#and took both the Imperium and the Ruinous Powers with him

[funeralprocessor]

I feel like a lot of my creative writing/worldbuilding projects result from me falling in love with the potential shitty things don't live up to/explore

[scoundrelstars]

League of Traitors

We fight the Long War, not through vain notions of duty and honour, but through a far purer purpose: hatred. --Ferrous Ironclaw, Warsmith of the Iron Warriors

[118.M42]

The tortured thrum of the void engines echoed throughout the Hangman’s Shadow like a heartbeat. Pict-screens shone sullen red, casting the cluttered Workshop in a bloody hue. The vaulted compartment echoed with the sounds of forging metal and agonizing screams blending together in a discordant symphony.

The Workshop was a nightmare combination of fabricator’s shop, surgical suite, and sorcerous library. Mortal men and women were strung up on steel trusses, skin and muscle flayed from their bodies to reveal bones upon which articulated mechanical arms carved blasphemous runes with lascutters. Maulerfiends, unholy amalgams of flesh, fire, and steel were chained to the decking in rows, their balefire hearts banked low. Occasionally, the screams that echoed through the Workshop would flare the daemon-engines to lash out at the mortal slaves who tended them, but they were in no short supply.

The ship lurched suddenly and Halaphus Stein, Warsmith of the Iron Warriors, grimaced as he mangled the exposed brain of the man he had on his table. He was a lord of the IV Legion, but centuries of mechanical adaptation and transplantation had elevated him to something that was so much more. He was clad in armor of gunmetal that shifted and moved with a mind of its own. Cabling and articulated tentacles coiled about him like living things, draping him in an unsettling mechanical cloak.

He’d been in the middle of hard-wiring the unfortunate’s synapses to a delicate, eight-pointed cogitator star that would have fed the brain with an unending stream of crushing dreams so vivid as to be real. Hours of work ruined.. Instead of a powerful testament to the Ruinous Powers’ revelations, he was left with a drooling vegetable. He remained calm; he had left emotion behind in another age. His prostheses, however, had their own reactions. His cloak of mechadentrites lashed out with a rage all their own and hurled the failed experiment across the Workshop, leaving trails of blood and spinal fluid where it streaked across the deck.

Mechanician slaves scattered out of his path as the metahuman warrior retrieved his cruel-looking war axe and stalked out of his lab.

The bridge of the Hangman’s Shadow was a thing of precision horror. Legion serfs, mutated beyond recognition, had become one with the machineries and consoles of the great ship. Distorted faces pressed against the fabric of the bridge’s walls to whisper dark secrets or maddening truths in languages long dead. Dataslate screens, holo-tanks, and auspex displays flickered with leering daemons who were drawn to the ship’s fell presence. Only the chosen of the Dark Gods--or those who had left their humanity behind--could command a glorious amalgam of machinery and warpcraft like the Shadow.

The ship rocked again as Stein came through the bridge doors. Something was hitting the void shields, the Warsmith could feel it.

“Report,” ordered Stein. His voice was a deep, digitized rumble.

Baltarius, Stein’s second, was hunched over the railing of the command pulpit, issuing orders to scurrying slaves, ship’s officers, and stoic Iron Warriors. He was clad in his battleplate, his helm mag-locked to his belt. Stein’s mechatendrils writhed with displeasure at the breach of protocol.

Baltarius saluted with one fist. “Warsmith. The sensorium has picked up a group of unknown ships in-system from the translation point. Initial scans reported they were scrap, but as soon as we began our acceleration burn, they opened fire with long-range ballistics.”

The Warsmith strode to the ship’s command throne and sat, his thrashing cable cloak snaking to interface with the Shadow’s systems. Sensory data flooded his mind and he began to take in the tactical situation. The ship was burning steadily towards Vraesis, the misbegotten star at the center of the system. Stein had expected more Imperial activity, even here in the far reaches of the heliosphere, but sensors picked up nothing. Only the strange foe-signs milling just off the ecliptic of Vraesis V. Auguries and scrying put a heavy Imperial presence in this sector, but so far, there was no sign.

The Iron Warrior continued. “The Tyrant of Enmity and the Bilious Prize, along with their tenders, have powered to full yield and are proceeding at full burn sunward in pursuit.”

“Enemy strength?”

“Unknown, lord. Auspex findings for all active threats read as system debris until they engaged. All active foes have changed course away from pursuing ships.”

Another missile on a ballistic course reached them and exploded in a blaze of nuclear fire. Hangman’s Shadow’s void shields flickered, but held. The plates of Stein’s armor trembled in annoyance as the squirming fleshmetal shifted. The enemy was so far away that the incoming missiles were unpowered by the time they got in close. This made them easy targets for point defense and maneuver, but even so. They were proving to be an exasperating navigational hazard.

He was a master of mechanology and yet he recognized nothing of the readings coming in from the sensorium. The enemy ships were of unknown design, built in ways that defied all logic. A more in-depth study was needed. Preferably when his fleet wasn’t taking fire.

But for now, he needed to reign in the fools racing in-system.

Stein stood, cabling unspooling  from his harness, letting him walk about the bridge while still being plugged into the bridge systems, and took his place on the hololith communion pad at the center of the bridge’s great gallery. He banged the butt of his warcog axe on the deck.

“I want Antaryon and Mortekai. Now.”

The fused vox-slave let out a gurgling acknowledgement and the hololith pad ignited with ghostlight. After a short moment he felt the data handshake through his neural uplink verify the connection to the Tyrant of Enmity and the Bilious Prize. At least those two were still coherent enough to answer their vox.

Ghostly figures appeared as if through mist. Motes of light coalesced in the hololith to form the hulking figures of two massive Astartes.

Antaryon, lord of the Sons of the Butcher, was a towering pillar of fury. The hololith light seemed to dance and burn around him. His battleplate smouldered like black iron out of the forge and he wore a cloak of ragged skin taken from his defeated enemies. He paced, dragging the tip of a savage daemon blade across the deck of his bridge, leaving furrows of tortured metal. Stein’s tendrils recoiled in disgust, but the Warsmith himself showed no reaction to the wanton destruction of his ancient voidship.

In contrast to the Khornate lord’s impatience, Mortekai of the Mouldering Claw, was a languid presence, wholly unperturbed by the sudden summons of the nominal master of the the entire raiding force. The hololith motes danced around his projection like flies. His green Terminator plate was distended and cracked, Bilious fluid leaked from the joints and rotten flesh spilled from rents in the once-proud armor. His enormous bulk was carried by a horde of gibbering daemons that shouted and gamboled around him. The lord of contagion picked at the rusted surface of a cruel axe that rested across his swollen gut.

“Stein,” Antaryon spat, “what could you possibly want now?”

The insubordination would have rankled ordinary men, but Stein let it pass him by.

“Return to formation,” he said, “Sensorium readings do not support this course of action. Caution is required. Enemy strength is unknown.”

“Caution is cowardice and I do not follow cowards,” growled Antaryon, “This foe is mine. I’ll offer their skulls to the throne and yours too if you get in my way.”

“So impatient!” chortled Mortekai. He spoke like he had fluid in the lungs and the nurglings that held him jeered and echoed his words, “I must say that I am eager as well. We don’t want to let the enemy die without the seven blessings.”

“There is an asteroid belt between the fourth and fifth planet. Enemy ships appear as dormant debris. Calculations point to an ambush there.”

“I do not need a lecture on how to wage war from a glorified servitor. Nor will I be taken by surprise by Imperium dogs. There’s nothing in this system that could pose a threat to the Tyrant.”

Stein contemplated letting both of his “subordinate” warbands rush to their death. Would the Despoiler praise his foresight or punish his wastefulness? Losing two complements of Astartes warriors could be a black mark against him.

His contemplations were cut short by his vox-slave’s pained announcement of an incoming message.

“It is from the fourth planet, my lord. Enemy transmission!”

“Main viewer,” said Stein, “We shall see the face of our enemy, my lords.”

On the bridge’s massive pict-plate, the image of an Ork of truly massive size fuzzed into view. It sat upon a throne of scrap, weapons, and crude effigies atop a plateau of alien green stone. Crackling emerald energy danced in crystaplas bottles that were tended by smaller orks in white coats and set into carved alcoves within the stone. The sky was clouded by the exhaust of a legion of orkish vehicles idling below the throne dais.

“Well, well, well,” grumbles the Ork, “wot ‘ave we ‘ere? Puny ‘umies makin’ their way inta Warrakka’s system? S’been a long while since we fought any ‘umies!”

The image resolved even further and Stein was able to make out the truly incomprehensible armor in which the Ork was clad. Stacks belched black smoke and crude hydraulics powered a savage pincer claw that looked like it could cut an Astartes in half with ease. Muscles bulged beneath leathery green skin and red eyes flashed with brutal cunning.

“You’m be in my sights now!” it bellowed, stomping on one of the grots that was scampering around the scrap throne, “You’m be eager for a fight! But don’t go tryin’ ta be sneaky! Only Orkses can be sneaky! SHOW ‘EM BOYS!”

Threat warnings lit up the sensorium as the Ork Warboss’s order burned like fire through the system. The entire asteroid belt seemed to light with red foe-sign as dorman ships came online at the huge Ork’s word. Antaryon’s ship was barreling straight into what looked like an asteroid fortress bristling with ship-killer weapons.

A savage smile split Antaryon’s face. “This is more like it! Weapons to power! Bring reactor up to maximum yield!”

Stein dismissed the holo-ghost of the Khornate lord and went back to studying the Ork’s ferocious countenance. All along his body, strange electrodes were burrowed into his flesh. Arcs of emerald power crackled from the strange electro-bottles that surrounded the dais. The white-coated orks that scuttled around the ramshackle machinery started gibbering excitedly. Their boss’s ire was up.

“We’ll kill ya just like da other ‘umies! We gots da Horderock! FIGHT DA WAAAGH AND DIE LIKE DA REST! I’M DA BIGGEST, BADDEST WARBOSS AND YOU BOYS ARE GONNA FIND OUT!”

All around Warakka, his minions were dramatically throwing switches on their machines with great showers of sparks. More green lightning streaked and cracked, rending deep furrows into the dais. Most was drawn to the electrodes in Warrakka’s flesh and he bellowed as the power coursed through him. Muscles bulged and grew as the energy danced into him. The chords in his neck strained as the Warboss hunched over in pain.

The machines sputtered and started to explode, causing the Orks to start jabbering excitedly. Warrakka howled as he grabbed his vox-caster and started laughing. It seemed to Stein that the Orks eyes were looking through the vox and right at him. His tendrils thrashed with excitement.

“You think you gots what it takes, ‘umies?” he growled and crushed the caster in one massive hand. The vox went dead.

Stein turned to Mortekai, who was watching bemused through the hololith. “Make sure Antaryon doesn’t get himself killed. It seems the Orks have our warpstone.”

[jakey-beefed-it]

3, 8, 14, 21 for 40k?

3.) Most Humble vs Most Arrogant

Most Humble: High Farseer Alethea Siamun, foremost leader of Craftworld Tel-Rethan. She sees herself as a servant of her people first and foremost, and is always internally slightly panicking that she’ll lead them to disaster. 

Most Arrogant: Lady Erys Voidtalon, Archon of the Voidtalon Reavers. Alethea’s aunt, actually. Looks down her nose at literally everyone but especially her own Commorragh trash vat-born followers. But especially Craftworlders. But especially any non-Aeldari.

8.) Happiest vs Saddest

Happiest: High King Tarren Calraenon, ruler of the Sunset Kingdom of Ruzhen upon the Exodite world of Almenor. He’s a well-liked ruler who has won the support of the recently arrived Rethani and he’s got a big ol’ crush on Alethea who seems to like him back.

Saddest: Captain (former Chapter Master/Praetor) Alexander Titus Maximus of the Ultramarines. In the Heresy, he led the 251st ‘Paladins’ Chapter. He got to watch his ideals wither on Monarchia, then his hopes snuffed out on Calth and in the following years. Spent almost 10,000 years in stasis before being awakened to serve once more as a Primaris marine. Took a demotion to Captain so he could stay with the Ultramarines rather than be assigned his own Primaris Chapter. Is wracked by grief over how the Imperium- already so far short of his ideals 10,000 years ago -has fallen into utter barbarism. 

(if you think of him as Captain Ultramar, you’ll basically get the gist)

14.) Physical Vices vs Spiritual Vices

Physical Vices: Lady Erys Voidtalon, probably. Possibly her XO, Dame Vitria Shadefall, who indulges in more drugs, less torture.

Spiritual Vices: Arakhos the Flenser, Haemonculus of the Voidtalon Reavers. All the deadly sins! Mix and match! Snort a rail of coke and perform surgery on whoever you can grab! He’s... he’s just the worst guy.

21.) Most Religious vs. Most Atheistic

Most Religious: Inquisitor Elizabeth Kane of the Ordo Hereticus. Born and raised on the Cardinal World of Espandor, she is a devout follower of the God-Emperor and believes that only through faith in Him can one protect one’s soul from the ravages of the Ruinous Powers.

Most Atheistic: Captain Alexander Titus of the Ultramarines. Born and raised on Espandor 10k years ago, when it was a relatively new colony of Macragge, inducted into the XIII Legion and firm believer in the old Imperial Truth. Actually met the Emperor once and was, of course, awed but also slightly appalled at how cold he was. Notoriously irreverent toward authority (for an Ultramarine- he’d probably be fairly tame for a White Scar or a Space Wolf), especially since waking up in m41.

(it should be noted that I kinda ship the kids from Espandor 10,000 years apart despite their religious differences; both are devoted to their ideals and good, brave leaders)

[bloomofiron]

Varajan, the Dark Iron Tyrant, Black Sun of Medrengard Daemon, the Old Night Era

Although Varajan was 'born' during the Old Night, his existence predates it. By how much is hard to say, because the Dark Tyrant was not always as he was. In mankind's Fifth Age he was the Red Star, and before that, the capricious Green Sun of the First Age. In a time before time, he was the Blue Radiant One, the Dawn of Dawns, but no one who lives who can recall it, not even Varajan himself. The Black Sun has set and risen, reforged and changed, many times, and perhaps it is that he is not yet finished casting off the unfinished shells of himself.

Born of Khorne's essence, Varajan disguised himself as a prince and walked the Materium during the First Age. The borders of reality had not yet been fully defined, and the Warp lay far closer to us than it does today. In this form, he met Martell, and the two were wed. He forgets her, each time he is shaped anew, but always finds his way back to her in the end. In his princely guise, he met a warrior clad in gold, and the two grappled with each other. Varajan was not the victor, and as a prize, the warrior took the Liber Solus from him - or so the Golden Hero believed. The Liber Solus could not truly to be taken, and later, Varajan surrendered its secrets more willingly (though no more realistically or truthfully), to one of the warrior's sons.

During the Fall of the Eldar, like so many others, the Red Star heard the birth-scream of She-Who-Thirsts and became enamored of Slannesh. He fought wars in the name of the fledgling goddess, and sent her many gifts, flattering her and praising her name in the places where the Ruinous Powers held court. To the Serpent-Coiling-Within he made grandiose promises, that he would conquer all of the material plane for her glory, or that he would capture all of the living Eldar and bring them before her throne as slaves, if only she would grant him an audience. Perhaps Slannesh was bored, or perhaps the Star's childish fawning amused her, because eventually she deigned to grant him one.

...what transpired between them, no one is quite sure, but the Red Star fled from her palaces and sequestered himself in his solar forges on Medrengard.

He gathered his armies to him, for it seemed whatever he had done and raised Slannesh's ire, and she would not rest until she saw him dead. Time passes differently, and occasionally not at all, in the Warp, and how long the conflict went on, it's difficult to say. The Fall gave way to the Old Night as centuries became millennia, human and xenos empires rose and well, and still there seemed no end to it. Had the Red Star not been born by drinking purely of Khorne's essence and had Slannesh not been young and been more practiced at warfare, he would surely have been destroyed, but this was not the way of it.

Instead, at the culmination of a fierce battle, he rose above the fray and loosed a cry that shook the Warp - a poor imitation of Slannesh's own birth-scream. The Red Star was consumed by it and destroyed utterly, all that he had been ceased to exist, and he was reborn as Varajan, the Black Sun. A good trick, to be sure, but that was not where it ended. Varajan was not of Khrone's essence, nor of Slannesh's, nor was he cast anew from the two of them twined together, he was his own creation. One free of their influences.

Slannesh, satisfied that her enemy had been destroyed, declared herself the victor and withdrew back to her pleasure palaces. Varajan was of no concern.

Others disagree.

Varajan, in his daemonic form, is Medrengard's black sun. He is far too proud to set, and so the new homeworld of the Iron Warriors knows no night, save on rare occasions when Martell passes beneath him in flight or surrounds him in the shrouds of her body. A literal star, he is far too large to engage in personal combat, though both the Imperium of Mankind and the forces of Chaos possess firepower and artifacts of sufficient might to kill suns - the Dark Tyrant is not as invincible as he believes. Interaction with Varajan typically involves him bilocating (or trilocating), taking a humanoid or monstrous form in order to speak with individuals. When walking the streets of Medrangard as a prince, the dark sun remains in the sky, and summoning Varajan calls forth one of his smaller bodies, the star that is his true self remaining fixed in place.

Typically, Varajan takes a 'human' form that is not at all human, and being that he is a sun, he's largely incapable of being subtle. He stands just under eight feet tall, with solid black flesh engraved with white glyphs. Lithe and nimble, most surfaces can bear his weight. Varajan always manifests with multiple limbs, usually an extra set of arms, and carrying along a number of sacred items, one grasped tightly in each six-fingered hand. He possesses a surprisingly mellifluous voice, and in demeanor he is an irascible flirt.

One of the oldest and most well-known daemons that inhabit the Warp, Varajan's name infests the pages of forbidden texts, and his image often adorns the banners of Chaos cults or is present in the manifestations of any of the Ruinous Powers. He is not their equal, and though he is stronger than any other daemon, he is but a pretender to their thrones. He is called forth by summoners for a number of reasons. Varajan is a warrior and blacksmith without peer, and he can forge wonders the likes of which were last seen during the First and Second Ages, or the Dark Age of Technology. He cannot create STCs, as the works that leave his forges are unique wonders. Aside from the Emperor and Fulgrim, he is one of the only beings who possesses the knowledge of how to refine truegold and argentum, and his body can serve as a crucible for both. Often, the Inquisition has called the Adeptus Mechanicus’ vast stockpiles of both materials into question, but the Priests of Mars are always quick to ensure them that these came from before the Heresy.

More often then not, Varajan is summoned in an attempt to glean knowledge of the Liber Solus, though he guards the secret jealously. Even the Emperor and Perturabo recognized the danger, and used its power only sparingly and in acts of desperation.

[ask-artemis-prima]

Rank your brothers from Most Favorite to Least Favorite :-) No holds barred.

1) Kenshin Watanabe, the Dragon - He was the first to accept me into the Imperium after I left the Craftworld. By this time, most of the Galaxy had been conquered, all of my brothers had developed into their own individuals, I had a hard time adjusting to human culture and I was afraid that there would be no use for me outside of a pretty face. Kenshin had the same feelings as well - funny since he was the second - but assured me that, despite our differences, we would all risk our lives to protect one another…. A part of me is glad that he never saw the true horrors of the Heresy.

2) Sanguinius, the Angel - What can I possibly say that so many had not already? He is both graceful and deadly and charismatic to the point it should be a crime. He was the only one of us who truly understood our Father’s vision and plans due to his unique prescient mind that even Magnus did not completely understand. The doubts and… condition he had merely made him more favorable.

3) Vulkan, the Fire Drake - Vulkan was everything that a Primarch should be. Selfless, noble, and caring, and the only one of my brother who took the time to teach me to be human, and how to use a Nocturne forge. I sense a deep sorrow within him though, and my heritage might upset him a great deal. 

4) Jaghatai Khan, the Warhawk - Khan was the soul embodiment of freedom, a trait he taught to his Legion. A tactical genius, we were all meant to be, but rather impulsive in his action. Never the less he was an honorable, and surprisingly cultured man, who had a savage side, but he lived his life as a warrior. Now if he could just find his way out of the Webway!

5) Leman Russ, the Wolf -  Everything I said about Khan, just apply it to Russ. Honestly, it amazes me that these two aren’t the closest of brothers seeing how they are exactly the same. Russ is stubborn, has a savage side, which is most of his side, which makes him quick to anger and quick to mirth, Nevertheless, he is honorable, strong independent streak and loyal to a fault. I know people like to hold Prospero over his head, but Russ was merely the sword that fell the planet, but he merely performed the duty that he was given. To further blame him and his Legion would be redundant, and to show ire solely towards him would be to blind oneself to the true culprits. Then there are those victory parties! I swear if the Imperium ever runs out of promethium, then they can just use Fenrisian Mjord.

6) Magnus, the Red - He had so much potential! On top of being a kind and insightful soul, the boundless imagination made the Gift a mark of pride rather than fear. The contributions to the Imperium, hell the Galaxy at large, could have ended the workings of the Ruinous Powers. My Father might have been the greatest human, but I don’t think he even knew what Nakaea would bring.

7) Corvus Corax, the Ravenlord - One of the few humble ones of my brothers. Corax was always a breath of fresh air when compared to the grandeur haze that the others gave off. He had the same views of freedom and intellectual knowledge as Khan, but possessed the restraint of Vulkan. He always knew when and where the best places to attack and the restraint know when it was over. Plus he and Ephrenia are just adorable together.

8) Ferrus Manus, the Gorgon - If Vulkan is a finely crafted blade, Manus is the hammer that shaped it into perfection. A crude man who despised weakness, the man had an uncanny ability to motivate those around him into superhuman acts of courage. How he and Fulgrim ever became friends I’ll never understand.

9) Rogal Dorn, the Unyielding One - That is putting it lightly. I don’t know who raised him, but I’m guessing that it might have been a glacier. He was rather intelligent in the form of siegecraft, charismatic in his blunt way, but even-tempered, understanding and wise at times. I still don’t believe that a man as unyielding as he could have died in a simple ship explosion.

10) Perturabo, the Lord of Iron - A brother who possessed a cold, calculating logic that even deterred Dorn at times, Perturabo is on that needed to relax the most. Though he had a hard exterior of a gruff stoic demeanor, Perturabo truly cared for those under his charge and was willing to take the jobs that no other Legion wanted - even my own. 

11) Lion El’Jonson, the Lion - Jonson has trust issues. Though he as courageous and honorable as his name entails, the secrets he keeps and his lack of trust in others make me question his stance. That being said, he’s not the type to stab one in the back or deceive an ally in a fight. 

12) Alpharius and Omegreon, the Twins - Though they may look the same, sound the same, and act the same, these two knuckleheads are different from each other. All it takes is a keen eye to find those traits. That being said I have no idea what they are planning or why. All I can do know is bleed Omegron’s Legion until he shows himself.

13) Konrad Curze (does he really need his title?) - So much wasted potential. He could have been the greatest Judicator in the Imperium if the Ruinous Powers didn’t dispose him on the worst planet in the Galaxy with no one to raise him. I pity my brother, no matter how much he hates it.

14) Roboutte Guiliman, the Avenging Son - When I left my home, I found planets that were brought into the Imperium by the Ultramarines. All I heard, from planet to planet, from system to system, were stories and praise of the Primarch known as Guiliman. When I revealed myself to my Father, the only person who I wanted to meet was Guiliman to see if he was the God-like figure that people proclaimed him to be. When I saw him I was… disappointed. I thought to myself that he was not a God, he was merely a man who was grasping for power. It was not until the Heresy when Guiliman showed his true nature as an honorable and caring individual. However, with recent developments, I begin to question whether this is just another scheme. If so, he wears more faces than I do.

15) Mortarion, the Death Lord - Honestly, Mortarion is an absolute mystery to me. Hates war, but slaughters thousands. Despises Psykers, but has the Gift. Rebelled against his first father, then his second, and cannot tolerate his third. I do not understand his motives, only that he like clocks - and hugs.

16) Fulgrim, the Phoenician - Or I like to call the Fop, Fulgrim could have been the Imperium’s greatest artist if his strive of his version of perfection did not cloud his judgment. It does not shock me in the least that he fell to She-Who-Thirsts. That being said, he would host the nicest parties, but I think he only used those as an excuse to show me in a dress. The joke was on him though, because I owned those parties.

17) Angron, the Red Angel - Angron, simply put, was a living weapon. You pointed him at a target and then let him go wild. However, he was fun sparring against. Though I wonder how he would react to know how he was ranked lower than Fulgrim.

18) Horus Lupercal - Though many now curse his name, for making the Galaxy the way it is today, I, for a small amount of time, saw the man in his prime. He had such wisdom, valued all things both great and small, and his charisma was on par with Sanguinius. He was our Father in many ways, and he could have been his successor, but I felt the darkness that was festering inside of him, and in the end that is what caused his demise. And people wonder why I never bowed to him.

19) Lorgar Aurelian - Lorgar was a child playing with a flamer. In a way, he showed that people needed to believe in something greater than themselves, and could have been a great writer and philosopher when the war ended. Though all of that wasted away when he began to preach about beings that he could not comprehend. In his desire to prove that he could, he never once questioned if he should.

[asktheadeptus]

Emperor of Mankind

"The Emperor Protects..."— The Lectitio Divinitatus

The Emperor of Mankind is the immortal ruling monarch of the Imperium of Man, and is described by the Imperial Ecclesiarchy and the Imperial Cult as the Father, Guardian and God of humanity. The Chaos Gods and the daemons of the Warp refer to Him as "the Anathema" for He is the greatest embodiment of universal Order in the galaxy today. He has sat immobile, his body slowly crumbling, within the Golden Throne of Terra for over 10,000 standard years. Although once a living man, His shattered, decaying body can no longer support life, and it is kept intact only by the cybernetic mechanisms of the Golden Throne and a potent mind itself sustained by the daily sacrifice of thousands of lives. The Emperor chose to sacrifice His immortal life at the end of the Horus Heresy in the service and protection of Mankind. To humanity's countless trillions across the galaxy-spanning Imperium, He is nothing less than God. Through his Imperium, Mankind is united and remains one of the most powerful intelligent races in the Milky Way Galaxy as well as its most dominant in terms of both population and territory held. United under one government, Mankind is able to survive the myriad deadly threats it faces from aliens, the Forces of Chaos and the Traitors, Heretics and mutants that lie within the Imperium's boundaries. The Imperium's rule, carried on in the Emperor's name since the end of the Horus Heresy by the High Lords of Terra and a multitude of Imperial organisations, has been long, oppressive and necessarily harsh. It has also resulted in technological and cultural stagnation, and a regression into tyranny, superstition and religious obfuscation and intolerance that would have horrified the Emperor.

Though He is no longer responsive to external stimuli, the Emperor still lies at the very heart of the Imperium's continued existence. Although He cannot be directly involved in the day-to-day running of humanity's galactic government, His existence on the Golden Throne is vital to sustaining the Imperium, since His powerful mind's presence in the Immaterium maintains and directs the Astronomican, the psychic beacon that makes possible faster-than-light Warp travel and is vital to Imperial shipping, transportation, commerce and communication. He is said to still guide His race through the psychically-reactive divination tool known as the Emperor's Tarot, which select psykers can consult to gain a glimpse of the future and the Emperor's will. He is also said to constantly battle the Chaos Gods in the Warp and prevent their further intrusion upon the material universe. His mind must remain vigilant at all times throughout the entire Imperium to safeguard the human race and to offer His protection to the faithful. Above all else, it is Mankind's collective belief in the Emperor's divinity that serves as its greatest protection from Chaos and the other hideous dangers that plague the galaxy. As the Imperial Creed has taught for over 10,000 standard years, the Emperor protects...

History

Origins

The Emperor is the collective reincarnation of all the shamans of Neolithic humanity's various peoples, the first human psykers. The foul Warp entities that would become the four Great Powers of Chaos had not yet fully formed when the Emperor was born on Earth during prehistoric times, somewhere in ancient central Anatolia (modern Turkey) in the 8th Millennium B.C. But even before the birth of the Emperor, as humanity grew and progressed, the Warp began to become increasingly disturbed by the dark undercurrents of humanity's collective psyche, and the shamans began to lose their former ability to reincarnate into new bodies. Instead, upon dying, their souls were being consumed by the entities and daemons of the Warp. Eventually the shamans of humanity, unable to reincarnate, would become extinct, and without the shamans and their psychic abilities to guide the race, humanity would inevitably fall prey to the corruptions of Chaos, just as eventually happened to the Eldar. In these ancient days, all the shamans of Earth gathered in a grand conclave to decide what must be done to stave off the day when they had all been consumed by the Warp.

In the end, the shamans decided to pool their collective psychic energies by reincarnating as a single soul in a single human body to create an individual they called "the New Man." The thousands of shamans, as one, took poison, and as one, they died, their souls flowing into the Immaterium in a rush of psychic power that overwhelmed those daemons who sought to feast upon it with a cleansing, purifying fire, a flame imperishable that became one soul out of many. A year later the child who would become the Emperor was born in a Neolithic settlement of Anatolian herders and farmers. His psychic power was so great that its energies altered His genome and physiology in the womb and rendered Him immortal so He would no longer need to reincarnate and could not be assaulted by the daemonic creatures of the Immaterium upon His death. As He grew older, His potent psychic powers began to manifest. Over the many millennia of His life, He traveled among the different peoples of Mankind, using His ancient wisdom to help where He could in the guise of many different benevolent persons from human myth, religion and history. But as His psychic powers further developed, He became ever more aware of the terrible dangers that awaited Mankind in the broader universe and He resolved to do all in His power to defend and guide humanity towards a future as the predominant species in the galaxy. As more and more humans were born with the mutant psyker genes that granted them the ability to wield the potent power of the Immaterium in the last centuries of the Dark Age of Technology, and humanity suffered from the deadly effects of uncontrolled psykers, the Emperor realized that He would have to take a more direct and open role in human affairs than ever before.

For thousands of standard years before becoming the Emperor, He guided and watched humanity develop over the course of its history, assuming the guise of a large number of historical personages. He was aware that the darker extremes of human nature were feeding the growth of the Chaos Gods in the Warp, and so He sought to promote peace and harmony on Earth and thereby curb the growth of the Ruinous Powers' strength. The Chaos Gods themselves recognized the Emperor as their greatest enemy among all the intelligent beings of the galaxy. Only at the end of the Age of Strife did the Emperor emerge from obscurity to take a more direct hand in the future of humanity, conquering the warring factions of Mankind's home world and establishing His direct rule over the Earth. The Emperor accepted the deaths of the many innocents that resulted from His conquest with great remorse in order to achieve the greater good of unifying humanity and protecting it from the manifest predations of the Warp.

With the assistance of the Adeptus Mechanicus on Mars, who joined with the Emperor and the people of Terra in the Treaty of Mars that formally founded the Imperium of Man in the 30th Millennium, the Emperor created the first Space Marines and fleets of interstellar star ships that would carry His armies across galactic space. The objective was a Great Crusade that would unify all of the planets colonized by Man during the Dark Age of Technology prior to the Age of Strife into one Imperium of Man, and also subdue, destroy, or force into exile all intelligent alien races from the Milky Way Galaxy, what was to become the Imperial Domain, the manifest destiny of Mankind. The Emperor also created the superhuman Primarchs from whom the Space Marines' gene-seed was later developed to serve as His primary military commanders for the Great Crusade. The Chaos Gods, however, sought to thwart the Emperor's grand plan. The Primarchs were sucked into the Warp even as they gestated in the gene-laboratories deep beneath the Imperial Palace, and were scattered across the inhabited worlds of the galaxy. During the Great Crusade all but two of the twenty Primarchs were found and united with the Space Marine Legions that had been created after their disappearances from the genetic material that they had left behind. As the Emperor traveled across the stars, some humans wanted to worship Him as a god, however He forbade this, proclaiming, "I am not a god; rather than enslaving humanity I want to free it from ignorance and superstition." However, Lorgar, the Primarch of the Word Bearers Legion, desperate to find some outlet for his belief that Man must have a God to worship to be truly whole, gave in to the constant whispers of the Chaos Gods and, after corrupting his Legion to their service, sent his First Chaplain Erebus to poison the minds of the other Primarchs and their Legions. Just as the Imperium had reached its apex in the early 31st Millennium, the Emperor's most trusted son, the Primarch Horus of the Luna Wolves Legion (later renamed the Sons of Horus), fell to Chaos as a result of his own pride and ambition and betrayed the Emperor, and along with fully half the Space Marine Legions, initiated a massive civil war for control of the galaxy. This rebellion is known to history as the Horus Heresy. Though the Emperor ultimately defeated Horus during the Traitor Legions' assault on Terra, He was all but slain in the battle after suffering a crippling loss of limbs and mortal systemic damage; only the life-supporting Golden Throne has sustained His living corpse in a kind of stasis, neither dead nor truly alive. Trapped within His prison of flesh, only the Emperor's mind is allowed to wander free within the Immaterium, still seeking to protect and guide humanity to an increasingly distant better.

Rise of the Emperor and the Great Crusade

The man who would later become known as the Emperor of Mankind first appears in Imperial records as just one of the many warlords struggling for control of Terra during the later part of the Age of Strife in the 30th Millennium. The Emperor undertook a series of military campaigns against all the other warlords on the planet that would collectively later become known as the Unification Wars. During these conflicts the Emperor employed several military formations -- such as the genetically-altered warriors of the unit designated Geno 5-2 Chiliad who would go on to serve in the Imperial Army -- that consisted of using genetically-enhanced warriors to maximize His tactical prowess. The most powerful of these troops were the proto-Astartes known as the Thunder Warriors. These warriors played a significant role in the Emperor's eventual victory over all the other warlords of Terra and led Him to believe that His future plans to reunite Mankind would require the creation of an even more potent core of genetically-engineered military commanders and warriors. Following the Battle of Mount Ararat in the Kingdom of Urartu, which was the last battle of the Unification Wars, the Unity of Terra was at last achieved after decades of blood, loss and fire. With this victory, the planet and population of Terra were at last unified under the single rule of the Emperor. But to make His dream of reuniting all of Mankind within a single galaxy-spanning empire possible, the Emperor knew that He would have to make some difficult, even immoral decisions.

