Thunder and the Void
Designing Saren von Aurastor, or: how to build a storm terrified of rain
Note: All characters, narratives, and artwork featured in this series are original works created as part of my portfolio development. These materials have not been published and are intended to demonstrate craft technique and understanding of the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
This guy.
If Origen Thule is the crushing pressure of the deep ocean, Saren von Aurastor is the storm that tears across its surface. The man is all thunder, lightning, and the desperate performance of a man who cannot afford to stop moving.
I already wrote about designing an antagonist whose power comes from Byronic stillness. Which is interesting because Origen came second in conception:
Today I dissect his perfect opposite: a character whose intensity comes from constant motion, whose control is maintained through perpetual performance, and whose greatest fear is the moment the theater goes dark and he’s forced to face what’s underneath.
This is about building a force of nature who is simultaneously apex predator and terrified child.
The Dossier: What You See
NAME: Lord Captain Saren von Aurastor
TITLE: Rogue Trader, Last Scion of House Aurastor
VESSEL: Novacula Mortis (Avenger-class Grand Cruiser, 7.5km, 141,000 souls)
KNOWN FOR: Ruthless efficiency, calculated charm, spectacular displays of authority, an a la mantella overcoat that commands rooms
OFFICIAL RECORD: A man of “refined” cruelty and cold logic. Abhors emotional decision-making. Views people as assets to be collected and managed. Operates with pragmatism in service to his Warrant of Trade.
And the truth is that every single aspect of that performance is a defense mechanism.
You’re not surprised? You know what, that is fair. It’s another trope.
Saren von Aurastor has no childhood memories. Decades ago, his family’s vessel—the Astrum Perdita—suffered a catastrophic Gellar Field failure during warp transit. The archaeotech aboard destabilized the ship’s warp translation, and the Immaterium tore through. When Arch-Inquisitor Origen Thule arrived to investigate, he found a lone survivor: a young man with xenotech in the hold, his mind wiped near clean by warp-exposure, surrounded by the wreckage of his entire dynasty.
What Origen saw was opportunity.
The Inquisitor struck a bargain: the archaeotech and all future finds in exchange for a new Warrant of Trade and the resources to reclaim power. Origen would forge this broken survivor into another of his tools. An asset who could probe dangerous frontiers and acquire xenos artifacts that official channels could never touch. The ship that would become the Novacula Mortis was built from this devil’s bargain: salvaged components of the Astrum Perdita merged with a Grand Cruiser hull Origen had access to through his work with the Ordo Originatus.
Saren took the deal. Because the alternative—that is, remaining powerless, amnesiac—was unthinkable.
Everything he is now is built on that absence. He is a man constructed entirely from scar tissue. He can never, ever stop moving because stillness means confronting the hollow space where his foundation should be.
Motion as Survival
Where Origen’s design philosophy was “stillness as a demonstration of power,” Saren is built around the opposite principle: motion as survival. He is a performance that cannot end. His mask has become him.
Every gesture is theatrical. Every word is calibrated. The clicking of his bronze-tap boots, the swirl of the stupid overcoat, the way he circles rooms like a predator establishing territory—it’s all part of an exhausting, never-ending show designed to keep the galaxy (and himself) from seeing the void underneath.
This creates a fundamentally different kind of threat than Origen. Where Origen waits and everything falls into his orbit, Saren moves and forces the world to keep pace. He’s centrifugal force—flying apart at incredible speed, held together only by the velocity itself.
The Paradox of Control
The central contradiction in Saren’s design is this: he desperately needs control, but his methods are fundamentally chaotic.
He claims to resent emotional decision-making but everything he does is driven by a terror so profound it dictates his every action. His “logic” is just fear he’s able to explain with better vocabulary. His “control” is actually a constant, near-frantic attempt to prevent the universe from taking anything else from him.
This is why his possessiveness is so violent. He doesn’t love people—he collects them. Not out of affection, but because losing control of what he considers “his” would mean experiencing that original trauma all over again. So now, every crew member, every artifact, every ally is insurance against powerlessness.
The Performance and the Performer
One of the most interesting design questions with Saren was: Is there anything left under the performance, or has the performance consumed him entirely?
I believe it is both. Simultaneously.
