Godwyn Cawdor

Primitus Magister Vacuus Niall "Godwyn" Cawdor

Born in Hive Primus on Necromunda, Godwyn Cawdor was press-ganged into Imperial Navy service when only a boy - sparing him from a brutal life on the polluted planet, but condemning him to a brutal life in the void. Rising through the ranks and maintaining his strict faith, Godwyn became an officer and - ultimately - the first mate of La Pucelle when he caught the eye of Captain Amelia.

History

Birth and Childhood

Niall Cawdor was born in Hive Primus on Necromunda, the son of an unimportant member of an insignificant gang of House Cawdor. Raised in the Redemptorist sect, a firm faith in a particularly harsh interpretation of the Imperial Creed was instilled in him.

While many Cawdor youths initially (at least privately - public impiety is severely punished) rebel against the strictures of the faith, and come to appreciate it more as tool for House cohesion rather than genuine religious fervor, young Niall was a truly pious child. In a home with more opportunity, he might have been selected for seminary formation and priesthood. But in the impoverished hovels of Hive Primus, not to mention in the anti-establishment cult of the Redemption, there were no such opportunities. Niall spent his scant free time in private devotion rather than the games of his peers.

La Pucelle

His life changed when he was eight standard years old; a whispered rumor came that a ship of the Ecclesiarchy had docked - a veritable cathedral-city the size of a hive which floated in the void, devoted to the worship of the God-Emperor, endless corridors filled with the perpetual chanting of pious devotees, air heavy with incense as thick as Necromundan smog, acres of stained glass of painful beauty showing the true faces of the Emperor and His Primarch-Saints, a crew of Adepta Sororitas so beautiful a man would tear his eyes from his head so the memory of their heavenly loveliness would never fade . . . .

Niall had no way of knowing the rumors were exaggerated by echoing repetition from a thousand-thousand mouths to a thousand-thousand ears, just as he had no way of resisting the siren call of going to see that ship. Packing a few meals worth of corpse-starch and recycled water in a knapsack, he snuck away from his family holestead and began his long journey uphive.

It was impossible chance or - as the older Niall would look back on it, a miracle wrought by the hand of the Emperor Himself that He might have Niall as His servant in the void - that allowed him to climb a kilometer into the sky of Necromunda without being killed, caught by slavers or starving. There were a thousand chances for him to fail, but none of them came true. And so, after a month, he arrived - tired, hungry, filthy and terrified by what he had seen on his pilgrimage - at the Hive Primus spaceport.

The ship was not there, of course - no craft capable of plying the void could dock at even the pinnacle of Necromunda's Hive Primus. It rode at high-anchor above the pollution-crusted orb, sending down a swarm of shuttles to resupply. It was one of these Niall saw - a crenelated craft from La Pucelle as gothic and spired as any hive chapel.

The ratings - earthy, rough men scarred and tattooed with mouths full of oaths and broken teeth - laughed at the scrawny boy who asked them what it was like to serve the Emperor in the void, to labor alongside His chosen daughters the Sororitas. The young and innocent Niall did not understand their crude answers - and, if he had, he would have flown at them in a rage at their lewd blasphemy, their numbers and size and weapons notwithstanding - but he hung on their every word, begging them to take him with them.
They laughed again - but then stopped and talked among themselves. The bosun's boy was dead, and he had always brought them luck. The bosun had been morose, his mood black as tar, since the lad's passing. If they brought him another one . . .
And so Niall Cawdor went to La Pucelle.

The Bosun's Boy

La Pucelle had, truly, once been a ship of the Ecclesiarchy - back before the Age of Apostasy and the enactment of the Decree Passive. An ancient Lunar-class cruiser older than many institutions of the Imperium it had been refitted so many times perhaps little remained of the starframe originally lain down in the Jovian shipyards - the ship now resembled a void-borne cathedral complex even more than the average Imperial spaceship. While the effusive descriptions of La Pucelle's pious beauty were exaggerated, it was certainly the case the exaggeration had a basis in truth. Seeing the ship for the first time through the transparisteel ports of the shuttle, young Niall was awed into rapturous adoration of the benevolence of the God-Emperor, and even when he set foot on the cramped and dingy gundecks which were to be his home for the next decade his fervor did not diminish.

It is not entirely accurate to say Niall was impressed into service - technically speaking he volunteered and received the Emperor's shilling (he still wears the actual coin on his watch-chain, having never spent it), but he was so callow his decision was not an informed one. The ratings didn't care - all they cared was that they had a young lad to sooth the bosun's black mood.

The bosun was an old man, an ancient voidfarer who had not set foot on a planet for a life of men or more. A harsh taskmaster, he had nevertheless been fair to the gundeck ratings assigned to him, as sparing with the lash and generous with the grog as the officer over him would permit, driving and drilling his men for love of the Emperor and their own pride. But that had changed when his boy died.
For as long as the eldest of the ratings could remember, the bosun had kept a boy - a young lad of tender years to serve on deck with them, ferrying messages and water, piping a tune or singing a shanty. The ratings had indulged them, dressing them in what finery they could to ape the uniform of an officer, teaching them voidcraft and scrimshaw. They were good-luck charms, beloved reminders of an innocence they had long-since lost.
When a boy became a man he was rousted and feted, taken on a trawl through the taverns of the lower decks, perhaps introduced to the rough delights of the ladies of the dog-watch and certainly plied with strong drink and branded with the first of many tattoos. He would join the bosun's crew as the youngest of the ratings and a new lad would be found.