Their purpose having been achieved, the Emperor ordered all of the remaining Thunder Warriors to be liquidated, as they were a dangerous group of men to leave alive in a time of peace and they needed to be removed to make way for their eventual successors, the Primarchs and the Space Marines. Official Imperial propaganda proclaimed that the Thunder Warriors had heroically died to the last man during the Battle of Mount Ararat, the greatest of their number, Arik Taranis, surviving just long enough to raise the Emperor's banner when victory, and unity, was achieved. But the Emperor could not wipe away the stain entirely, for several Thunder Warriors managed to escape what they called the Culling, including Arik Taranis, who would yet have a role to play in the fate of the Emperor's realm.

The Emperor next set in motion His plan to defend and better Mankind across the galaxy, by unifying those lost bastions of humanity scattered across the myriad stars under the aegis of the newborn Imperium. This extraordinary undertaking would become known as the Great Crusade.

The Emperor prepared extensively for the Great Crusade in the years after Unity was achieved on Terra; He created the special astro-telepath (Astropath) corps to link his eventual interstellar dominion together through the use of telepathy, and engineered the creation of the Astronomican, a supremely powerful psychic navigational beacon powered by the Emperor's own will and psychic abilities that would allow simplified and safer interstellar travel through the Warp across far greater distances than before. Chief amongst His designs, however, was the creation of new legions of superhuman, genetically-engineered warriors, the logical extension of the gene-troopers already under his command, though they would be far superior to the gene-enhanced troops of the Imperial Army He had used during the Unification Wars. The Emperor first undertook the Primarch Project, the creation of 20 superhuman infants whose genomes had been designed using His own genetic code as the foundation, who were intended to mature into powerful generals and statesmen for His armies. The Primarchs would be beings of such great mental and physical superiority that nothing merely human could stand against them.

To enhance the Primarchs beyond the capabilities that even genetic-engineering allowed, however, the Emperor also drew upon the powers of the Warp to enhance His creations, imbuing them with nearly godlike levels of charisma and capability, but also unintentionally making them susceptible to corruption by the entities of the Warp. However, this plan went awry with the intervention of the Ruinous Powers, who feared that the Emperor's plans might succeed too well, vastly increasing the hold of Order over the universe and diminishing their own strength. It is for this reason that all of daemonkind refers to the Emperor as "the Anathema." While accounts vary as to exactly what happened, the end of the tale is always the same; the Primarchs were cast into the Warp in their gestation chambers from beneath the Himalazian (Himalaya) Mountains in the Emperor's gene-labs despite the multiple psychic wards the Emperor had laid down upon the laboratory, and thought lost. In the aftermath of these events, the Emperor conceived a new plan. Using genetic samples that had been derived from the Primarchs' genomes, He created a caste of warriors who would possess some of the same superhuman qualities of the Primarchs and Himself. These successors to the genetically-enhanced human warriors of the Unification Wars-era were the Legiones Astartes, the Space Marine Legions of the First Founding.

After their creation, the Emperor led the 20 Space Marine Legions, all of their Astartes originally recruited from Terran-born males, in their first missions to give them experience in war and diplomacy through the reconquest of the rest of the Solar System. The Space Marines drove alien slavers from the moons of Saturn and Jupiter and most importantly, achieved peace and the eventual integration of Imperial Terra with the Cult Mechanicum of Mars. This crucial military and political alliance, formalized in the 30th Millennium with the signing of the Treaty of Mars, provided the Emperor with much of the technological means and materiel required to extend His crusade into the stars. At the same time, the alliance formalized the creation of the Imperium of Man and established the Imperial bureaucracy on Terra, transforming the Cult Mechanicum into the Adeptus Mechanicus, one of the myriad organisations that comprised the newborn Adeptus Terra, the massive government of the Imperium, the future Priesthood of Earth.

With the final abatement of the Warp Storms caused by the birth-pangs of the Chaos God Slaanesh and ended by the Fall of the Eldar, the Emperor finally began the Great Crusade at the end of the 30th Millennium. The Emperor's forces, concentrated amongst a rapidly growing cadre of Expeditionary Fleets, rediscovered long-lost human colony worlds, cast out alien oppressors, and claimed vast new territories for the newborn Imperium to exploit across the galaxy. Perhaps most importantly, the Emperor, leading His Crusade, rediscovered His lost sons, the Primarchs, as the Expeditionary Fleets pushed out deeper into the depths of unexplored space. Scattered across the galaxy, the Primarchs were found one-by-one, over a period of many decades, and reunited with their father and their own genetic sons in the Space Marine Legions. All were placed in command of the Astartes Legions created from their respective gene-seed and played a major part in forging their father's Imperium. Together they brought thousands of worlds into Imperial Compliance, establishing the rule of the Imperium over these worlds and inculcating in them the values of the Imperial Truth -- a rationalist, atheistic faith in science and technological progress that rejected all the vestiges of human irrationality and superstition, including all forms of religious faith.

The Emperor Himself declared that Mankind would never be free to progress and advance to its destined position as the pre-eminent intelligent species in the Milky Way Galaxy until "the last stone from the last church was cast down onto the last priest." He had already purged ancient Terra of all its ancient religions and superstitious beliefs by the time the Great Crusade began, even going so far as to personally witness the destruction of the final church on Terra's ancient soil after engaging its resident holy man, Uriah Olathaire, in a battle of ideas, wit and dogma. The Imperial Truth also held that humanity was the species which should rightfully rule the galaxy since its physical form was both the most pure and all of the other intelligent alien races, such as the Eldar, had already tried and failed to maintain galaxy-spanning civilizations. Now it was Mankind's turn to find a place amidst the stars. As almost all intelligent alien species encountered by Mankind had either proven to be irrevocably hostile to humanity or presented a future threat to human dominance and exploitation of the galaxy, xenos species were generally to be exterminated outright if they presented the slightest threat or obstacle to the Imperium. The Emperor believed the Imperial Truth needed to be brought to all the worlds of Mankind, peacefully at first but imposed by war if necessary, because the Emperor believed that true unity was the only way for humanity to survive and prosper in the face of a very hostile universe. If this required the unfortunate use of force against those who refused to understand this necessity, then so be it. Just as He had during the Unification Wars, the Emperor again lamented the loss of innocent lives and the curtailing of individual freedoms that the fleets of the Great Crusade sometimes trod upon, but He could see no other way to safeguard humanity and weaken the endless corruptive power of the Ruinous Powers at the same time.

While the Imperial Truth upheld the light of reason and science, it did have one unbreakable proscription: Men must never develop artificially intelligent machines. The Emperor remembered that it was the great war fought by Mankind against the thinking machines known as the Men of Iron that had helped to destroy humanity's last united interstellar civilization at the end of the Dark Age of Technology and He had no desire to see the human race repeat its past mistakes. As such, when the Expeditionary Fleets of the Great Crusade encountered advanced human civilizations in the dark of space that had developed artificial intelligence, these worlds' populations were simply exterminated outright as potential dangers to the entire body politic of the newborn Imperium.

Additionally, there was an increasing concern as the Great Crusade progressed about the use of psychic sorcery by agents and warriors of the Imperium. The Emperor was the most powerful human psyker to have ever lived, but He was deeply ambivalent about the growing spread of the mutant psyker genes through more and more of the human population. He rightly believed that most of Mankind was not yet evolved enough either physically or spiritually to truly control the great power of the Warp or avoid the temptations offered by its more malevolent denizens. More and more often during the progress of the Imperial conquest of the galaxy, the Imperial Army and Space Marines would make planetfall only to find that the populace were in thrall to mysterious powers and unnatural mystics called "sorcerers." These people were essentially members of Chaos Cults who would resist the forces of the Emperor with sorcerous psychic powers granted them by daemonic entities from the Warp. These psychic powers were also very akin to those used by the Thousand Sons Legion of the Primarch Magnus the Red. The Thousand Sons had come under criticism for their use of sorcery by the Primarch Mortarion of the Death Guard Legion, who knew by his own personal experience with sorcerers on his homeworld of Barbarus the dangers to be found in anything spawned from the Warp, and Leman Russ of the Space Wolves Legion, for whom any battle fought through sleight of hand, clever deceit or any trick other than straight physical combat was by definition dishonourable. Russ found the Thousand Sons' use of sorcery distasteful in the extreme. It was Russ who fought the hardest for the Imperium to ban the use of psychic powers after his own experiences during several campaigns of the Great Crusade where his Space Wolves had fought beside the Thousand Sons. The schism grew so great that it threatened the very stability of the fledgling Imperium and so the Emperor Himself called for an Imperial conclave to resolve the issue once and for all.

Both sides of the debate over the use of psychic abilities arrived at the world of Nikaea determined to present their views, with the Emperor as the arbiter, enthroned above the dais in an ancient amphitheater that seated tens of thousands where the conclave was held. On one side of the question were the Witch Hunters like the Sisters of Silence who presented their case by reciting a litany of human suffering inflicted upon the Emperor's own subjects by sorcerers enslaved by what would eventually later be recognized during the Horus Heresy as Chaos, of gibbering mutants who had lost their humanity, and of cults and power-hungry men who turned their psychic gifts to dark purposes. All present were also aware of the terrible damage that had been done by uncontrolled and daemon-possessed psykers during the early days of the Age of Strife. On the other side was a powerful advocate for the continued use of sorcery, the Primarch Magnus the Red. His very presence frightened many, but he began to speak with the great charisma that only a Primarch could wield. His argument was that no knowledge was tainted in and of itself, and no pursuit of knowledge was ever wrong so long as the seeker of that truth was the master of what he learned rather than its pawn. He spoke with finality that his Thousand Sons Astartes had mastered their knowledge of sorcery and that there was no knowledge too labyrinthine for them to grasp or that they could not master to serve Mankind rather than enslaving it. Magnus called on the Emperor not to ban the use of psychic abilities, but to contribute to further research into their usage so that they might be harnessed more fully for the betterment of humanity and the Imperium.

Magnus had spoken passionately with great power and the Council of Nikaea became even more divided. While they had strong arguments in their favor to justify their anti-psyker position, the Witch Hunters could not effectively match Magnus' persuasiveness. The tension could easily have been cut with a knife when a group of Space Marine Librarians approached the dais. The Emperor acknowledged them with a nod, and all present fell silent. Among the group were some of the greatest Librarians of the Space Marine Legions. They formed a semi-circle around the dais to indicate that they spoke as one voice, but it was a young Librarian Epistolary who spoke for the group. A psyker, he proposed, was like an athlete, a gifted individual whose native talent must be carefully nurtured. Psykers were not innately evil in themselves, but like any tool, could be used for either good or evil purposes. Sorcery, however, was a knowledge of how to wield psychic powers that had to be sought for, even bargained for with the foul entities of the Warp. No one could be truly sure who or what had benefited in the deal. The Librarians proposed that all psykers be strictly educated by the Imperium with the express purpose of using their abilities to serve Mankind. This should become an immediate Imperial priority. The practice of psychic sorcery would forever be outlawed as an unforgivable offense against Mankind and the worst kind of heresy. The end result of the Council of Nikaea's deliberations was a compromise that offered both the pro-and-anti-psyker factions something.

The Council of Nikaea was also the trial of Magnus the Red -- for he was accused of sorcery and of introducing sorcerous practices to the Space Marine Legions through the institution of the corps of Librarians. As the evidence of Magnus' continued practice of sorcery became apparent, the Emperor barely contained His wrath as He pronounced judgement on the Primarch of the Thousand Sons, for He had entrusted His son years before to obey His bidding and foreswear the use of such occult practices because of the dangers inherent to the Warp. He had entrusted only Magnus with the true secrets of the Warp to which only they remained privy, but now it appeared that His son had disobeyed His edicts and at the very least dabbled in the occult and the forbidden black arts of psychic sorcery. The confrontation between father and son is recorded in the Grimoire Hereticus.

The Emperor's judgement at the Council of Nikaea proved severe, largely as a result of His anger at Magnus. The Emperor rejected the Librarians' proposed compromise outright. With the exceptions of Navigators and Astropaths who were properly trained, controlled and sanctioned by the Imperium and were necessary to its continued existence, the Space Marine Legions were no longer to employ psykers within their ranks. He commanded that the Primarchs were to close their Librarius departments forthwith and not to indulge the undoubted psychic talents of those Asartes who possessed the gift. All existing Space Marine Librarians were likewise forbidden to make use of their abilities. The Council's rulings also created a new position amongst the Space Marine Legions, the Space Marine Chaplain, to uphold the Imperial Truth and help maintain the purity of an Astartes Legion's dedication and fidelity to the Emperor's commands.

The Emperor ordered Magnus to cease the practice of sorcery and incantation, and the pursuit of all knowledge related to magic. Magnus, of course, did not like the idea, and he remained bitterly opposed to the decision made at Nikaea. But in the end, he bent his will to his father the Emperor and agreed to obey, though the machinations of the Ruinous Powers would ultimately lead to a far darker fate for Magnus the Red and his Thousand Sons. The Edicts of Nikaea stood largely untouched for the next 10,000 standard years as the primary Imperial policy regarding human psychic mutation. Only the edict against the use of Librarians within the ranks of the Space Marines would be reversed as a result of the Horus Heresy, as that terrible civil war made clear to the rulers of the Imperium that Astartes psykers were essential to combat the power of the Forces of Chaos.

Imperial Webway Project

Well over a standard century into the Great Crusade, the Emperor decided to return to Terra to oversee a special project that He intended to cap His ambitions for humanity. This was the secret Webway Project, in which the Emperor planned to use a special artifact from the Dark Age of Technology that had been discovered on Terra, the potent psychic amplifier known as the Golden Throne, to enter and reshape the Labyrinthine Dimension of the Eldar Webway to serve as a direct and instantaneous transport network between all the worlds of the Imperium. This human Webway would recreate the vast network of Warp Portals that had once bound together the Old Ones' and the Eldar's ancient interstellar empires and would allow Mankind to advance at a more rapid rate, scientifically and economically, than at any other time in its history. A human-dominated Webway would also truly unite the Imperium, preventing Mankind from ever again being divided by time and great distance. But this project would require all of His considerable attention and had to be pursued in secret, lest the Eldar or other opponents of the project learn of it and seek to stop it before the Emperor's efforts could come to fruition.

The Golden Throne had been built during the Dark Age of Technology to allow human access to the Eldar Webway and took the form of a heavily mechanised throne created from an unknown type of psychically-reactive gold-complected alloy that was suspended over a pair of massive doors composed of the same golden alloy. These doors acted as the portal to the Webway and were supposedly large enough for a Warhound-class Scout Titan to walk through upright. The Golden Throne was originally located in the depths of the Imperial Palace where the Emperor's original gene-laboratory complex had once stood, an area known as the Imperial Dungeon. Hundreds of red-robed Adeptus Mechanicus Tech-priests and Servitors toiled in the Imperial Dungeon, as the Emperor sat upon the Golden Throne and used His immense powers to hold the portal into the Webway open for His workers, who constructed a new section of the Labyrinthine Dimension intended to connect Terra to the rest of the largely abandoned Eldar transdimensional transport network. Because the Webway had been constructed from a psychically-resistant material intended to protect it from penetration by the entities of the Warp, and Mankind did not possess the technology required to replicate it, the Emperor had to personally shield the new human-built sections of the Webway from Warp incursions. This required him to remain on the Golden Throne continuously and was the reason why He had been forced to leave the Great Crusade in the hands of His Primarchs and return to Terra to oversee the project personally.

As such, following the extraordinary victory of Imperial forces over the greatest Ork WAAAGH! encountered by the Imperium, until the Third War for Armageddon 10,000 standard years later, during the Ullanor Crusade, the Emperor decided that He was no longer directly needed to command the efforts of the Great Crusade. To this end, the Emperor placed Horus, His favoured and most talented son, in charge of the military advancement of the Great Crusade in His stead. Horus was foremost amongst the Primarchs and was the first re-discovered by the Emperor on the dying world of Cthonia that lay so close to Terra that Warp-Drive was not needed to reach the planet. Horus was the only Primarch to serve in the Great Crusade alongside his father for many decades and was the most highly honoured of the Emperor's sons, the Primarch he most trusted and most loved. Granting him the unique title and rank of Warmaster, the Emperor declared that the time had come for His sons to show Him what great leaders they were. Turning His back on direct military matters, the Emperor then created the Council of Terra (the precursor of the High Lords of Terra), the Imperial Tithe, and expanded the civil governing and bureaucratic bodies of the Imperium like the Adeptus Administratum, before retiring in seclusion beneath the Imperial Palace to begin work upon the Golden Throne and His secret plan to invade the Webway of the Eldar and bring at least a portion of it under humanity's control. But the Emperor's decision to not tell His sons why He had retired to Terra as well as His decision to begin shifting the Imperium's government out of the direct control of the Primarchs and to the Terran nobility and bureaucrats whom they detested sowed the seeds of discord among the Primarchs, as did disquiet over the Emperor's decision to raise Horus above his brothers by naming him the Warmaster and thus their commanding officer. From these seeds of ambition, pride and jealousy the Chaos Gods would find fertile ground to corrupt many of the Primarchs and bring on the horrors of the Horus Heresy.

Horus Heresy

This turn of events did not please all of the Emperor's subjects, several of His Primarch sons in particular. In the final stages of the Great Crusade, the Emperor's most trusted son Horus succumbed to the temptations of Chaos. This seduction had been set in place over long decades by the Primarch Lorgar and his Word Bearers Legion. The idea of "the Pilgrimage," a journey to the legendary place where mortals could directly interact with the Gods, was an ancient mythological trope on many human-settled worlds of the Milky Way Galaxy, including Lorgar and the Word Bearers' home world of Colchis. Of course, such a place, the Warp, did exist, and one could discover the Primordial Truth of the universe there, i.e. that the Immaterium was dominated by the powerful spiritual entities known as the Chaos Gods.

Prompted by the so-called Pilgrimage of Lorgar to discover whether or not the Gods once worshiped by the adherents of the Old Faith of the Word Bearers' home world of Colchis actually existed, Lorgar journeyed with the Word Bearers Legion's Serrated Suns Chapter to what was then the fringes of known Imperial space as part of the 1301st Expeditionary Fleet of the Great Crusade. At this time, Lorgar had not yet fallen to the corruption of Chaos, though he had turned against the Emperor of Mankind as a deity no longer worthy of his worship after the Emperor and the Ultramarines had personally humiliated him and the entire Word Bearers Legion on the world of Khur 43 years before the start of the Horus Heresy.

The Emperor had come to Khur personally with His Regent, Malcador the Sigillite, after ordering the Ultramarines to destroy the Khurian city of Monarchia where the Emperor was worshiped as a God as a result of the teachings of the Word Bearers. He made his displeasure known to Lorgar about the Word Bearers spreading the religion of Emperor-worship to every world they brought into the Imperium, in direct contravention of the rationalist, atheist philosophy of the Imperial Truth. The Emperor forced the entire Legion to kneel against their will through the use of His psychic might and then explained that they were the only Astartes Legion to have failed His purpose during the Great Crusade. After this humiliation, Lorgar, on the advice of his First Captain Kor Phaeron and the Word Bearers' First Chaplain Erebus, decided to undertake a Pilgrimage to discover if the Gods worshiped by the ancient Old Faith of Colchis were real and worthy of the Word Bearers' faith and allegiance. Lorgar believed that the Emperor was wrong to condemn Mankind's natural instinct to seek out the divine as an unworthy superstition and he intended to discover if there were truly deities worthy of humanity's respect. To this end, though Lorgar no longer had any love or loyalty for the Emperor, he and his XVII Legion rejoined the Great Crusade but did so only for their efforts to serve as a front for their pursuit of the Pilgrimage.

The Word Bearers were also accompanied on this Pilgrimage by 5 members of the Adeptus Custodes who had been set by the Emperor to watch over everything the Word Bearers did to prevent them from falling back into error once more. The Word Bearers' pursuit of any scrap of information that could be found on the Primordial Truth or the nature of the place where Gods and mortals could mingle ultimately led the 1301st Expeditionary Fleet to the Cadia System near the largest Warp Storm in the universe, later known to the Imperium as the Eye of Terror. The Expeditionary Fleet's Master of Astropaths advised Lorgar that unusual "voices" in the Warp were heard in the vicinity of the great Warp rift, voices that spoke directly to the Primarch as well, which were the voices of the Chaos entities within the Immaterium. It would be in the Cadia System that Lorgar would learn that his suspicions had been correct and that all of the religions across the galaxy that possessed so many similarities to the Colchisian Old Faith were not coincidences, but expressions of worship in the universal truth that was the existence of Chaos.

The decision was made to hold orbit over Cadia and for the 1301st Fleet's elements to make planetfall on the unknown world, designated as 1301-12. The landing force was comprised of Imperial Army, Word Bearers, Adeptus Custodes and Legio Cybernetica elements. The landing party, led by Lorgar, was greeted by a large number of barbaric human tribes, tribes described as "dressed in rags and wielding spears tipped by flint blades...yet they showed little fear." Most notable were the barbarians' purple eyes, which reflected the colour of the Eye of Terror itself in the spectrum of visible light. Despite the Custodian Vendatha's protests and request to execute the heathens, the Word Bearers approached the natives. A strange woman emerged from the crowd and addressed the Primarch directly, calling him Lorgar Aurelian and welcoming him to Cadia. This woman, the Chaos priestess Ingethel, would ultimately lead the Primarch down a path of spiritual enlightenment that actually marked the beginning of Lorgar's fall to heresy and Chaos. Later, the Priestess Ingethel of Cadia would initiate a ritual that would see her transformed into the Daemon Prince known as Ingethel the Ascended, and then lead the 1301st Fleet's scout vessel Orfeo's Lament into the Eye of Terror.

Within the Eye of Terror, the Serrated Sun Chapter of the Word Bearers Legion witnessed the failure of the ancient Eldar empire first hand in the form of the Crone Worlds that had been scoured of all life that littered the Eye's region of space. Ingethel, of course, lied to the Word Bearers about how the Chaos God Slaanesh had truly been born and warned that the Eldar had failed as a species and suffered the Fall because at the moment of their ascension they were unable to accept the Primordial Truth, i.e. worship Chaos. They gave birth to a God of Pleasure, yet they had felt no joy at her coming. Their new God, Slaanesh, had awoken to consciousness in the 29st Millennium to find its worshippers abandoning it out of ignorance and fear, and from the Prince of Pleasure's grief was born the endless storm of the Great Eye (the Eye of Terror), an echo of the birth-screams of the Eldar's new and rejected God. The nature of the Primordial Truth was revealed to the Word Bearers in the ashes of the Eldar empire, and Ingethel warned them that in order for humanity as a species to survive they must not commit the same sins the Eldar did, and must instead accept the worship of Chaos.

The surviving Space Marines of the Word Bearers' Serrated Sun Chapter eventually returned to Cadia and related to Lorgar all that had happened and all that they had learned within the Eye, the place where mortals and Gods could meet. Following the visits into the Eye of Terror, Lorgar ordered a cyclonic bombardment of the planet, wiping out the Cadians and leaving the planet abandoned so that no others could stumble upon the secret of the Primordial Truth that had been entrusted to him alone by the Chaos Gods. However, the planet's extremely strategic location meant that it would prove useful to the Imperium and in the 32nd Millennium Imperial colonists were dispatched to resettle the world, becoming the ancestors of the present-day population of Cadians. Perhaps as a result of the Eye of Terror's proximity, this later population of Cadians also soon developed the unusual violet-coloured eyes that had marked the first human inhabitants of the planet.

This "truth" changed Lorgar and the Word Bearers forever as they were exposed to the Ruinous Powers of Chaos and slowly corrupted, the first of the Legiones Astartes to worship the Chaos Gods and become Traitors to the Emperor in their hearts. Lorgar and the Word Bearers spent the remaining years of the Great Crusade attempting to enlighten humanity about the true spiritual nature of Creation, ultimately resorting to manipulation and deception to sway nine of the Primarchs to the cause of Chaos as their Gods demanded, the most notable being the Warmaster Horus. When it became clear that Mankind could not be enlightened by Chaos without first being forcibly weaned at a great price in blood from the Emperor's false Imperial Truth, Lorgar willingly helped orchestrate the events of the Horus Heresy itself.

To this end, Lorgar used his Legion's First Chaplain Erebus as his agent. Erebus stole a Chaos-infected blade known as a Kinebrach Anathame from the branch of humanity known as the Interex during the Luna Wolves' brief contact with that technologically-advanced offshoot of Mankind. When Horus and the Luna Wolves personally arrived on the moon of the world of Davin to put down a rebellion against Imperial authority led by the former Planetary Governor Eugen Temba, Erebus made sure that the Anathame ended up in Temba's hands where he could use it to wound Horus. Temba had become a servant of the Plague Lord Nurgle and the moon of Davin was a decaying swamp filled with undead horrors like Plague Zombies created from Temba's Imperial Army garrison who caused Horus and the Luna Wolves no small amount of grief. In a final confrontation on the bridge of his downed Imperial warship, Horus slew the vile Nurgleite, but not before the Anathame bit deep into his flesh and delivered a toxin personally created by the Plague Lord, a poison so powerful that not even the Primarch's enhanced immune system could successfully fight it off. In desperation, the Luna Wolves allowed Erebus to take Horus to the Davinite Lodge Priests of the Temple of the Serpent Lodge, a Chaotic temple on Davin, who promised that they could heal the Warmaster.

During his "healing," the Warmaster's spirit was actually sent into the Immaterium to meet with the Ruinous Powers with Erebus as his guide. Drawing on the Primarch's own untapped subconscious wells of ambition and jealousy, Horus was shown in a vision granted by the Ruinous Powers that the reason the Emperor had left the Great Crusade and returned to Terra was so that he could attempt to reach godhood, abandon all his sons and betray the Imperial Truth's promise to enlighten humanity and free it from the shackles of false gods and organised religion. Believing this vision of the future, which ironically was actually a vision of the Imperium that would only come to pass because of his betrayal of the Emperor, Horus saw it as his duty to save the Imperium of Man from such a fate and turned on his father, accepting the assistance of the Ruinous Powers in the guise of Chaos Undivided in return for his actions against the Emperor. Having corrupted fully half of the Space Marine Legions to the service of Chaos, Horus then led them against the Emperor and plunged the fledgling galactic empire into a colossal civil war that lasted for 7 standard years and began with the terrible betrayals of the Loyalist forces during the Battles of Istvaan III and Istvaan V. This conflict, known to later generations as the Horus Heresy, became the most terrible in human history, and billions perished as the Traitor Legions tore apart the empire they had helped to forge. The climax of the conflict came during the Battle of Terra, when the Traitor Legions and the other Forces of Chaos that they led unsuccessfully assaulted the heart of the Imperial Palace itself. Unable to breach the Inner Palace and the throne room of the Emperor due to the sacrifice of countless Loyalist Astartes and the victory of the Primarch Sanguinius over the Bloodthirster Greater Daemon Ka'Bandha, Horus feared that his forces were running out of time as Loyalist reinforcements moved to reach Terra and relieve their compatriots. Hoping to force a final confrontation that would decide the course of the war once and for all, Horus deliberately dropped the Void Shields surrounding his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, which stood in orbit above Mankind's homeworld.

Throughout all of this, the Emperor had been forced to remain on the mechanism of the Golden Throne. At the start of the Horus Heresy, the Primarch Magnus the Red had violated the Edicts of Nikaea to use sorcery to penetrate the psychic wards of the Imperial Palace and bring news of Horus' treachery directly to the Emperor. The Emperor had refused to believe Magnus' warning about His favored son and instead came to believe that it was Magnus who had been corrupted by Chaos because of his decision to continue to use sorcery in violation of Imperial law. The Emperor dispatched Leman Russ and his Space Wolves Legion to bring Magnus back to Terra to account for his actions, but Horus tampered with the Emperor's orders and had the Space Wolves launch an all-out assault on the Thousand Sons Legion's home world of Prospero that ultimately led to the fall of the Thousand Sons and Magnus to Chaos and the service of the Chaos God Tzeentch in order to save both themselves and all the knowledge they had collected over the centuries. At the same time, Magnus' spell to penetrate the Imperial Palace's psychic wards had also badly damaged the Webway Project, allowing hordes of daemons to gleefully punch through the Emperor's weakened psychic shield and assault the thousands of Adeptus Mechanicus workers constructing the human portions of the Webway. The Adeptus Custodes and the Sisters of Silence were forced to fight a desperate battle to prevent the daemons from pouring through the portal generated by the Golden Throne and into the dungeon of the Imperial Palace itself. While the Imperial forces were ultimately successful in fighting back the daemonic assault, only the Emperor was powerful enough to keep the portal closed and the daemons trapped within the human-constructed Webway. As a result, as the Horus Heresy reached its climax seven standard years after its start, the Emperor was forced to remain on the Golden Throne at all times save for the few moments when Malcador the Sigillite, the Regent of Terra and the second strongest human psyker, could take His place.

When the Emperor learned of Horus' action in lowering his flagship's Void Shields during the final Battle of Terra, He realised that His treacherous son was actually offering an invitation to battle. The Emperor believed He had to take the war to Horus to put an end to the terrible conflict once and for all. He had Malcador the Sigillite take his place upon the Golden Throne to protect Terra from a daemonic assault and prepared a strike team of Astartes to face the Warmaster on his own ground. The last act of the bloody treachery of the Horus Heresy was played out above Terra, as the Emperor led a desperate assault of Imperial Fists and Blood Angels Space Marines against Horus' Chaos-corrupted flagship, using teleporter technology to make their way aboard. The Primarch Sanguinius also accompanied the assault force, but the Warmaster's Chaotic powers caused the attackers to be split up and teleported to random locations throughout the massive warship. Sanguinius reached Horus first and met him in a mighty battle that resulted in his own death at his brother's hands, but not before the angelic Primarch managed to create a small gap in the Warmaster's Terminator Armour. The Emperor eventually managed to make His way to the Battle Barge's bridge.

Though the Emperor was a being of unfathomable psychic and physical might, Horus had become a being of monstrous Chaotic strength, bloated with the combined powers of all four Chaos Gods, the true champion of Chaos Undivided, even as the Emperor remained the Champion of Order. The two champions engaged one another in a tragic battle of father and son, as Horus mortally wounded the Emperor, tearing off one of His arms and shattering His internal organs, largely because the Emperor still loved Horus and could not bring Himself to use the full extent of His psychic abilities to defeat His son. At the critical point in the battle, a lone Adeptus Custodes warrior entered the Battle Barge's bridge, having successfully caught up to his master. Horus flayed him alive with but a look using the potent powers of Chaos sorcery that he now commanded. In that instant of Horus' pure cruelty and casual disregard for human life, the Emperor finally realized how truly far His favored son had fallen into the grip of the Ruinous Powers and how Mankind would suffer and ultimately be destroyed under his rule. The sacrifice of the Custodian bought the Emperor the time He needed to deliver a finishing blow to Horus. With iron resolve, He gathered the full strength of His mind at last and delivered a massive psychic attack through the chink in his Terminator Armour that killed Horus almost instantly and obliterated his very soul from the Warp so that the Chaos Gods could not resurrect their champion. In his final moments, the corrupting powers of Chaos briefly relinquished their hold on the Warmaster's soul and the Emperor sensed the return of His son's sanity in the seconds before his consciousness was utterly obliterated. The Emperor felt only Horus' utter horror at what he had done under the influence of Chaos and gratitude that he had at last been released from its grip before the Warmaster's psyche dissolved into shining motes of psychic energy dispersed amidst the howling voices of the Immaterium.

It was in this battered and bleeding state that the Emperor was found by Rogal Dorn, the Primarch of the Imperial Fists Legion who had accompanied the assault force onto the Vengeful Spirit. Dorn returned with the Emperor to the Imperial Palace, where Malcador the Sigillite simply crumbled to ash upon relinquishing his place upon the Golden Throne, for his body and mind had been burned out by the strain of holding the Golden Throne's portal closed for the time that the Emperor had been aboard the Warmaster's flagship. The dying Emperor quickly dictated plans to Dorn for the modification of the Golden Throne into an arcane life support machine that would sustain His remaining cells in an undying state between life and true death for over ten thousand years, and He was subsequently interred in this altered version of the Golden Throne. The throne's mechanisms would also allow the Emperor to maintain the Astronomican and battle the influence of the Chaos Gods in the Warp so long as His mind was empowered and sustained with the psychic energies of 1,000 psykers every day, preventing a daemonic incursion on Terra and helping to sustain Mankind against Chaos' corruptive influence throughout the galaxy. His strength rapidly failing, the Emperor had only enough time to give His final, brief instructions to Rogal Dorn before the Golden Throne's modified mechanisms were activated and He was placed within an unending stasis for more than 10,000 standard years. Only His mind remained active within the Warp as His dying body continued to decay at a glacially slow pace.