Saren is Schrödinger’s authenticity. The theatrical persona is so complete, so practiced over centuries, that it is him now. But in rare moments when someone like Calix looks at him and says “the storm you hold back must be immense”—the mask cracks, and you see the terrified amnesiac boy adrift in wreckage.
Those moments are violations for him. To be seen is to lose control. To be understood is to be vulnerable. And vulnerability, for Saren, is death.
Visual Storytelling: Designing Thunder and Gilt
Visual choices for Saren were designed to communicate spectacle, authority, and fragile control barely maintained.
The Ship as Metaphor
Before we even discuss his physical design, there’s also Novacula Mortis.
The ship embodies everything about Saren’s constructed identity. It’s an Avenger-class Grand Cruiser—7.5 kilometers of rare, elegant lethality that most Rogue Traders could never acquire. At 141,000 souls, it’s a statement: I am legitimate. I am powerful. I matter.
Yet it’s built from the corpse of his family’s ship.
When Origen salvaged the Astrum Perdita, he didn’t just scrap it. He merged its components with a Grand Cruiser hull. Saren literally commands a rebuilt monument to his trauma. He can’t let go, so instead he transformed his greatest loss into his greatest asset. Every day, he walks corridors that might contain bulkheads from a ship that killed his family and he wouldn’t even know this.
It’s the perfect metaphor for his existence: something magnificent built on top of devastation, performing strength while standing on silt.
And like the man, the ship has a critical vulnerability. Avenger-class cruisers lack prow weapons, leaving them exposed to frontal assault. Most captains would consider this a fatal flaw. Saren sees it as proof of his tactical brilliance—he’s so skilled he can compensate for what lesser commanders would never risk.
There’s one more detail that reveals everything: Saren’s obsession with Geller Field stability borders on pathological.
I was inspired by an anecdote I read about a man’s neighbour in Japan, who was so pathological about making sure his front door was locked, he would return to check a dozen times before finally leaving for work satisfied that it was, indeed, locked.
Saren monitors field integrity constantly, runs triple-redundant systems, and has been known to abort warp jumps at the slightest fluctuation. His crew whispers that he’d rather drift through realspace for months than risk even a microsecond of field destabilization.
They don’t understand why.
He’ll never tell them that somewhere in the blank void where his memories should be, his body remembers the Astrum Perdita tearing itself apart. His mind doesn’t know what happened. But his nervous system does. And it will do anything to prevent that helplessness from happening again.
The Silhouette
That overcoat.
It’s a vast, gilt-red and black garment that flows to his calves, with heavy faulds that amplify his already stupid void-born height. The skull motif, the intricate aiguillette arrangement, the sheer weight of it—this is costume as armour, as declaration, as the physical manifestation of I am too magnificent to be powerless.
Where Origen’s severe greatcoat communicates containment, Saren’s is pure expansion. It takes up space. It performs even when he’s standing still.
The bronze heel-taps aren’t just aesthetic but rather a constant auditory imposition on those around him. Click. Click. Click. He needs you to know he’s there. It’s exhausting.
Saren’s beauty is supposed to be unsettling. It’s the sharp, predatory elegance of a raptor—refined features that should be attractive but instead trigger some instinctive alarm in prey animals.
The mismatched eyes create asymmetry that’s a bit wrong. They scan surroundings with “wild almost deranged intensity” because he’s constantly assessing threats or imposing his dominance by looking at you.
The Voice
Saren’s dialogue is designed to be the opposite of Origen’s economical precision. Where Origen wastes nothing, Saren uses language as spectacle, as territory-marking.
“A fine weapon,” Saren murmured as he came to a halt before Calix, his mismatched eyes not on the pistol, but on Calix’s face. “A tool for a precise hand. It suits you. Keep it.”
“My new master provides his own tools, Lord Captain,” Calix replied.
The rhythmic cadenza of clicking bronze heels ceased. Saren went utterly still, his head tilting fractionally, like a predator that has just caught an unexpected, dangerous scent on the wind.
“Your... master,” Saren repeated, the words a low purr.
Saren is harder to apply a formula to. He operates on performance and then relies entirely on said performance to manipulate whatever outcome he wants. And he does so through determining your weaknesses.
