Made of shimmering blue Wraithcrystal, the elegant and powerful sword was originally part of Fitheak Battleseer’s equipment provided for her by ‘her’ shrine, that of the Swooping Hawks. From the beginning, the young Battleseer’s Gift and the psychically reactive blade were a good match, and over the years Fitheak grew ever more confident in its use, constantly pushing the limits of what could be and couldn’t be achieved by channeling her powers through the sword.
Whether it was this experimental attitude that made her reckless and over-confident in the end, or whether she was fully aware of the danger involved and willingly took the risks when fighting Chaos on Parseman IV, we do not know, but the result proved nearly fatal.
The mission was to eliminate one nascent human psyker who would play a pivotal role in the history of Parseman, and even the whole subsector, the outcome of which would bring untold grief to Eldar and humans alike. Arriving in the nick of time, Fitheak Battleseer and her small force had to fight their way through the middle of an all out war zone to find the psyker, and when they did find what was left of him it was almost too late: He had already opened a gate for the armies of Chaos to enter Parseman in force. Desperately, Fitheak took on the leader of the Blood Cult to deny them entry and get the chance to close the gate again, but obviously she had found her match in him: He was protected by his god from the powers she tried to use. She was grievously wounded, and went for a last ditch resort: Using her witchblade to bind that warrior with her own force into something, anything; and close the gate from the other side, no matter the cost.
Her desperate attempt succeeded and the gate was closed. Caught on the wrong side of the gate and separated from her waystone, she bound the soul of the Chaos Champion into the most receptable object at hand, which was the witchblade (which was, after all, made of almost the same substance as waystones), and sealed it with her own soul. The blade shattered and went dull, and was flung through the dimensions to end up more than a sector away, while on Parseman her soul-less, dying body was hurled into a ruined building by the implosion of the gate.
After a veritable oddyssee, blade and body were reunited again, the Eldar’s soul freed from the sword and restored to her, and the blade reforged on Caer Diomasach at her express wish. Indeed she finds it more powerful than before, still safely binding the spirit of the Chaos warrior; but even re-made it never was the same again: The crystal of the blade stayed dull and grey, only sometimes, very rarely, emitting a deep red glow. The blade clearly is tainted by what it contains, but Fitheak refuses to have it destroyed. Her feelings towards the sword are very ambiguous: While it miraculously sheltered her soul from the dangers of the warp and the predations of Slaneesh in the place of the waystone she could not reach, it also at the same time kept the soul imprisoned together with that of the Chaos Champion for what seemed an eternity. This must have been torment for the Eldar, and Fitheak refuses outright to speak of the jumbled memories she retains from this time.
The witchblade’s new power has its backdraws, though. More than ever before the sword now has to be mastered instead of just used; imposing the wielder’s will requires a great amount of strength, and taxes Fitheak severely every time she uses it, sapping her power and flooding her mind with unwelcome visions. But that is not the only problem: Chaos want’s its Champion back, and while Fitheak is still totally unaware of this, the Blood Cult knows full well where to look for the blade…
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