated. By campaign’s end, Periremunda was saved from both internal corruption and the looming Tyranid menace – at least for the time being. Cain humbly credited the timely arrival of Imperial reinforcements and, of course, Inquisitor Vail’s guidance, for the victory.
But the populace of Periremunda hailed him as their savior, cheering “Cain! Cain! Cain!” in the streets as order was restored. If Perlia had established Cain’s legend, Periremunda made it virtually unassailable: here was a commissar who conquered not just alien foes but the very sedition and heresy that lurked among the Emperor’s flock.
Over the following years, Cain and the 597th were continually on the move, fighting wherever they were needed. They crushed a horde of nocturnal xeno scavengers known as the Hrud on the swamp-world Skekwi, where Cain noted that the oily, shadowy Hrud were nearly as repulsive as his aide’s body odor (a rare humorous swipe at Jurgen, who remained cheerfully oblivious).
The regiment also deployed to Kastafore to put down an Ork incursion; Cain by now had a grim routine for Ork fights – decapitate the leader, scatter the rest – and it worked, though not before an Ork freebooter nearly took his other hand off. Each victory added to Cain’s accolades, and each time he prayed it would allow him a quiet garrison posting next. Instead, in 937.M41 came Adumbria, and with it one of Cain’s most perilous trials yet.
On Adumbria, the 597th walked into a war against Chaos renegades that was already in full infernal swing. A Chaos cult, backed by traitor PDF and even some Chaos Space Marines, was attempting to summon a daemon lord to claim the planet. Open warfare raged as the Imperial Guard battled the heretics for control of Adumbria’s cities and orbital defenses. Cain found himself serving alongside another commissar during this campaign – Commissar Tomas Beije of the Juristan 229th.
Beije was everything Cain was not: rigid, doctrinaire, and utterly without a sense of humor. The two commissars immediately clashed. Beije considered Cain something of a fraud – he openly questioned how Cain really managed to be at the center of so many triumphs, hinting that perhaps Cain orchestrated crises just to solve them. Cain, for his part, thought Beije a pompous fool who would get a lot of good soldiers killed for the sake of his ego.
Their professional rivalry came to a head when Cain made a fateful decision during the Battle of Adumbria’s capital. Sensing that the heart of the enemy’s plan was an ongoing ritual in the ruins outside the city, Cain left the front lines (where Guard forces were holding off a Chaos assault) and led a small strike team to disrupt the summoning. In doing so, he technically disobeyed orders – abandoning his post in the defense to address a threat elsewhere. Beije was livid and saw his chance to finally nail Cain for misconduct.
But Cain’s intuition was correct: by striking at the cult’s ritual site, he arrived just as the heretics succeeded in bringing forth a terrifying Daemon Prince into realspace. The greater daemon, infused with warpfire and malice, began slaughtering anything in its path. Cain would later claim he nearly died of fright on the spot.
Still, true to his peculiar form, Cain stood his ground (perhaps rooted in sheer terror) and fought the Daemon Prince long enough for reinforcements – including, notably, Inquisitor Vail in disguise among the Guard – to arrive. Accounts differ on how exactly the Daemon Prince was banished. Some say Cain lured the monstrosity under a munitions silo which was then bombarded from afar, collapsing onto the beast. Others report Cain emptied his laspistol into the creature’s eyes while Jurgen’s blank aura weakened it, until it crumbled to dust.
Cain himself only mumbles that he was “in the wrong place at the right time” and that the Emperor (and possibly Jurgen’s noxious body odor) did the rest. Either way, the destruction of the Daemon Prince broke the back of the Chaos offensive, saving Adumbria from becoming a new daemon world.
In the aftermath, however, Cain’s comrade Commissar Beije filed a formal charge against him for dereliction of duty – essentially attempting to court-martial Cain for leaving the defensive lines without authorization. It was a farcical situation: the man who had prevented a Chaos apocalypse was being accused of cowardice by a rival who spent the battle safely behind a bulwark.
The trial was convened, but it didn’t get far. Numerous high-ranking officers (including Lord General Zyvan, an old friend of Cain’s by now) testified on Cain’s behalf, lauding his decisive action. Even Amberley Vail – incognito, of course – pulled strings to ensure a fair hearing. In the end Cain was fully acquitted and commended for initiative, while Commissar Beije earned a stern reprimand for his pettiness (though he too was later quietly absolved of malice).