But the last boy hadn't been allowed to become a man. The officer newly-placed over the gundeck was a cruel man with unnatural appetites. Not for him the bawdy pleasures of a bilge-deck harlot, nor even the expensive delights of a 'tween-deck ingenue - his was a depraved desire for the smooth flesh of a slender boy. His jaundiced eye had fallen on the bosun's boy and he had taken him, ruining the youth and driving him to despair and suicide. He had thrown himself into the capacitor chamber of the lance as it charged, the coruscating current chewing his flesh to charred gobbets in a single screaming instant.

The bosun could not hope to seek vengeance - even if he cared not a fig for the consequences of striking an officer, the libertine was a fearsome sabreur and always accompanied by carapace-clad armsmen bearing shotguns and stun-gaffs. He might have still done it, so consuming was his grief, but he knew the officer's retribution would fall on the voidsmen who were his charge.
And so he had sought solace in the bottom of a bottle, sinking into a black morass of surly cruelty, driving his men hard with lavish use of the lash. There were no more shanties, no tall-tales exchanged as the grog was passed around, no bonny lad to bring them water or luck.

"The Good-Wine"

An ordinary lad would not have been enough to rouse the bosun from the doldrums, but Niall was no ordinary lad. Bright of eye and quick of wit and eager to learn, yes, but he was more than that. He was a pious youth, cheerful in the face of suffering and privation, grateful for the merest largess, unquestioningly trusting in the protection of the Emperor but ready to sacrifice anything for the Throne. He piped and sang for the ratings, but he would not sing bawdy shanties and chastised them for the way they spoke of the deck-followers who washed their clothes and provided other, baser, services.

At first, they laughed at him and mocked him as "little lord Cawdor, the preacher boy". But he was earnest and insistent. They grew angry and give him harsh words and even blows, but he would not quail. The bosun stepped forward to protect him, making more than one of them kiss the gunner's daughter for laying hand on his boy. Such protection did not make Niall moderate his condemnation - he told the bosun his drinking and cruelty did not serve the Emperor, that he was made for better things than clouding his mind with grog and malice.

Long-forgotten catechisms sharpened by guilt penetrated the rum-haze surrounding the bosun's mind. He did not stop grieving for his boy and his hatred for the degenerate officer did not abate, but he tempered it with a faithful certainty that the Emperor's justice would find him eventually. He set the bottle aside and returned to his old ways, harsh but fair with his men and joining in with the shanties and tales. "The bosun's not on the bad wine anymore," they said. And then, "It's the boy, he's the good wine." And so Niall became known as Godwyn to them, a name he has used ever since.

"For the love of a maid . . ."

It was the height of the Indomitus Crusade, Guilliman's reconquest of his Father's Imperium three-generations old. There was action aplenty for any number of ships and La Pucelle was kept at a constant state of war readiness, jumping from system to system and taking part in more battles than Godwyn could count. For his part, he saw nothing but the gundeck, laboring in the cramped darkness without question or complaint.

In the snatched moments between shifts and sleep, the bosun and ratings took the young land under their wing, teaching him more than shipcraft and the words of ancient shanties. They taught him to love the ship - any ship he might serve on, but La Pucelle in especial. "There are some who say the void be a harsh mistress," the bosun said, "but 'tis a lie - aye, harsh she be, but no mistress. She be a harlot who'll cut yer purse and slit yet throat when you're spent in her bed. She's beautiful, aye - but 'tis a harridan beauty like a rusted bulkhead all painted over.

"No, lad - if ye must fall in love, fall in love with yer ship. Mother, sister, lover - she be all that. Treat her like a lady and she'll always bring ye home. Do all you do for the love of a maid, and you'll keep yer soul."
Stars in his eyes and in the void beyond the bulkheads that bounded his life, Godwyn listened enthralled and never forgot those words.

Optio Praefectus Armis

Three years passed. Godwyn was an old hand on the gundeck, now - able to tell the readiness of the lance by the electrostatic tension in the air, able to tell when the ship was in the Warp, heeling around a star, or kissing a planet's atmosphere by the vibration of the deck. He was a bonny lad, smooth-skinned and wide-eyed, with a beautiful singing voice and limber limbs to dance a jig.