At Present (Late 41st Millennium)

As mentioned above, the Emperor's shattered and mortally wounded body was discovered on the bridge of the Vengeful Spirit by the Primarch of the Imperial Fists, Rogal Dorn, who, following the Emperor's instructions, oversaw His internment within the Golden Throne, the arcane device modified at the Emperor's own direction to sustain his mind and decaying body. The Imperial Cult, after its establishment as the state religion of the Imperium in the 34th Millennium, would later claim that this internment within the Golden Throne had been necessary so that the Emperor could leave the physical plane behind and "ascend" once more to his proper place in the Immaterium as the one, true God of Mankind after sacrificing Himself to save humanity from the Traitor Horus. The Emperor has remained in the Golden Throne since His "ascension" to this day, neither fully living nor wholly dead. Although the device was initially intended to be used as the nexus of the Emperor's secret project to utilize the Eldar Webway for the good of humanity, the Golden Throne also now functions as a complex life support device and psychic amplifier, projecting the Emperor's mind into the Warp and across the galaxy. The Golden Throne itself lies in the Sanctum Imperialis, the great hall at the heart of the Imperial Palace guarded by the Emperor's Companions, a special and highly elite bodyguard contingent of the Adeptus Custodes. The Emperor's decaying physical form is preserved by the vast arcane machinery of the Golden Throne, which itself is maintained by a legion of Tech-priests from the Adeptus Mechanicus. His psychic essence is spread out across the whole of the galaxy through the Warp, watching over as much of humanity as He can manage in His current depleted state, in order to keep the Ruinous Powers at bay.

The Golden Throne is also connected to a massive psychic beacon known as the Astronomican, which makes faster than light travel possible for Imperial starships outfitted with a Warp-Drive by generating a telepathic signal by which the specialised mutant psykers known as Navigators are able to navigate through Warpspace. The Astronomican signal is originated by the Emperor's mind, but is amplified and directed by a choir of 10,000 human psykers. These individuals are selected for their psychic prowess, their ability to control their power, and are put to the task only after undergoing a rigorous process that includes their soul-binding to the Emperor to strengthen their minds against possession by daemonic entities. The life force of these psykers is consumed over the course of several months, 1,000 of whom die every day, which means that replacements must constantly be found and brought to Terra aboard the infamous Black Ships of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, the Imperial organisation responsible for regulating humans who possess the psychic mutation. The selected psykers are, for the most part, indoctrinated to accept their fate as their sacred duty for the Imperium, for they are too dangerous to those around them to be allowed to live, and the sacrifice of their life is the greatest good that they can do in service to the God-Emperor. Those who prove less willing to give themselves for the glorious cause of Mankind are sedated and their psychic life force fed to the power collection mechanism of the Golden Throne regardless. The Imperium must survive, regardless of the daily cost in lives.

It is said that the Emperor's existence is one of endless pain and suffering, and that it is only His utter devotion to the human race that keeps Him from accepting the death He now desperately longs to embrace. Should the Emperor die, then the Astronomican will become useless, and humanity will no longer be able to safely travel through the Warp using its current technology (although this may be disputed by the fact that humanity traveled the stars before the Emperor sat upon the Golden Throne, during the Dark Age of Technology and the Great Crusade). The Imperium would then become fractured and disintegrate into civil war. The reliance on the Emperor's life force for guidance and protection, and the dedication of His subjects to prevent his death, is the foundation for the Emperor's divinity as held by the Imperial Cult and countless billions of human beings across the galaxy. Only the Astartes of the Space MarineChapters do not openly believe the Emperor is divine, instead dimly remembering and honouring His determination to free Mankind from the shackles of superstition and organised religion even as they revere Him as the founder of the Imperium and the greatest human leader in history.

Yet now something unexpected has happened. Even as the Imperium came under assault from the greatest conglomeration of the Forces of Chaos since the Horus Heresy with the unleashing of Abaddon the Despoiler's 13th Black Crusade in 999.M41, the Adeptus Mechanicus reported a terrible secret to the High Lords of Terra and the Adeptus Custodes. The highly advanced life support mechanisms of the Golden Throne have begun to fail and the Tech-priests no longer possess the knowledge necessary to repair them. Unless some solution can be found or some miracle intervenes, the Emperor's mummified body will eventually die and His mind and spirit will gutter out like a candle in the wind amidst the madness of the Warp, leaving Mankind all alone in the darkness. And then the predators will feast...

Source: http://warhammer40k.wikia.com

[thenewmandalordoc]

Artemis Prima, Primarch of the XI Legion

“The Universe orchestrates so many lovely symphonies. My Father and my Brothers are just mere maestros in the cacophony. I dance to the Great Music, but I listen to my own symphony.”

Artemis Prima, also known more simply as the Dancing One, the Golden Queen, the Great Lioness, the Oracle and the Mystic, is one of the 20 genetically-engineered Space Marine Primarchs created by the Emperor of Mankind from the foundation of his own DNA before the start of the Great Crusade to lead the armies of the newborn Imperium of Man. She was the Primarch of the Twilight Repentia Legion of Space Marines (an attempt at a primarily female legion), one of the missing Primarches and ultimately one of the greatest weapons against Chaos Undivided.

Biography

Early Life

All documents on Artemis Prima are heavily censored and guarded by the Inquisition. What is known is that Artemis was created as a genetically-engineered organism by the Emperor in the Imperial gene-laboratories under the Himalayan Mountains on Terra in the late 30th Millennium, Artemis, along with his brother Primarchs, were scattered across the Milky Way Galaxy through the Warp by the machinations of the Ruinous Powers of Chaos. Unlike her gene-brothers, Artemis’s capsule came to rest on the Eldar Craftworld of Tir-Xala, during a meeting the Craftworld’s Aspect Warriors. At first, the Eldar did not know what to make of the sudden appearance of a human infant. Most of the Aspect Warriors wanted to have her slain to preserve the secrets of the Eldar while the Farseer could not foretell the future of Artemis. Her fate came to a stalemate until the Harlequin representative offered a solution. If the toddler could match his Troup in a dance, step for step than she would be allowed to live as one of them.

The troupe put on a magnificent display which amused the young Artemis so much that she joined in as well. Just from the brief observation, Artemis was able to match the senior Harlequin in this dance. It impressed the troupe's leader and the rest of the council and secured Artemis’s place in the Craftworld. From there she studied and learned different aspects of Eldar warfare, able to comprehend and master each one at a faster rate than even the most determined aspirant. She was also trained in the ways of statehood and how to develop her psychic abilities by the Farseer and her Warlock Council. By the time she was a full grown woman, Artemis was a well-respected individual in Tir-Xala society. However, even with many accolades, Artemis knew that she never belonged with the Eldar. Due to her human nature, she sought to find a group like her to call a family, but to no avail.

Artemis had visions of a man in golden armor leading vast armies throughout the galaxy. Fascinated by these vision, Artemis took the Oath of the Outcast and left the Craftworld to find the man she would call Father. Whether it was known to the Emperor or not, Artemis had begun following him on through the majority of the Grand Crusade, only appearing in the corners of his conciseness. She observed the fight with Ferrus Manus, the reunion with Magnus the Red, and the pacification of Conrad Kurze. Artemis found him amusing but nothing more, that was until she received a vision of great turmoil and a galaxy at war. With this newfound knowledge, Artemis found that it was time to reveal herself to her Father while telling Tir-Xala to flee to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Artemis made her presence to her father on the Agri-World of Hope’s Landing. She appeared before her Father as a mask of the Harlequin and began to question him. Satisfied with the answers, Artemis took off her mask and chameleon cloak, knelt and swore fealty to the Emperor.

The Emperor’s Daughter

Following her discovery, Artimus was taken back to the epicenter of the ever-expanding Imperium and reunited with her own kind. There was the usual rejoicing, pomp, and circumstance, but records on Terra suggest that the Emperor had an unusual tension and protectiveness around his only daughter, while Artemis was stated to have a subtle confusion for the human homeworld with an inhuman grace and fluidity to her moments. Artemis was given command of the XIth Legion, which she renamed the Twilight Repentia. It only consisted of the only ten female Astartes – who referred to as Valkyries – survived the transformation, the rest of the Legion was comprised of regular male Astartes. She made the ten her personal bodyguards, with Lieutenant Electra becoming the Legion’s Chapter Master. Artemis then addressed her Legion that it mattered little what they were born as and instead focus on what they can become.

The Great Crusade

By the time the Oracle took command of her Legion, the Great Crusade was over a century old and believed to be ending soon. Artemis was quick to impose the styles of war she had perfected on Tir-Xala over that which had come to define the XIIth Legion, mixing different combat facets, unique fighting techniques, weapons and abilities that were not practiced during the Crusades. Although its history as an active Legion is a shorter one compared to many – at least under its own name – the Twilight Repentia proved quickly determined to match any of its brethren in glory – or perhaps more accurately prove itself superior to them – and its tally of victories mounted with an unheard of speed. The Twilight Repentia’s combat doctrine stated to end conflicts quickly and with little danger to Astartes life. This was achieved by having special skilled specialist for specific battlefield roles. The XIth Legion had the least amount of casualties when compared to the other Legions, and were able to make normally hostile human worlds complacent and loyal to the Emperor. However, she found that the young Imperium was different from the oligarchal society of the Eldar. No matter how many heroic deeds she performed, Artemis would always be overlooked by her brother Primarchs. This lead to a growing jealousy and anger towards the family she had always wanted.

Though they were hesitant at first, many of her Primarchs grew to respect their only sister. She managed to have a healthy relationship with Sanguinius, Magnus the Red, Leman Russ, Jaghatai Khan, Roubutte Gulliman and Kenshin Watanabe for they were the first to respect her as a Primarch first, and a woman as a far second. Artemis had to earn the respect of Vulkan and Ferrus Manus by proving herself in the forge. Fulgrim viewed her as a rival to his beauty, which Artemis gave him the nickname of “the fop”. Other Primarchs showed a wariness around Artemis, while others - such as Kurze and Perturabo - openly mocked her. Horus Lupercal stated that she might be the one to unify the different personalities of each with each Primarch, but Artemis was reported of being wary around the Emperor’s favored son.

The Great Temptation

Artemis was not present at Ullanor, instead, she was assisting the IInd Legion who were engaged with the forces of WAAAGH! Gorzkull da Face-Rippa who had planned on joining the Ork Warlord, Urrlak Urruk. The might of two legions clashed with a WAAAGH! that was used to fighting Astartes, and both sides suffered. Chapter Master Electra had to be medically evacuated and a large number of the Crimson Dragons lay dead. It ended when Kenshin and Artemis decapitated the Ork Warlord and routed the rest of the WAAAGH! Afterward, Artemis gave Kenshin a crystal which she stated was a sign of their friendship. When the news finally reached them that Horus was proclaimed Warmaster, Kenshin immediately swore his allegiance while Artemis was slower to respond and seemed to avoid confrontation. Afterward, Artemis sent her Legion into unknown space, searching for Craftworld Tir-Xala. 

Artemis received orders from the Warmaster to reclaim the Garden Worlds of the Eden sector. What Artemis and the Twilight Repentia did not know was that Horus had sent her there to be corrupted by a Slaneeshi daemon known as Temptation.  Upon arriving in the Sector, the Twilight Repentia witnessed strange phenomena occurring on the planets below. Large temples had been constructed in odd, and often lewd designs that stretched into the atmosphere. On Eden Superior, Artemis was drawn to the largest temples belonging to the once Xenos empire that had laid claim to the system. Alone in the Temple of Temptation, Artemis began to meditate. There she had a vision of her on the Golden Throne of Terra, the Galaxy worshipping her as the Empress of Mankind with all of her brothers bowing and paying homage to her. Though the feeling of elation was like nothing Artemis had felt before the Primarch soon became weary of this new reality. Soon her vision turned into the Galaxy further at war, Primarch versus Primarch, and Kenshin’s fall to Chaos. Foreseeing Kenshin being slain by Leman Russ and becoming a Deamon Prince, Artemis awoke from her trance - the grief and trauma of two of her favored brothers being too great to help. However, when she was awoken, she for the Greater Deamon Temptation was on top of her feeding her false visions. 

The battle with the daemon required every bit of strength, insight, and training that she had received from her years spent with the Eldar and fighting in her Father’s wars. But even with the strength of a Primarch, Temptation managed to better Artemis by feeding her different visions, making her question her own existence and reality. When Temptation showed a vision of Artemis, in daemon form, next to Fulgrim she released a psychic blast so powerful that it tore apart half of the temple and could be seen from orbit. Though this did wound the daemon greatly and called the attention of the Electra and the elite first company who rushed to assist her, the massive psychic trauma knocked Artemis into unconsciousness.

With the Primarch momentarily dealt with, the weakened Temptation turned it’s attention to the First Company rushing up the steps to slay it. Not wanting this to happen, Temptation started to feed off their own wants and desires while it healed and moved Artemis into the Warp. However, what it did not count on was the hysterical laughter or the dancing shapes forming around it. Temptation soon found itself fighting Harlequin troupes of the Laughing God, the same troupe that raised and trained Artemis. Unable to properly locate any of the dancing troupe, Temptation was unable to feed off the Twilight Repentai any further and soon found itself fighting nimble Harlequins, Aspect Warriors of Tir-Xala, and Cataphrax Astartes. Chapter Mast Electra was the one who slew Temptation and had it screaming back to the Warp, repaying the life debt she owned her Primarch.

When Temptation was deposed of an uneasy stalemate occurred between the Eldar and the First Company. Though Electra was grateful for their assistance, she demanded that the Eldar stood aside and allow the apothecaries to oversee Artemis’s healing. The Eldar refused by remaining silent. What first started as a possibility of miscommunication soon started to become hostile as the possibility of the Eldar allowing their Primarch to die became more present. In truth, the Eldar were allowing their own healers revive the Primarch. Before the battle could join, a still wary Artemis stopped her Astartes from attacking the Eldar. From there, she told her Legion of her upbringing and that there would be no hostility between the Twilight Repentia of the forces of Tir-Xala. When Battle Chaplin Jane Borella stated that this was against the Emperor’s Creed. Artemis responded by saying,

“The entire Galaxy goes against my Father’s Creed. Soon brother will turn against brother and this Imperium will be a shell of itself. As of now, we need all the help we can get.”

Not wanting to argue with their Primarch any further, the Twilight Repentai agreed to the alliance. The leader of the troupe presented Artemis with her former mask. 

The Dragon, the Oracle, and the Wolf

Using a still functional Webway Gate, Artemis’s combined forces arrived on the world of Calliope V to find the Wolves of Fenris fighting the Crimson Dragons, with Kenshin and Russ at the middle. Artemis went to separate the two but found the normally calm Crimson Dragons possessed by an insatiable blood rage. Even with the help of the Space Wolves, the Crimson Dragon’s savagery kept Artemis from reaching the two Primarchs and she had to witness one killing the other. With the Crimson Dragon’s Primarch dead, the Crimson Dragon’s fell into complete madness while the veil of reality ripped and torn. Minors of Khorne poured forth to collect the body of Kenshin Watanabe, but Artemis managed to save the Soul Stone that she had given Kenshin. Russ retreated back to the Spear of Fenris, Artemis fled back to Webway with the Eldar contingency covering the retreat of the two Legions.  

The Grand Performance of Terra

“The stage is set, let the performance commence.”

Artemis and her Legion fought her former allies on Terra, going through Chaos Daemons and fall Astartes like a scythe through wheat. She had her legion harass supply lines and assassinate major targets, while she stayed with her Father and brothers. When the Emperor left Terra to fight aboard the Vengeful Spirit, Artemis stayed to protect the Imperial Palace and defending Malcador while he sat on the Throne.

When the Emperor was placed on the Golden Throne, Artemis was distraught and enraged. She gathered her Valkyries and told them that the Legion would be placed in cryogenic sleep, and would awaken only if the Imperial Palace fell and the Throne was threatened. She would go into the warp and personally take the fight to Chaos, dawning her Harlequin mask once more and becoming a Solitaire. 

M32-M41

Very little is known about Artemis Prima after her departure. Though being an unsung hero of the Imperium, her intimate connection with a Xenos race has deemed her Excommunicate Traitoris by the High Lords of Terra have had her stricken from the records and her naive blacked out.

Within the Warp and Webway, however, Harlequin and Daemons alike speak of a human woman who wears a mask of Cegorach. One rumor states that it was Artemis who was immune to The Masque of Slaanesh’s spell and was able to match her move for move for six days and nights until the Masque finally faulted and missed a step. Other reports come from mercenaries seeing her on Commorragh holding an audience with Asdrubael Vect and fighting in the Arenas of the Wych Cult. Artemis has also been rumored to venture out of the Warp on occasion. It is said that it was she who sabotaged Abaddon the Despoiler’s plans in twelve of his thirteen Black Crusades. Laughing all the while at the Warmaster’s complete incompetency.

M. 42

She was not there to support the brave forces of Cadia against Abaddon’s unofficial Fouteenth Black Crusade, instead, she led a force of like-minded individuals on a raid against Fabius Biles’ laboratories in order to secure the Pure Clone of Ferrus Manus. Though the raid was successful, most of Artemis’ raider were slaughtered fighting against the horrors of the Primogenitor’s mind. Artemis, herself, managed to slice off the head of a Bile clone and destroying his facilities, but she fears that all she did was draw the ire of the true Bile and Fulgrim on her.

Artemis is currently on Macragge, with the now adolescent Manus, seeking to aid Guiliman in his fight against Chaos.  

Personality

“You once asked me to whom do I fight for, brother. The answer is simple. I fight for the side who fights for the living.” - Artemis talking to Guiliman, M. 42.

Artemis Prima was known to have a light-hearted personality, mimicking the same jovial nature that the Harlequins are said to have. She would treat every encounter as if it was a part to play in some grand performance, and rarely allow her true self to be shown. This partly comes her her time living amongst the Eldar who shun openly expression, and from her own disconnection with her own species not knowing what it means to be human. She can be mystics and philosophers at times, possessing knowledge and wisdom not shared by her more practical subjects. This has changed with her emergence to the physical galaxy in M.42. She has become more cynical and calloused in nature, and opening questioning Guiliman’s motives and past discretions with the Ynnari. 

When she received the Eleventh Legion, Artemis treated them with a protective nature and tried to take them from the worse of the fighting. However, as the battles of Great Crusade soon turned into the Heresy, Artemis had to trust the prowess of her warriors more. This soon turned into a stronger bond with her Legion, and she began to treat every member with the same amount of trust and respect regardless of their rank.

Appearance

The records of Artemis Prima are limited. One source states that she was prettier than Fulgrim and Sanguinius, while another source states that her beauty was simply indescribable. Some deeply classified reports state that she would change her appearance if she needed too. Whether this is a mental or physical ability is unknown. What all the sources could agree on was that she had locks of curly black hair that was worn long and yellow golden skin that glowed like her Father’s.  

Wargear

The Wraith Plate -  Artemus’s war panoply is of her own design, fusing Power Armour technology with her knowledge of Eldar Technology. It is designed not only to protect her in battle but augment her own range of motion  It is studded with many gemstones and runes that enhance her own psychic abilities and protected her from harm.

Mask of Faces- Her masks come with various forms of auto-senses and respirators and is highly ornamented. Her allows her to mimic the features and attributes of others using sensory holo-field admitters.

 Zaram-tir, the Sword of Oblivion - the final Cronesword of Morai-Heg, this sword absorbs that which makes it stronger. It was given to her by the Warlock Council of Craftworld Tir-Xala to aid her against the fight against Chaos. She has stated that the sword “has a temper,” and “plays favorites,” implyin that the blade is somewhat sentient and has grown attached to Artemis.

The Lady’s Sabre -  The weapon of choice of Artemis during the Great Crusade and the Heresy Era. Made by her own hands, it was as long as a full grown man and perfectly balanced. It was rumored to ripple with a molecular realignment field that allowed Artemis to cleave through force fields and metaphysical wards with ease. It was destroyed when she dueled Leman Russ and the Soulless One. She keeps the pomel as a memento.

The Lady’s Breath -  The Lady’s Breath is an elegantly designed razor-edged steel fan that is always seen on Artemis’s hip. It serves both as a shield and offensives last resort of needed. The two weapons are very deadly in her hands.

Quicksilver, the White Lion - A megestic beast that follows Artemis wherever she travels. He serves as a familiar to the Primarch, augmenting her psychic abilities and swerving as a faithful companion. The familiar manifests as a mighty beast that used to inhabit an old world that had long since been shattered. Using lethal predatory instinct, Quicksilver remains a loyal and vigilant companion that protects his master from any threat, ever vigilant should danger present itself.

Ok… I’m either going to get a lot of praise of flack for this, but this was an idea that was banging around in my head for a while. I know that the very idea of Female Astartes is a hot button issue in the fandom, seeing how it is going against the lore. Personally, I theorize that the Imperial Saints are actually the failed female candidates which the Emperor fixed in the Warp. Artemis was made because of a quip that Malcador made to the Emperor about a Sister Primarch. Though Big E brushed it off, I would not be shocked if he did it any because… why the hell not? And yes I did model the Twilight Repentia based off the non-canon Sisters of Purification. And since there is no lore on them you make it. @fuukonomiko for being one of my hardest and most insightful critics.

[ejct1]

Index Astartes: The Gravewalkers, Worshippers of Death Pt. 3

Beliefs “Men cannot reshape the past. We may wipe the minds of a hundred thousand men, burn a million texts, destroy a billion worlds, but the scars of our actions upon this life remain. It is up to you to heal the scars. We are the last, and our legacy rests in your hands.”- Grave Lord Premo to new Neophytes Believing themselves to be the last remaining Loyalist children of the Death Guard, the Grave Walkers see it as their duty to redeem themselves in the eyes of the Emperor and the Imperium at large for the failings of their genetic ancestors, and as such value loyalty above all else. Further compacting this desperate cling to loyalty is the civil war that raged in the Chapter’s early years. What emerged from the conflict was not the Codex compliant Chapter founded in M35, but a twisted shadow, scarred and afraid of the years to come. It is only through immense faith that the Grave Walkers have overcome their obstacles, and it is this faith that further sets them apart from their fellow Astartes. While many Chapters see the Emperor as the peak of humanity, powerful beyond measure, the Grave Walkers worship him as a god, the Domnus Mortis, the Lord of Death. The Emperor, in the eyes of the Grave Walkers, conquered death itself after he was slain by Horus and now rules not only the Imperium but a realm beyond death, beyond the Warp, where those whose souls were loyal to him in life go after their mortal death. They believe that as a Chapter it is their duty to the Imperium and the Emperor to safeguard the souls of men from being corrupted and devoured by the Ruinous Powers so that they may join their Lord in whatever realm lies beyond. The Death Priests believe that it is from the Domnus Mortis they receive their powers over the dead, and those spirits that they summon are drawn from this great realm beyond death. All of these beliefs have caused the Grave Walkers to worship the dead and death as sacred, things to be met without fear and greeted as a friend. Wherever the fighting is thickest and the challenges insurmountable one can expect to find the Grave Walkers, raining doom upon the Traitor, the Heretic, the Xenos, and the Mutant alike without mercy or remorse. However, due to their own mutations, origins in the Cursed Founding, and the overall attitude of the Imperium, they are found fighting alone in nearly all campaigns and prefer that others leave them to their duties. When they are called upon to fight alongside others, be it the Imperial Guard or fellow Astartes, they are made to perform undesired duties, ranging from rearguard actions to scouting enemy positions to protecting supply lines.

Whispers in the Dark “Ghostly Wraiths… untouchable… volleys of Warp Fire… Astartes… Doom… Run, run, run… ”- Salvaged data-slate from site of a Grave Walkers suppression Amongst the most secretive and heretical practices amongst the Grave Walkers, their practice of necromancy has oft driven their Chapter to the brink of doom. Dating back to the time of the Great Crusade, it is believed that the Death Priests of the Grave Walkers derive their practice from the ancient rituals of Barbarus’ Warlords. It is currently unknown how the Chapter has gained the knowledge of such unholy practices, be it through pacts with Warp-fiends or some genetic corruption, but either way these powers have spawned divisions within the Chapter and conflict with the wider Imperium time and time again. When the first signs of mutation first began springing up within the Chapter in 127.M36, Chaos sought a new servant in the Long War. Many in the former Librarius, including the vaunted Thaetos, found the efforts of the Apothecarion wanting, and as such sought their own cure to the developing curse. Leaving the Tomb, their journey took them, and nearly half the Chapter, across the width of space and into the depths of the Warp where they were drawn by, “Whispers in the Dark, messages written on the walls of the mind.” Seeking help amongst the souls of the lost and the damned, Thaetos’ desperation and pride allowed not only his body, but his soul to be corrupted by the Ruinous Powers. Possessed by the spirits he once commanded, Thaetos’ mind was broken and forever lost. Returning in 145.M36, the Chapter Master found not a hero and his champions, but a band of madmen, mutated beyond recognition. Thaetos, now the Mad Ghoul, murdered his former comrade soon after, and as such began a civil war in the Chapter that would last decades. The Loyal Grave Walkers, led by Reclusiarch Necto, faced off against the Mad Ghoul and his corrupt warband in brutal combat across the Veiled Region of the Segmentum Pacificus where their Chaotic battle-brothers had made their home. Sustained by faith, Necto saw victory through with the Mad Ghoul’s death in 239.M36 after nearly one hundred years of bloody conflict. Now known amongst the Grave Walkers as the Trial of the Faith, the war left Necto with a broken Chapter of only 150 Astartes. It was that day that the modern Grave Walkers took shape. Knowing no one but the most loyal and the strongest of will should hold such dread power as did Thaetos, the Chapter’s Librarius was merged with the Reclusiam, creating the Death Priests of the Grave Walkers, who to this day still enforce their unique take on the standard Imperial Cult within the Chapter. Over time more modifications and adaptations were made to the Chapter’s organization, deviating farther and farther from the Codex. Though he kept much of the tactical and combat doctrine intact, Necto penned his own organizational text, the Scutum Fidei, the Shield of Faith. Dictating how the Companies are to be organized, how the command chain must be structured, how psyker powers should be honed and applied both in and out of combat, and, most importantly, how to summon and treat with the spirits of the dead. The text is sacred to the Grave Walkers much in the same way the Codex is to their Ultramarine cousins, as its wisdoms and truths were revealed at a great cost. Now in the 41st millennium, wherever Death Priests stalk the battlefield, they are accompanied by chanted litanies and the swirling forms of the vengeful dead. More recently, the Chapter has come under the scrutinous eye of the Inquisition for their mutation and their supposedly heretical practices of necromancy. Their leadership was called to stand trial before the Inquisition for crimes consisting of Heresy and Mutation. While many Chapter Masters would react with indignity and outrage, Autarkhos Aurel, along with the Chief Mortician, the Master Artificer, and the Mortem Cantor submitted themselves to the judgement of Ordo Hereticus. At Hydraphur the Inquisition was split on the fate of the Grave Walkers. Puritans desired liquidation and obliteration, Radicals desired study, while the moderates amongst them called for censure and watchfulness. In the end the Inquisition declared that the Grave Walkers would be destroyed and their homeworld purged. Before the sentence could be enacted, a savior rose from an unexpected quarter to the aid of the damned chapter. Three companies from the Iron Snakes Chapter arrived at Hydraphur en masse to defend the Grave Walkers, who had served alongside them admirably during the Sabbat Worlds Crusade. Unwilling to see honored comrades slain so unjustly, the Iron Snakes issued their own proclamation, an attack upon the Grave Walkers would be treated as an attack upon the Iron Snakes and would be met with fiery retribution. Unwilling to risk war with two Astartes Chapters, one with unknown powers and another widely respected and honored, the Inquisition decided instead that the Grave Walkers would henceforth always have Inquisitorial oversight (though Inquisitors sent to do so are oft “lost in the Warp” or “slain in battle”) and declared the use of necromancy was forbidden on Imperial planets. It was on this day that the Aurel swore an oath of loyalty and gratitude to the Iron Snakes, declaring that forevermore in the halls of the Tomb songs would be sung in their honor, and that the Grave Walkers would forever stand ready to assist them in any endeavors.

[jakey-beefed-it]

What We Hold Sacred

A short 40k fic depicting the first (tense) meeting between my 30k/revived from stasis for 40k Captain Alexander Titus and my Inquisitor Elizabeth Kane

The Cathedral of Saint Beatrix- or a building with the same name, at any rate -had stood outside Herapolis for over two millennia. Built to endure bombardment, quake, and the slow grinding of time itself, its inner walls were so thick as to muffle all noise, all distractions, leaving the secluded offices in peace. In silence. In tedium.

Beth dropped her stylus to the desk with a clatter and a heavy sigh. To one side was a pile of dataslates she had reviewed, authorized or vetoed according to her judgment, and now awaited dispatch. The other side of the desk was clear, the morning’s work finally done. Where the slates had been, a crimson indicator glowed and faded softly.

She depressed the indicator, activating the two-way vox. “Speak.”

“The envoy from the Ultramarines Second Company has arrived, Inquisitor.” The young man on the other end of the comm paused. “It’s Captain Alexander Titus, himself, my Lady.”

Beth resisted the urge to grind her teeth. “And how long has Captain Titus been waiting, Javier?”

“Since seven bells, Inquisitor.” She heard him swallow audibly. “You said you were not to be disturbed-”

She jerked her finger away from the vox, closing the channel, and took a sharp breath. Shit shit shit SHIT. Five hours kept waiting? Shit! No. Not good enough. “Emperor-damned throne-forsaken fething GROX-SHIT!” Her fist slammed to the table, and the stylus clattered to the floor. She took a breath. Another. Touched the vox with a finger that trembled ever so slightly, red tinging her vision. Her tone was calm, the way the eye of a hurricane is calm. “Send him in, Javier.”

She buttoned her coat and brushed a few stray hairs behind her ears. There was a perfunctory knock at the door, and in strode Captain Titus. Her gaze started at roughly his waist and climbed up… and up… and up. He was tall, even for an astartes- nearly eight feet out of his armor. He wore a uniform that bore a passing similarity to those of the Ultramar Defense Force, somewhat more ornate and a richer cobalt color on both coat and pants, instead of the cobalt-grey and tan of the UDF. He wore a leather sash, his medals pinned to that rather than the breast.

Beth gestured to the oversized chair opposite her imposing desk. She did not rise. “Captain. Please, sit down.”

His dark eyes flicked everywhere as he crossed the room, a habit of vigilance she expected from mortal veterans but was surprised to see echoed in an astartes Captain. They turned to her, assessed, dismissed. He sat, back straight, hands on his knees. “Inquisitor…”

“Elizabeth Kane, of the Ordo Hereticus. I hope you weren’t too bored out there.”

“I distracted myself with some of your sacred texts. I found them… more familiar than I expected.”

She frowned at something in his tone, but pressed on. “I understand you’ve just returned from the front lines on Konor? How fares the war?”

He let out a soft grunt that could have been a laugh. “Traitors and daemons tread upon the soil of a world of Ultramar. It fares poorly. Even victory will have a heavy price- heavier even than what we have already paid.” His voice was a carrying rumble, with a weariness and bitterness that surprised her.

She paused a moment. “Do you always speak so bluntly?”

“Of course not. Guilliman wants his sons to be politicians, Inquisitor.” His features softened. “Blunt honesty is how I prefer to operate. I meant no disrespect- quite the opposite. I felt you deserved an honest assessment.”

“Then let us exchange courtesies- Bluntly, I need to speak with you about your personal beliefs.”

His mustache twitched. “I believe the Death Guard should be driven from Ultramar, and back into the hell from which they came. Is that insufficient?”

“The Inquisition makes… allowances for eccentricities in the Adeptus Astartes that elsewhere would be considered grossly heretical. You do not follow the Imperial Faith-”

“No. I follow the Imperial Truth.”

“-but what alarms me is that you freely share your ‘Truth’ with any and everyone. Younger astartes. Guardsmen. Abhuman auxilia.”

“Only if they ask.” There was definitely a hint of amusement in that bass rumble.

“This puts me in a difficult situation, Captain. Whatever your personal beliefs, I cannot tolerate anyone going around spreading heresy among the rank-and-file. Your position shields you from the full weight of the Inquisition’s wrath- and I would not want to compound the morale issues you have created by arresting an Imperial hero.” She pinched the bridge of her nose and took a breath. “A theoretical for you, Captain- in my place, how would you resolve this situation?”

He considered, stroking his beard. “Private censure. Not necessarily on-record. A conversation in your office, perhaps. Followed by orders to regurgitate Ecclesiarchy dogma if any non-astartes request my belief- or lack thereof -in the Emperor’s divinity.”

She nodded. “We understand one another, then.”

“I understand, yes. I cannot comply with that order.” He shook his head. “The Emperor himself had an abhorrence for religion generally… and for those who would venerate him, particularly.”

“So you’ve said,” she gestured to her reports. “On at least two hundred thirty five occasions. Did…” she closed her eyes for a moment. “Did He tell you so, personally? You asked Him, and he denied His divinity?”

“He didn’t have to,” Titus said. “He showed me how he felt about it, on Monarchia.” She gave him a blank look, and he let out a weary shrug. “Of course it’s been redacted. Everything else that matters has been.”

“What happened on Monarchia?”

“It was the only time I saw him. He was… in form like a man, but more. He was to the Primarchs as they are to the astartes… as the astartes are to mortal men and women. But he was…” His gaze settled on the wall above her head, bored through it and into the distant past. “He was more than human. He was less than human. His anger was… impersonal. I don’t know how to describe it. It was like a living thing, a cold fury that could extinguish stars without remorse. There was much in him of greatness… ambition, aspiration, charisma. But there was little in him that was human, that I saw. No fear, of course- but no pity, either. No compassion.” There were dark circles under Titus’ eyes. Odd that she hadn’t noticed them before. “I understand why people wanted to worship him. It would have made him… righteous. Holy. Comprehensible. I don’t know that we were made in his image, or that he was made in ours… but he wasn’t human.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either. I didn’t then, and I never will. On Monarchia… they raised temples to him. Cathedrals, much like this. Sang his praises, prayed to him for deliverance. They loved him, as Lorgar Aurelian had taught them to love him. They would have killed or died in his name, at his whim, gladly and with joy in their hearts. And he ordered my Legion to burn their world to ashes for it.” Titus shook his head, slowly, almost imperceptibly. “We left nothing standing. No one alive. Not even children. We left it radioactive dust, and the Emperor forced Lorgar and his legion to kneel in that very dust, the dust of what had been their crowning achievement, to us. To the Thirteenth, who had murdered their world.”

