Editing Arturia Eld (Hektor Heresy)

'The Blade of Terra', 'King of Cattegirn', 'Saint of Knights', all of these titles given to a single Household leader, one among many in the Emperor’s Great Crusade. And yet the actions of Arturia Eld, King of Cattegirn and Lord of the Knights of Accolon remain vivid long after the Crusade and Heresy she fought in have long passed and have become legend. Few mere humans ever reach the level of Primarchs and Astartes in the tales of yore, but Arturia Eld is one of the rare exceptions.

==Appearance==
Even for a human woman, Arturia was smaller than most. Her ageing process seemed to have stopped or at least slowed when she bonded with her Knight mount, meaning that even over a hundred years later she still had the appearance of a girl in her mid-to-late teens. The few remaining picts and images made by Remembracers show short blonde hair and vivid green eyes, described by those who came face to face with her as like Emeralds, or Jade. She was never a great beauty, and nor did she wish to be one.

In battle she was like a tornado, a storm of perfectly directed anger and force. Never reckless without purpose, she directed her Knights with an instinctual grasp for the ebb and flow of the battlefield and how to turn the tide to her advantage. She also proved herself a saviour of allied Imperial Units, often risking the lives of her own Knights to aid Imperial Army or Astartes forces when they were caught out by the foe.

She was always considered cool and aloof, as if slightly detached from the world around her, able to remove herself and look upon it as a stranger. An aura of calm and control was said to surround her, that she could stop even the bitterest argument between generals and leaders just by walking into a room, and was often asked to be a mediator for opposing Imperial Army Commanders. However this detachment made her a distant figure to her Knights, and very few ever truly knew her. Even her mightiest Knight was unable to pierce the veil she hid her true self within. Her sense of duty was one of her driving factors, her duty to her Knights, to her people and to the Imperium. Loyalty was everything, a lesson learned during her youth that would drive her and her Household to destruction during the Heresy.

==Youth==

Arturia Eld was born in 874M30, the only child of Artur Eld, the great uniter of Cattegirn. He had been fighting for decades to unite the many Households of Knights that squabbled over land and resources on the cold moors of Cattegirn, and had many times sought a successor to take over from him.
Upon her birth, he decided that come what may, she would be his successor, old traditions be damned. Her death was faked, and she was adopted out to one of his Knight Vassals to protect her from his foes. Dux Uktar, a son of the ‘sea people’ or Seaxe and father of two sons took her on, and raised her as a paragon of chivalry and virtue with a string sense of duty and loyalty. She was taught much that would be considered ‘unwomanly’, like how to ride, fight and hunt. She was constantly in competition with her ‘brothers’, Kai who soon became a Knight in his own right, and Shrike, who idolized her, though there was much love between them.

Her short childhood ended however when her true father was assassinated by her bastard brother Medraut. After several years of chaos where the Kingdom Artur Eld had created began to fall apart, Uktar reluctantly revealed her heritage and almost immediately she rose up against the usurper. 
It was now that the first of the many myths surrounding her was born. Despite her youth, she went out seeking a fabled lost Knight Suit that local legends spoke about, and not only did she find it in the buried remains of an ancient Starship, but she was able to interface with it and claim it for her own. She named it ‘’’Caliburn’’’, and with it she was almost unstoppable. Caliburn was unlike any other Knight Suit before or since, and some Magos claim it was a prototype model from the last days of the Golden Age of Technology as the abyss began to settle upon the first human solar empire and the final fruits of their once-great power were contained within, though every time she was petitioned to allow the Mechanicum to study it she declined.
Over the course of two years she won back much of her father’s realm and even some parts that he had been unable to claim during his life. Several of her Father’s Knights flocked to her banner, including mighty ones like Dux Bedieve. Eventually she met her bastard Brother’s full might at the Battle of Lake Camaln, where in a brutal battle where over five hundred knights clashed in open combat she met and destroyed Medraut’s knight, decapitating his army at a single stroke. Those few survivors of the usurper’s army lay down their arms and joined her, and with them on her side the last few enemy holdfasts were swiftly conquered. Thus all of Cattegirn was united at last under her banner.

==The Coming of the Imperium==

For five years Arturia settled into rebuilding her shattered world. New farms and mines were opened to replace the ones lost, towns were rebuilt, culls of the Great Beasts which had multiplied during the years of strife were organised and the chaos was finally settling down. The Knights, once of many Households were now all one, and any enmity and bad blood between them was met on the duelling ground and not the battlefield. She proved herself no less skilled in matters of peace as in war, though even then her distance and aloofness could be seen as a potential flaw. But before that could be realized, the ancient orbital scanners, relics of the old times that had watched the empty skies for centuries skies suddenly burst into life. The skies were full of hundreds of ships. There was panic among the peasantry and consternation among the Knights. There was always a fear that foes would come from the stars, a fear borne of the last few memories of the down of the Age of Strife. The King mobilised the entire Household and made ready for any invasion. But what came was not a mighty fleet of landers but a single golden hulled dropship which landed before the great keep of the Knights of Accolon, and from the Dropship came a mortal god made flesh.

