The blade came free with a slick sound, suction trying to hold it tight in the body of the broken... thing. No longer was it a Night Lord, not even a Warp Talon touched by the fickle aether. This was something darker, more bestial and savage. A creature that kept the form of an Astartes but thought alien thoughts and bled black, stinking blood.

The Gloamclaws encircled the dueling pair, flickers of warp energy running up and down their shadowy forms. The winner watched them in turn, judging their disposition and mien. His was the duty to curb moral corruption, to remove the taint of the Never-born. Not the feared axe of the Headsman Kordesh, that massive blade that enforced the Stained Lord's political will and military discipline, but a sharp scalpel of purification.

Orren Malith faced the Warp Talons. Their burning eyes turned away, unable to face his gaze. Even their Flaymaster Amathys, could only hold steady for a few breaths, such was the mingled judgement and compassion. The Grave-Ward took up his glaive and rested his gloved hand on the dead man's head. 

"For those of us that still serve, we will remember you. Our brother, taken in by the whispers of the dark. Your vigil is over, ours remains. Ave Dominus Nox."

The brittle snap of broken steel ended the scene. A fragment of the dead's claw would be added to the glaive in remembrance of another brother who lost his way in the dark. Another one gone, another soul forfeited to the Long War.

Orren Malith

Dark Apostle of the Shrikeborn, Grave-Ward

I hear your anger, your hatred, your rage my brother. I will give you peace.

- Orren Malith the Grave-Ward

Orren Malith walks the decks of Shrikeborn vessels like a mourner at a wake- silent, deliberate, and burdened by the weight of his calling. He is a Dark Apostle unlike any other, for his sermons do not praise the Dark Gods, nor do they seek to inflame devotion. His faith is a blade turned inward, a doctrine of restraint and remembrance. Malith preaches that the Shrikeborn must never lose themselves fully to the gifts of the warp, for to do so is to become no more than beasts and playthings of the Warp.

A long glaive, its haft made of the shards of Nostraman blades, rests across his back; a weapon he wields only when necessity demands judgment. When a brother succumbs to the whispers of the warp and rages beyond control, Malith does not rage or condemn. He ritually challenges the fallen in a duel, speaks a quiet benediction, and delivers the killing stroke with sorrowful precision. Each death is recorded in his litany, not as punishment, but as remembrance.

Malith is both shepherd and executioner. He the one who ensures their terror remains pure, untainted by madness or divine indulgence. His presence is a reminder that faith, unchecked, becomes corruption; that devotion, unfettered, becomes ruin. His eyes watch all, his words reach all. Councilor and executioner in one, the Grave-Ward brings the comfort of deadly certainty to the Shrikeborn.

He does not preach salvation but survival; survival through discipline, through sorrow, through the mercy of the blade.