He reached inside his collar, slipping a small vial on a necklace free, and passing it across the desk. Within was a fine mix of ash and dust, black and grey and beige. “I took that from the ground where I stood. To remind me of what I’d done at his command. To remind me of the price of obedience.”

“That’s…” Beth shook her head. “I can’t believe it.”

“Then don’t.” He took the necklace back from her shaking hand and slipped it around his neck once more. “Consider it another 'eccentricity’. Or call it a damned heretical lie and order my arrest. But before you decide, you should know that there is one thing I hold sacred.”

Beth held one hand near the vox, the other on the plasma pistol strapped to the bottom of her desk. “If not the Emperor Himself, what could you possibly hold sacred?”

“Humanity.” Titus looked at her. “Humanity is greater than any of us. Greater than your Imperium, greater than your Emperor. It is the only thing I hold truly sacred- and I will not betray it again, not for you or any other authority. On Monarchia, I followed my orders and burned cities to nothing. Had I followed my conscience, I would have been censured. Perhaps even executed. Better that than to live with… this.” He patted his chest, where the vial rested beneath his coat. “Fire that weapon if you must, Inquisitor. I have served humankind to the best of my ability. If that’s not good enough, after all this time, then fire.”

Beth was silent for a long time. Finally, she set her hands upon the surface of the desk, folding them and resting her chin on the knuckles. “I do not think,” she began “that you are in any danger of falling to the Ruinous Powers. You have never lacked for… opportunity, if that was your desire. It would be a pity to lose your experience, your prowess. But I cannot let you carry on unchecked, spreading doubt among the faithful.”

He sat perfectly still, awaiting judgment.

“You and your company will return to the front after your leave is ended,” she said. “Reinforced by a Perceptory of Sororitas, and ten additional regiments of the UDF. And I will accompany you, along with my retinue, personally. If anyone asks you any particular questions about your beliefs, you will refer them to me. If at any time I feel you are a risk to operational safety, I will charge you with heresy despite the blow to morale. If, on the other hand, you mean what you say and you seek only to serve humankind, then you will have ample opportunity.”

“Most reasonable, Inquisitor.” His mouth twitched in a wry half-smile once more. “Unexpectedly reasonable, from what I know of the Ordo Hereticus. It would be disingenuous to say I look forward to working with you… but this should be… interesting.” He extended a massive hand across the desk.

She took it in her own, matching his grip as best she could. “On that we agree, Captain.”

[asktheadeptus]

Fulgrim

“Enter every city as though you were it’s first born master.” - attributed to Fulgrim the Phoenician. 

Fulgrim, also known in the time before the Horus Heresy as The Phoenician, is the Primarch of the Emperor's Children Traitor Legion. He possessed silvery-white hair and was quite vainglorious, as his entire life was dedicated to the pursuit of perfection in all things; physical, mental and spiritual. Today, Fulgrim is a four-armed, serpentine Daemon Prince of Slaanesh who is believed to reside on a Daemon World somewhere within the Eye of Terror. Unknown to almost everyone, including his own remaining Chaos Space Marines, Fulgrim expressed remorse, repenting his corruption by the Ruinous Powers during the Drop Site Massacre on Istvaan V during the opening days of the Horus Heresy nearly ten millennia ago. A Greater Daemon of Slaanesh took advantage of this weakness to possess his body for a time, but Fulgrim used his spiritual imprisonment to further explore the power of Chaos and eventually turned the tables on the daemon and forced it into imprisonment to regain control of his body. Fulgrim emerged from that experience even more committed to the pursuit of the path of sensation offered by Slaanesh and Chaos, and after the Horus Heresy he was rewarded for his devotion with ascension as a Daemon Prince of the God of Pleasure. His current exact location remains unknown to the Imperium and the majority of the Chaos Space Marines of the Emperor's Children Legion who still wander the galaxy in pursuit of their own pleasure and ascension.

History

Early Life

Like all the Primarchs, Fulgrim was teleported away from Terra while still an infant in a Warp rift through the machinations of the Chaos Gods, who hoped to prevent the coming of the Age of the Imperium, or at least to corrupt it so that the spread of the Emperor's Order would not weaken their power or threaten their existence. After being snatched from the Emperor of Mankind's gene-laboratory deep beneath the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains on Terra, Fulgrim's gestation capsule came to rest on a resource-poor Mining World known as Chemos. Chemos was a bleak, unforgiving planet warmed by a small binary star and surrounded by a thick nebula dust cloud. The result was a world that was a place forever shrouded in perpetual twilight. Chemos had been settled by humanity during the Dark Age of Technology as a Mining World but it was isolated from its neighbors by the great Warp Storms that marked the Age of Strife. The problem was that the resources of the planet were running out and its people were not producing enough food even for their own needs. Eventually, it fell to a group of fortress-factories to produce all the needed resources for Chemos. The entirety of the Chemosian people had to work every hour of the day, maintaining the vapor mines and synthesizers. Recreation, art and leisure were sacrificed for survival. Chemos was dependent upon interstellar commerce for the provision of food, but the world was buffeted by Warp Storms that made it difficult for traders to reach the planet, thus condemning the Chemosians to a slow death, despite their attempts to impose strict food rationing and improvise other solutions for providing nutrients. Scouts from the fortress-factory of Callax's branch of the planetary police force, the Caretakers, discovered the Primarch's gestation capsule after it plummeted to the surface of Chemos and were so impressed by the beauty of the infant within that they begged the leaders of Callax, its Executives, to spare his life, as orphans were routinely put to death so they would not further strain a settlement's resources. Fulgrim was spared and given into the hands of one of his rescuers, a member of the Caretakers, to raise as his own child.

Named after an ancient deity of the Chemosian people, Fulgrim in time became a new legend to the people of that suffering world. At half the age at which most of the other people of Callax went to work in the vapor mines and synthesizers, Fulgrim proved able to fulfill all the obligations of an adult labourer. He came to understand the ramshackle Chemosian mining technology with an intuitive ease that allowed him to begin to modify it with his extraordinary technical acumen, dramatically increasing its efficiency. By the time he was only 15 Terran years of age, Fulgrim had risen from the rank of a simple laborer to become one of the Executives who governed the fortress-factory of Callax. As a leader, Fulgrim learned of the terrible plight that faced Callax and all the other settlements of Chemos as their technology and population gradually declined in the face of their resource shortages.

Under Fulgrim's direction, teams of engineers traveled far from Callax and the other fortress-factories, reclaiming and repairing many of the most ancient and far-flung of the world's original mining outposts, many of which had not been used since before the start of the Age of Strife. Mining production skyrocketed, and as resources began to pour in large amounts into the treasuries of the fortress-factories of Chemos for the first time in millennia, Fulgrim supervised the construction of even more sophisticated and efficient extraction machinery. This industrial efficiency soon grew to the point that Chemos' mines were actually producing surpluses for the first time in decades, allowing the world to begin to purchase food and other needed materials in large quantities from passing interstellar traders. Fulgrim, now the recognized planetary leader, fostered the re-emergence of Chemosian art and culture, important aspects of human life that had long been sacrificed to Chemos' resource shortage and need for constant labor.

The Coming of the Emperor

Not long after this great triumph, the world's isolation came to an end. From the perpetually twilit sky emerged a flight of Stormbird dropships, heavily armoured and battle-scarred and bearing the Imperial Aquila, the badge of the Emperor of Mankind. When he learned of the Aquila, Fulgrim found his memories stirred. Chemos had no real military forces, but the Stormbirds' landing zone had been surrounded by the Caretakers, the planetary police force of the fortress-factories. Fulgrim ordered the Caretakers to welcome the strangers and take them to meet with him in Callax.

In his private quarters, Fulgrim met with the heavily armoured warriors from the stars, men who represented a true civilization that possessed all the culture and refinement that Fulgrim longed to return to his home world. From amongst the Astartes stepped the shining figure of the Emperor of Mankind, and with one look upon him, Fulgrim said nothing and simply dropped to his knees before his father and offered his sword in service. Fulgrim swore from that moment forward to serve the Emperor and the needs of the Imperium of Man with all his heart. The Emperor taught his son of Terra and of the Great Crusade he had initiated to reunite all the scattered worlds of Mankind beneath a single rule so that humanity would no longer face possible extinction at the hands of the galaxy's hostile forces and could claim its rightful place as the dominant intelligent species in the Milky Way. Imperial records do not indicate the exact date of the meeting between Fulgrim and the Emperor; all that is known is that Fulgrim's vast flagship, the Battle Barge known as the Pride of the Emperor, was completed by the Adeptus Mechanicus of Mars 160 standard years before the start of the Horus Heresy, sometime in the late 30th or early 31st Millennium.

Fulgrim returned to Terra with the Emperor to meet the IIIrd Legion of Space Marines that had been created from his own genome. But Fulgrim learned to his horror that an accident had destroyed the majority of the gene-seed that had been cultivated from his DNA to implant the Astartes of the IIIrd Legion and that without their Primarch, replacing it had proven to be a slow and laborious process. Fulgrim addressed the mere 200 Astartes that had been created for the III Legion and his speech proved so inspiring to the Imperial cause that the Emperor named the III Legion the Emperor's Children on the spot, and determined that only they could carve the Imperial Aquila, the double-headed eagle that was his own personal badge, upon the Ceramite chestplates of their Power Armour.

Fulgrim was soon consumed by the idea that he and the Emperor's Children needed to live up to the extraordinary honour the Emperor had shown them by becoming shining paragons of the perfection inherent in both the Emperor's person and his vision for Imperial culture and civilization. The drive for perfection soon consumed the Primarch and his Legion, from the military tactics they employed to the embrace of an unusually artistic Legionary culture and a concern for aesthetics and their personal appearances that was unsurpassed by any of the other Astartes. Fulgrim embodied this pursuit of physical beauty and perfection, for long silver hair flowed down his back, his wide eyes and melodic voice welcomed all who sought his counsel and his full lips often quirked into a wry smile. Fulgrim made sure that his Power Armour was of the finest quality that could be fabricated by Imperial technology and was intricately decorated in the purple and golden colors he had chosen for his Legion. Over it he usually wore a wide variety of intricately embroidered and high-collared cloaks.

The Phoenix and the Gorgon

The brotherhood shared by the Primarchs Fulgrim and Ferrus Manus, the Phoenician and the Gorgon, was well known in the Imperium at the time of the Great Crusade, as the two superhuman leaders formed an instant connection upon their first meeting. This initial encounter occurred on Terra, beneath Mount Narodnya, the greatest forge of the Urals, where Ferrus Manus was busy toiling with the forge-masters who had once served the Terrawatt Clan during the Unification Wars soon after his arrival from Medusa. The Primarch of the Iron Hands had been demonstrating his phenomenal skill and the miraculous powers of his liquid metal hands when Fulgrim, the Primarch of the IIIrd Legion, the Emperor's Children, and his elite Phoenix Guard, had descended upon the sprawling forge complex.

Neither Primarch had yet met the other, but each had felt the shared bonds of alchemy and science that had gone into their making. Both were like gods unto the terrified artisans, who prostrated themselves before these two mighty warriors as though fearing a terrible battle might ensure between them. Ferrus Manus later told the tale to the Astartes of the Xth Legion claiming that Fulgrim had declared that he had come to forge the most perfect weapon ever created, and that he would bear it in the coming Great Crusade. Of course the Primarch of the Iron Hands could not let such a boast go unanswered, and he had laughed in Fulgrim’s face, declaring that such pasty hands could never be the equal of his own living metal appendages. Fulgrim accepted the challenge with regal grace, and both Primarchs had stripped to the waist, working without pause for weeks on end, the forge ringing with the deafening pounding of hammers, the hiss of cooling metal, and the good natured insults of the two demigods as they sought to outdo one another.

At the end of three months' unceasing toil, both warriors had finished their weapons. Fulgrim had forged an exquisite warhammer -- Forgebreaker -- that could level a mountain with a single blow, and Ferrus Manus a golden bladed sword -- Fireblade -- that forever burned with the fire of the forge. Both weapons were unmatched by any yet crafted by Man, and upon seeing what the other had created, each Primarch declared that his opponent’s was the greater. Fulgrim declared the golden sword the equal of that borne by the legendary hero Nuada Silverhand, while Ferrus Manus had sworn that only the mighty thunder gods of Nordyc legend were fit to bear such a magnificent warhammer. Without another word spoken, both Primarchs had swapped weapons and sealed their eternal friendship with the craft of their hands.

The weight of the formidable warhammer Forgebreaker was enormous and unbearable for anyone but one of the Emperor’s Astartes. Its haft was the color of ebony, elaborately worked with threads of gold and silver that formed the shape of a lightning bolt, and the head was carved into the shape of a mighty eagle, its barbed beak forming the striking face and its tapered wings the claw. Anyone who looked upon the mighty warhammer could feel the power radiating from within it and know instinctively that more than just skill had gone into its forging. Love and honour, loyalty and friendship, death and vengeance...all were embodied within its majestic form, and the thought that the Iron Hands Primarch’s sworn honour brother had created this weapon made it truly legendary.

According to legend, Ferrus Manus was commonly referred to as The Gorgon. Some on Terra said the name was in reference to an ancient legend of the Olympian Hegemony. The Gorgon was a beast of such incredible ugliness that its very gaze could turn a man to stone. Many would be outraged at the disrespect in the implication of such a term when referring to a Primarch, but those who knew him best believed that Ferrus Manus quite enjoyed the name, because in any case, that was not where the name originated. It was an old nickname Fulgrim had given his brother after their initial meeting. Unlike the Phoenician, Ferrus Manus had little time for art, music or any of the cultural pastimes the IIIrd Legion's Primarch so enjoyed. It is said that after the two Primarchs met at Mount Narodnya, they returned to the Imperial Palace where Primarch Sanguinius of the Blood Angels Legion had arrived bearing gifts for the Emperor, exquisite statues from the glowing rock of Baal, priceless gem-stones and wondrous artifacts of aragonite, opal and tourmaline. The lord of the Blood Angels had brought enough to fill a dozen wings of the Palace with the greatest wonders imaginable.

Of course, Fulgrim was enthralled, finding that another of his brothers shared his love of such incredible beauty, but Ferrus Manus was unimpressed and said that such things were a waste of their time when there was a galaxy to win back. Fulgrim laughed and declared Ferrus a "terrible gorgon," saying that if the Primarchs did not value beauty, then they would never appreciate the stars they were to win back for their father. After that time the name stuck, and forever after Ferrus Manus was often referred to as The Gorgon.

The Great Crusade

Fulgrim was anxious from the start to make a substantial contribution to the Great Crusade like all of his brother Primarchs, but the small size of his Legion meant that the Emperor's Children were at first placed under the command of the Primarch Horus and were assigned to fight alongside his Luna Wolves Legion. Horus and Fulgrim soon grew personally close during their time together while their Legions participated in the conquest and pacification of the Eastern Fringe of the galaxy in the Ultima Segmentum. Eventually, over the course of several decades, the Emperor's Children's ranks were swelled by new Astartes who had been recruited from both Terra and Fulgrim's homeworld of Chemos, where the IIIrd Legion had established its fortress-monastery at the old fortress-factory of Callax. When the Emperor's Children were judged to have reached an appropriate size, Fulgrim was given command of the 28th Expeditionary Fleet of the Great Crusade and set off on his own course of conquest, adding dozens of worlds to the rule of the Emperor. Among them was the advanced xenos world of Laeran, where Fulgrim's fate would be sealed.

Fulgrim’s Fall

Fulgrim first fell from the Emperor's grace on the xenos planet called Laeran, officially designated as Twenty-Eight-Three, being the third world the 28th Expedition had brought to Imperial Compliance. Unbeknownst to the III Legion, the serpentine Laer species were corrupted xenos worshippers of the Chaos God of Pleasure, Slaanesh. Though the resource-rich Ocean World of Laeran would be of immeasurable value to the Crusade of the Emperor, its alien inhabitants did not wish to share what blind fortune had blessed them with. They had refused to see the manifest destiny that guided Mankind through the stars and had made it abundantly clear that they held the Imperium in nothing but contempt. The IIIrd Legion's advance had been rebuffed with violence, and honour demanded that they answer in kind.

Fulgrim's 28th Expeditionary Fleet of the Great Crusade conquered Laeran for the Imperium, exterminating its hostile native reptilian species, the Laer. Laeran was a water world, its continents having sunk beneath its oceans' waves centuries before when all of its ice caps and glaciers melted. The oceanic world was home to a native sentient species known as the Laer who were reptilian and serpentine in form but also engaged in extensive genetic engineering to perfect their species, creating a multitude of different castes who were genetically designed to best serve their intended function in Laer society. Having no land area, the Laer, whose technology equaled or even exceeded that of the Imperium in certain areas, had moved their entire society onto hundreds of floating coral islands that circled a central nexus in the planet's atmosphere. Each coral island was held aloft by an anti-gravity generator.

What Fulgrim and his Emperor's Children Legion did not know was that the Laer were also an entire civilization that had been corrupted by Slaanesh, the Chaos God of Pleasure and Pain. The central nexus point that all of their coral islands orbited was actually a massive temple dedicated to the Prince of Pleasure at the heart of which lay a potent Chaos artifact, a beautifully crafted, single-edged Daemonblade, that served as the physical vessel for a Greater Daemon of the Prince of Chaos. The Laer evinced all the signs of what later generations of the Imperium would recognize as Slaaneshi corruption, including a need for constant extreme sensory inputs, such as riotous colors and constant sound, and the deriving of pleasure from only the most extreme of sensations, including their own deaths. Completely unaware of the real dangers he and his Astartes Legion faced on the Chaos-corrupted world, Fulgrim ordered the Emperor's Children and the other forces of the 28thExpeditionary Fleet to assault the planet and conquer it for the Imperium within a single Terran month, completely eradicating the Laer species in the process. The Council of Terra had decided that the subjugation of the Laer would cost too many Imperial lives and would take too long. Some estimates indicated that an attempted Imperial Compliance would take as long as ten standard years. There had even been talk of making Laeran a protectorate of the Imperium. Primarch Fulgrim would not countenance such talk, for by refusing the Emperor's beneficence, the Laer had effectively sealed their doom.

During the final slaughter of that serpentine xenos race, Fulgrim and his Astartes discovered the great temple dedicated to Slaanesh that lay on the central floating coral island of Laeran. The Imperium, ignorant of the existence of the Chaos Powers at this time and holding to the extreme rationalism and atheism of the Imperial Truth, did not realize the significance of such a find or what they had really discovered. The expedition led by Fulgrim began to be unwittingly corrupted by the temple's potent and malign influence. After defeating the temple's fanatical Laer defenders, Fulgrim discovered what the Laer were so fiercely protecting -- at the center of the chamber of the unholy temple was a circular block of veined black stone, and embedded within was a tall silver sword with a gently-curved blade and a crude amethyst gem set in the pommel. This sword was not only a potent Slaaneshi artifact but also the physical vessel of a Greater Daemon of Slaanesh.

Once Fulgrim had claimed the blade as his own, the daemon within it began whispering in his mind and corrupting his soul towards the service of Slaanesh. He began to wield the daemon blade more often than his prior weapon, the great sword Fireblade that had been forged for him on Terra by his fellow Primarch and most favored brother, Ferrus Manus. Thinking the whispers in his mind was only his own subconscious speaking to him, Fulgrim began listening to what it offered. Eventually, he discovered these were actually the whispers of the daemon that existed within the blade. After a lot of persuasion from his brother Horus, himself already corrupted by the Ruinous Powers after his injury on the moon of Davin, Fulgrim gave himself over to Chaos, and found his particular patron in the Prince of Pleasure, who offered the Primarch a route to the ultimate perfection he so craved for himself and his Astartes, free of all morality and dependent upon the pursuit of ultimate self-obsession.

The Diasporex Persecution

During the latter part of the Great Crusade, the Iron Hands Legion encountered a nomadic, fleet-based civilization composed of both humans and xenos known as the Diasporex. The Iron Hands shared the Imperial Truth of the Emperor of Mankind and offered the human members of the Diasporex the opportunity to separate from their alien allies and to join the newly forged Imperium, but they declined the Astartes' offer. Their offer rejected, the Iron Hands passed judgement, and in the following months the Iron Hands fleet attempted to annihilate the Diasporex, but they proved to be highly skilled and experienced in the realm of naval warfare, and managed to easily evade crucial battles and even to severely damage the Iron Hands' Strike Cruiser Ferrum. The Emperor's Children of the 28th Expeditionary Fleet were called in as reinforcements, and so, a joint Imperial strike force composed of both the Iron Hands and forces from the Emperor's Children Legion launched an all-out assault against the willful Diasporex. Though the Diasporex knew that a powerful fleet of warships was hunting them and sought their destruction, they refused to leave the sector and move on to someplace safer. The Iron Hands' scout ships soon discovered the truth -- the Diasporex used hidden solar collector arrays to collect fuel for their vessels from a star. This was the reason why the Diasporex remained within the sector. Attacking these vital fuel stations, the two Imperial Expeditionary Fleets drew the Diasporex fleet out into open battle as the human-alien alliance sought to avoid utter annihilation at the Imperials' hands.

During the massive naval battle that ensued Fulgrim's personal gunship, the Firebird, came under heavy attack and soon found itself in trouble. Rushing to his brother's side, Ferrus Manus' flagship, the Battle Barge Fist of Iron, came rushing to the rescue of his beleaguered brother. To restore his wounded pride, Fulgrim led a brief ship boarding action where the Emperor's Children wreaked bloody havoc on the troops of the Diasporex. But ultimate victory was robbed from him when the enemy ship's bridge was taken by one of his subordinate commanders. For months thereafter, Fulgrim would resent The Gorgon's actions, unable to truly understand the altruism of Ferrus' deed and the loss of life his selfless act had incurred on his Legion. Under the malignant influence of the daemon-possessed Laer blade that he wore at all times, Fulgrim could only see self-aggrandizement in his brother’s action, instead of the the heroic deed it had truly been. Ferrus' critical comments, the wounding darts that Fulgrim believed were meant to undermine him, were in actuality only jests designed to puncture Fulgrim's self-importance and restore his humility. What Fulgrim perceived as Ferrus’ prideful boasts and rash actions had been deeds of courage that he spitefully dismissed as the influence of Chaos began to claim the Phoenician's soul.

The Horus Heresy

Certain members of the Inquisition who have studied the fragmentary Imperial records of this time now believe that the Laeran daemon sword began to exert a powerful Chaotic influence over Fulgrim, and that the Emperor's Children forces he had deployed against the Laer may also have been tainted by their exposure to the concentrated Chaotic corruption of that serpentine race, who had fully sworn themselves to the service of Slaanesh. Even while wrestling with his own Chaotic taint, the Primarch of the Emperor's Children soon found himself at the center of the events that would bring on the Horus Heresy.

Fulgrim met with the renowned Eldar Farseer Eldrad Ulthran of Craftworld Ulthwe on the Maiden World of Tarsus, in which the Farseer attempted to warn Fulgrim that Horus had been wounded by the Chaotic artifact blade known as the Kinebrach Anathame at the hands of Eugen Temba, the Planetary Governor of Davin who had fallen to the influence of the Plague Lord Nurgle. The wounding had allowed the Chaos Gods to gain a purchase on the Warmaster's soul and he was already turning to their service as he recuperated from the nearly-mortal wound the Kinebrach blade had given him at the hands of Temba on the Nurgle-corrupted moon of Davin. Fulgrim reacted with violent outrage at the Farseer's accusations due to his close friendship with his brother Horus, as his bond with the Warmaster was second only to that he shared with Ferrus Manus, the Primarch of the Xth Legion. This outrage was further enhanced by the influence of Fulgrim's daemonblade, which wanted the Primarch to reject the Eldar's truth and it led Fulgrim to launch an unprovoked and furious attack on Eldrad and his retinue alongside his Emperor's Children Captains and his personal Phoenix Guard. In the battle that ensued, the Emperor's Children slew both the revered Eldar Wraithlord Khiraen Goldhelm and a potent Avatar of Khaine, which forced the Farseer and the other Eldar troops to sorrowfully withdraw, as they realised that Chaos had already claimed yet another of the Mon-Keigh's Primarchs. Yet they had succeeded in killing all of Fulgrim's elite personal Phoenix Guard before their departure. Believing the Eldar had proven themselves a treacherous race that sought to divide and conquer the Imperium by spreading such lies about its leaders, Fulgrim, again under the increasing influence of the daemonblade, ordered the destruction by the 28th Expeditionary Fleet of several other beautiful Eldar Maiden Worlds using hideous virus bombs.

Whilst the exact timing of this meeting remains unknown in Imperial records, it is known that Fulgrim soon met Horus in person after the Eldar had provided their warning about the Warmaster's turn to Chaos, and Fulgrim demanded a personal account of his actions. Instead, Horus, deploying every ounce of his immense charisma, proved able to sway Fulgrim to his cause and the service of the Ruinous Powers. Fulgrim's respect for Horus allowed Chaos to find its own way into Fulgrim's heart, destroying Fulgrim's once rock-solid loyalty to the Emperor, and replacing it with the burning desire to destroy the man who he now believed held humanity back from the perfection Fulgrim so craved and that Horus convinced him only the Chaos Gods could truly provide. Only when Mankind had fully embraced Chaos could it know true perfection, Fulgrim came to believe, and the Emperor and his false Imperial Truth stood directly in the way of his and the rest of humanity's attainment of that perfection. In recognition of the trust that Horus put in his brother, he gifted him with the potent Chaotic blade known as the Kinebrach Anathame. Only the two brothers shared the secret of the poisoned blade's true power, as it was the weapon blessed by the Plague God Nurgle that had almost killed Horus on Davin's feral moon.

Fulgrim was next ordered by Horus to meet with Ferrus Manus, the Primarch of the Iron Hands Legion and Fulgrim's greatest friend amongst his brother Primarchs, aboard his flagship the Battle Barge Fist of Iron in the hope that he could be swayed to the side of Horus and the other Traitor Legions who now served Chaos. Fulgrim had sent the bulk of his Legion and the 28th Expeditionary Fleet on to meet Horus and the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet in the Istvaan System while he and a small force aided the Iron Hands' 52nd Expeditionary Fleet in retaking the world of Callinedes IV from Orks. Great bonds of friendship and brotherhood had long existed between them, and Fulgrim felt that he could convince Ferrus of the righteousness of Horus' cause. Fulgrim's hope proved disastrously wrong and the meeting of the two Primarchs in Ferrus' private inner sanctum in his flagship's Anvilarium did not go well, as Ferrus was outraged that his brothers would turn against their father the Emperor. The meeting ended in violence as The Gorgon made his difference of opinion over continued loyalty to the Emperor known to the Phoenician with his weapons, and he was determined to stop Fulgrim's betrayal of the Imperium before it could begin. Ferrus used his silvery necrodermis hands to destroy Fulgrim's Power Sword Fireblade, but the explosion knocked him out.

Fulgrim intended to kill his brother with his own weapon, the warhammer Forgebreaker, but proved unable to kill his oldest friend despite the promptings of the Slaaneshi daemon that now throttled his soul. When Fulgrim emerged from Ferrus' inner sanctum, he gave a signal to his Phoenix Guard who instantly beheaded all of the Iron Hands Morlocks Terminators who served as Ferrus Manus' bodyguard with their Power Halberds. The Emperor's Children also nearly slew the Iron Hands' First Captain Gabriel Santor. Fulgrim successfully fled the Iron Hands' expeditionary fleet in his personal assault craft, the Firebird, when he ordered his flagship, the Battle Barge Pride of the Emperor and its Escorts, to open fire upon the ships of the 52nd Expeditionary Fleet. This surprise attack crippled them and provided a distraction while Fulgrim and the forces of the IIIrd Legion fled into the Warp to rendezvous with the rest of their 28th Expeditionary Fleet in the Istvaan System.

With their allegiance now settled and their path forward determined, the Chaotic corruption of the Emperor's Children spread quickly throughout the IIIrd Legion, from Fulgrim to his chief lieutenants, the two Lord Commanders of the Legion, and then to its company captains and squad sergeants and finally to all but a small minority of Emperor's Children Astartes who followed the dictates of Slaanesh rather than remaining loyal to the Emperor. The IIIrd Legion's once-laudable quest for excellence and perfection had been corrupted into a desire to achieve perfect hedonism and constant, self-absorbed, sensual excess.

Istvaan III

Before Horus openly launched his rebellion to overthrow the Emperor, an opportunity presented itself that would enable him to get rid of the Loyalist elements within the Astartes Legions under his command. The Imperial Planetary Governor of Istvaan III, Vardus Praal, had been corrupted by the Chaos God Slaanesh whose cultists had long been active on the world even before it had been conquered by the Imperium. Praal had declared his independence from the Imperium, and had begun to practice forbidden Slaaneshi sorcery, so the Council of Terra charged Horus with the retaking of that world, primarily its capital, the Choral City. This order merely furthered Horus' plan to overthrow the Emperor. Although the four Legions under his direct command -- the Sons of Horus, World Eaters, Death Guard and the Emperor's Children -- had already turned Traitor and pledged themselves to Chaos, there were still some Loyalist elements within each of these Legions that approximated one-third of each force; many of these warriors were Terran-born Space Marines who had been directly recruited into the Astartes Legions by the Emperor Himself before being reunited with their Primarchs during the Great Crusade.

Horus, under the guise of putting down the rebellion against Imperial Compliance on the world of Istvaan III, amassed his troops in the Istvaan System. Horus had a plan by which he would destroy all of the remaining Loyalist elements of the Legions under his command. After a lengthy bombardment of Istvaan III, Horus dispatched all of the known Loyalist Astartes down to the planet, under the pretense of bringing it back into the Imperial fold. At the moment of victory and the capture of the Choral City, the planetary capital of Istvaan III, these Astartes were betrayed when a cascade of terrible Life-Eater virus-bombs fell onto the world, launched by the Warmaster's orbiting fleet. The Loyalist Captain Saul Tarvitz of the Emperor's Children, however, was aboard the Strike Cruiser Andronius and had discovered the plot to wipe out the Loyalist Astartes of the Traitor Legions. He was able, with help from Battle-Captain Nathaniel Garro of the Death Guard who was in command of the Death Guard Frigate Eisenstein, to reach the surface of Istvaan III despite pursuit and warn the Loyalist Space Marines he could find of all four Legions of their impending doom. Those that heard or passed on Tarvitz's warning took shelter before the virus-bombs struck.

The civilian population of Istvaan III received no such protection: 12 billion people died almost at once as the lethal flesh-dissolving virus called the Life-Eater carried by the bombs infected every living thing on the planet. The psychic shock of so many deaths at one time shrieked through the Warp, briefly obscuring even the glowing beacon of the Astronomican. The Primarch of the World Eaters, Angron, realizing that the virus-bombs had not been fully effective at eliminating all the Loyalists, flew into a rage and hurled himself at the planet at the head of 50 companies of World Eaters Traitor Marines. Discarding tactics and strategy, the World Eaters Traitors worked themselves into a frenzy of mindless butchery fed by their growing allegiance to the Blood God Khorne. Horus was furious with Angron for delaying his plans, but Horus sought to turn the delay into a victory and was obliged to reinforce Angron with troops from the Sons of Horus, the Death Guard, and the Emperor's Children.

Fortunately, a contingent of Loyalists led by Battle-Captain Garro escaped Istvaan III aboard the damaged Imperial Frigate Eisenstein and fled to Terra to warn the Emperor that Horus had turned Traitor. On Istvaan III, the remaining Loyalists, under the command of Captains Tarvitz, Garviel Loken and Tarik Torgaddon, another Loyalist member of the Sons of Horus, fought bravely against their own traitorous brethren. Yet, despite some early successes that delayed Horus' plans for three full months while the battle on Istvaan III played out, their cause was ultimately doomed by their lack of air support and Titan firepower. During the battle, the Sons of Horus Captains Ezekyle Abaddon and Horus Aximand were sent to confront their former Mournival brothers, Loken and Torgaddon. Horus Aximand beheaded Torgaddon, but Abaddon failed to kill Loken when the building they were in collapsed. Loken somehow survived and witnessed the final orbital bombardment of Istvaan III that ended the Loyalists' desperate defense.

The few remaining Loyalists of the Emperor's Children Legion fought bravely on Istvaan III, led by Captains Saul Tarvitz and Solomon Demeter. To prove his worth and loyalty to Lord Commander Eidolon of the Emperor's Children -- and thus to his Primarch, Fulgrim -- Captain Lucius of the 13th Company of the Emperor's Children, the future Champion of Slaanesh known as Lucius the Eternal, turned against the Loyalists that he had fought beside because of his prior friendship with Saul Tarvitz. He wanted to punish Tarvitz for taking command of the defense, which had incited Lucius's fierce jealousy of his fellow captain. Lucius slew many of his former comrades personally, an act for which he was then accepted back into the III Legion on the side of the Traitors. In the end, the Loyalists retreated to their last bastion of defense, only a few hundred of their number remaining. Finally, tired of the conflict, Horus ordered his men to withdraw, and then had the remains of the Choral City bombarded into dust for a final time from orbit.