Cain bore Beije no lasting grudge, but he did take wry satisfaction in the outcome. Ever one to find humor in hindsight, Cain later joked that it was the first time he’d ever seen a commissar try to have a hero shot for doing his job too well. The Adumbria affair only heightened Cain’s legend in the Guard: now he was the “Daemonbane” – the commissar who had personally faced down a daemon prince of Chaos and lived. Stories of Cain’s bravery (wildly exaggerated, in his opinion) spread across regiments. On distant Tallarn, a minor sect even began worshipping Cain as a blessed emissary of the Emperor – a fact Amberley Vail wisely kept hidden from Cain, knowing it would mortify him.
By this point, Cain had served decades in the Guard and was well into middle age (not that anyone could tell under the grime and flak armor). His superiors offered him comfortable staff roles and even the rank of Lord Commissar, but Cain stubbornly refused such promotions. He preferred to remain simply Commissar Cain, avoiding the higher profile (and added responsibility) that grander titles would bring.
After Adumbria, he was briefly assigned as Lord General Zyvan’s liaison to the Commissariat – essentially a bureaucratic advisory post. For once, this was a desk job Cain didn’t mind; Zyvan, a jovial and savvy commander, valued Cain’s practical insight and was content to keep him at headquarters, sipping tea and dispensing advice. During this period Cain was able to catch his breath. But the respite did not last forever. The galaxy was darkening as the millennium 41st drew to a close, and there were still a few more adventures in store for the unwilling hero.
In one such late campaign, Cain found himself on the world of Quadravidia, which was under attack by the insidious Tau Empire. The Tau had come in force, seeking to add the planet to their dominion. Imperial high command, not blind to Cain’s history on Gravalax, attached him to the Quadravidia defense forces as something of an “expert” on the Tau.
Cain, remembering the delicacy of that earlier situation, braced for a protracted and politically messy conflict. And indeed, initial fighting with the Tau was fierce and frustrating – their high-tech weapons and diplomacy-first approach made for a confusing war. But then matters took a dramatic turn: the Tau abruptly called for a ceasefire during the campaign.
Cain’s instincts told him this was no olive branch but a sign of an even worse threat. His fears were confirmed when the true enemy revealed itself – Tyranids, at last in full. A Tyranid Hive Fleet was approaching Quadravidia, ready to devour the world whole. In a surreal twist, Cain suddenly found himself negotiating alongside the Tau commander for a temporary alliance.
Both the Imperium and the Tau realized that if they didn’t work together, the incoming Tyranids would consume them all. Cain, of course, had no love for xenos of any kind – he’d spent his life fighting them – but he did love staying alive. Thus, with his trademark pragmatic cynicism, Cain helped broker a détente: Imperial Guard and Tau Fire Warriors fought side by side against the swarms of ravenous Tyranids descending on Quadravidia.
Cain led from the front (where else?), coordinating joint battle plans with a Tau commander who found the commissar both baffling and oddly impressive. Over several desperate days, they managed to hold the line and even push back the Tyranid vanguard. Cain later wrote that no one was more shocked than he to hear a Tau Etherial publicly thank him after one engagement.
Ultimately, reinforcements from the Imperial Navy and Adeptus Astartes arrived, driving off the Hive Fleet. With the greater foe beaten, the uneasy alliance shattered – the Tau quit the planet, and the Imperials, Cain included, breathed a sigh of relief that they didn’t have to continue fighting the sophisticated xenos.
The episode on Quadravidia added yet another notch to Cain’s belt: he was now known as a diplomat-warrior who could even charm (or strong-arm) aliens into focusing on “the greater good” of not getting eaten by Tyranids. It was an extraordinary feat of survival and statesmanship – though Cain would later jest that getting two of his enemies to kill each other hardly made him a statesman.
In another late-career incident, Cain confronted a widespread Chaos uprising that had infiltrated an entire subsector’s supply chain. On a routine suppression of a Chaos cult on a mining world, Cain and the 597th uncovered evidence that the taint had spread far – reaching even the mighty Forge World of Ironfound.