Therefore, he’s not a one-trick pony insofar as being limited to one register. Not like Origen. Origen you can—at least—expect to be measured and calm. Saren is like weather. You can think you know what to expect and then the weatherman is wrong like he always bloody is. God what is the point of you weathermen?
And so Saren uses language to control the room, to perform dominance, but when that fails, the mask cracks and you see the genuine threat underneath. Or the pain.
The Theatrical vs. The Real
“Look at you,” Saren whispered, his voice a hypnotic thrum. “Dressed in his sober colors, reciting his cold logic. A fine performance.”
He calls Calix’s new allegiance a “performance” because everything is performance to Saren. He can’t conceive of genuine transformation because his entire existence is theater. When someone acts differently, they must be performing—because the alternative (that change is real, that people can choose to leave) is too threatening to his control.
Then Calix says:
“The storm you hold back must be immense.”
And Saren breaks. Just for a moment.
That’s the essence of his dialogue: it’s all spectacular armor, brilliantly maintained, until someone finds the exact right words to crack it. Then you see the terrified boy underneath, before the mask slams back into place.
Saren isn’t threatened by the accusation of courting damnation—he’s threatened by someone caring about whether he ruins himself. Genuine concern is intensely terrifying because it requires acknowledging that someone perhaps sees past the performance to the person underneath.
So he does what he always does. Weaponizes intimacy, mocks attachment, and reasserts control through cruelty. Because being seen is more frightening than any external threat.
The core of him is that he’ll use every tool at his disposal—physical intimidation, verbal brilliance, strategic cruelty—to ensure no one gets close enough to see what he’s standing on and find that he’s perhaps not so magnificent after all.
The Dynamic
Saren exists in constant tension with Origen because Origen is the one person who knows. Who found him in the wreckage. Who built him into what he is now. Who cannot be performed at, manipulated, or impressed because he’s seen Saren at his most powerless.
In a way, he’s like a parent. And parents are often better positioned than most to hold an image of us that may not be what we want others to see.
Saren is desperate to prove he’s not Origen’s creation, while simultaneously needing Origen’s validation. He wants to be seen as an equal while knowing he was found as a powerless child. He performs magnificence while Origen sees through to the mechanism underneath.
And without any real contempt, which is almost worse.
The Memory Problem
Saren has no origin story. Not because I haven’t written one, but rather he doesn’t remember it.
This creates fascinating opportunities because, without memory, he has no anchor for his identity aside from what he’s built. Every quirk is constructed. Preferences are choices, not inherited. How much of him is him and how much is something he can’t quite recall?
This uncertainty is the static he’s constantly at war with. The performance can never stop because stopping means confronting the possibility that there’s nothing underneath.
So his obsessive need to collect and possess things makes perfect psychological sense: if you have no past, no memories to anchor your sense of self, then your identity becomes what you own. Every artifact, every subordinate, every piece of shiny thing becomes evidence that you exist, that you matter, that you have substance.
To lose something he owns isn’t just a logistics failure in a pragmatic sense but rather—it’s existential threat.
The Romance?
If you were designing Saren as a romance option (à la a companion quest concept), the entire arc would be about whether genuine intimacy can exist when one person is incapable of vulnerability without self-destruction.
The “romance” would mostly be:
A high-stakes game of intellectual chess
Constant testing and manipulation
Rare, shocking moments of accidental honesty that he immediately tries to retract
The slow, painful realization that being known might be worth the terror of being seen
The climax wouldn’t even be love confession. It would likely be just Saren letting someone see him existing. Without the performance, without trying to control every outcome. Just being—and not immediately destroying that vulnerability with defensive cruelty.
That would be his ultimate character growth: learning that intimacy isn’t possession, and that being understood isn’t the same as being controlled.
But getting there would require someone willing to weather the storm long enough to find the eye and, really, is anyone that damn determined? I suspect it would be an accident and a long game.
Conclusion?
Saren is what happens when trauma isn’t processed but weaponised, when vulnerability is so unacceptable that you rebuild yourself as pure spectacle, when the performance becomes so complete that you can’t remember what you looked like before you put on the mask.
He’s magnificent. He’s dangerous. He’s exhausting. And somewhere under all that flourish is a terrified boy who just wants to stop running but has forgotten how to stand still.
He is thunder trying to outrun silence.