Lords of Pleasure

Throughout the final days of the Great Crusade, just before the outbreak of the Horus Heresy, the famed composer Bequa Kynska of Terra had accompanied the Emperor's Children's 28th Expeditionary Fleet as a Remembrancer aboard Fulgrim's Battle Barge Pride of the Emperor. Kynska was a jaded musician always in search of further sensations to create more exhilarating and all-encompassing music, which made her an easy target for Slaaneshi corruption. After Kynska accompanied many of the 28th Expedition's Remembrancers to the temple dedicated to Slaanesh on the xenos world of Laeran, she was touched by the Chaotic corruption of that foul place and slowly sought to create the ultimate orchestral piece that she believed could capture the wondrous sounds she had heard within the Laer temple. Her ultimate masterpiece was a symphony she named the Maraviglia and which she performed for Fulgrim and all the assembled Astartes of the Emperor's Children and their support personnel within the Remebrancers' lounge and theatre called La Fenice aboard the Pride of the Emperor. To recreate the sounds she had heard, Kynska created new musical instruments whose sonic powers could also be used for destruction when employed by an individual already corrupted by Slaanesh. As the Maraviglia began, the cacophony of sound unleashed by these instruments acted as a sorcerous ritual that opened a link between realspace and the Warp and allowed the power of Slaanesh to directly touch the audience. During the "performance" it was noted that the musical instruments were able to produce effects variously disorienting, stimulating and downright murderous.

Chaotic mutations ran rampant through the audience and Astartes and mortal humans alike were so overwhelmed by sensation and uncontrollable emotions that they unleashed an orgy of both sensual hedonism and the most base form of murder upon one another. Ultimately, the music summoned five Lesser Daemons of Slaanesh known as Daemonettes from the Warp who possessed the bodies of Kynska and several of her singers and joined in the slaughter. During this part of the concert, several Emperor's Children Astartes left their seats and took up the instruments to try and keep the Chaotic music playing and in the course of their untrained fumblings with the instruments discovered that they could unleash waves of destructive sonic power filled with the strength of Chaos. These Astartes became the first Noise Marines, who would eventually take to the field on Istvaan V wielding this strange, new weaponry as a new unit of the III Legion called the Kakophoni under the command of First Captain Julius Kaesoron. It was during this performance in La Fenice that the Emperor's Children finally gave themselves wholly, both body and soul, to the Prince of Pleasure as his most dedicated servants.

Drop Site Massacre

When the Loyalist Salamanders, Raven Guard and Iron Hands Legions arrived in the Istvaan System to face Horus and the Traitor Legions on Istvaan V, the Emperor's Children eagerly took part in the fighting. Thousands of Drop Pods and Stormbirds were deployed for the drop. The first wave was under the overall command of the Primarch Ferrus Manus and besides his own Xth Legion, the Salamanders led by Vulkan, and the Raven Guard under the command of their Primarch Corax joined him. Vulkan's Legion assaulted the left flank of the Traitors' battle line while Ferrus Manus, the Iron Hands' First Captain Gabriel Santor, and 10 full companies of elite Morlock Terminators charged straight into the center of the enemy lines. Meanwhile, Corax's Legion hit the right flank of the enemy's position. The odds were considered equal; 30,000 Traitor Marines against 40,000 Loyalists. Horus was aware of the location of the Loyalists' chosen drop site and his troops fell upon the Loyalist Legions.

The battlefield of Isstvan V was a slaughterhouse of epic proportions. Treacherous warriors twisted by hatred fought their former brothers-in-arms in a conflict unparalleled in its bitterness. The mighty Titan war engines of the Machine God walked the planet's surface and death followed in their wake. The blood of heroes and traitors flowed in rivers, and the hooded Heretek Adepts of the Dark Mechanicum unleashed perversions of ancient technology stolen from the Auretian Technocracy to wreak bloody havoc amongst the Loyalists. All across the Urgall Depression, hundreds died with every passing second, the promise of inevitable death a pall of darkness that hung over every warrior. The Traitor forces held, but their line was bending beneath the fury of the first Loyalist assault. It would take only the smallest twists of fate for it to break.

The second wave of "Loyalist" Space Marine Legions descended upon the landing zone on the northern edge of the Urgall Depression. Hundreds of Stormbirds and Thunderhawks roared towards the surface, their armoured hulls gleaming as the power of another four Astartes Legions arrived on Isstvan V. Yet the Space Marine Legions of the reserve were no longer loyal to the Emperor, having already secretly sworn themselves to Chaos and the cause of Horus. The Night Lords of Konrad Curze, the Iron Warriors of Perturabo, the Word Bearers of Lorgar, and the Alpha Legion of Alpharius represented a force larger than that which had first begun the assault on Isstvan V. The secret Traitor Legions mustered in the landing zone, armed and ready for battle, unbloodied and fresh.

Though the Iron Hands, Raven Guard and Salamanders had managed to make a full combat drop and secured the drop site, known as the Urgall Depression, they did so at a heavy cost. Overwhelmed with rage, the headstrong Ferrus Manus disregarded the counsel of his brothers Corax and Vulkan and hurled himself against the fleeing rebels, seeking to bring Fulgrim to personal combat. His veteran troops -- comprising the majority of the Xth Legion's Terminators and Dreadoughts -- followed. What had begun as a massed strike against the Traitors’ position was rapidly turning into one of the largest engagements of the entire Great Crusade. All told, over 60,000 Astartes warriors clashed on the dusky plains of Isstvan V. For all the wrong reasons, this battle was soon to go down in the annals of Imperial history as one of the most epic confrontations ever fought.

Fulgrim smiled as his brother Ferrus Manus renewed his attack into the heart of the Traitors' defensive lines atop the Urgall Depression. Backlit by the flaring strobe of battle, his brother was a magnificent figure of vengeance, his silver hands and eyes reflecting the fires of slaughter with a brilliant gleam. For the briefest second, Fulgrim had been sure that Ferrus would pause to muster with the Raven Guard and Salamanders, but there would be no restraining his brother's aggrieved sense of honour. Around the Phoenician, the last of the Phoenix Guard awaited the blunt wedge of the Iron Hands, their golden halberds held low and aimed towards their foes.

Ferrus Manus and his Morlocks charged through the shattered ruin of the defenses, his black armour and their burnished plates scarred and stained with the blood of enemies. Fulgrim's fixed smile faltered as he truly appreciated the depths of hatred his brother held for him and wondered again how they had come to this point, knowing that any chance for brotherhood was lost. Only in death would their rivalry end. The Iron Hands pushed through the defenses, the bulky Terminators unstoppable in their relentless advance. Lightning crackled from the claws of their gauntlets and their red eyes shone with anger. The Phoenix Guard braced themselves to meet the charge, fully aware of the power of such mighty suits of armour. The Phoenix Guard answered with a terrible war cry and leapt to meet the Morlocks in a searing clash of blades. Electric fire leapt from the golden edges of the halberds and the Lightning Claws of the warriors, and a storm of light and sound flared from each life and death struggle. The battle engulfed the Primarch of the Emperor’s Children, but he stood above it, awaiting the dark armoured giant who strode untouched through the lightning shot carnage as brothers hacked at one another in hatred. Ferrus had long dreamt of this moment of reckoning, ever since Fulgrim had come to him with betrayal in his heart. Only one of them would walk away from their final confrontation.

Final Confrontation

Ferrus taunted Fulgrim for his betrayal of the Emperor and siding with the Traitor Horus. He thought his brother mad, for the Warmaster was defeated -- his forces routed and the power of another four Legions would soon be brought to bear to crush their attempt at rebellion utterly. Unable to contain himself any longer, Fulgrim shook his head, savoring the final act of betrayal to come, revealing to Ferrus that it was he who was naive. Horus would never be foolish enough to trap himself like this. He pointed out towards the northern edge of the Urgall Depression so that Ferrus could see that it was he and his fellow Loyalists who were undone. Ferrus looked and saw a force larger than that which had begun the assault during the first wave of attack, mustered in the landing zone, armed and ready for battle.

Dragging their wounded and dead behind them, Corax and Vulkan led their forces back to the drop site to regroup and to allow the warriors of their recently arrived brother Primarchs of the second wave a measure of the glory in defeating Horus. Though they voxed hails requesting medical aid and supply, the line of Astartes atop the northern ridge remained grimly silent as the exhausted warriors of the Raven Guard and Salamanders came to within a hundred meters of their allies. It was then that Horus revealed his perfidy and sprung his lethal trap. Inside the black fortress where Horus had made his lair, a lone flare shot skyward, exploding in a hellish red glow that lit the battlefield below. The fire of betrayal roared from the barrels of a thousand guns, as the second wave of Astartes revealed where their true loyalties now lay. Ferrus looked on in stunned horror as Fulgrim laughed at the look on his brother's face as the forces of his "allies" opened fire upon the Salamanders and Raven Guard, killing hundreds in the fury of the first few moments, hundreds more in the seconds following, as volley after volley of Bolter fire and missiles scythed through their unsuspecting ranks.

Even as terrifying carnage was being wreaked upon the Loyalists below, the retreating forces of the Warmaster turned and brought their weapons to bear on the enemy warriors within their midst. Hundreds of Sons of Horus] and the Death Guard fell upon the veteran companies of the Iron Hands, and though the warriors of the XthLegion continued to fight gallantly, they were hopelessly outnumbered and would soon be hacked to pieces. Ferrus Manus turned to face Fulgrim, his teeth bared with the volcanic fury of his homeworld. The two Primarchs leapt at one anther, Ferrus wielding Fireblade and Fulgrim holding Forgebreaker. Their weapons had been forged in brotherhood, but were now wielded in vengeance, meeting in a blazing plume of energy. The two Primarchs traded blows with their monstrously powerful weapons, Ferrus Manus wielded his flaming blade in fiery slashes, his every blow defeated by the ebony hafted hammer he had borne in countless campaigns. Both warriors fought with the hatred only brothers divided could muster, their armour dented, torn and blackened by their fury.

The two Primarchs traded terrible blows, wounding one another deeply during their fierce struggle. As Ferrus pushed himself to his feet and staggered towards the wounded Fulgrim, he cried out as he brought the flaming blade towards his brother's neck. But Fulgrim lashed out as he drew the single-edged, daemonically-possessed sword he had taken from the Laer temple and blocked the descending weapon. With the power of Chaos streaming from the blade, diabolical strength flooded Fulgrim's limbs as he pushed against the power of Ferrus Manus, feeling his brother's surprise at his resistance. Fulgrim managed to surge to his feet and lashed out, his silver blade biting deep into the breastplate of Ferrus' armour, and the Primarch of the Iron Hands cried out, falling to his knees once again. Fireblade slid from his grasp as he gasped in fierce agony. As Fulgrim raised the silver sword in preparation of delivering the deathblow to Ferrus Manus, he found that he did not possess the fortitude to deliver the killing blow. In an instant he saw what he had become and what monstrous betrayal he had allowed himself to be party to. He knew in that eternal moment that he had made a terrible mistake in drawing the sword from the Temple of the Laer, and he fought to release the damnable blade that had brought him so low.

His grip was locked onto the weapon and even as he recognized how far he had fallen, he knew that he had come too far to stop, the realization coupled with the knowledge that everything he had striven for had been a lie. As though moving in slow motion, Fulgrim saw Ferrus Manus reaching for his fallen sword, his fingers closing around the wire-wound grip, the flames leaping once more to the blade at its creator's touch. Fulgrim's blade seemed to move with a life of its own as he swung the blade of his own volition. Fulgrim tried desperately to pull the blow, but his muscles were no longer his own to control. The daemonic blade sliced through the genetically-enhanced flesh and bone of one of the Emperor's sons. The Iron Hands' Primarch fell to the ground, his head decapitated. Ferrus Manus was dead by his brother's own hand.

Though Fulgrim had proved the victor, he discovered as he looked down at his battered brother's prostrate body that everything up until that moment had all been a lie. Fulgrim, as if awakened from a long sleep, was shocked by the death of Ferrus into thinking clearly about the situation for the first time since his expedition to Laeran, and he was horrified by what he had done and by the many betrayals that had led brother Astartes to slay one another. Overcome by his grief, he succumbed to a moment of weakness and foolishly agreed to the daemon's whispering suggestion that he could find release in oblivion. The Greater Daemon was then freed from the prison of the sword and fully possessed Fulgrim's body, claiming it for its own, trapping the real Fulgrim's consciousness away within a psychic prison formed within his own mind but symbolically represented by a painting of the Primarch that stood in the place of honour in La Fenice, the theatre of the IIIrd Legion's flagship, the Pride of the Emperor.

Fulgrim and the Warmaster

Following the Traitor's victory at Istvaan V, Fulgrim requested a private audience with the Warmaster. Horus was pleased as his brother presented the grisly trophy of the severed head of Ferrus Manus, as promised. Gloating at this great accomplishment, Horus wished to share this triumph with his fellow captains. But the Emperor's Children's Primarch informed Horus that Fulgrim did not possess the fortitude to fulfill his oath to his brother, so he had done it for him! The Warmaster suddenly realised that the creature that stood before him was not truly his brother Fulgrim, but some sort of doppelganger. Horus threatened harm against this false Fulgrim, informing the creature that he could break him like a straw. The false Fulgrim had no desire to test himself in such a wasteful and fruitless trial of combat. Horus glanced towards Fulgrim’s waist, and relaxed as he saw that this thing masquerading as his brother had come before him unarmed. Whatever its purpose in unveiling itself, it had not come with violence on its mind. For he had come to pledge his loyalty to Horus' cause. He then informed Horus that he was actually a creature of the Warp -- a humble servant of the great power that was the Dark Prince Slaanesh. The Greater Daemon explained to the horrified Horus that he had claimed Fulgrim's mortal shell as his own, and further explained how pleasing it was to him.

Horus inquired as to his brother's fate. The daemon who now inhabited Fulgrim's body explained to Horus that Fulgrim was quite safe, residing within the body now under the control of the Greater Daemon, utterly aware of all that transpired but unable to do anything to intervene. His cries of anguish were a great comfort to the malefic creature. Horus was appalled by this turn of events, and said nothing in response to the daemon's revelations. The Daemon-Fulgrim had pledged its allegiance to his cause and it was a patently powerful Warp entity. Horus thought it best to keep the creature as an ally, for he certainly could not do without the IIIrd Legion at this juncture. However, Horus resolved to destroy the daemon and rescue Fulgrim from his torment when the time was right, for no one deserved to endure such a terrible fate. But Horus wondered what power could unmake a daemon. Horus and the Daemon-Fulgrim agreed to keep its true nature to themselves. The daemon had no particular desire to reveal itself and Horus was convinced that such a revelation would create many problems for him with the other Primarchs dedicated to the Traitors' cause.

Traitor Conclave

Four days after the Drop Site Massacre on Istvaan V, Horus Lupercal assembled those Primarchs who stood in opposition to the Imperium aboard his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit. They all knew the costs of the coming campaign, and their destinies within it. The Traitor fleets were underway. But after the "unpleasantness" of Isstvan, this was the first time they had gathered as a full fraternity. Eight Primarchs were present, though only half of them were physically in the room where the gathering took place. This included Fulgrim, Perturabo, Angron and Lorgar Aurelian. The absent four were nothing more than holographic projections: three of them -- Konrad Curze, Mortarion and Alpharius -- manifested around the table in the forms of flickering grey hololithic simulacra. The fourth of them appeared as a brighter image comprised of the silver radiance of brilliant witchfire. This last image was of Magnus the Red, who projected himself from afar by sorcerous means, from the Sorcerer's Planet where he was still licking his wounds from the recent Burning of Prospero by Leman Russ' Space Wolves.

As soon as Lorgar had taken his seat at the council table he could not take his eyes off his brother Fulgrim. The Warmaster grew ever more weary of his brother's inability to adhere to established planning and his lack of attention to the important gathering. Before the meeting could properly get underway, Lorgar slowly reached for the ornate Crozius mace on his back. As he drew the weapon in the company of his closest kin, his eyes remained locked on one of them, and all physically present felt the deepening chill of psychic frost riming along their armour. The Word Bearer Primarch accused the thing that mimicked his brother in physical appearance as not being who he purported to be. Before anyone could react, Lorgar's Crozius mace struck the supposed Emperor's Children Primarch. Fulgrim crashed into the back wall, his prostrate form crumpled to the ground. Turning his fierce eyes upon his other brothers he declared that this pretender was not Fulgrim. The other Primarchs that were present, advanced upon the changeling, drawing their own weapons. The Warmaster tried to placate the enraged Lorgar, his merest threat of a confrontation had usually been enough to quell Lorgar from any rash actions in the past. But as they faced Aurelian now, even Horus was wide-eyed in the changes wrought within him since Istvaan V. Clutching his mace in his crimson coloured gauntlets, defying his brothers, he warned them to stay back.

When Horus once again attempted to calm the enraged Primarch, Lorgar was surprised at the sudden realization that the Warmaster already knew that Fulgrim was not whom he pretended to be. The Warmaster informed his fellow Primarchs that he would personally deal with the situation and dismissed them all from his chambers, with the exception of Lorgar. The Word Bearers Primarch could see the truth -- this creature was one of daemons of Chaos -- as whatever was wearing his brother's skin and armour had its soul hollowed out. Something nestled within, puppeteering the soulless body of their own brother. What Lorgar couldn't understand was how this had come to pass and why did Horus continue to protect such a dark secret? Horus explained to his brother that he had not orchestrated Fulgrim's demise; he was merely containing the aftermath.

Lorgar was perturbed that another sentience now rode within Fulgrim's body. Horus was annoyed at his brother's line of questioning, for Lorgar and Fulgrim had never been close. Why did it matter to him? Lorgar explained that it mattered because this vile intrusion was a perversion of the natural order. There was no harmony in such a joining. Not like his own blessed daemon-possessed sons, the Gal Vorbak. A living soul had been annihilated for its mortal shell to simply house a greedy, unborn wretch of a daemon. During Lorgar's Pilgrimage to the Eye of Terror years earlier, he had walked in the Warp itself. He had stood where the gods and mortals met. Lorgar knew this form of possession was weakness and corruption -- a perversion of what the Chaos Gods wished for Mankind. The Ruinous Powers wanted allies and willing followers, not soulless husks ridden by their daemons.

Using his powerful psychic abilities, Lorgar held the daemon at bay. The Warmaster cautioned that he was killing Fulgrim, but Lorgar replied that it was not their brother, but an "it" -- one that he could destroy if he so wished it. Lorgar threatened the daemon that he would learn its true name and banish it back into the Warp. The Daemon-Fulgrim was helpless against Lorgar's formidable psychic abilities. As the Warmaster attempted to restrain his brother by placing his hand on Lorgar's shoulder, the Primarch psychically commanded Horus to remove his hand. Unable to resist, Horus obeyed. His fingers shivered as they withdrew, and his grey eyes flickered with tension. As the enraged Lorgar strode away from the council chambers, Horus commented that his brother had changed since crossing blades with Corax on the surface of Istvaan V. Lorgar replied that everything had changed that night. He then took his leave and returned to his ship to contemplate what he perceived as utter foulness.

Fulgrim's Fate

Those that served in the IIIrd Legion had no idea that their beloved leader was clawing ineffectually at the bondage of his own mind in which he was held. Only the swordsman,Captain Lucius of the 13th Company, had appeared to realise that something was amiss with Fulgrim, but even he had said nothing. The Daemon-Fulgrim had sensed the burgeoning Warp touch upon the warrior and had presented him with the silver daemon blade within which the Laer had bound a fragment of its essence, as he now wielded the far more potent Kinebrach Anathame, a gift from Horus. Though the Laer Daemon sword was now bereft of its spirit, there was still power within the blade, power that would empower Lucius in the years of death to come.

After the conclave aboard Horus' flagship, the Daemon-Fulgrim and the Emperor's Children Legion were ordered to Mars to aid the coming civil war within the Adeptus Mechanicus by the Warmaster. But instead of following his brother's orders, the increasingly mercurial Primarch decided to disobey, and instead ordered his Legion to assault an Adeptus Mechanicus crystal Mining World called Prismatica V. Unable to deal with his lord's mercurial temperament as well as his fellow senior members of the Legion, Lord Commander Eidolon questioned the Primarch's orders. This proved to be a tragic miscalculation on Eidolon's part. Unable to placate his angered lord, the few words he managed to speak on his own behalf inadvertently provoked the Primarch further. The paranoid Primarch believed that the Lord Commander was mocking him and planned to betray him. Quicker than the mind's eye could follow, the Primarch withdrew the Anathame from its scabbard and slew his once-favored son. He then held the severed head of the slain Eidolon over the opened casks of victory wine, the viscous blood dripping from the grisly trophy and mixing with the potent drink which was then shared amongst the senior members of the IIIrd Legion's inner circle.

Far from upset at the death of the much-despised Eidolon, the ascendant champion of the Emperor's Children, Lucius, took note of yet another example of Fulgrim's increasingly capricious behavior. Contemplating upon the change in his lord, Lucius was inspired to investigate further after receiving a series of dark dreams concerning the painting of the Primarch that hang in La Fenice, which had been cordoned off and sealed by a detachment of the Phoenix Guard after the Maraviglia had worked its corrupting influence upon the Legion. Already concerned by his lord's erratic behavior and strange moods, Lucius proceeded to scrutinise the Primarch's every move. His concerns grew even more when he noticed Fulgrim's lack of brotherly-camaraderie and observance of Legion rituals and tradition. But what truly aroused Lucius' suspicions was the realization that Fulgrim's swordsmanship was suddenly inferior to his own superlative skills. His Primarch was not whom he appeared to be. His suspicions were further confirmed when he witnessed Fulgrim employing powerful psychic abilities in open combat against a Warhound-class Titan of the Adeptus Mechanicus during the IIIrdLegion's assault on Prismatica V.

Lucius continued to receive the strange dreams in his sleep, and began to follow the threads implanted by these prescient visions. Breaking a standing order, Lucius defied the Primarch and went to investigate La Fenice, the theatre located aboard the Emperor's Childrens' flagship Pride of the Emperor. This is where the Emperor's Children had truly fallen to the corrupting influence of Slaanesh, awakened by the operatic symphony known as the Maraviglia. Investigating the ruined chamber thoroughly, Lucius discovered above the stage that a great portrait hung above the smashed wreckage of the proscenium. Even in the dying light, the portrait’s magnificence was palpable. A glorious golden frame held the canvas trapped within its embrace, and the wondrous perfection of the painting was truly breathtaking. Clad in his wondrous armour of purple and gold, Fulgrim was portrayed before the great gates of the Heliopolis, the heart of the flagship, the flaming wings of a great phoenix sweeping up behind him. The firelight of the legendary bird shone upon his armour, each polished plate seeming to shimmer with the heat of the fire, his hair a cascade of gold. The Primarch of the Emperor’s Children was lovingly portrayed in perfect detail, every nuance of his grandeur and the life that made Fulgrim such a vision of beauty captured in the exquisite brushwork. No finer figure of a warrior had ever existed or ever would again, and to even glimpse such a flawless example of the painter’s art was to know that wonder still existed in the galaxy.

Gazing at the eyes of the painting, Lucius could see the horror within his Primarch's eyes, a horror that had not been rendered by the skill of a mortal painter. The perfect, exquisite agony burned in the portrait's gaze, the dark pools of the painted eyes seemed to follow his every movement. Lucius came to the conclusion that somehow, his Primarch was trapped within the painting, and that the entity that paraded around as their Legion's lord was an impostor. Determined to free his Primarch by any means at his disposal, Lucius secretly convened the Brotherhood of the Phoenix -- the exclusive warrior lodge of the IIIrd Legion that only allowed warriors of officer rank to join because of the Legion's love of hierarchy. This had to be done with the utmost secrecy, for by this time the corrupted senior officers had become powerful, volatile and self-obsessed with the pursuit of their individual pleasures. Also, many of these senior officers carried a loathing for Lucius, whom they viewed as a despised upstart. Through his skilled oratory, the swordsman was able to persuade his mercurial brothers that the Primarch was not himself. He further challenged their egos and stroked their vanity, tempting them into boldly capturing their Primarch. Shortly after, the Brotherhood of the Phoenix ambushed the Primarch, and despite taking several casualties, manage to subdue their lord by rendering him unconscious.

The Primarch was then taken to the Apothecarion of the IIIrd Legion's Chief Apothecary Fabius Bile, where he was strapped down to one of the examination tables. Here, Fabius, Lucius, Julius Kaesoron and Marius Vairosean attempted to drive forth the daemonic entity from their lord's mortal shell through a protracted torture session known as excruciation. Fulgrim willingly submitted himself to his tormentors' ministrations, and continuously spoke of his perceptions of reality, events that were currently taking place in the galaxy as Chaos grew in power and the envisioned path for his Legion. During the torture session, Lucius suddenly realized that they had been misled. Misinterpreting the situation, they had been duped by their lord. Lucius immediately bended his knee and prostrated himself before his Primarch as Fulgrim easily tore himself free from his restraints. His fellow conspirators all bowed to their lord and master. Content that his favored sons had learned from the experience, the Primarch did not punish them for their transgressions, for he was not the daemon-possessed shell of the Phoenix as he had allowed his Astartes to believe, but the man himself.

Fulgrim decided to share with Lucius his motives for such an elaborate ruse. He revealed that he had indeed been possessed by a daemonic entity for quite some time, an entity that had trapped his disembodied spirit within the great portrait that had hung in La Fenice. Unwilling to accept his fate, the Primarch had bided his time and used the tormenting experience to learn of Warp-craft and the infallible ways of daemon kind. He eventually was able to use this newly acquired arcane knowledge to force the daemon out of his mortal body -- swapping places with the foul entity -- and trapping it within the portrait for all time. Presumably, it was the daemon that had been sending Lucius the dark dreams in order to attempt to free itself from its prison. In an attempt to further educate his favoured champion in the unfathomable ways of Chaos, the Primarch's apparent inferiority in his sword techniques was merely a ploy to manipulate Lucius into challenging him. The Primarch went on to explain that his mercurial moods and lack of interest in camaraderie and the IIIrd Legion's rituals were a natural evolution of his nature to achieve perfection along the path laid out by Slaanesh. Fulgrim announced that he intended to go further than anyone in the realms of sensual experience, intent on pushing the boundaries of reality to the extreme. Fulgrim didn't merely want to accomplish these things for the sole acquisition of power, but to experience the journey -- a journey he wanted his sons to undertake with him. He explained that he had ordered the assault on Prismatica V to claim the crystal the Mechanicus had been mining there so that it might be used to erect a wondrous new city of mirrors dedicated to the exploration of sensual pleasure and self-enlightenment through sensation. But the next step on the Emperor's Children's path towards enlightenment through Chaos, was to rendezvous with the Primarch Perturabo and his Iron Warriors Legion.

Angel Exterminatus

As Horus' rebellion ground on, the Iron Warriors took the time to humble their great enemies, the Imperial Fists, upon the isolated world of Hydra Cordatus that the Sons of Dorn had recently brought into Imperial Compliance. Following their victory, word reached Perturabo that Fulgrim and his Emperor's Children Legion, wished to rendezvous with him to discuss something of great import. Though the Phoenecian had yet to reveal the true purpose of his visit, he had promised Perturabo that it was "wondrous." Perturabo knew that his brother had a flair for the melodramatic, which only seemed to have gotten worse since the IIIrd Legion threw their lot in with the Warmaster. The Lord of Iron counted none of his fellow Primarchs as close, but the Phoenician's adherence to perfection in all things had once provided common ground between the two superhuman warriors and allowed them to talk as trusted comrades-in-arms if not beloved brothers. What the Emperor’s Children had sought with constant movement towards the attainment of perfection, the Iron Warriors earned with rigid discipline and methodical planning; two divergent paths to the same ultimate goal.

Perturabo believed Fulgrim's visit had something to do with the inevitable campaign to be conducted against Mars. The Warmaster needed the Martian theater fully secured before they moved against Terra, and he believed that Fulgrim was there to seek the Iron Warriors' aid in breaking open the forge-cities of the Mechanicum. If he was right, Perturabo wanted his Legion to have a plan in place to achieve that objective. Until the Iron Warriors received further orders, Perturabo would humor his brother and listen to what Fulgrim had to say. While making plans for the upcoming campaign, Perturabo received word that the Emperor's Children had arrived, unannounced, on the surface of Hydra Cordatus. Over three hundred drop-craft had landed beyond the mouth of the valley where the Iron Warriors had made their encampment.

The IV Legion quickly gathered in formation to honour the IIIrd Legion with a vanguard to receive them. Battalions of Thorakitai Imperial Army troops stood ranked in their tens of thousands. Before them stood two hundred Grand Battalions of Iron Warriors, fifty thousand warriors in amberdust-burnished warplate. Such a display of might and magnificence had not been seen since the slaughter unleashed upon the black sands of Istvaan V. Yet Perturabo and his senior officers looked on in awe at the gaudy cavalcade of noise, colour and spectacle that emerged from the IIIrd Legion's drop site into the valley. Fulgrim and his Emperor’s Children were now completely unrecognizable from the honourable warriors that had once formed the IIIrd Legion. Perturabo knew something fundamental had changed within the Emperor’s Children, but could not imagine what purpose the disfigurements and degradations its warriors now sported could possibly serve.

Fulgrim met with his brother Primarch in the private inner sanctum of his command bunker with an enticing offer that Perturabo could not refuse; the means to make it so that the Lord of Iron's every desire could be made real and would never disappoint, never fail to live up to his fondest expectations, and never, ever be eclipsed. Fulgrim came with an offer to unite their mutual forces in battle on a glorious quest. One that might tip the balance of the Warmaster’s rebellion. Though Perturabo was suspicious of his brother's intentions, perhaps this joint venture would grant understanding through common cause. Fulgrim revealed his purpose; they were to venture to the Warp Storm that had plagued Perturabo's dreams all of his life. Within it was hidden an ancient and forbidden xenos weapon known as the Angel Exterminatus. It had been hidden in the grave of its doom, a weapon of such power that the stars themselves turned upon it rather than allow it to escape its prison.

Sisypheum

Unknown to both the Emperor's Children and the Iron Warriors, they were being pursued by a ragtag group of Loyalist Astartes who were survivors of the Drop Site Massacre of Istvaan V and were determined to stop the Traitors at all costs. These Loyalist Space Marines were gathered from survivors that had fought their way out of the killing ground of the Urgall Depression on Istvaan V. They had managed to escape the Istvaan System aboard an Iron Hands Strike Cruiser known as the Sisypheum. Iron Hands Astartes and their mortal serfs formed the bulk of the warship's crew, but surviving warriors of the Salamanders and a single Raven Guard Astartes were also counted among their number. In the wake of the slaughter, escape from the Istvaan System had been a nerve shredding series of mad dashes under fire and silent runs through the Traitors' orbital blockade, culminating in a final sprint to the gravipause, the minimum safe distance between a star’s mass and a vessel’s ability to survive a Warp Jump. The Sisypheum had escaped the trap, but not without great cost.

The months that followed saw the Sisypheum embark on a series of hit-and-run attacks on Traitor forces on the northern frontiers of the galaxy, wreaking harm like a lone predator swimming in a dark ocean. Traitor forces seeking flanking routes through the Segmentum Obscurus were their prey; scout craft, cartographae ships, slow-moving supply hulks heavily laden with mortal troops, ammunition and weapons. Disruption and harassment were the Sisypheum's main objective until contact had been established with disparate groups of Loyalist forces that had also escaped the massacre, and a stratagem of sorts agreed upon. With the Xth Legion too scattered to function in a traditional battlefield role, its surviving commanders found their own way to fight back: as the thorns in the flanks of the leviathan that distract it from the swordthrust to the vitals.

At Cavor Sarta, an Iron Hand known as Sabak Wayland and the lone Raven Guard survivor Nykona Sharrowkyn had captured an Unlingual Cipher Host -- one of the so-called "Kryptos" -- a hybrid abomination creature of the Dark Mechanicum that had previously made the Traitors' code network a cryptographic impossibility to break. With the Kryptos, Loyalist commanders were able to finally access the Traitors’ coded communications. And with this knowledge, the Sisypheum's Captain, the Iron Hand Ulrach Branthan, had ordered the Sisypheum to make the circuitous journey to Hydra Cordatus and the meeting of the Traitor Primarchs that had been indicated by the cracked communications. After learning of Fulgrim's intentions to enter the Eye of Terror and recover the Angel Exterminatus, the crew of the Sisypheum made their way towards the Warp Rift, aided by a mysterious Eldar guide with the intention of thwarting the Traitors' plan to acquire the unknown xenos weapon.

Crone World

The destination of the joint fleet of Iron Warriors and Emperor's Children vessels was the lost Eldar world of Iydris, a world said to have been favoured by the Eldar Goddess Lileath. Iydris was one of the legendary Crone Worlds, which once formed the heart of the lost Eldar empire before they were consumed by the creation of the vast Warp Rift that was the Eye of Terror following the birth of the Chaos God Slaanesh. The lost world was located at the heart of the Eye of Terror, somehow remaining in a fixed position keeping it from destruction in the gravitational hellstorm of a super massive black hole that lay at the centre of the eternal Warp Storm. It was from this epicentre that the galaxy vomited unnatural matter into the void, a dark doorway to an unknowable destination and an unimaginably powerful singularity whose gravity was so strong that it consumed light, matter, space and time in its destructive core.

Their ultimate goal was within the Primarchs' grasp; the Sepulchre of Isha's Doom, which sat at the centre of the citadel of Amon ny-shak Kaelis. The citadel stood astride the entrance to the prison tomb of the Angel Exterminatus. Before launching a full planetary assault, the Iron Warriors launched a preliminary orbital bombardment around the citadel, a standard practise when preparing to assault a potentially hostile environment. A cone of fire gouged the surface of Iydris, burning, pounding and flattening in the blink of an eye structures that had stood inviolate for tens of thousands of Terran years. A barren ring of pulverized earth encircled the citadel of Amon ny-shak Kaelis, leaving its walls, towers and temples an isolated island cut off from the rest of the planet’s structures by a billowing firestorm of planet-cracking force. In the wake of this orbital bombardment flocks of Thunderhawks, Stormbirds, Warhawks and heavy planetary landers launched from crammed embarkation decks. Bulk tenders descended to low orbit and disgorged thousands of troop carriers, armour lifters and supply barques. Titanic, gravity-cushioned mass-landers moved with majestic slowness as two Titans of the Legio Mortis took to the field, and this was but the first wave of the invasion. Another eight would follow before the martial power of two entire Space Marine Legions and their auxiliary Imperial Army forces had made planetfall.

