The Crystal Lady herself - Verity the Six-Winged Seraph!

Recently - to the sound of much wailing and gnashing of teeth as she went from direct-sale-only to last-change-to-buy to permanently-out-of-stock-you're-out-of-luck-matey - I purchased Celestine the Living Saint.

That's my girl...

She arrived on Friday and, on Saturday, I gathered together various bits and pieces I'd been collecting over the previous few weeks...

Celestine, Stormcast Prosecutor wings, Necron Wraith tail, some pieces from
the Tech-Priest Dominus, Anvil Industry's mechanical arms, Secret Weapon's base,
and (finally) a Canoness arm

...and started work on building my custom Living Saint; Verity the Seraph!

As I am going to detail in The Tale of Verity, she was originally a humble Tech-Priestess who accompanied the Emperor. Exactly what happened to her during the Great Crusade is shrouded in mystery (not least because I haven't finished writing the background!) but what the Crystal Lady is today is a psycho-mechanical construct reflecting aspects of the Necrons, the Mechanicum and the Imperial Creed. She is a champion of humanity, imbued by the Emperor himself with power, but so much of that humanity has been sacrificed for the sake of survival and victory. I wanted to reflect all of this in the model.

Inspired by Biblical Saraph / Seraphim imagery (six-winged angels, whose name means "serpent") and other "winged serpents" from around the world, I'd imagined Verity as a six-winged serpent with a human torso. Following von Clauzewitz, I first made the base secure. I fixed the Necron tail to the resin base and then attached the torso of Celestine to that. I trimmed away her legs carefully to preserve the waist armor and also removed the left arm below the elbow. She was secured in place with a pin and glue, and gaps filled with greenstuff.

I also trimmed off the protruding hemispheres from the Necron tail and drilled fairly large holes where they had been. These were for the Anvil Industry mechanical arms, which attach with a ball-and-socket joint. They had the balls (oo-er!) but I needed to create new sockets. Then, I started work on the wings, which I wanted to be arranged in a formation inspired by classical images of angelic Seraphim.

Seraphim have three pairs of wings - one covers their "feet" (which is a euphemism for genitals - they use them as clothes, essentially), one veils their eyes and they use the final pair to fly. This exact arrangement wouldn't work (it would hide so much of the model!) but I really liked the look of the crossed wings acting almost as a halo. Taking the three pairs of Stormcast wings, I cut and repositioned them until I had something I liked.

A simple pin and a bit of greenstuff attached the wings to the torso, and Verity was ready for the the artsy "descending-from-on-high" shot!

The light is the glory of the Emperor, and totally not a desk lamp.

After that, it was a pretty simple process to give her arms (holding Tech-Priest's axe and a large wrench) and attach various mechanical arms to her serpent tail.

All in all, not a difficult conversion once I'd got the parts together. I think it worked very well; it hits all the notes I wanted it to. The wings are weird and alien, dramatic and even impractical. They frame the human torso, which is small and insignificant compared to the rest of the model. The Mechnicum parts hint at her origin, while the number of them show her physical form is a fusion of not just her body but those of the Seraph's other victims. Finally, the Necron tail is subtle enough to not be immediately obvious, but very visually distinctive.

Anywhere - there she is! This is what becomes of our heroine Verity ... or, at least, this is what currently bears her name and leads the Order of Our Crystal Lady. Where "she" might lead them during the Time of Ending is anyone's guess ...

On Hyper-Femininity, Sexism, Objectification and the Sisters of Battle

This article has been republished on / moved to my World Anvil page here.