The flow of weapons from Ironfound had inexplicably slowed to a trickle, threatening Imperial armies at war. Cain’s retirement plans were put on hold as he and the Valhallans were dispatched to investigate the forge world. What they found was near open rebellion: heretical tech-priests and mutated skitarii soldiers had turned the factories of Ironfound into a battlefield.
Amid the clangor of Titan forges and the stench of machine oil, Cain dodged assassination attempts by Chaos cultists hidden among the Mechanicus, all while trying not to offend the Mechanicus Magi with his very presence. This was not a conflict Cain was comfortable with – it wasn’t just soldiers and guns, but arcane tech-heresy and internal Mechanicus politics.
Nevertheless, he pressed on, rooting out the cult leaders who were sabotaging Ironfound’s output. In the climactic fight, Cain confronted a Magos who had secretly pledged to the Dark Gods, controlling an entire legion of skitarii. Cain managed (with some off-camera assistance from Amberley’s agents) to broadcast a surge of scrapcode that disrupted the heretics’ command protocols, freeing many loyal skitarii to turn on their corrupted masters.
Ironfound was secured and the prodigious flow of weapons resumed, but not before Cain had to personally fend off a berserk cyber-assassin in the forge’s undercroft. He prevailed – barely – and finally, after so many years and so many close calls, got official approval to retire from active duty. Inquisitor Vail teased him that the Administratum likely relented just to see if Cain could actually stay out of trouble for more than a standard week.
Retirement, Renown, and the Second Siege of Perlia
With the dawn of 999.M41 approaching, Ciaphas Cain at last stepped away from front-line service. He had spent decades fighting the Emperor’s foes on countless worlds; by his own reckoning, he had “done enough for the Emperor’s glory to last ten lifetimes – preferably someone else’s.” Officially, Cain retired with full honors and took a post as a lecturer at a Schola Progenium, training the next generation of commissars.
Unofficially, he chose a very specific Schola on a very specific planet: Perlia – the world of his first great triumph. Perhaps Cain thought the planet would remain peaceful now, or perhaps he had a soft spot for Perlia’s people (who still remembered him fondly as their Liberator). Settling in a quiet mountain town outside the Perlian capital, Cain attempted to live the life of a scholarly veteran. He taught cadet commissars about the importance of morale and made a point to drill into them that a commissar’s duty was to protect his Guardsmen from foolish waste (a philosophy quite different from the usual fear-mongering many commissars employ).
Those who attended Cain’s lectures found him pragmatic, surprisingly relaxed, and full of the kind of sardonic anecdotes only a grizzled hero could share. Cain even began writing his memoirs during this time – candid personal recollections meant for Amberley Vail’s eyes (and red pen) only, alongside a more sanitized version for wider Imperial audiences. It was a peaceful, pleasant twilight for the weary commissar… for a short while.
Inevitably, war found Cain again. In the closing year of M41, Abaddon the Despoiler launched his infamous 13th Black Crusade, and the forces of Chaos roared across the segmentum. Even far-flung Perlia was not spared. A Chaos warlord, Warmaster Varan the Undefeatable, led a massive horde in a campaign that overran several neighboring systems – and his next target was none other than Perlia.
Cain got wind of this looming threat from an old friend: Rogue Trader Lord Aloysius Orelius (whom Cain had first met on Gravalax) arrived on Perlia bearing warnings from Inquisitor Vail. Amberley suspected that Varan’s interest in Perlia was tied to the mysterious artifact – the Shadowlight – that had been hidden on the planet decades ago. If a Chaos force seized the Shadowlight, the results could be apocalyptic.
Cain quickly shed his professor’s robes and donned his old commissarial greatcoat once more. With the planetary governor in a panic and the local PDF understrength, Cain’s experience and reputation made him the natural choice to organize Perlia’s defenses. Some might have expected Cain to hop the first evacuation shuttle off-world, but that was never his way; when push comes to shove, Cain always finds himself at the center of the storm, one way or another.