Amon ny-shak Kaelis

Fulgrim looks on as his Emperor's Children, his brother Perturabo and the Iron Warriors fight for their lives against an army of Eldar revenants within the Sepulchre of Isha's Doom at the heart of the citadel of Amon ny-shak Kaelis

The Traitors' assault began five hours later, despite the full circuit of fortifications still being incomplete. For all intents and purposes, the route into the citadel of Amon ny-shak Kaelis was undefended and their route unopposed. Ever mistrustful of the lack of defenses, Perturabo had his Iron Warriors dug in, assuming a perfect formation outside the walls in a layered barbican that protected the Traitor Legions' line of retreat. Fulgrim’s host broke apart into individual warbands, ranging in size from around a hundred warriors to groups of nearly a thousand. Each of these autonomous groups appeared to be led by a captain, though such was the bizarre ornamentation and embellishment on each warrior’s armour, it was often impossible to discern specific rankings. Leaving the fortified bridgehead behind, Perturabo led his Iron Warriors and the Emperor’s Children contingent into the heart of Amon ny-shak Kaelis. The Sepulchre of Isha’s Doom was a monumental palace, sprawling and richly ornamented with bulbous mourn-towers and sweeping, ivory-roofed domes. As the column of Traitors pressed onwards towards the sepulchre, they were being silently and unknowingly observed by the Loyalist Astartes of the Sisypheum. Despite being outnumbered a thousand to one, the small force of Loyalist Legionaries devised a means to find another way into the massive sepulcher.

As the two Primarchs neared their ultimate goal, Fulgrim kept pressing his stern brother with curt impatience to not linger. Perturabo took the time to study Fulgrim and his assembled host. His brother was sheened in sweat, but it was not perspiration that beaded his brow, Fulgrim was sweating light. Though it was faint, it was visible to Perturabo's gene-enhanced sight that saw beyond what even Astartes eyes were capable of detecting. He wondered if Fulgrim was aware of the radiance bleeding from him and decided he must be. His brother’s armour strained against his body and his features were drawn and tired, as though only by an effort of will was he still standing. His captains looked no better, like hounds straining at the leash. A number of Fulgrim's Lord Commanders' flesh was also suffused with a light similar to that enveloping Fulgrim, a deathly radiance that had no place within a living being. Perturabo did not trust Fulgrim one bit, knowing that inevitably he would be betrayed by his brother. The Lord of Iron pressed on, intent on bringing their quest to completion. As they neared their final destination at the heart of the sepulcher, the power at the heart of Iydris spasmed in hateful recognition of the followers of Slaanesh, known to the Eldar as She Who Thirsts, and awoke its guardians from their slumber.

Thousands of crystalline statues threw off their previous immobility. They moved stiffly, like sleepers awoken from an aeons-long slumber, and the gems at the heart of their bulbous heads bled vibrant color into glassy bodies that suddenly seemed significantly less fragile. This army of wraiths were the Eldar dead of Iydris. Soon both the Traitor forces outside the citadel as well as those inside were attacked from all sides by the revenant army. Like automata, but with a hideously organic feel to their movements, the Eldar constructs emerged in their thousands with every passing second. As Perturabo was busy fighting for his life, Fulgrim slipped away in the midst of the fighting. Realizing where he had gone, the Lord of Iron stepped into the green glow emanating from the center of the massive chamber. Perturabo understood that this was no elemental energy or mechanically generated motive force, but the distilled essence of all those who had died there.

Perturabo descended downwards on an unending spiral towards a point of light that grew no brighter no matter how far he descended. The journey downwards was never-ending, or so it seemed until it ended. Fulgrim stood at the origin of a slender bridge that arched out to the center of a spherical chamber of incredible, sanity-defying proportions. The footings of the bridge were anchored on the equator, and a score of other bridges reached out to where a seething ball of numinous jade light blazed like a miniature sun. Iydris, it transpired, was a hollow world, its core this colossal void with the impossibly bright sun at its heart. Perturabo confronted his brother, realizing that there was never an Angel Exterminatus. Fulgrim confirmed for Perturabo that there was no such weapon yet, for he was to be the Angel Exterminatus. Perturabo responded that his brother always did have an appetite for rampant narcissism, but this was the grandest delusion yet. Unamused at Fulgrim's explanation, Perturabo took a step towards his brother, Forgebreaker in his hand, intent on killing him. Fulgrim spoke a single word, its nightmare syllables tore at Perturabo's brain, causing him to stumble and drop to one knee. Fulgrim revealed the reason for his brother being drained of energy.

When Fulgrim had arrived on Hydra Cordatus he had presented the Lord of Iron with a gift; a folded cloak of softest ermine, trimmed with foxbat fur and embroidered with an endlessly repeating pattern of spirals in the golden proportion. A flattened skull of chromed steel acted as the fastener. Set in the skull’s forehead was a gemstone the size of a fist, black and veined with hair-fine threads of gold. As they had made their way towards the heart of the Eye of Terror, the large gemstone at the center of the skull-carved cloak pin had changed from black to a solid gold color and pulsed with its own internal heartbeat. This was the maugetar stone, known as the harvester, which had slowly been draining Perturabo's strength and life force. With the Lord of Iron's sacrifice, Fulgrim would finally be able to achieve apotheosis. The two Primarchs ascended upwards within the shaft of light, emerging into the chaos that was happening within the heart of the sepulcher.

Apotheosis of Fulgrim

The Primarch of the Emperor’s Children hurled his brother aside, and Perturabo fell in a languid arc to land with a crunch of metal and crystal at the edge of the shaft. Blood trailed the air in a streaming red arc from Perturabo’s chest. The Lord of Iron lay unmoving, his body broken and lifeless. The attention of every Astartes within the chamber was irrevocably drawn towards the Primarch, for they recognized that an event of great moment was in the offing. The Phoenician was no longer the same being as had descended into the planet. He floated in the air above the shaft, which no longer poured its green torrent up to the restless darkness above, but simply radiated a fading glow of dying light. Fulgrim’s armour was shimmering with vitality, as though the light of a thousand suns were contained within him and strained to break free. The Primarch’s dark, doll-like eyes were twin black holes, doorways to heights of experience and sensation the likes of which could only be dreamed by madmen and those willing to go to any lengths to taste them.

Just as Fulgrim was about to achieve his ultimate desire, Perturabo had regained enough of his former strength and rose to his feet, the maugetar stone in his hand. Perturabo walked towards Fulgrim, keeping the hand holding the maugetar stone extended over the shaft in the center of the chamber. Perturabo looked his brother in the eye for some hint of remorse, a sign that he regretted that things had come to this, something to show he felt even a moment of shame at plotting to murder his brother. He saw nothing, and his heart broke to know that the Fulgrim he had known long ago was gone, never to return. He had not thought it possible that anyone could plunge so far as to be beyond redemption. Perturabo knew that Fulgrim no longer wanted to be an angel, he wanted to be a god. He informed the Phoenician that Mankind had outgrown such beings a long time ago. Disgusted by Fulgrim's desires, Perturabo hurled the maugetar stone into the deep shaft.

Suddenly, a barrage of Bolter fire erupted and a handful of Emperor's Children Astartes were pitched from their feet. Black-armoured Space Marines bearing a mailed fist upon their shoulder guards charged towards the Traitors. It was the Astartes of the X Legion, the Iron Tenth -- the Iron Hands. Soon the battle was joined, as Loyalist fought Traitor within the expansive chamber. The noose of battle was closing on the two Primarchs at its center -- Perturabo locked on his knees, and Fulgrim hovering in the air as though bound to his brother by ties not even the call of war could break. The Iron Hands were mired in battle with the Emperor’s Children and Iron Warriors, zipping streams of fire blasting back and forth between them. During the battle, one of the Loyalist Astartes, the Raven Guard named Sharrowkyn, had acquired the fallen maugetar stone. He instinctively knew that if this stone was desired by Fulgrim, then it had to be destroyed. Taking a Bolter from a fallen Emperor's Children Astartes, he aimed the muzzle at the strange gold and black stone and pulled the trigger.

The weakened Perturabo was renewed with the sudden release of his life force from the Chaotic relic. Fulgrim’s body arched in sympathetic resonance, for the maugetar stone contained more than just the strength stolen from Perturabo by Fulgrim. It contained their mingled essences, a power greater than the sum of its parts, a power to fuel an ascent so brutal that only the combined life-force of two Primarchs could achieve it. Armour burned from Fulgrim’s body, flaking away like golden dust in a hurricane, leaving his monstrously swollen body naked and his flesh blazing with furnace heat. Spectral flames of shimmering pink and purple licked around his body, a hungry fire waiting to consume him the moment his focus slipped. As the Lord of Iron finally pushed himself upright and stood fully erect, he lifted Forgebreaker onto his shoulder. Fulgrim saw his death in Perturabo's eyes and grinned, knowing that his brother had to do it. Perturabo hefted Forgebreaker like a headsman at an execution and swung the mighty hammer in a wide arc, splitting the Phoenician's body wide open. It was done.

Fulgrim’s body exploded under the impact of Perturabo’s warhammer, and the cry of release was a shrieking birth scream. An explosion of pure force ripped from the Phoenician’s destroyed flesh, filling the chamber of towers with a blinding light that was too bright to look upon, too radiant to ignore. Like a newborn sun, the wondrous incandescence was the center of all things, a rebirth in fire, new flesh crafted from the ashes of the old. Every eye in the chamber was turned to the light, though it would surely blind them or drive them to madness. Through slitted fingers and shimmering reflections, the survivors of the fighting bore witness to something magnificent and terrible, an agonizing death and violent birth combined. A figure floated in the midst of the light, and it took a moment for Perturabo to recognize the impossibility of what he was seeing. It was Fulgrim, naked and pristine, his body unsullied by any of the mawkish ornamentation with which he had defaced his flesh, as perfect as the day the Emperor had first conceived him. Fulgrim’s back arched and his bones split with gunshot cracks. His flesh, once so perfect, now ran fluid and malleable, his form molding and remolding as though an invisible sculptor pressed and worked him like clay upon a wheel. Fulgrim’s legs, extended like the man of Vitruvius, ran and lengthened, fusing together in a writhing serpent’s tail, the skin thickening and sheening with reptilian scales and segmented plates of chitinous armour. Perturabo took a step towards this thing being born from the death of his brother, all the while despairing that this was his brother.

Perturabo had destroyed Fulgrim’s mortal shell. This was an immaterial avatar of light and energy, of soul and desire. What was being done here was an act of will, a creature birthing itself through its own desire to exist. Fulgrim’s face was a mask of agonized rapture, a pain endured for the pleasure it promised. Two obsidian horns erupted from Fulgrim’s brow, curling back over his skull, leaving his perfect face as unsullied as the most innocent child. Fulgrim ascended into Chaos, a prince of the Neverborn, a lord of the Ruinous Powers, the chosen and beloved Champion of Slaanesh. As the newborn Daemon Prince departed, the first of the Traitor Primarchs to achieve daemonic apotheosis, he left his brother with a cryptic message that they would one day meet again, and both brothers would yet renew their bonds. Lifting his hands into the air, a curtain of light rose up from the ground and Fulgrim and all of his Emperor's Children Chaos Space Marines disappeared in a flare of arcane teleportation energy.

With the disappearance of the Emperor's Children, the Crone World of Iydris began to tear itself apart. The force at the heart of the world was no more. The strength of the life forces of the dead Eldar that had kept it safe was failing, and soon this planet would be swallowed by the unimaginable force of the super massive black hole that lay at the heart of the Eye of Terror. Across the chasm, the remaining Iron Hands gathered up their wounded and fell back from the spreading fissures and heaving ruptures opening in the floor. They looked upon Perturabo with hatred, but decided to make their way off-world from the doomed planet. They knew that they could not fight the Lord of Iron and live through the encounter. Perturabo let the Iron Hands depart. Then he led his warriors out of the crumbling citadel. Once aboard his flagship the Iron Blood, Perturabo watched the final death throes of the Eldar Crone World.

The Iron Blood strained to break orbit, but the force at the heart of the Eye of Terror was reasserting its grip on reality with a vengeance. Many of the smaller vessels of the Iron Warriors survivor fleet that had followed the Sisypheum had already been dragged within its embrace, swallowed by the black hole’s powerful energies. Only the capital ships had engines large enough to resist the inexorable pull, but even they were only delaying the inevitable. Perturabo's Triarchs stood patiently around their lord, awaiting his orders. The Lord of Iron informed them that he always moved forward, never backwards. They would go into the black hole. Though his senior commanders believed that it was suicide, the Lord of Iron informed them that Fulgrim had promised that the two brothers would meet again. The Iron Warriors were not meant to die within the Eye, and there was only one way onwards. His men moved to carry out his order, and the Iron Warriors fleet plunged deep into the heart of Terror.

Flames of Rebellion

Over the next seven years that followed the massacre on Istvaan V, Horus' rebellion spread across the galaxy, consuming the entire Imperium in the flames of the horrific civil war known to history as the Horus Heresy. By the time the final Battle of Terra began, the Emperor's Children had become only shadows of their former glorious selves, wholly consumed by the desires of Slaanesh, with every trace of decency long lost. While the other Traitor Legions assaulted the Imperial Palace, the Emperor's Children instead launched themselves upon the innocent citizens of Terra, engaging in a mad orgy of rape, terror and mutilation that only barely began to satiate their all-consuming, Slaanesh-inspired hunger for hedonistic pleasure, pain and sensation. Billions of Terrans were used as human guinea pigs or raw materials in the Emperor's Childrens' constant desire to create ever more powerful stimulants, as daemonic hosts to bring Slaaneshi Daemonic Legions to the fight from the Warp or were simply slain outright to allow a Traitor Marine the fleeting enjoyment brought on by the sensation of brutal murder.

After the Heresy

The history of the Emperor’s Children in the period that followed the defeat of the Traitor Legions at the Siege of Terra is largely obscured from Imperial scholars, for obvious reasons. When Horus was finally defeated by the Emperor aboard his Battle Barge the Vengeful Spirit, the Emperor's Children left a trail of depopulated worlds in their wake as they fled alongside the other Traitor Legions into the Eye of Terror. As their supply of slaves was exhausted by their constant abuse, the remains of the III Legion resorted to raiding the other Traitor Legions for fresh meat to feed their endless perversions, and in the end were crushed by their angry brethren in a series of bloody wars that tore the Traitor Legions apart as they lost the guiding and unifying hand of Horus. Finally, in the course of these conflicts, the Emperor's Children's unity as an Astartes Legion was shattered and they devolved into a series of small, competing warbands. Because of the losses they suffered on Terra and in the period immediately after the Battle of Terra, warbands of the Emperor's Children are rare today in the 41st Millennium. This is a boon for the galaxy as the Emperor's Children love to take prisoners. There is perhaps no worse way to die than at the hands of these superhuman Slaaneshi fanatics -- save for perhaps facing the tender mercies of the Dark Eldar.

Perhaps the greatest mystery surrounds the fate of the Primarch Fulgrim himself, for it appears that he disappeared entirely. Some say that the Dark Prince of Chaos granted him apotheosis, and he assumed the mantle of a Daemon Primarch -- his mortal shape transformed into a serpentine form with four arms very similar to the appearance of the Laer xenos that Fulgrim and his Legion had exterminated when he began his fall to Chaos. Others claim that he was already possessed by a powerful Warp entity, and so such a fate could not have come about. There are those that claim that Fulgrim has retreated to some Daemon World of his own creation, and rules there still, overseeing such debased extremes of sensation and experience as no mortal can imagine. Some of those who revere Slaanesh regard this mythical place as the holy of holies, and spend entire lifetimes obsessively questing after it. To this day, many of the scattered surviving warbands of the Emperor's Children and the agents of the Inquisition's Ordo Malleus seek the location of this world, but none have yet returned with that information. Following the Horus Heresy, Fulgrim was last seen in realspace fighting Roboute Guilliman, the Primarch of the Ultramarines Chapter and its Successors. During their great duel, Fulgrim proved too crafty and guileful, slitting Guilliman's throat with the toxic Anathame that had nearly slain Horus himself without the intervention of the Chaos Gods to heal him. Guilliman was placed within a stasis field and returned to the Ultramarines' homeworld of Macragge where his body became a focus for the devotion of countless generations of Imperial pilgrims, while Fulgrim retreated into the Warp.

Source: http://warhammer40k.wikia.com

[asktheadeptus]

Rogal Dorn

"Discipline. Duty. Unyielding Will. These are the measures by which every warrior is judged. Unarmed, a warrior with these qualities will still find victory, no matter how long or arduous the path. When girded with the sacred armaments of the Adeptus Astartes, such a warrior becomes truly indomitable."— Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists

Rogal Dorn, known as The Vigilant, the Praetorian of Terra and the Unyielding One, was the Primarch of the Imperial Fists Space Marine Legion and one of the greatest heroes in the history of the Imperium of Man. A being of thunderous zeal and stone made manifest is how many described the Primarch of the VII Legion. He had a stern and naturally unsmiling face, topped with an unruly shock of short, bone-white hair. His zeal was the fire of a son who believed in his father's dream for the Imperium without reservation and without question. To Rogal Dorn there was no higher purpose to the existence of the Legiones Astartes than the unification of Mankind, and the illumination of the Imperium's ideals. This idealism drove Dorn and his Legion ever on wards, never compromising, never stinting in any aspect of duty. The stone in his soul was his ability to bear whatever his father needed of him, an unyielding nature, which made him both a master of defense in war, and an indomitable fighter on the attack. If the Primarchs were the Emperor's nature split like white light through a prism's rays, as many Imperial scholars of the Imperial Court suggested, then from such a point of view, Rogal Dorn was the Emperor's implacable disciple in the pursuit of the cause given flesh; without compromise and in who loyalty and duty was as integral as blood and breath. It was perhaps for this reason, that even before the betrayal of Horus, the Emperor named Dorn "Praetorian of Terra", and drew him to his side far away from the Warmaster and his newly-forged command. To some among his brother-Primarchs this served only to distance him and his Legion further from them, and those among them who had seen the sins of hubris and obstinacy in Dorn's undoubted stubbornness and pride, saw this aggrandizement as a further cause for discord and disquiet.

It was Dorn who supervised the construction of the formidable defenses of the Imperial Palace in the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains on Terra that would be sorely tested by the Forces of Chaos during the epic climax of the Horus Heresy in the terrible Battle of Terra. Rogal Dorn allegedly died fighting aboard a Chaos Space Marine vessel in the late 31st Millennium, after attacking the 1st Black Crusade's warfleet with a vastly outnumbered Imperial force. Seeing the importance of attacking the enemy fleet while they were still preparing to invade Imperial space, he relied on hit-and-run attacks until his reinforcements could arrive. Dorn was supposedly slain on board the Chaos Despoiler-class Battleship Sword of Sacrilege, after leading a desperate attack on its bridge, but in fact the Imperial Fists and their Successor Chapters believe that Dorn is still alive somewhere and may yet return when the Imperium needs him most.

History

Youth

Primarchs are transcendent beings, holding a portion of the sublime and unknowable in their nature. All the qualities which seem strong in a warrior of a Legion exist more strongly, more deeply and with greater subtlety in a Primarch. Though spun from the seed of humanity the Primarchs are not human. This nature often seems to enhance and focus the qualities gifted to a Legion by their gene-seed. So it is that at the moment at which Primarch and Legion unite, there is often a point at which a Legion's character may seem to shift. In the case of the Imperial Fists, the discovery of their Primarch, and the planet which had raised him, only strengthened the character the Imperial Fists had shown since their creation. When the 20 genetically-engineered nascent Primarchs were stolen from the Emperor's labs on Terra by the Ruinous Powers and cast into the Warp, they were scattered throughout the galaxy upon different worlds, which would shape the nature of each Primarch and later their individual Legions created from their genome. When the Primarch Rogal Dorn was restored to the Imperium, it was to be on the Ice World of Inwit located in the Inwit Cluster.

Inwit was, and is, a world of death and cold. Its star is old and withered, bleeding the last of its heat as cold, red light. Tidally locked against its dying star, perpetual darkness soaks one side of the planet, faded sunlight the other. Crevasse mazes, frozen mountain ranges and plains of frost dunes cover the planet's dark side -- this is the Splintered Land, the beast-stalked wilderness which shapes the bodies and beliefs of the human population that clings to life here. Under the ice crust, thick seas flow in sluggish tides and pale and sightless creatures swim the waters, hunting by vibration and a preternatural taste for blood. Far above this desolation, great and ancient space stations and shipyards look down on the cold-shrouded worlds through perpetual auroras -- created in a lost past, these citadels of the void have looked down on Inwit since before any records or tales can recall. Whilst on the planet, the light side of Inwit offers little more comfort than the dark, being a land of drift-crusted saline seas and sparse bare rock under the unblinking gaze of the red sun.

There is little of value on Inwit; its seas are buried or lifeless, its mountain bare of riches and its native species vicious. There is, however, one thing that this harsh world produces that led it to conquer a star cluster and endure as an island empire of order in the Age of Strife: its people. Though they are barbaric, they are far from unsophisticated. The warriors of Inwit are raised to endure and survive. The world that bears them teaches them to never relent and that the price of weakness is death, for them and the rest of their kin. Death comes in many forms on Inwit; in the ice storms that can freeze and cover a man in seconds, at the claws of the predators that roam the Splintered Lands, and in the lapse in concentration that allows the cold to penetrate the warmth-seals of a hold. These factors make a certain kind of people: strong, grim and dedicated to the survival of the whole rather than the individual. Much of the world's population is nomadic, moving between the subterranean ice hives to trade in weapons, fuel and technology. Conflict between the roaming clans is common and young warriors learn how to defend against their clan's enemies as early as they learn how to endure the death touch of Inwit's merciless chill. They are incredibly quick learners and have an innate sense of an object's functional value and, most importantly, they have the strength and intelligence to conquer those who possess knowledge they do not.

Long ago, before the coming of the Emperor was even a dream on night-shrouded Terra, the people of Inwit began to create their own realm in the stars. On every world they took, they assimilated, realigned and reinforced. With each conquest their culture and learning grew, but Inwit itself remained unchanged even as it became the centre of a stellar empire. The ice hives and clan disputes remained and while their world birthed starships and ringed its orbits with weapon stations, its rulers kept to the old ways, the ways that had created their strength, the warlords and matriarchs who commanded armies amongst the living stars have it somewhat easier than their vassals. So it was, and so it is now.

It was as part of this burgeoning empire that Rogal Dorn grew to manhood, and then to rule its domains as emperor. Much of his early years remains unknown, or at least little talked about. It is, however, for certain that in the cold and darkness of Inwit, a boy named Rogal by his adoped kin, rose to lead the House of Dorn also known as the Ice Caste, and then to the rule of the Inwit Cluster. The patriarch of the clan that raised Dorn became an adoptive grandfather to him, and taught him much of tactics, strategy, and diplomacy. Even after he discovered he was not blood-related to his "grandfather," Dorn held his memory in high value; he kept a fur-edged robe that had belonged to the man and slept with it on his bed every night. His qualities married perfectly with those of Inwit, and he pushed their empire further than any other. Rogal led and trained its armies, and fashioned spacecraft the like of which had not been seen before.

The Coming of the Emperor

Forty standard years after his grandfather's death, the outlying Imperial starships of the Great Crusade finally reached the Ice Hives of Inwit. When the true Emperor was reunited with Rogal Dorn, He regained not only a lost son, but the strength of a star spanning society already forged into a tool of war. Dorn greeted the Emperor at the helm of the enormous star ship constructed during the Dark Age of Technology called the Phalanx, which the Emperor had discovered within Inwit's region of space. Dorn is the seventh of the twenty Primarchs who had been found by their father. The Emperor welcomed Dorn as his long-lost son, and returned the Phalanx to his care, transforming it into the mobile fortress-monastery of the VII Space Marine Legion which was also turned over by the Emperor to be led by Dorn, since all of its Astartes had been created using Dorn's own genetic template.

Dorn himself was fiercely loyal to the Emperor from the first moment that they met on the bridge of the Phalanx, and he never once sought any favour from his father. Dorn embodied the human quest for truth, and could never tell a lie, even if it would have aided his cause. Because of this quality, Dorn's statue stands as one of only four ever erected on Macragge, next to that of Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the Ultramarines. Dorn commanded the VII Legion and Expeditionary Fleets with peerless devotion and military genius. It was said that he possessed one of the finest military minds amongst the Primarchs, ordered and disciplined but still inclined to flashes of zeal and inspiration. His record of achievements for the Imperium during the Great Crusade were innumerable, and indeed the Warmaster Horus said that he esteemed Dorn and the Imperial Fists so highly that he reckoned if the Fists, noted masters of defence, were to hold a fortress against he and his Luna Wolves, noted masters of assault, the resultant conflict would spiral into a never-ending stalemate.

Great Crusade

Dorn was possessed of a single-minded energy tempered by a reserved and stoic nature. Many have remarked on the dour and emotionless disposition of both this Primarch and his Legion, but such an assessment misses much. Reserved, but terrifying in anger, Dorn was both cautious and calculating, and capable of pursuing an end with relentless energy. While he would rarely show emotion, when he did it was capable of shaking the ground or darkening the sun. During the near-disastrous resurgence of the Xahelican breed in the Adonis Cluster, Dorn's cold rage was said to have held the battlements as much as the arms of those standing upon them. His admonishment of the reinforcements at Castoris is said to have echoes from the fire-touched sky to the still burning sea. "As swift and unforgiving as the falling edge of an axe," is how Leman Russ of the Space Wolves Legion is said to have described his brother-Primarch. Dorn was also capable of brooding and letting matters eat at him beneath his stone-cast demeanour. For as much as he was a warrior of absolute loyalty, he was also an idealist -- the reasons why he fought were as important to him as the outcome of his efforts. During the time of the Great Crusade few ever saw this quality in Dorn, for there was little cause, though those who knew him well could perhaps see hints of it in his near-fatal confrontation with Konrad Curze of the Night Lords Legion in the Cheraut System and his brief schism with Ferrus Manus of the Iron Hands Legion after one particularly brutal campaign. It is only immediately following the horrific events of the Horus Heresy, with so much lost never to be rebuilt, and blood still staining the birth of the Imperium which survived, that history could see that perhaps even in perfect loyalty there can be a flaw. At the moment that the Imperial Fists were united with Rogal Dorn, however, the shadow of eternal treachery still waited far in the future.

Few integrations of Primarch and Legion were as swift or as complete as that between Rogal Dorn and the Imperial Fists. The ideals of the Imperium, and the purpose of the Great Crusade fitted with Dorn's outlook and drive, and the warriors of the Imperial Fists were exemplars not only of everything that he had built in the Inwit Cluster, but everything he had dreamed of for its future. From the first moment Dorm met his gene-sons, he demanded of them everything that he would ask of himself. It is said that when he met Legion Master Matthias and Veteran contingents of the Imperial Fists he said nothing, maintaining his silence even when they had knelt and pledged him fealty. Only when he had observed them in battle did he break his silence and speak to them directly. He said that they had much to do, and more to learn. To Matthias he gave a single word of thanks for his service, and named him High Castellan of the Inwit Cluster. Such an honour was also a deep duty, for the next he gave was to raise thirty regiments of new Imperial Fists from the Inwit System. Without waiting or looking back, Rogal Dorn and his sons plunged back into the stars.

Over the next sixteen Terran decades, the Imperial Fists fought in the burning edge of the Great Crusade. Relentlessly they pushed from war zone to war zone, were honoured by each of their brother Legions, and rose high in the estimation of many. In their methods of war, the ways of Inwit and the echoes of the VII Legion's victories combined. They drove ever on, without pause or respite. Just as on Terra they fortified and built to secure what they conquered, but just as before they did not linger to rule their conquests. While a castellan with a household of warriors might remain to maintain its defences, they did not administer, or draw up and enforce laws, for they were warriors of the Imperium, not its masters, and they existed to serve in war and die for its survival. What they did take from all the lands they conquered were recruits.

A famous example would be the Imperial Compliance action of Necromunda where the Imperial Fists won a major victory against the Orks on the ash wastes of the Hive World. The Hive Lords consented to recruits being drawn from their population in gratitude. A Fortress-Chapel was duly consecrated but the Imperial Fists were there as esteemed guests, not masters. Rogal Dorn asked no special rights on the worlds where the Imperial Fists recruited. Some Primarchs, such as the increasingly mercurial Perturabo, took every opportunity to garrison a world for their Legions and claim its tithes. Dorn is famously recorded as saying, "I want recruits not vassals," and was always satisfied to keep his Legion as a military unit with none of the civil or political responsibilities that came with governing a Legion homeworld.

During the Great Crusade, the Imperial Fists acted as the strategic reserve of the Emperor's forces due to their ability to rapidly redeploy to battlefields aboard Phalanx. They made use of detailed planning and as such were soon found to be supreme urban fighters and siege specialists. After several campaigns and thousands of conquered worlds being brought into the Imperium, the Emperor returned to Terra to build a capital from which He could run His new empire. He took the Imperial Fists with Him, set them up as His praetorians and charged Dorn with the construction of the Imperial Palace, something that did not go unnoticed by the other Primarchs. Perturabo flew into a rage upon hearing that Dorn thought the Imperial Palace would be proof against an assault by even as mighty siege-masters as the Iron Warriors and he unleashed a torrent of vitriol and accusations against his brother Primarch so unfounded that the onlookers from his own Legion were dumbstruck. After this outburst was reported to Dorn, the two Primarchs rarely spoke, neither Legion serving in the same campaign again. The Imperial Fists were ever at the Emperor's side and the Iron Warriors were part of Horus' vanguard.

Iron and Stone

Similarity encourages understanding, or at least some would claim so. In the case of Rogal Dorn and Perturabo, Primarch of the Iron Warriors Legion, this sentiment not only falls but shatters under the weight of reality. For rarely could there be said to be two beings on the surface who more resembled each other, yet were separated by a greater chasm. Both were reserved to the point of taciturn, both unyielding, both sublime artisans of war who prized indomitability and endurance; there was much that would suggest that they should see the world with one set of eyes, that perhaps they should be closer than any others. That bitterest loathing could arise between two such closely matched kin seems incredible, but it was a reality, some say from the first moment of their meeting.

The exact roots and cause of their enmity cannot be known to any save Rogal Dorn and Perturabo, but if one looks closely there appears a pattern both of behaviour and incidents which may offer a clue. Often it seems as though the pair's similarities were the cause of discord rather than understanding. Both were stubborn and more so when challenged, both spoke rarely, and brooded much behind their stone and iron masks. So it was that the silence of one would aggravate the other, the blunt honesty of one roused the other to anger, and the intractability of both ensured that once a dispute was begun neither would yield.

That there were differences between the two cannot be denied, and often these differences may have been the cause of disputes even if they were not the underlying cause. While both Rogal Dorn and Perturabo often favoured siege craft in war, they often differed in its execution. While both were pragmatic, Perturabo often displayed a brutal directness in waging war, applying overwhelming force or sustaining horrific casualties. While Dorn would never baulk at paying such a price for victory, he rarely accepted large numbers of casualties except through necessity. Dorn was an undoubted idealist above all else, Perturabo a pragmatist first and foremost. On such cracked foundations the decades of the Great Crusade heaped pleasures, honours, disparities and mischance, and from the result history reaped an enmity which would take both Primarchs and their Legions to the brink of destruction.

Triumph of Ullanor

The greatest of the nascent Imperium's victories during the Great Crusade came in the form of the defeat of the largest Ork empire ever encountered in the late 30th Millennium. The Ullanor Crusade was a vast Imperial assault on the Ork empire of the Overlord Urrlak Urruk. The capital world of this Greenskin stellar empire, and the site of the final assault by the Space Marine Legions, lay in the central Ullanor System of the galaxy's Ullanor Sector. The Crusade included the deployment of 100,000 Space Marines, 8,000,000 Imperial Army troops, and thousands of Imperial starships and their support personnel. The Ullanor Crusade marked the high point of the Great Crusade's vast effort to reunite the scattered colony worlds of humanity.

The Orks of Ullanor represented the largest concentration of Greenskins ever defeated by the military forces of the Imperium of Man before the Third War for Armageddon began during the late 41st Millennium. Following the defeat of the Orks of Ullanor, the Emperor of Mankind returned to Terra to begin work on His vast project to open up the Eldar Webway for Mankind's use. In His place to command the vast forces of the Great Crusade He left Horus. In the aftermath of this Ullanor Crusade, Horus was granted the newly-created title of "Warmaster," the commander-in-chief of all the Emperor’s armies who possessed command authority over all of the other Primarchs and every Expeditionary Fleet of the Great Crusade.

Jealousies and Rivalries

Following his promotion to the exalted rank of Warmaster, Horus had solicited the opinions and advice of all his brother Primarchs on the subject since the honour had been bestowed upon him. Being named Warmaster set him abruptly apart from them, and raised him up above his brothers, and there had been some stifled objections and discontent, especially from those Primarchs who felt the title should have been theirs. The Primarchs were as prone to sibling rivalry and petty competition as any group of brothers. Guided by the shrewd political hand, it was likely, of his Equerry Maloghurst, Horus had courted his brothers, stilling fears, calming doubts, reaffirming pacts and generally securing their cooperation. He wanted none to feel slighted, or overlooked. He wanted none to think they were no longer listened to. Some, like Sanguinius, Lorgar and Fulgrim, had acclaimed Horus' election from the outset. Others, like Angron and Perturabo, had raged biliously at the new order, and it had taken masterful diplomacy on the Warmaster's part to placate their choler and jealousy. A few, like Leman Russ and Lion El'Jonson, had been cynically resolved, unsurprised by the turn of events.

