Tech-Priest Enginseer

Where the great archmagi command entire forge worlds, it falls to the humble Enginseer to walk among the common soldiery of the Imperium and tend the machines upon which victory depends. Bound by the ancient treaties that yoke the Adeptus Mechanicus to the Emperor's armies, thousands of these lesser Tech-Priests are seconded to Astra Militarum regiments, Imperial Navy vessels and fortress garrisons, where they hold sole authority over the maintenance of tanks, artillery and generatoria that ignorant mortals must not be permitted to profane.

An Enginseer is a strange and unsettling figure to the men he serves alongside. Half his flesh has been given over to augmetics, a whirring servo-arm rises from his back like the limb of some patient insect, and he speaks to the engines in the clicks and drones of binary cant. To him the crews are little more than functionaries; it is the machine spirit that commands his devotion, and he will brave enemy fire to anoint a stalled Leman Russ with sacred unguents and rouse its slumbering soul back to wrath.

In the thick of battle the Enginseer labours without pause, directing his servitor thralls to haul, weld and repair while he intones the rites of restoration. A single priest can mean the difference between a spearhead of armour grinding to a halt and one that fights on through wounds that should have crippled it. For this reason commanders guard their attached Enginseers jealously, even as they resent the priest's cold contempt for the frail flesh around him.