The ratings, men calloused by rough years in the ship's iron bowels, ribbed him for his beauty and assured him it would pass. For his part, Godwyn longed for the deep voices and broad shoulders and shadowed chins of the voidsmen and counted the days until manhood would be his.
The ratings mocked Godwyn's youth, and he disdained it. But the gundeck's officer hungered for it with an unnatural hunger. He had not come to the bosun's section in three years, not since he had ruined the previous lad, so large was La Pucelle's gundeck. He had slaked this awful thirsts elsewhere. But now he returned, glutted but not satisfied, and his eye fell on Godwyn.
This time, the bosun would have none of it, nor the voidsmen neither. The libertine cupped Godwyn's narrow chin in a clammy hand and drew the boy away, and with wrenches and marlin spikes they hurled themselves at the armsmen. The soldiers, consciences deadened by years of turning a blind-eye to horror, slaughtered the ratings with shotgun blasts. The officer cut the bosun down with his sabre, leaving him to bleed-out on the gundeck, helplessly watching with dimming vision as his beloved boy was carried screaming away.

Who knows what awful horrors Godwyn would have been subjected to, as dozens of boys before him had? Thankfully, he does not remember much of it - the forbidden holovids he was shown, the drinks he was plied with, the whispered endearments and lies. His young mind blocked it out, recalling it later only in snapshot-images in nightmares.

He remembers the sharpness of the wire-wrapped saber hilt in his soft hand, the squelching tear as flesh was penetrated, the burst of blood and air as he pulled the blade free. He remembers running, running, running from the officer's cabin, sprinting along the gundeck and then corridors less and less familiar, pursued by the pounding feet of the armsmen. He remembers the grated deck plates giving way to riveted steel and then marble tiles.

He remembers being brought up short with a split lip and bloody nose, knocked to his stern on the deck as he bounced off the sable battleplate of the immaculate Adepta Sororitas in the black-dappled white cloak. She was touring La Pucelle's upper gundecks in the company of the praefectus armis (weapons officer) when Godwyn literally ran into her. She stooped and lifted him to his feet even as he gawped at her - mostly in in pious adoration, but also in awe at her beauty.

The praefectus armis, aghast at the rambunctiousness of one of the rating's boys and terrified of what the Sororitas might do to him, attempted to discipline him severely. But Alicia stayed his hand, her keen senses taking in the bloody saber in his hand, his disheveled clothes, the scent of effeminate perfume on his skin and amasec on his innocent breath, and - most awful of all - the ten-parsec stare in his haunted eyes. When the armsmen arrived instants later in a clatter of carapace, it was hard to tell if he hid behind her or she placed herself protectively in front of him.

Inquisitor Danforth Laertes had requisitioned La Pucelle for his strikeforce, and the Sororitas was Alicia, his Throne Agent and sister. But, perhaps most importantly, she was a Daughter of Verity, unable to lie or be lied to.

And so when the armsmen claimed the boy had attacked an officer, she knew they were telling the truth. But when she asked "Why?" she knew their equivocal answers were lies. Her mantle wrapped protectively around Godywn, she marched back towards the officer's stateroom, the praefectus armis and the armsmen following nervously in her wake.

A scene of blood and horror greeted them; the officer was drastically injured with a puncture wound deep enough in his chest to suck. A mono-minded chirurgeon-servitor had been summoned to tend to him, but even as he labored for breath and gasped out bloody froth he tried to hide the evidence of his depravity. Lascivious images cavorting lewdly on the holograph, liquor and drugs on the nightstand, his breeches around his ankles. Alicia took it all in at a glance, understanding exactly what had transpired. "You knew," she said simply.

The armsmen stammered protestations of ignorance, of innocence - a couple pretended to not know or understand what the tableau represented. With blinding speed, Alicia drew her bolt pistol and shot each of them before they could bring their weapons to bear.


Silently, she pressed the omniclavis of her Inquisitorial rosette against the servitor's dataport, authorizing her voice to override its programming. "Depart," she ordered.

"He'll die!" exclaimed one of the armsmen. "You can't . . ." He got no further before the bloody saber in her hand pierced up under his chin and burst from the top of his head. Realizing the game was up, the remaining armsmen flung themselves at her. They were

Mental characteristics

Sexuality

Holds to the Imperial Creed's very strict sexual morality, although is hopelessly in love with Amelia (but would never admit it).

Employment

Began as an impressed rating, rising through the ranks and achieving an officer's commission in the Imperial Navy. Served on board La Pucelle as a gunnery officer and became Primitus Magister Vacuus - "First Void-Master" (First Officer / Mate) - following a tech-priest mutiny

Morality & Philosophy

Raised in the Redemptionist sect, and still holds to a very strict interpretation of the Imperial Creed, taking a dim view (although not forbidding or condemning as sinful) of gambling, drunkeness, foul language and so forth. Broadly a proponent of the monodominant philosophy, but struggles with his admiration of (and even desire for) the abhuman Amelia.

Taboos

Does not smoke, use stimulating or intoxicating substances (with the exception of limited and almost ritualized consumption of tarantella ), gamble, fornicate or commit other sexual acts proscribed by the Imperial Cult.

Social

Religious Views

Raised in the Redemptionist sect; still a strict adherent to the Imperial Cult

Honorary & Occupational Titles

Quinque Segmentae Summa Magister Navis

Birthplace

Necromunda

Current Residence

La Pucelle

Gender

Male

Quotes & Catchphrases

"I am here because of the love of a maid."

Aligned Organization

Inquisition

Other Affiliations

• Strikeforce Danforth