As the Second Siege of Perlia began, Cain rallied everyone he could: the Planetary Defense Force, the local militia, even his own Schola cadets. Holo-pict recordings show Cain broadcasting a message to the people of Perlia, urging them to stand firm and fight for their home – an impassioned plea that inspired thousands of civilians to take up arms. (Cain later remarked he was simply “reminding them I wasn’t going to do all the work this time”, but in truth his words struck a chord.)
With makeshift militias and booby-trapped defenses, Perlia braced for the onslaught. Warmaster Varan’s armies – a terrifying amalgam of Chaos Space Marines, traitor Guard, and mutants – assaulted the planet ferociously. Cain, acting as de facto overall commander, led from the front as usual, scoffing at any suggestion that he remain in a bunker. He fought street by street in the capital city, Havendown, bolstering morale by his mere presence.
To the Perlian defenders, it seemed their beloved Commissar had returned in their hour of need like a hero from legend. Even as he gripped his chainsword with whitening knuckles, Cain managed to crack gallows-humor jokes to keep the spirits of those around him from crumbling. In private, he confided to Jurgen that he felt sick with dread – but he knew if he faltered, the defense would falter. So Cain did what he had always done: pretended to be the fearless champion everyone wanted him to be.
The siege wore on for weeks. Casualties mounted, the city burned, and still Chaos forces pushed forward. At the height of the war, Warmaster Varan himself entered the fray – a hulking Chaos Champion who boasted of his invincibility. Cain had a personal encounter with Varan during the final battle in the ruins of Havendown’s spaceport. In a scene almost too dramatic to believe (were it not attested by dozens of witnesses), Cain faced Varan in single combat amid a storm of bolter fire and warp sorcery.
Varan, eight feet of spiked armor and dark blessings, towered over the relatively slight commissar. But Cain had one advantage: nobody expected the “coward” to charge. So charge he did. With a defiant roar of “For the Emperor!” (which Cain swears was actually Jurgen yelling, not him), Cain engaged Varan.
He ducked a sweeping daemon-axe and answered with a precise slash of his chainsword, severing the tubing on Varan’s corrupted power armor. The Chaos warlord staggered, momentarily vulnerable – and Cain seized the moment to do what he does best: improvise. Spotting a loose stack of promethium barrels nearby (legacy of the PDF’s final defensive trap), Cain shot the barrels at point-blank range with his laspistol.
The resulting explosion was colossal. Varan was engulfed in flame and shrapnel, the concussion hurling Cain off his feet. When the smoke cleared, Warmaster Varan lay dead, blown apart by the blast, and Ciaphas Cain, bruised and half-deafened, found himself once more the last man standing amid the wreckage. The death of their leader broke the Chaos army’s momentum. Imperial Navy reinforcements arrived soon after, driving the invaders into retreat. Perlia was saved – again – by Ciaphas Cain.
In the chaotic aftermath, Cain discovered one final twist. During the battle, a Necron task force had infiltrated the area with one objective: the Shadowlight artifact. As the dust settled, Necron agents absconded with the ancient device, presumably to destroy it, since it posed a danger to their kind. Cain and Amberley Vail (who had been coordinating clandestinely during the siege and emerged at the end) observed that the Necrons seemed to fear the warp-tainted artifact might be used against them.
Thus, ironically, the Necrons themselves ensured the Chaos desire for the Shadowlight was thwarted. Cain was content to let the xenos vanish with the damned thing – good riddance, he thought, anything to avoid yet another round of “chase the super-weapon.” With Varan gone and the relic off-world, the Second Siege of Perlia ended in hard-won victory. The people hailed Cain with almost religious fervor.
Some started calling him “Liberator” again; others, “Steadfast Saint of the Emperor.” Cain squirmed at the adulation, but Amberley Vail recorded in her notes that she had never seen him look more quietly proud than in that moment, standing amid the cheering crowds of Perlia, alive and victorious in the Emperor’s light.
Legacy of a Self-Deprecating Hero
After the Second Siege, Ciaphas Cain truly stepped back from warfare. The galaxy soon plunged into the even greater tumult of the 13th Black Crusade and the opening of the Cicatrix Maledictum, but Cain had finally earned his rest. He lived out his remaining years on Perlia, teaching at the Schola Progenium and putting pen to paper to chronicle his astonishing life.