But others, like Roboute Guilliman, Jaghatai Khan and Rogal Dorn had simply taken it in their stride, accepting the Emperor’s decree as the right and obvious choice. Horus had ever been the brightest, the first and the favorite. They did not doubt his fitness for the role, for none of the Primarchs had ever matched Horus’ achievements, nor the intimacy of his bond with the Emperor. It was to these solid, resolved brothers that Horus turned in particular for counsel. Dorn and Guilliman both embodied the staunchest and most dedicated Imperial qualities, commanding their Legions' expeditions with peerless devotion and military genius. Horus desired their approval as a young man might seek the quiescence of older, more accomplished brothers.

Following his promotion, Primarch Dorn had come to the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet at Horus' behest, so that the two of them might discuss in detail the obligations and remit of the role of Warmaster. Rogal Dorn possessed perhaps the finest military mind of all the Primarchs. It was as ordered and disciplined as Roboute Guilliman's, as courageous as the Lion’s, yet still supple enough to allow for the flash of inspiration, the flash of battle zeal that had won the likes of Leman Russ and the Khan so many victory wreaths. Dorn's record in the Crusade was second only to Horus', but he was resolute where Horus was flamboyant, reserved where Horus was charismatic, and that was why Horus had been the obvious choice for the position of Imperial Warmaster. In keeping with his patient, stony character, Dorn's VII Legion had become renowned for siegecraft and defensive strategies. The Warmaster had once joked that where he could storm a fortress like no other, Rogal Dorn could hold it. "If I ever laid assault to a bastion possessed by you," Horus had quipped at a recent banquet, "then the war would last for all eternity, the best in attack matched by the best in defense." The Imperial Fists were an immovable object to the Luna Wolves' unstoppable force.

Fortifying the Imperial Palace

When the Emperor returned to Terra to build a capital world worthy of ruling a million planets, Dorn went as well, commanded by the Emperor to return to the Imperial home world and establish a guard around Him there. The Imperial Fists Legion had been chosen as the Emperor's Praetorians. Having always excelled in the construction of fortresses, Dorn was tasked with designing the defenses for the Imperial Palace. These would prove to be magnificent, and would be well-tested in the following years as the storm of the Horus Heresy broke over the Imperium. The Primarch Fulgrim once asked if Rogal Dorn thought the Imperial Palace could withstand an assault by the Iron Warriors Legion. Dorn's truthful answer, that it could, infuriated the Iron Warriors' Primarch Perturabo to such a degree that they would almost destroy each other in battle years later during the Heresy. Dorn and the entire Imperial Fists Legion were later recalled to Terra by the Emperor to take up garrison duty there near the end of the Great Crusade. Once the Horus Heresy began, this garrison duty would transform into responsibility for preparing the defenses of Terra and the Imperial Palace for the coming invasion of Horus and his Traitor Legions.

Horus Heresy

Before the Imperial Fists could arrive at Terra in full complement, the events of the Horus Heresy overtook them. Stranded for some considerable time by severe Warp storms, the Imperial Fists fleet eventually discovered the badly damaged Loyalist Death Guard frigate Eisenstein, and so learned of Horus' betrayal. However, at first Dorn did not believe Captain Nathaniel Garro and nearly killed him when Garro said that his Brother-Primarch Horus was a traitor to the Imperium and the Emperor. Rogal Dorn was eventually convinced by several members of the Eisenstein survivors of the Istvaan III Massacre, notably Captain Garro, Iacton Qruze of the Luna Wolves and Remembrancer (later Imperial Saint) Euphrati Keeler, that his brothers the Primarchs Horus, Fulgrim, Mortarion, and Angron were staging a full-scale rebellion against the Emperor's rule. Dorn therefore dispatched the bulk of his Legion to the Istvaan System on a war-footing. He himself returned to Terra with his veteran Space Marine companies to bring word of the terrible events personally to the Emperor of Mankind.

The Solar Campaign

With its network of operatives and bondsmen- and -women, it is believed that even in the state of civil war that the Imperium had fallen into, the Alpha Legion had the means and opportunities to transfer materiel and personnel between sectors, including the Segmentum Solar and the strategically vital Sol System, whose defense had been entrusted to the Imperial Fists and their Primarch, Rogal Dorn, the newly proclaimed Praetorian of Terra. Under the tireless efforts of the Imperial Fists, the Sol System had become a fortress, each strata of the Solar System being turned into a perfectly organised defence zone to break the Warmaster Horus' eventual assault. Given the Alpha Legion's need to prove its own superiority, it would not simply suffice to break open Terra's outer defenses. To humiliate the VII Legion, they would have to infiltrate the most secure location in the entire galaxy -- the Imperial Palace itself.

Activating assets that had been dormant and hidden on Terra for several standard decades, the Alpha Legion would eventually succeed where all others had failed before, infiltrating several agents within the Imperial Palace and especially the Investiary, where great statues had been erected to commemorate the Great Crusade's greatest generals -- the Primarchs of the twenty Space Marine Legions. Two plinths had stood empty for a long time, the statues adorning them destroyed when their respective owners were cast to oblivion and their history erased -- the Lost Primarchs. But the nine statues of those Primarchs having turned against the Emperor had merely been covered up. This was the Alpha Legion's target. Infiltrated Legionaries succeeded in penetrating the Investiary and destroyed all the statues except two of them -- those of Alpharius and Rogal Dorn. Intended as both a challenge and a message, this feat was deliberately kept secret from the other organisations within the Imperial Palace. Even the Regent of Terra, Malcador the Sigilite, and the Emperor's own bodyguards, the Legio Custodes, were forbidden to enter the Investiary and witness the shaming of the Imperial Fists. By what means the Sigilite still discovered the presence of the Alpha Legion on Terra remains a mystery, but Rogal Dorn was adamant that he would deal with the treacherous XX Legion in due course. Shortly after this act of sabotage, an Alpha Legion fleet, led by Harrowmaster Kel Silonius, attacked the Sol System's outermost defences, and managed to even capture several of Pluto's moons, which constituted the heart of the outermost defence perimeter. What truly occurred there remains a well-guarded secret, one only kept by Rogal Dorn himself and his Huscarl-bodyguard.

Battle of Pluto Begins

In order to prepare for Horus' advance towards Terra, the Alpha Legion was charged by the Warmaster to carry out vital acts of sabotage and preparation, which would plunge the Solar System into complete chaos. Though heavily defended by the Imperial Fists Legion, led by the Praetorian of Terra, Rogal Dorn himself, the Primarch Alpharius, aboard his flagship Alpha, led his fleet towards the Sol System. He managed to successfully infiltrate the outer defenses of the system by putting himself, and the entirety of the personnel within his fleet, into stasis. Meanwhile, the Alpha Legion fleet approached at minimum speed and powered its vessels down to the bare minimum, in order to reduce their overall heat signature. Thus it took an entire standard year for the Alpha Legion fleet to drift towards Sol and successfully reach the outskirts of Terra's defenses undetected, as Warptravel had been strictly forbidden.

Meanwhile Alpha Legion Sparatoi (augmented and highly adept human agents) as well as Alpha Legion operative teams activated throughout the Sol System. These "sleeper" cells had been planted standard years earlier before the outbreak of the Horus Heresy, and upon activation, performed their primary functions of sowing destruction and diversionary terrorist acts, causing panic and anarchy. Multiple acts of murder and sabotage were conducted on a number of planets to distract the beleaguered Imperial defenders from the Alpha Legion's true objective -- Pluto -- the lynchpin of the Loyalists' surveillance network within the Sol System. As Rogal Dorn was distracted by these diversionary attacks across the system, Alpharius' fleet, comprised of over 200 vessels, led by the Alpha, struck Pluto and its moons Charon, Kerberos, Nix, Styx and finally Hydra. As the fleet arrived, a further uprising, instigated by Alpha Legion infiltrator teams, erupted across the Sol System.

The Alpha Legion's primary objective was Hydra, a fortress moon that orbited Pluto and was a major astropathic monitoring station. Alpharius himself led a team of Alpha Legion warriors in the attack on the moon. Meanwhile, the Loyalist defenders, led by First Captain Sigismund, had just 30 ships to defend against the massive Alpha Legion fleet. Due to the unexpected and brutal assault, the severely outnumbered Loyalist fleet was badly mauled by Fire Ships hidden among the Alpha Legion fleet, to wreak havoc on the Imperial Fists defenders. The captured fortress moon of Kerberos rained down deadly fire upon Charon, Nix, and Styx with heavy weapons. Despite facing overwhelming odds, the Imperial Fists resolutely stood their ground in the face of the Alpha Legion's overwhelming assault.

Death and Rebirth

Meanwhile, Archamus, Rogal Dorn's Master of the Huscarls, was eventually able to deduce the Alpha Legion's true intentions -- to sabotage the Imperial astropathic monitoring network centred on Hydra. During the fighting, Archamus led a Huscarl contingent in a daring assault upon the Alpha Legion force led by Primarch Alpharius himself. In the subsequent fighting, the Huscarls were killed and Archamus was left mortally wounded. All seemed lost, as the battle seemed to swing in favour of the Traitor forces. But miraculously, the Imperial Fists' mobile star-fortress Phalanx, led by Rogal Dorn himself, arrived with a massive Imperial Fists fleet in tow. They were boosted by additional reinforcements from the Armada Imperialis. Utilising the competing gravity wells throughout the Solar System, the Imperial Fists fleet managed to arrive quickly by slingshotting itself towards Pluto. The Imperial Fists reinforcements immediately pacified the captured guns on Kerberos, as Rogal Dorn led his Huscarls in an assault upon the astropathic chamber on Hydra.

Dorn and his remaining Huscarls teleported directly into the locked chamber, and soon joined battle against Alpharius and his elite Lernaean Terminators. Archamus looked on helplessly, as the two Primarchs fought one another in an epic life-or-death duel. When Alpharius was about to impale Dorn with his Pale Spear, the now-dying Archamus grabbed the hilt of the weapon and deflected it harmlessly into a non-vital area of Dorn's chest. This gave Rogal Dorn the opening he needed, to grab the weapon's hilt, and using his deadly Chainsword, Storm's Teeth, he sliced through Alpharius' wrists, severing his hands from his arms, before slashing his former brother across his chest, and then impaling him with his own spear. Finally, Dorn finished off Alpharius with a deadly chop of his mighty Chainsword into the top of his skull. With the death of their Primarch, the Alpha Legion fleet withdrew and retreated from Pluto. At the moment of his twin-Primarch's death, Omegon sensed the demise of his sibling and became distant. Shortly thereafter, he was notified that the Warmaster demanded that Alpharius speak with him so that he could know the status of the Alpha Legion's attack on the Sol System. Like he had done many times before, Omegon immediately took upon himself his brother's name, and permanently assumed the mantle of sole Primarch of the XX Legion.

Defense of the Imperial Palace

Dorn was subsequently charged with bolstering the defenses of the Imperial Palace even further against the coming storm of the Traitor Marines, and oversaw the construction himself. Dorn constructed great bastions armed with millions of artillery cannons, and added steel plating to the towers and walls of the Palace. He felt he was marring the perfection and beauty of the existing structure in doing so, and regretted it, even though it was necessary. His Legion also struck out to Mars, securing vital weapons, armour and munitions from the Loyalist Adeptus Mechanicus, even as the planet fell to the Chaos-tainted Dark Mechanicum, though the Imperial Fists Space Marine force under Captain Camba-Diez took terrible casualties in the raid to secure the critical supplies. This materiel would later prove essential in holding off the siege of the Imperial Palace by the Traitor Marines.

What forces of his Legion Dorn had taken with him would fight in the Siege of Terra, manning the Palace defenses with the Blood Angels Legion. When Horus dropped the shielding on his flagship, Dorn and his most trusted veterans, clad in the few remaining suits of Terminator Armour, would teleport directly into battle with Horus on that ship. Unfortunately, Dorn and his chosen Marines would land farthest from Horus, and had to fight their way across almost the entire length of the battle barge. This meant that they would arrive too late to participate in the battle with Horus himself. Dorn would be the one to find the bodies of the Emperor, the Blood Angels' Primarch Sanguinius and Horus. He was also the one to take notes from the fatally crippled Emperor on how to rebuild the Imperium, and personally carried his shattered father's body to his resting place in the Golden Throne of the Imperial Palace, where he would lie, neither alive nor dead, for the next ten millennia.

Post-Heresy

After the internment of the Emperor in the Golden Throne, Dorn was stricken with grief. He felt the Emperor's near-demise to be his fault and led his Legion on a crusade of penitence across the Imperium. He was summoned back to Terra when Roboute Guilliman announced the adoption of his Codex Astartes, turning the large Space Marine Legions into the much smaller 1,000-man Space Marine Chapters. Dorn was initially outraged at this proposal, feeling that the Imperium blamed him (and rightly so, he thought) for the fall of his Brother Marines. However, realizing what damage another internal conflict could do to the fragile peace of the Imperium, Dorn finally relented and agreed to the Second Founding. This was a dark period in Rogal Dorn's life; he had both failed the Emperor and his Legion now faltered without the guiding light of the Master of Mankind.

Dorn was shaken to the core, shocked that the Imperium no longer trusted him or his Legion and that now after the loss of the Emperor and the failure of the Great Crusade the brotherhood of the Legion would be sundered as well. Without battle to focus them the Imperial Fists hovered on the brink, unsure of their future, Dorn despairing that he had not seen the Imperium changing while he hunted down the traitors. Dorn, Leman Russ of the Space Wolves and Vulkan of the Salamanders all refused the dictates of the Codex, and the Imperium seemed poised to tear itself apart in civil war again. The Imperial Fists Strike Cruiser The Terrible Angel was even fired upon by the Imperial Navy for the Fists' supposed heresies. It was at this time that the Iron Warriors issued a clear challenge that Dorn could not refuse by building an immense fortress and daring the Imperial Fists to attack it.

Some controversy exists about the next event in Rogal Dorn's life. What is clear is that the Imperial Fists could not be as easily divided into Chapters as, for example, the Ultramarines could. The total commitment to the entire Legion was bred into each Marine and many didn't wish to form their own Successor Chapters. Dorn found the answer to this problem in meditation through self-inflicted pain, using a device known as the Pain Glove. The pain-induced vision revealed that his Legion had to be redeemed in the eyes of the Emperor, and that the way to salvation was through pain and self-sacrifice. Dorn meditated for seven full days in the pain glove until he saw a vision of the Emperor. Realizing that the Emperor was not dead and gone and the He still watched over them from the Golden Throne. Decreeing that the Imperial Fists would all enter the pain glove as a Legion, and emerge as a Chapter, symbolically reborn, Dorn led his die-hard warriors in an assault on the Iron Warriors fortress. The 'collective pain' needed to cleanse the Chapter was decided by Dorn to be the siege of an Iron Warriors' fortress, the Iron Cage. The battle known as the Iron Cage has gone down in history as one of great tragedy and remorse for the Imperial Fists. For not only was it a disaster, it also signaled the end of the Legion.

Iron Cage

The battle known only as the Iron Cage has gone down in history as one of great tragedy and remorse for the Imperial Fists. Some however suspect that Dorn knew the outcome when he threw himself and his Legion into the assault. Some believe Dorn knew that many of his zealous warriors would never accept the dissolution of the Legion as the adoption of the Codex Astartes required, and that by throwing themselves into the suicidal assault on the Iron Cage they would at least be granted an honourable death, for that is exactly what many of them got. The Iron Cage was actually a defensive trap set by the Iron Warriors Traitor Legion on the world of Sebastus IV that was known as the Eternal Fortress and which was a besieging force's nightmare straight from the depths of hell. The Iron Warriors were masters of siege and defence and Perturabo’s writings on the subject had even been retained by the Primarch Roboute Guilliman in the Codex Astartes. But Dorn was Perturabo’s equal, and furious at the defiance of the Traitors, the Imperial Fists launched an all-out assault straight into the heart of the Iron Warriors defenses within the Eternal Fortress, enraged that the enemy had dared raise their heretical banners over another Imperial world. Without any planning or strategy the Fists fought with zeal, endurance, and sheer grit determination, breaking out of every trap, fighting through every ambush and breaching every defense that got in their way. Dorn led the attack, a colossus who threw back every assault. While the battle should have favored the Iron Warriors in their network of trenches and redoubts the Imperial Fists matched the Iron Warriors guile with cold fury. Brother fought brother in half flooded trenches, tearing at each other with knives and chainswords when all ammunition was expended, neither giving nor expecting any quarter.

The Iron Warriors' Daemon Primarch Perturabo had built the massive fortifications to mock the Imperial Fists, and Dorn led his most die-hard followers in a siege that would last for several weeks. The Iron Warriors, now twisted Chaos Space Marines, claim that the Imperial Fists suffered a crushing defeat, and that Dorn and his Legion would have been wiped out if Perturabo hadn't prolonged Dorn's suffering so long that the Ultramarines managed to intervene. Imperial records of the battle indicate otherwise. The Imperial Fists had always been masters of siege craft, and even unprepared and at a disadvantage they fought like lions. Dorn stood as a giant in their midst, his mind clear with purpose after years of doubt and guilt.

Eventually it became obvious that though the Imperial Fists had suffered horrible losses and that the Iron Warriors could not finish them off, lacking the faith to make the ultimate sacrifice to achieve victory. During a pause in the fighting Roboute Guilliman and his Ultramarines intervened in the struggle, extracting the battered Imperial Fists and letting the Iron Warriors escape. Guilliman had decided that the destruction of the Iron Warriors was not worth the death of Rogal Dorn and so, he had come with the entirety of his Ultramarines to break up the brutal fight and drive the Iron Warriors off. With their cleansing in the fires of battle at the Iron Cage over the Imperial Fists withdrew into seclusion, letting their successor Chapters take to the field in their stead. For two decades the Imperial Fists re-organized, under the direction of Dorn the Chapter absorbed the tenets of the Codex Astartes and by the time they reappeared on the battlefields of the Imperium their adherence to the Codex was second only to the Ultramarines themselves.

Death

Rogal Dorn is believed to have "died" in 781.M31 whilst fighting a Chaos Fleet during the 1st Black Crusade that had emerged from the Eye of Terror under the command of the returned Abaddon the Despoiler, with a vastly outnumbered Imperial force. Seeing the importance of attacking the enemy fleet while they were still preparing to invade Imperial space, Dorn relied on hit-and-run attacks until his reinforcements could arrive. Dorn "died" onboard the Chaotic Despoiler-class Battleship Sword of Sacrilege after leading a desperate attack on its bridge. The only trace of the missing Primarch uncovered by the Imperial Fists' subsequent searching was a single fist. Dorn's skeletal hand was returned to the Phalanx where, over the years, it has been scrimshawed, the bones intricately engraved with the heraldry of all the Imperial Fists Chapter's previous Chapter Masters. Only the current Imperial Fists Chapter Master has the right to engrave his name upon the bones. Even with minuscule script, ten thousand standard years of history have left the bones covered with names, giving a list of the Imperium's greatest heroes. Each bone corresponds to former commanders of the Chapter. For instance, the left hand first metacarpal contains the names of Chapter Masters Bronwin Abermort, Maximus Thane, Kalman Flodensbog and many others, while the first phalange of the thumb bears the name Ambrosian Spactor, and so forth. The Hand of Dorn is the Imperial Fists' holiest icon and it serves as a reminder of sacrifice and commitment. So it is that, throughout the Imperial Fists’ history, from the Ork Onslaughts of the 32nd Millennium to the 13th Black Crusade, they have drawn inspiration from their Primarch's remains and resolved to defeat their foes or die in the attempt. Whether the fist actually belongs to Rogal Dorn or his remains lie elsewhere, is unknown. It is even possible that Dorn survived the assault upon the Sword of Sacrilege; whatever his fate, its truth is known only to the Emperor at present.

Source: http://warhammer40k.wikia.com

[asktheadeptus]

Ferrus Manus

"Rest? We were not made to rest; we go on, unflinching, unstoppable, unending in our strength. The Emperor did not make us for such mortal concerns as hearth and home, vanity or contemplation; we are his engines of war, his hammers, beating out the fabric of existence into a vessel fit for Mankind to inhabit."— Ferrus Manus, as quoted in Shadow of the Gorgon by the Remembrancer Czel Atternus

Ferrus Manus, also known as The Gorgon, was the Primarch of the Iron Hands Space Marine Legion, a master smith known for creating weapons that were able to inspire awe in any who saw them, such as the sword he created for Fulgrim, Primarch of the Emperor's Children Legion or the Bolter he crafted for Vulkan, the Primarch of the Salamanders Legion, said to have a barrel designed to look like the gaping mouth of a dragon. Ferrus' hands were covered in the metallic substance known as necrodermis and he needed no hammer or flame to create beauty through metallurgy, using only his exceptionally powerful hands to mold and shape molten metal. Ferrus forged his closest bond with his brother Fulgrim, but this relationship ultimately ended in tragedy after Fulgrim fell to Chaos during the Horus Heresy. During the Drop Site Massacre on the world of Istvaan V at the start of the Heresy, Fulgrim decapitated Ferrus with a daemonic sword, an action that ultimately cemented his slavery to a Greater Daemon of the Chaos God Slaanesh.

History

Youth

“They are not my hands. This fact is forgotten by my brothers -- inexplicably, it has always seemed to me. The hands are strong, to be sure, and have created great things for us all, but they are not mine. And that counts for something. They forget that the silver on my arms comes from a beast that I vanquished. It is the mark of a great evil that I ended, and yet it persists within me... I would struggle to remove it now... I will not remove the silver from my flesh because I have learned to depend on it. The fault is with my mind. I rely on the augmentation given to me by my metal gauntlets, so much so that the flesh beneath them is now little more than a distant memory... A day will come when I will strip it from me, lest I lose the power to master myself forever. Already my Legion's warriors replace their shield hands with metal in my honour, and so they too are learning to doubt the natural strength of their bodies. They must be weaned off this practice before it becomes a mania for them. Hatred of what is natural, of what is human, is the first and greatest of the corruptions. So I record it here: when the time comes, I will strip my hands of their unnatural silver. I will instruct my Legion to recant their distrust of the flesh. I will turn them away from the gifts of the machine and bid them relearn the mysteries of flesh, bone and blood. When my father's Crusade is over, this shall be my sacred task. When the fighting is done, I shall cure my Legion and myself. For if fighting is all there is, if we may never pause to reflect on what such devotion to strength is doing to us, then our compulsion will only grow.

"—The Neimerel Scrolls attributed to the Primarch Ferrus Manus

At the dawn of the Imperium of Man, before the Great Crusade had begun, the 20 gene-children of the Emperor of Mankind, the Primarchs, were scattered across the known galaxy through the Warp in a mysterious accident due to the intervention of the Ruinous Powers of Chaos. The gestation capsules of all 20 Primarchs were stolen from the Emperor's secret gene-laboratory deep beneath the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains on Terra and were flung across thousands of light years, all eventually coming to rest on backwater human colony planets. It was this first touch of Chaos before the Primarchs had even been born that may have corrupted so many of them and laid the foundation for the agonising tragedy of the Horus Heresy that was to come. One of these infant Primarchs turned up on the dark, geologically unstable Feral World of Medusa in the Segmentum Obscurus very near to the Eye of Terror, his gestation capsule burning a trail through the cloud-dominated sky as it impacted the highest mountain on the world, Karaashi, the Ice Pinnacle. The impact shattered the mountain top, burying Ferrus deep in the ice in a tremendous explosion of steam. The land shook under the impact which could be felt the world over. Mountains were toppled and great chasms were formed as the planet rumbled under the coming of the Primarch. Medusa rumbled with such ferocity that the Medusans later said that many of the world's mountains simply shook themselves to pieces.

Years later that special infant, named Ferrus Manus (High Gothic for "Iron Hand") by the Medusans, walked unscathed and already fully grown from the uninhabited mountain ranges of the far northern wastes where the Ice Pinnacle lay. The legends of the roaming clans, taught from father to son throughout the ages, revolve around the early exploits of Ferrus, who came to be regarded as a great warrior amongst the nomadic clans of Medusa. Much about the formative years of Ferrus Manus on Medusa remains unknown, not so much through any deliberate veil of secrecy perhaps, but because what was later retold by the Medusans themselves was filtered through the barbaric folk-memory of their culture, while the Gorgon himself was taciturn on the matter to any save the Emperor. There have been many who have studied the formative situations of the Primarchs who have drawn parallels between the conditions in which Vulkan found himself on Nocturne and Ferrus Manus encountered on Medusa; both were found on savage, barren worlds riven by hostile conditions and both were home to primitive cultures, long cut off from the rest of Mankind during the Age of Strife. But beyond these surface features, the two worlds and, in particular, those who dwelled upon them could not have been more different.

If what can be gleaned from the Medusan folk tales holds true, it was not into the clan-ranges he first fell in blaze of light that sundered the grey, shrouding skies of the planet, but in the northern polar regions, shattering Karaashi, the Pinnacle of Black Ice. This locale was one of many places the Medusans considered the accursed abodes of the malign shades of the dead and slumbering iron-skinned monsters of legend. This set the scene for the Primarch's entrance into mythic history, and the Medusan legends teach of him wandering the northern realms, casting down hulking storm giants, performing superhuman feats of cunning and strength, and slaying monsters and murderous machine-creatures left relic beneath the black ice of Medusa from bygone ages of war and slaughter. The most renowned of such fables featured the deathless horror of the great silver wyrm Asirnoth, who Imperial savants hypothesize to have been a Necron machine construct impervious to harm. The Primarch had to draw the creature into molten magma in order to kill it. The creature's quicksilver-skin (Necrodermis) marked the Primarch in its death-throes and now perpetually coated the Primarch's own hands and forearms, lending him his common name.

When the Gorgon, as he had become known, strode forth from the forbidden realms of sundered Medusa to batter the disparate clans of his world into submission to his overlordship, he was already thought of as a living god by its natives. But while he did not require of the Medusans worship and did nothing to encourage it, he demanded obedience to his will, and bloodily broke any who would contest his word. Nor did he quell conflict or bring peace upon the planet, but instead he gave the Iron Fathers -- the half Tech-priests, half-shamans who ministered to the clans' spiritual and technological needs -- the fruits of his own intervention in exchange for the technological secrets they had kept down the generations. Through the Gorgon's teachings the Medusan clans then forged better weapons and stronger machines with which to fight to prove their worth to survive.

Ferrus Manus also led the bravest warriors of the clans to delve into the frozen realms below, breaking open long-sealed vaults and intruding into ice-buried fragments of the great machine-works that had plunged from the skies in ancient days in search of salvage and strong metal. In the depths, the warrior-bands and the silver-eyed giant who led them fought degenerate mutants, living-dead cyborgs whose decayed flesh hung in tatters from corroded metal bodies, and subdued the dark-engines of the nightmare ages that had gone before to take their plunder. By the time the Emperor had come to claim him for the Great Crusade, Ferrus Manus was warlord, demi-god and sage to the people of Medusa, and it is said that he was waiting, and that he more than half-suspected the true purpose of his creation.

When the Primarch of the Xth Legion was discovered, he was among the first of the Emperor's lost sons to be found, and, like Horus Lupercal and Leman Russ before him, had risen to become a warlord in his own right on the world on which he had been cast. So it was that Ferrus Manus' transition from planetary warlord to general of the Great Crusade was a swift one, aided by his evident hunger for the task set before him and the uncompromising intelligence and diligent application to this greater challenge he displayed. In a scant few years, Ferrus Manus was transferred full control of the Xth Legion which he took command of body and soul, renaming it and remaking it in his image. Sweeping away much of what had gone before by way of organisation at a stroke, the Primarch took the Xth Legion apart with the precision and intent with which an artisan might deconstruct a mechanical chronograph, reconfigure its components and re-assemble it in a fashion more to his liking.

When Ferrus Manus took charge of his Legion, he, like most of the other Primarchs, used his foster-world as the base and principal headquarters of his Legion. In doing this he wedded the two: the Medusan people and the Terran-founded Xth Legion together forcibly, creating something new that shared aspects of both that had gone before and eradicating with bloody-handed ruthlessness anything that would not yield to his will. Where once there had been Chapters as constituent units of the Legion in the Terran style, there would now be Clans, but this was not a mere symbolic union, and Terran Space Marines were ordered to displace the existing Clans' rulership both temporal and spiritual in the only way that the Medusans knew: by brute force. So the Iron Hands became the new Medusans; the Astartes walking among them as demi-gods, and the people of the nomad clans under their thrall fighting and dying not simply just to survive any more, but ultimately for their children to prove worthy to join the Iron Hands Legion's ranks.

The installation of the Iron Hands on Medusa and the establishment of Imperial Compliance over the world did little to alleviate hardship, halt conflict or undo the barbaric superstitions of the natives. Ferrus Manus saw to that, for the trials and hardships of life on Medusa would winnow the weak from the strong and see that only the physically fittest, most warlike and psychologically "suitable" recruits would join the ranks of his Legion. To counteract the potential flaw of Medusa's small population base, Ferrus Manus saw to it that on suitably recalcitrant human worlds his Iron Hands conquered by force, he exacted a tithe in perpetuity of strong male youths, taking them in early adolescence and selected at his behest by mendicant priests of the Mechanicum as tribute to Medusa: there to live, struggle, fight and survive if they were strong enough, as fresh blood for its clans. Should they prove worthy, they would become Aspirants for his Legion upon attaining their maturity. So it was that the bloody inheritance and bleak creed of Medusa was spread to successive generations of the Iron Hands, forging the X Legion into a weapon of unparalleled ruthlessness.

The Gorgon and the Phoenix

The brotherhood shared by the Primarchs Fulgrim and Ferrus Manus, the Phoenician and the Gorgon, was well known in the Imperium at the time of the Great Crusade, as the two superhuman leaders formed an instant connection upon their first meeting. This initial encounter occurred on Terra, beneath Mount Narodnya, the greatest forge of the Urals, where Ferrus Manus was busy toiling with the forge-masters who had once served the Terrawatt Clan during the Unification Wars soon after his arrival from Medusa. The Primarch of the Iron Hands had been demonstrating his phenomenal skill and the miraculous powers of his liquid metal hands when Fulgrim, the Primarch of the IIIrd Legion, the Emperor's Children, and his elite Phoenix Guard, had descended upon the sprawling forge complex.

Neither Primarch had yet met the other, but each had felt the shared bonds of alchemy and science that had gone into their making. Both were like gods unto the terrified artisans, who prostrated themselves before these two mighty warriors as though fearing a terrible battle might ensue between them. Ferrus Manus later told the tale to the Astartes of the Xth Legion claiming that Fulgrim had declared that he had come to forge the most perfect weapon ever created, and that he would bear it in the coming Great Crusade. Of course the Primarch of the Iron Hands could not let such a boast go unanswered, and he had laughed in Fulgrim’s face, declaring that such pasty hands could never be the equal of his own living metal appendages. Fulgrim accepted the challenge with regal grace, and both Primarchs had stripped to the waist, working without pause for weeks on end, the forge ringing with the deafening pounding of hammers, the hiss of cooling metal, and the good-natured insults of the two demigods as they sought to outdo one another.

At the end of three months' unceasing toil, both warriors had finished their weapons. Fulgrim had forged an exquisite warhammer -- Forgebreaker -- that could level a mountain with a single blow, and Ferrus Manus a golden bladed sword -- Fireblade -- that forever burned with the fire of the forge. Both weapons were unmatched by any yet crafted by Man, and upon seeing what the other had created, each Primarch declared that his opponent’s was the greater. Fulgrim declared the golden sword the equal of that borne by the legendary hero Nuada Silverhand, while Ferrus Manus had sworn that only the mighty thunder gods of Nordyc legend were fit to bear such a magnificent warhammer. Without another word spoken, both Primarchs had swapped weapons and sealed their eternal friendship with the craft of their hands.

The weight of the formidable warhammer Forgebreaker was enormous and unbearable for anyone but one of the Emperor’s Astartes. Its haft was the color of ebony, elaborately worked with threads of gold and silver that formed the shape of a lightning bolt, and the head was carved into the shape of a mighty eagle, its barbed beak forming the striking face and its tapered wings the claw. Anyone who looked upon the mighty warhammer could feel the power radiating from within it and know instinctively that more than just skill had gone into its forging. Love and honour, loyalty and friendship, death and vengeance...all were embodied within its majestic form, and the thought that the Iron Hands Primarch’s sworn honour brother had created this weapon made it truly legendary.

According to legend, Ferrus Manus was commonly referred to as The Gorgon. Some on Terra said the name was in reference to an ancient legend of the Olympian Hegemony. The Gorgon was a beast of such incredible ugliness that its very gaze could turn a man to stone. Many would be outraged at the disrespect in the implication of such a term when referring to a Primarch, but those who knew him best believed that Ferrus Manus quite enjoyed the name, because in any case, that was not where the name originated. It was an old nickname Fulgrim had given his brother after their initial meeting. Unlike the Phoenician, Ferrus Manus had little time for art, music or any of the cultural pastimes the IIIrd Legion's Primarch so enjoyed. It is said that after the two Primarchs met at Mount Narodnya, they returned to the Imperial Palace where Primarch Sanguinius of the Blood Angels Legion had arrived bearing gifts for the Emperor, exquisite statues from the glowing rock of Baal, priceless gem-stones and wondrous artifacts of aragonite, opal and tourmaline. The lord of the Blood Angels had brought enough to fill a dozen wings of the Palace with the greatest wonders imaginable.

