Editing Nobledark Imperium Notable People (section)

=== Lady High Admiral of the Imperial Navy Merelda of House Pereth ===

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Merelda of House Pereth, Lady High Admiral of the Imperial Navy, is the only abhuman serving on the High Council of the Imperium. She is a Void Born and quite typical of her kind; Abnormally tall and thin, skin unhealthily pale bordering on translucent, long dexterous fingers, bone white hair and big dark eyes. She is the descended from a line of space farers that have served in the Imperial Navy since the days of King Horus and much further into the inky black before that. Her list of victories in the name of the Imperium is legendary having seen heavy action in innumerable Chaos Incursion around the Maelstrom and the Gates of Fire and also a War for Armageddon.

She knows Empty Space, that realm to which dear Horus was once king, and to her it is home. Indeed it is so much her home that like most of her kind she can't set foot upon Old Earth without a full body harness to take the weight.

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Her understanding of trajectory, gravity, light speed delay and three dimensional theatres of battle is in the very top of what the Imperium has to offer. Eldar and Demiurg who ply the starry seas for a living do not understand it as she does.

In her time, to the disbelief of many, she has fought everything from orks to chaos to strange hostile things without name beyond the edge of the maps. She has been from one ragged edge of the galactic disc to the other and fought from Hub to Rim. Most unbelievable to most are her claims of boarding action battles. How, they ask, could a creature incapable of standing up for extended periods of time possibly fight in any meaningful way? It was this suspected dishonest that almost had her rejected for consideration of her job when her predecessor retired.

It wasn't until the Emperor himself confirmed that he believed her. He had seen Void Born in anti-boarding actions, scuttling in the zero and micro-gravity like great pale spiders across the walls. Void Born ships have no floors or ceilings and are built by shipwrights without a concept of "down" and "up". Even to veteran Chaos Marines, brains addled by centuries on Deaomn Worlds, the notion of attack from 6 cardinal directions was too much to instinctively know unless raised in it from near infancy.

Indeed there is something unsettling about watching Void Born swim through their ships of almost inhuman design, it is not a way man was meant to be but it is so.

Since assuming her job as Lady High Admiral of the Imperial Navy there has been nothing if not a mild resurgence in overall capability. She was Void Born born and raised and for a thousand generations and more the people of the deeps have not suffered incompetence well or often at all. Traditionally the greatest virtue of the pale-folk was always considered to be thrift, space is big and empty. Those that waste, be it fuel of lives or (horror of horrors) ships typically are the first to be disposed of in extremis.

This abhuman hardness got a lot of people worried, very worried, and not without cause. Although Merelda is not a cruel woman she is also not a forgiving one and although she holds no one to standards that she would not hold herself she holds herself to very high standards. This is the Navy, she would remind her critics, the first and most formidable line of defence of this Blesséd Imperium. It is not a social club for high society fops and inbred fools appointed for notions of nepotism.

There has been in the years since her appointment a notable increase in the number of Void Born transferring from the Merchant Navy to the Imperial Navy, all fairly and above board with not favour shown to them.

But Void Born are innately and instinctively better than normal men when it comes to the finer points of void warfare.

Much as the Fabricator-General the majority of her time is not spent upon the surface of Old Earth, visiting only when needed or when called for. Most of her time she spends in the ancestral capital of her kind, the Earth Luna Lagrange Point.

There in the dockyards once called home by Horus, Home still of House Lupercal among many other venerated names, she holds office. There she marshals her kind and orchestrates the training of generations of officers to captain ships as yet unbuilt to. Horrors lurk between the stars and she takes pride in that she commands the worst of them. Though she will never wear the Corona Nox, will never be the Queen of Empty Space, she is as near as any can be. The responsibility is greater as the Imperium sails to Judgment Day than in any days before.

The dockyards at thunderously busy and so are her people. As they scuttle and glide through the hallways, habs and foundries of the Lagrange Sprawl she sits at the centre of it all dictating the turning of the wheel.

The Sons of Horus have taken note of her. She is one of their faithful, adherent of the Old Gods of Empty Space. The secret faith known only to the pale-folk and shared with no outsiders save a few and most trusted.

Of the woman herself? She is hard to read. Often her people are compared to spiders, pallid, with long limbs and big dark eyes. She is if anything an exaggeration of this. When people look up into those dark eyes they see nothing but the bottomless deeps of space looking back at them. She seems to look upon her fellow lords and ladies dispassionately in the extreme to a degree considered unnerving even to the Navigators. She speaks when spoken to or when needed and never else. It is suspected that she is almost as unnerving to her fellow countrymen as she is to everyone else, abnormal even among abhumans.

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