The reason why the Emperor Himself, who was still prosecuting the Great Crusade almost singlehandedly would deliberately seek out and land upon an obscure Knight World far from the most vital war zones of the time are known only to one being, and He cannot speak anymore. Even at the time there were many theories, with even Hektor Himself known to have asked his Father about it. Some Magos of the Mechanicum believed that there were relics of the Dark Age of Technology on Cattegirn that the Emperor wished to obtain first, to their dismay. Several proto-remembracers who were present there specualted that even then he saw the potential in the young King of Cattegirn and wanted her in his armies. The truth will likely never be known, but what is known is that the King of Cattegirn and the Emperor of Mankind met and spoke in private for some hours, and when they both emerged the King bowed before the Emperor and announced that from that day forth she and all her subjects would be servants of the Emperor, riding and fighting at His command for the unity of all men lost in the veil of night and for all time. A week later she would leave Cattegirn along with over half her Knights, joining the Emperor’s own 1st Expeditionary Fleet as the first Questoris Household from Cattegirn, even before the official Imperial Warrant had been issued for the Household.
For a full decade the Knights of Accolon would fight alongside the Custodians and the chosen warriors of the Imperial Army in the first fleet, before leaving and beginning a long period of service moving from priority warzone to priority warzone, often serving alongside many of the Astartes Legions, gaining accolades and battle honours by the dozen.

Soon there were over a dozen Accolon Households fighting in the stars, but the largest remained the King’s own, averaging fifty to sixty line Knights. Arturia led her Knights into the most famous and hellish warzones, and soon gained a reputation for near superhuman feats. It was she that brought down the King of the Gigacephalopod on Pathalsa, who alongside her Knights slew an entire herd of rampaging Squiggoths during the Gorro Campaign and broke the defences of the Marwick Empire. The number of battle honours adorning Caliburn grew and grew with every battle. She frequently honoured valiant allies by adding their heraldry to her Knight, so by the end of the Crusade both shoulder pads were covered in the sigils of hundreds of Imperial Army Regiments from across the Imperium.
Deliberately seeking out the most dangerous warzones meant that her Household fought alongside no less a figure then the Primarchs themselves. Unlike most human commanders, who were shocked into reverential awe by their mere presence, she regarded them the same as any other, and spoke to them as such. This sometimes did not work out in her favour, as The Voidwatcher is known to have felt offended by her matter-of-fact way of dealing with him. But other Primarchs were swift to listen to her counsel on matters of war. Inferox the Burned King personally ash-marked her Knight for her actions during the destruction of Craftworld Arkender, despite her known distaste at the savagery shown there.While Gaspard Lumey had an Accolon Banner displayed in his own Flagship alongside the Standards of his own Legion after the Igwen Complaince, though that battle left a bitter taste in the mouth of Arturia.

Only a few times was her cool shattered. Most infamous of those was during the Igwen Compliance, and the cause of that was one of her foremost Knights, Abdul Al-Sherar. Abdul Al-Sherar was the only Knight of Accolon who did not hail from the bleak heaths of Cattegirn, instead an escaped scion of the Thrall-Knights of Bahri, subordinate to Forge World Al-Sherar. As a freeblade he fought alongside the Household during a compliance campaign alongside the seventy-seventh Expeditonary Fleet, and his skills were so impressive that after learning his fate Arturia offered him a place within the ranks of her Household, a very rare honour. Al-Sherar countered by asking why she did not have a high-born consort, that being the norm for all Knight Nobles. Her seemingly perpetual state of bountiful youth and her incredible battle skills had brought her many suitors in the past, but she had turned them all down. When she didn’t answer he boldly offered himself as an option. This was the cause of much mirth within the ranks of the household, especially the Thegns who knew her best. However she indulged the brash young Knight and promised that if he would give her seven years service, then she would consider his suit. There were plenty of Knights within the Household who were against it. Marriages in Knightly Households were all about political gain, a reflection of the darker aspects of the Thrones Mechanicum. A marriage to Abdul Al-Sherar would give nothing to the Household and do nothing to further its standing within the Imperium, a capital sin for a high ranking Knight. She herself knew this, and from the recorded sagas of Thegn Bedieve she spoke several times with him on the subject of Al-Sherar, though what she said, and what she thought of him was not recorded by Bedieve.

[[Category: The /tg/ Heresy]]