His memoirs – “To Serve the Emperor: A Commissar’s Life” (the expurgated version for mass consumption) and the unabridged Cain Archive (for Inquisitorial eyes only) – were completed in early M42 with Inquisitor Amberley Vail serving as editor and annotator. In these writings, Cain tells his story with the same satirical wit and humility that characterized his life, never shying from admitting his fears and mistakes.
Of course, Amberley Vail’s marginal notes politely correct some of Cain’s more outrageous self-effacements, ensuring that history remembers the truth behind his “lucky coincidences.” As Vail points out, Cain had a habit of downplaying feats that were, by any objective measure, near miraculous. The Cain Archive was eventually circulated among the Ordo Xenos and select scholars, serving as both an entertaining war memoir and a subtle treatise on the value of pragmatic leadership.
Ciaphas Cain’s legacy in the Imperium is a unique one. Officially, propaganda posters and Munitorum records paint him as a paragon of courage – the Hero of the Imperium, a title he earned a hundred times over. Unofficially, those who read his own words know him as a witty, likable man who genuinely never sought the spotlight or the laurels of heroism. He was that rare Imperial hero who remained painfully aware of his own mortality and used that very fear to sharpen his survival instincts. Far from diminishing him, Cain’s self-awareness and compassion for the common soldier made him more of a hero to those under his charge.
Unlike many Commissars, Cain never glorified needless sacrifice; he valued the lives of his men because, as he’d famously say, “if you’re all dead, who’s going to cover my escape?” – a joke that concealed a real commitment to keeping them alive. His relationships – with the endlessly loyal Jurgen, with Colonel Kasteen and the Valhallans, and with Amberley Vail, his Inquisitorial confidante – show a man who, despite professing selfish motives, inspired deep loyalty and affection in others. Jurgen in particular stayed by Cain’s side through every horror imaginable, a testament to the bond between them (and perhaps to Jurgen’s blissful ignorance of just how many horrors they faced).
In the end, Cain lived long enough to see the dawn of the 42nd Millennium. He survived well into the early decades of M42 (some say aided by juvenat treatments and the Emperor’s own blessing). When he finally passed away – peacefully, it is said, in his sleep – Cain was over two centuries old.
Fittingly, the Departmento Munitorum found itself in a bind: Cain had been declared dead or missing so many times only to reappear alive that they had created a standing regulation to always list Ciaphas Cain as active until a body was produced. Thus, for a brief bureaucratic moment, Cain remained on the active roster of the Imperial Guard even after his funeral, the only guardsman in history to achieve such a feat. It’s a posthumous joke Cain himself would have loved.
Commissar Ciaphas Cain’s legend lives on in two forms. To the masses of the Imperium, he is an icon of unflinching bravery, his name evoking steadfastness in the face of darkness. Countless Imperial youths have heard embellished tales of how Cain defeated endless swarms of xenos and the vilest of heretics. Some even whisper prayers to him, as if he were a saint – a development Amberley Vail was glad Cain did not live to witness, for it surely would have made him distinctly uncomfortable.
But to those with knowledge of his true memoirs, Cain is perhaps even more inspiring: a real, flawed human being who prevailed despite his fears. His life story, compiled in his own sardonic words and annotated by an amused Inquisitor, offers a rare honest glimpse into what it means to be a hero of the Imperium. It shows that courage isn’t the absence of fear, but doing what must be done in spite of it – even if you’re inwardly quaking in your boots and plotting your exit.
In the end, Ciaphas Cain was the Imperium’s most unlikely hero, a man who claimed to be craven yet stood against every terror the galaxy hurled at him and saved untold billions of lives. His legacy is one of hope mingled with a hearty dose of irony. As Cain himself might put it with a wink: he didn’t set out to be a hero, but fate kept volunteering him anyway – and who was he to argue with fate?
“I’ve been called many things – hero, savior, coward, liar… Perhaps I’m a bit of all of them. In truth, I just did what any sensible man would do: tried to keep as many people alive as possible, myself especially. If that’s heroism, then Emperor help us, because it’s a damnable way to live.” – Final scribbled note in the Cain Archive (with an addendum in Amberley Vail’s hand: “Modesty becomes you, Ciaphas – but you’ve earned your peace. Rest well, hero.”)