Of course, Fulgrim was enthralled, finding that another of his brothers shared his love of such incredible beauty, but Ferrus Manus was unimpressed and said that such things were a waste of their time when there was a galaxy to win back. Fulgrim laughed and declared Ferrus a "terrible gorgon," saying that if the Primarchs did not value beauty, then they would never appreciate the stars they were to win back for their father. After that time the name stuck, and forever after Ferrus Manus was often referred to as The Gorgon.

The Great Crusade

Although torn between the people of Medusa and the needs of the greater Imperium he had been created to serve, Ferrus eventually accepted from his father the command of the Xth Legion, who were re-named the Iron Hands to honour their Primarch's necrodermis-sheathed hands. The Legion quickly added their efforts to the Emperor's ongoing Great Crusade, becoming the heart of the 52nd Expeditionary Fleet. They were said to fight with valor across the galaxy, cutting a swathe through any that opposed the Emperor's word. New Aspirants for the Legion were now drawn from Medusa rather than Terra, and Ferrus' early beliefs about the Medusan tribesmen's healthy competition made them more than capable of adapting to the rigours of life as Astartes. The Xth Legion believed deeply in the Emperor's efforts to reunite all of humanity after the Age of Strife, and held that the greatest danger to the human race was to be found in its own divisions. Only unity—unity under the rule of the Emperor—could truly ensure the survival of Mankind in such a hostile galaxy. The Legion believed that any weakness in humanity should be stamped out, which resulted in many culls of newly-discovered populations who were unwilling to accept the Emperor's rule and the teachings of the Imperial Truth.

Diasporex Persecution

During the latter part of the Great Crusade, the Iron Hands encountered a nomadic, fleet-based civilization composed of both humans and xenos known as the Diasporex. The Iron Hands shared the Imperial Truth of the Emperor of Mankind and offered the human members of the Diasporex the opportunity to separate from their alien allies and to join the newly forged Imperium, but they declined the Astartes' offer. Their offer rejected, the Iron Hands passed judgement, and in the following months the Iron Hands fleet attempted to annihilate the Diasporex, but they proved to be highly skilled and experienced in the realm of naval warfare, and managed to easily evade crucial battles and even to severely damage the Iron Hands' Strike Cruiser Ferrum. The Emperor's Children of the 28th Expeditionary Fleet were called in as reinforcements, and so, a joint Imperial strike force composed of both the Iron Hands and forces from the Emperor's Children Legion launched an all-out assault against the willful Diasporex. Though the Diasporex knew that a powerful fleet of warships was hunting them and sought their destruction, they refused to leave the sector and move on to someplace safer. The Iron Hands' scout ships soon discovered the truth—the Diasporex used hidden solar collector arrays to collect fuel for their vessels from a star. This was the reason why the Diasporex remained within the sector. Attacking these vital fuel stations, the two Imperial Expeditionary Fleets drew the Diasporex fleet out into open battle as the human-alien alliance sought to avoid utter annihilation at the Imperials' hands.

During the massive naval battle that ensued Fulgrim's personal gunship, the Firebird, came under heavy attack and soon found itself in trouble. Rushing to his brother's side, Ferrus Manus' flagship, the Battle Barge Fist of Iron, came rushing to the rescue of his beleaguered brother. To restore his wounded pride, Fulgrim led a brief ship boarding action where the Emperor's Children wreaked bloody havoc on the troops of the Diasporex. But ultimate victory was robbed from him when the enemy ship's bridge was taken by one of his subordinate commanders. For months thereafter, Fulgrim would resent The Gorgon's actions, unable to truly understand the altruism of Ferrus' deed and the loss of life his selfless act had incurred on his Legion. Under the malignant influence of the daemon-possessed Laer blade that he wore at all times, Fulgrim could only see self-aggrandizement in his brother’s action, instead of the the heroic deed it had truly been. Ferrus' critical comments, the wounding darts that Fulgrim believed were meant to undermine him, were in actuality only jests designed to puncture Fulgrim's self-importance and restore his humility. What Fulgrim perceived as Ferrus’ prideful boasts and rash actions had been deeds of courage that he spitefully dismissed as the influence of Chaos began to claim the Phoenician's soul.

Horus Heresy

As the Warmaster Horus made the opening moves of his rebellion on Istvaan III, Ferrus Manus' oldest and dearest friend Fulgrim was ordered by the Warmaster to meet with the Iron Hands Primarch aboard his flagship Fist of Iron in the hope that he could be swayed to the side of the Traitor Legions who now served Chaos. Fulgrim had sent the bulk of his IIIrd Legion and the 28th Expeditionary Fleet on to meet Horus and the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet in the Istvaan System while he and a small force aided the Iron Hands' 52ndExpeditionary Fleet in retaking the world of Callinedes IV from Orks. Great bonds of friendship and brotherhood had long existed between the two Legions, and Fulgrim felt that he could convince Ferrus of the righteousness of Horus' cause. Fulgrim's hope proved disastrously wrong and the meeting of the two Primarchs in Ferrus's private inner sanctum in his flagship's Anvilarium did not go well, as Ferrus was utterly outraged that his brothers would turn against their father the Emperor. The meeting ended in violence as The Gorgon made his difference of opinion over continued loyalty to the Emperor known to the Phoenician with his weapons, determined to stop Fulgrim's betrayal of the Imperium before it could begin. Ferrus attempted to use his silvery necrodermis hands to destroy Fulgrim's golden sword Fireblade, but the resulting explosion knocked him unconscious.

Fulgrim intended to kill his unconscious brother with the weapon he had forged for him, the warhammer Forgebreaker, but proved unable to kill his oldest friend despite the promptings of the Slaaneshi daemon that now corrupted his soul. Instead he took the wondrous weapon that he had once crafted in brotherhood for Ferrus as a reminder of their former friendship, and left behind Fireblade, which Ferrus had forged for him. When Fulgrim emerged from Ferrus' inner sanctum, he gave a signal to his elite Phoenix Guard, who instantly beheaded all of the Iron Hands Morlocks Terminators who served as Ferrus' own elite bodyguard with their Power Halberds. The Emperor's Children also nearly slew the Iron Hands' First Captain Gabriel Santor. Fulgrim successfully fled the Iron Hands' expeditionary fleet in his personal assault craft, the Firebird, as he ordered his warships, the Battle Barge Pride of the Emperor and its Escorts, to open fire upon the ships of the 52nd Expeditionary Fleet. This surprise attack crippled the Iron Hands force and provided a distraction while Fulgrim and the Emperor's Children warships fled into the Warp to rendezvous with the rest of their 28th Expeditionary Fleet in the Istvaan System.

Drop Site Massacre

Overcome with mind-numbing rage at such treachery, Ferrus and his warriors gratefully received the Emperor's orders through his brother Rogal Dorn. Together with the Raven Guard and Salamanders Legions, the Iron Hands were to confront Horus and his lieutenants on the world of Istvaan V and crush them utterly. A second wave, comprising the Night Lords, Iron Warriors, Alpha Legion and a contingent from the Word Bearers Legions, would follow them and support their initial attack. The Imperial fleet managed to make orbit over Istvaan V and the Loyalist Legions proceeded with their planetary deployment. Thousands of Drop Pods and Stormbirds were deployed for the assault. The first wave was under the overall command of Ferrus Manus and besides his own Legion, the Iron Hands, the Loyalist forces included the Salamanders led by Vulkan, and the Raven Guard under the command of Corax. Vulkan's Legion assaulted the left flank of the Traitors' battle line while Ferrus Manus, First Captain Gabriel Santor, and 10 full companies of elite Morlock Terminators charged straight through the center of the Traitor Legions' lines. Meanwhile, Corax's Legion hit the right flank of the enemy's position. The odds were considered equal; 30,000 defending Traitor Astartes against 40,000 Loyalists. Horus was aware of the location of the Loyalists' chosen drop site and his troops fell upon the Loyalist Legions.

The battlefield of Isstvan V was a slaughterhouse of epic proportions. Treacherous warriors twisted by hatred fought their former brothers-in-arms in a conflict unparalleled in its bitterness. The mighty Titan war engines of the Machine God walked the planet’s surface, and death followed in their wake. The blood of heroes and traitors flowed in rivers, and the hooded Adepts of the Dark Mechanicum unleashed perversions of ancient technology stolen from the Auretian Technocracy to wreak bloody havoc amongst the Loyalists. All across the Urgall Depression, hundreds died with every passing second, the promise of inevitable death a pall of darkness that hung over every warrior. The Traitor forces held, but their line was bending beneath the fury of the first Loyalist assault. It would take only the smallest twists of fate for it to break.

The second wave of "Loyalist" Space Marine Legions descended upon the landing zone on the northern edge of the Urgall Depression. Hundreds of Stormbirds and Thunderhawks roared towards the surface, their armoured hulls gleaming as the power of another four Astartes Legions arrived on Isstvan V. Yet the Space Marine Legions of the reserve were no longer loyal to the Emperor, having already secretly sworn themselves to Chaos and the cause of Horus. The Night Lords of Konrad Curze, the Iron Warriors of Perturabo, the Word Bearers of Lorgar, and the Alpha Legion of Alpharius represented a force larger than that which had first begun the assault on Isstvan V. The secret Traitor Legions mustered in the landing zone, armed and ready for battle, unbloodied and fresh.

Though the Iron Hands, Raven Guard and Salamanders had managed to make a full combat drop and secured the drop site, known as the Urgall Depression, they did so at a heavy cost. Overwhelmed with rage, the headstrong Ferrus Manus disregarded the counsel of his brothers Corax and Vulkan and hurled himself against the fleeing rebels, seeking to bring Fulgrim to personal combat. His veteran troops—comprising the majority of the Xth Legion's Terminators and Dreadnoughts -- followed. What had begun as a massed strike against the Traitors’ position was rapidly turning into one of the largest engagements of the entire Great Crusade. All told, over 60,000 Astartes warriors clashed on the dusky plains of Isstvan V. For all the wrong reasons, this battle was soon to go down in the annals of Imperial history as one of the most epic confrontations ever fought.

Fulgrim smiled as his brother Ferrus Manus renewed his attack into the heart of the Traitors' defensive lines atop the Urgall Depression. Backlit by the flaring strobe of battle, his brother was a magnificent figure of vengeance, his silver hands and eyes reflecting the fires of slaughter with a brilliant gleam. For the briefest second, Fulgrim had been sure that Ferrus would pause to muster with the Raven Guard and Salamanders, but there would be no restraining his brother's aggrieved sense of honour. Around the Phoenician, the last of the Phoenix Guard awaited the blunt wedge of the Iron Hands, their golden halberds held low and aimed towards their foes.

Ferrus Manus and his Morlocks charged through the shattered ruin of the defences, his black armour and their burnished plates scarred and stained with the blood of enemies. Fulgrim’s fixed smile faltered as he truly appreciated the depths of hatred his brother held for him and wondered again how they had come to this point, knowing that any chance for brotherhood was lost. Only in death would their rivalry end. The Iron Hands pushed through the defenses, the bulky Terminators unstoppable in their relentless advance. Lightning crackled from the claws of their gauntlets and their red eyes shone with anger. The Phoenix Guard braced themselves to meet the charge, fully aware of the power of such mighty suits of armour. The Phoenix Guard answered with a terrible war cry and leapt to meet the Morlocks in a searing clash of blades. Electric fire leapt from the golden edges of the halberds and the Lightning Claws of the warriors, and a storm of light and sound flared from each life and death struggle. The battle engulfed the Primarch of the Emperor’s Children, but he stood above it, awaiting the dark armoured giant who strode untouched through the lightning shot carnage as brothers hacked at one another in hatred. Ferrus had long dreamt of this moment of reckoning, ever since Fulgrim had come to him with betrayal in his heart. Only one of them would walk away from their final confrontation.

Death of Ferrus Manus

Ferrus taunted Fulgrim for his betrayal of the Emperor and siding with the Traitor Horus. He thought his brother mad, for the Warmaster was defeated—his forces routed and the power of another four Legions would soon be brought to bear to crush their attempt at rebellion utterly. Unable to contain himself any longer, Fulgrim shook his head, savouring the final act of betrayal to come, revealing to Ferrus that it was he who was naive. Horus would never be foolish enough to trap himself like this. He pointed out towards the northern edge of the Urgall Depression so that Ferrus could see that it was he and his fellow Loyalists who were undone. Ferrus looked and saw a force larger than that which had begun the assault during the first wave of attack, mustered in the landing zone, armed and ready for battle.

Dragging their wounded and dead behind them, Corax and Vulkan led their forces back to the drop site to regroup and to allow the warriors of their recently arrived brother Primarchs of the second wave a measure of the glory in defeating Horus. Though they voxed hails requesting medical aid and supply, the line of Astartes atop the northern ridge remained grimly silent as the exhausted warriors of the Raven Guard and Salamanders came to within a hundred meters of their allies. It was then that Horus revealed his perfidy and sprung his lethal trap. Inside the black fortress where Horus had made his lair, a lone flare shot skyward, exploding in a hellish red glow that lit the battlefield below. The fire of betrayal roared from the barrels of a thousand guns, as the second wave of Astartes revealed where their true loyalties now lay. Ferrus looked on in stunned horror as Fulgrim laughed at the look on his brother's face as the forces of his "allies" opened fire upon the Salamanders and Raven Guard, killing hundreds in the fury of the first few moments, hundreds more in the seconds following, as volley after volley of Bolter fire and missiles scythed through their unsuspecting ranks.

Even as terrifying carnage was being wreaked upon the Loyalists below, the retreating forces of the Warmaster turned and brought their weapons to bear on the enemy warriors within their midst. Hundreds of World Eaters, Sons of Horus and the Death Guard fell upon the veteran companies of the Iron Hands, and though the warriors of the Xth Legion continued to fight gallantly, they were hopelessly outnumbered and would soon be hacked to pieces. Ferrus Manus turned to face Fulgrim, his teeth bared with the volcanic fury of his homeworld. The two Primarchs leapt at one anther, Ferrus wielding Fireblade and Fulgrim holding Forgebreaker. Their weapons had been forged in brotherhood, but were now wielded in vengeance, meeting in a blazing plume of energy. The two Primarchs traded blows with their monstrously powerful weapons, Ferrus Manus wielded his flaming blade in fiery slashes, his every blow defeated by the ebony hafted hammer he had borne in countless campaigns. Both warriors fought with the hatred only brothers divided could muster, their armour dented, torn and blackened by their fury.

The two Primarchs traded terrible blows, wounding one another deeply during their fierce struggle. As Ferrus pushed himself to his feet and staggered towards the wounded Fulgrim, he cried out as he brought the flaming blade towards his brother's neck. But Fulgrim lashed out as he drew the single-edged, daemonically-possessed sword he had taken from the Laer temple and blocked the descending weapon. With the power of Chaos streaming from the blade, diabolical strength flooded Fulgrim's limbs as he pushed against the power of Ferrus Manus, feeling his brother's surprise at his resistance. Fulgrim managed to surge to his feet and lashed out, his silver blade biting deep into the breastplate of Ferrus' armour, and the Primarch of the Iron Hands cried out, falling to his knees once again. Fireblade slid from his grasp as he gasped in fierce agony. As Fulgrim raised the silver sword in preparation of delivering the deathblow to Ferrus Manus, he found that he did not possess the fortitude to deliver the killing blow. In an instant he saw what he had become and what monstrous betrayal he had allowed himself to be party to. He knew in that eternal moment that he had made a terrible mistake in drawing the sword from the Temple of the Laer, and he fought to release the damnable blade that had brought him so low.

His grip was locked onto the weapon, and even as he recognized how far he had fallen, he knew that he had come too far to stop, the realization coupled with the knowledge that everything he had striven for had been a lie. As though moving in slow motion, Fulgrim saw Ferrus Manus reaching for his fallen sword, his fingers closing around the wire-wound grip, the flames leaping once more to the blade at its creator’s touch. Fulgrim’s blade seemed to move with a life of its own as he swung the blade of his own volition. Fulgrim tried desperately to pull the blow, but his muscles were no longer his own to control. The daemonic blade sliced through the genetically-enhanced flesh and bone of one of the Emperor's sons. The Iron Hands' Primarch fell to the ground, his head decapitated. Ferrus Manus was dead by his brother's own hand and his Legion nearly shared his fate. A small group of surviving Iron Hands managed to elude the Traitors' closing trap and flee off-world, but the Xth Legion had been shattered in body and spirit and would play no further role in the Horus Heresy as it moved to recover from its critical losses at the Drop Site Massacre. The fate of their Primarch was a mystery to the Legion as his last known position was overrun by hordes of screaming enemy warriors. What became of the great Primarch Ferrus Manus would remain a mystery to the Astartes of the Xth Legion. Their enemies proclaimed the Iron Hands' Primarch dead upon the blasted wastes of Istvaan V, but the Xth Legion refused to accept this for no body was ever recovered, and many Iron Hands Astartes believed that Ferrus had somehow survived. One particular Imperial legend tells that his wrecked body was rescued and restored, and that he took refuge on Mars where he resides still, though this is violently refuted by the Iron Hands themselves. Their Primarch lost, the Iron Hands despaired as to the fate of Mankind. Their distress and confusion grew further when they learned that the Emperor had fallen in a titanic battle with the corrupted Horus. For the next 10,000 Terran years, the sons of Ferrus Manus would continue to stoke the unquenchable fires of their hatred, drawing strength from their bitterness and awaiting with faithful devotion the day of their Primarch's return.

The Sapphire King

It was at the precise moment that Ferrus Manus' head was scythed from his shoulders by the Traitor Fulgrim that the Daemonic entity known as the Sapphire King came into being. Spawned from the psychic bow wave of Ferrus Manus' death, this Daemon was forged from the Primarch's frustrated pride, his boiling anger and sorrow, and from his shame. From the moment of its birth, the Sapphire King fed on the repressed emotions of the soul-scarred Iron Hands. It basked in their chained desperation, bound to their fate by the emotions they felt but would not express. The Daemon bedevilled them across the centuries, offering opportunities for damnation disguised as steps away from the weakness they so feared. It nudged the minds of Imperial officials and potential foes, forever seeking to goad the Iron Hands into spending away their humanity like coin. The Chapter bent their every effort to purging the weaknesses of the flesh, never realising that the more they demonised their wants and needs, the greater the hold the spectre of their repressed emotions gained upon them. Following the aftermath of the campaign fought against a massive Ork WAAAGH! dubbed the Weirdwaaagh!, upon the Forge World of Columnus in 249.M41, questions arose in the Iron Council regarding Iron Father Kristos' questionable conduct. In 260.M41, sufficient dissent continued to arise amongst the Iron Fathers in regards to Kristos' conduct. Only an entire Iron Council could resolve the wider issues raised. Though a fair and logical process, it was not a swift one; the years turned to decades as the Kristosian Conclave ground on over the next couple of centuries.

As the Kristosian Conclave reached its zenith in 460.M41, the Sapphire King judged the Iron Hands ripe to fall and set its trap in motion. Each Iron Hand carried within his heart a rancid seed, a bomb of repressed passions that could erupt to destroy him at any moment.

In that same year, a vast host of Iron Hands descended upon the Gaudinia System. Iron Father Kristos had assumed the mantle of war leader and had assembled more than eight hundred Iron Hands under his control. This was the greatest deployment of the Chapter for centuries, and was accompanied by the majority of the Iron Council. Clan Company Raukaan once again took the lead in a massive planetary assault upon Gaudania Prime and so was at the heart of the abominable trap that was there unleashed. A Daemonic entity known only as the Sapphire King, spawned from the psychic bow wave of Ferrus Manus' death on Istvaan V, had long fed on the repressed emotions of the soul-scarred Iron Hands. It basked in their chained desperation, bound to their fate by the emotions they felt but would not express. The Daemon bedevilled them across the centuries, offering opportunities for damnation disguised as steps away from the weakness they so feared. The Sapphire King judged the Iron Hands ripe to fall and set its trap in motion. Each Iron Hand carried within his heart a rancid seed, a bomb of repressed passions that could erupt to destroy him at any moment. The Daemon would simply provide the spark to light the flame and watch the Chapter burn upon a pyre of their own emotions.

As the Daemonic entity was confronted by the Clan Companies Raukaan and Sorrgol in their entirety on Gaudinia Prime, Iron Father Kristos was corrupted, both body and soul. Everywhere, the adherents of Kristos (known as Kristosians) were overcome by the twisted perfection of strange flesh engines -- the harder they attempted to repress their urges with logic, the faster they succumbed. Howling Daemons of Slaanesh burst forth from tears in reality, and set themselves upon the beleaguered Iron Hands. With them came warriors of the Emperor's Children. Amid the madness, the bejewelled Daemon itself strode forth to confront the Iron Hands.

At that moment, Iron Father Kardan Stronos was struck by the revelation that by cutting off their emotions, his Battle-Brothers were only causing themselves to fall to the corrupting influence of Chaos. Their only chance to save themselves was not by cutting themselves off from their emotions, but by embracing them, and shackling them to their iron will. Activating his Vox, Stronos barked commands to the forces around him, ordering them to release their anger, lest their foes destroy them with it. The Battle-Brothers disengaged their inhibitor protocols and loosed furious battle cries. As the emotional floodgates burst open, the Sapphire King shrieked its rage as the repressed energies that had fueled its spell were vented like steam from a boiler. Freed from the debilitating Warp-craft, the surviving Iron Hands gave vent to their revulsion, blasting the Daemons apart in rains of ectoplasmic filth or tearing them limb from shimmering limb. With a fury they had never before allowed themselves to display, the Iron Hands made short work of their Chaotic foes. The Sapphire King was utterly destroyed and the remaining Emperor's Children were swiftly blasted into bloodied ruin. To ensure the destruction of the surviving machine-spawn, the Iron Hands launched a massive orbital bombardment, ensuring the Daemon Engines' destruction.

Source: http://warhammer40k.wikia.com

[asktheadeptus]

Lion El’Jonson

"In Warfare, preparation is the key. Determine that which your foe prizes the most. Then site your heavy weapons so that they overlook it. In this way, you may be quite sure that you shall never want for targets."— Lion El'Jonson, Tenets of Strategy and Supremacy

Lion El'Jonson, known also by the cognomen, The First, and the honorific Primaris Angelus Mortis, and often times referred to as the Lion during his lifetime, was the Primarch of the Ist Legion of Space Marines, the Dark Angels. Following the events of the Horus Heresy, Jonson and his Crusading fleet returned to his home world of Caliban. Inexplicably, they were fired upon by the Dark Angel forces garrisoned there under the command of his once-trusted mentor and surrogate father, Luther, who had been entrusted with the custodianship of Caliban in the Lion's absence. Luther would eventually betray the Lion after allowing himself to be seduced by the offers of Chaos, rallying a good portion of the Dark Angels who had been left behind by their fellows to garrison the Legion's home world to his cause and attacking the Lion's fleet as he returned to Caliban. The titanic struggle between the two former friends resulted in the destruction of Caliban and the loss of the Dark Angels' Primarch, as well as the escape of Luther's allies who had sided with the Ruinous Powers. Known as the Fallen Angels amongst their former Battle-Brothers of the Ist Legion, it became the overriding goal of the Dark Angels and all of their Successor Chapters (collectively known as the Unforgiven) after the Second Founding to hunt down every one of the Fallen and get them to repent their betrayal of the Emperor and of the Lion. Perhaps one of the greatest secrets of the Imperium of Man, known only to the Emperor himself, is that the Lion is still alive and resting in stasis, buried deep within the Dark Angels' mobile fortress-monastery, The Rock. There he waits to be awakened to lead the Dark Angels in one final Crusade to save Mankind from all the enemies who threaten it with extinction.

History

Early Life

During the event that isolated the infant Primarchs from the rest of the Imperium, Lion El'Jonson was cast to a hostile, feudal Death World infested with monstrous, Chaos-warped Great Beasts that was named Caliban by its inhabitants. The humans of Caliban had regressed to a feudal state, yet still retained sufficient technology to produce armour similar in appearance, if not quality, to Imperial Power Armour and firearms similar to Bolt Pistols. Caliban was kept relatively safe from the Great Beasts by the Knightly Orders such as the Order and the Knights of Lupus.

The Lion was discovered as a feral child by the Knights of the Order, including the greatest man of the age, Sar Luther. Luther then named the boy Lion El'Jonson (meaning "Lion, Son of the Forest" in the Calibanite dialect of Low Gothic). In a very short time after this, the Lion replaced Luther as the greatest man on Caliban and became the Grandmaster of the Order. The Lion killed a great many of the death world's Great Beasts, including one of only two Calibanite Lions on the planet, the other being slain by the psyker and Supplicant of the Order, Zahariel El'Zurias, with the aid of the latent psychic ability later called, "terror sight," that allowed him to slow down the perception of time long enough for him to find an opening in the animal's defenses.

During his career as a Knight of the Order, the Lion led a planet-wide crusade of all the Knightly Orders (save for the conservative Knights of Lupus) against the Calibanite beasts. If not for Luther, this crusade could not have occurred, as his influence was required to persuade the other Orders to participate. During the course of this crusade, both the beasts and the Knights of Lupus were exterminated. It was on the ceremonial last hunt of the beasts that the forces of the Imperium's Great Crusade would finally arrive on Caliban and reunited the Space Marines of the Ist Legion with their gene-father.

Arrival of the Emperor

Eventually a unit of the Emperor of Mankind's forwards scouts from the Ist Legion of Space Marines arrived at Caliban and identified the Lion as one of the Emperor's missing sons, the Primarchs. Jonson was immediately given command of the I Space Marine Legion when the Emperor realized he had not only found one of his lost sons, but the genetic father of the Astartes who had landed on Caliban. Luther and the other members of the Order who passed the Legiones Astartes' trials were transformed into Ist Legion warriors, either as fully-fledged Astartes if they were young enough to undergo the implantation of the gene-seed organs, or through genetic manipulation to increase their physical abilities if they were too old for the process, like Luther. After the new Astartes were ready, Jonson publicly re-named the First Legion the Dark Angels after an old Calibanite myth. Luther, too old to be a Space Marine, was the first to be genetically modified and became Jonson's second in command, as he had been during the Calibanite crusade against the great beasts. Jonson then left with the Emperor and the newly re-named Dark Angels to continue the Great Crusade.

Great Crusade

The Lion was granted command of the 4th Expeditionary Fleet of the Great Crusade in orbit of the planet Sarosh. The Saroshi had recently expressed their interest in becoming part of the Imperium, and the Imperials were eager to allow them in, believing that these people seemed to possess the same secular beliefs as they did in the Imperial Truth. But the Saroshi secretly worshiped Chaotic entities in the Warp they called the Melachim ("kings" in ancient Hebrew) who may have been the Ruinous Powers or their lesser daemonic servants. They saw the atheistic stance of the Emperor's Imperial Truth as nothing less than a philosophy of pure evil since it would deny the very existence of their gods. The Lord High Exacter, the leader of the Saroshi bureaucracy, denounced El'Jonson and the Emperor to their faces aboard the Dark Angels' flagship. El'Jonson responded by impaling the Lion Sword through the fanatical Saroshi leader's body. However, unknown to the Dark Angels the Saroshi had also brought a nuclear device aboard their shuttle, intending to assassinate the fleet's entire command structure, including Jonson; however, Luther and a junior Librarian named Zahariel managed to eject the shuttle into space, causing only minor damage to the flagship. After this incident, Luther, Zahariel and two hundred other Dark Angels were sent back to Caliban in disgrace for allowing an enemy to get a nuclear device aboard the Primarch's flagship. They were to oversee the recruitment of new Space Marines into the Legion from the Calibanite population.

As the years passed, news of Jonson's victories kept coming back to Caliban. The jealousy which Luther had first felt on Jonson's appointment as Supreme Master of the Order grew with every report, and the position Jonson had given Luther was not one suited to his ambitions. He slowly changed from an honorable knight to a man full of jealousy and hatred towards Jonson, because he felt he had lost out on fame and glory. Additionally, new reports indicated that Luther discovered a book of Chaos lore on Caliban that gradually caused him to turn from the path of righteousness until he was consumed by the temptations of the Ruinous Powers and was transformed into a Chaos Champion.

A Lion and a Wolf

At some point during the Great Crusade, the Dark Angels and the Space Wolves Legions were assaulting the planet Dulan that had not given in to the Imperium's demands to become a compliant world. The leader of the rebels had insulted Leman Russ by naming him "The Emperor's Lapdog." Russ and his Space Wolves planned to assault rebel leader's stronghold for this blemish on their honor. While they were busy planning, the Dark Angels took the initiative and brought the fight to the capital instead and the Lion himself killed their leader. Russ found the Lion with the dead leader at his feet and immediately attacked his brother Primarch. They fought for a full day and a night, the combat ending only when the Lion threw Russ through a table. When Russ got up he started laughing at the foolishness of their quarrel. The Lion, incensed that his brother appeared to be mocking him, hit him square in the jaw, knocking Russ out cold. Russ awakened many hours later to find that Lion El'Jonson and his Dark Angels had already left the planet. Honour Duels are still fought between members of the Space Wolves and the Dark Angels to this day over this incident, which sometimes results in fatalities.

Horus Heresy

Suppression of the Gordian League

During the 200th year of the Great Crusade, the Dark Angels Legion was carrying out an Imperial Compliance campaign against the Shield Worlds of the so-called Gordian League -- a confederation of human worlds who were allied with degenerate xenos. During this campaign, in 005.M31, the Dark Angels high command received word that Warmaster Horus and the XVIth Legion had renounced their oaths of allegiance, along with Primarch Angron's World Eaters, Mortarion's Death Guard and Fulgrim's Emperor's Children. They also received word of the atrocity committed against the doomed world of Istvaan III, when Horus ordered it to be virus-bombed, rendered it a lifeless planet. The Warmaster knew that the Emperor would respond with all the force he had available. Jonson believed that the Dark Angels' deployment to the Shield Worlds was part of an effort to scatter the Imperium's most loyal servants as far as possible in order to minimize the number of Legions Horus would have to face at any given time. Even so, a strike force of seven full Legions posed a dire threat to Horus's survival, as they made their way towards Istvaan V.

Battle of Diamat

Jonson's forces were too deeply enmeshed in the Shield Worlds to respond quickly to Horus's treachery; the best estimates of the Primarch's staff indicated that it would take them nearly eight months to conclude their offensive operations, even on an emergency basis, and reposition themselves for a strike against Istvaan V. Even if they could move more quickly, Horus's agents would be able to alert the Warmaster in time to organize a counter-strike. However, Jonson believed that a small, hand-picked force, might accomplish what an entire Legion could not. The Primarch issued orders for many of their reserve squadrons to resupply and prepare for immediate deployment to the Tanagra System. Their primary target was to secure the Forge World of Diamat. They could not afford to let the Warmaster acquire the substantial supplies and ordnance needed to fortify the world of Istvaan V against the approaching Loyalist strike force. Jonson would personally lead the expedition to Diamat, with a battle group of fifteen warships. Secrecy was vital, as the Primarch was aware that the Warmaster's agents were more than likely tracking the Dark Angels' movements. Jonson went to Diamat in order to secure several powerful continental siege machines; vast artillery pieces that could devastate the most powerful fortifications.

The small fleet of Dark Angels vessels arrived in the Tanagra System just five days after the destruction of Horus's landing force at the Xanthus star port. With no way to secure the siege machines held in storage in Diamat's depots from Jonson's Astartes, the admiral of the raiding fleet had little choice but to withdraw back to Isstvan. The Warmaster's final gambit had failed. Following this small victory, Jonson met with his fellow brother Primarch, Perturabo of the Iron Warriors Legion aboard his flagship Invincible Reason. Perturabo informed Jonson that the IVth Legion was enroute to the Istvaan System, to face the Warmaster and his Traitor Legions upon the black sands of Istvaan V. Ferrus Manus and the Iron Hands Legion had hastened ahead of them, hungry to claim the Emperor's vengeance against Horus. Perturabo than lied to Jonson, explaining that he had hoped that his Legion could provision his vessels at the Xanthus star port above Diamat before continuing to the combat zone. Of course, they were now unable to, as the Ist Legion had destroyed the star port.

Perturabo then inquired to Jonson how he had learned of the existence of the siege engines. Jonson explained that he had learned of it fifty years earlier when he was studying the history of the Great Crusade and saw a reference to them in a despatch from Horus that had been sent to the Emperor. He'd commissioned the colossal siege machines from the masters of Diamat during the long siege of the xenos fortress-states on Tethonus. The war machines took much longer for the forge masters to complete than planned. By the time they were finished, the campaign on Tethonus had been over for a year and a half, and Horus had moved on to other conquests. So the weapons were put into a depot here against the day when he would come to claim them. But then the Istvaan III Atrocity occurred. When Jonson had received word of Horus's perfidy, he knew that ultimately the Warmaster's path would ultimately lead to Terra. Even if he were somehow to prevail against Perturabo and the other Legions sent to confront him in the Istvaan System, the Warmaster couldn't claim total victory so long as the Emperor was safe in his palace. No, for Horus to triumph, their father had to die. And that meant a long and costly siege of Terra. Therefore, the Warmaster would come to claim the siege engines of Diamat.

Jonson informed his brother that he would be unable to accompany the Loyalist fleet to Diamat, as he had to make all haste to the Shield Worlds and prepare the rest of the Ist Legion for the trip to Terra. In fact, he thought it best if no one outside Perturabo, himself and the other Primarchs ever knew that the Lion was there. He didn't want the Emperor to believe he did anything at Diamat with an ulterior motive in mind. Perturabo agreed that its was both a prudent choice, and a very humble one. Jonson explained that his actions were done for the good of the Imperium, not for accolades, nor for power. Jonson confessed to his brother that he believed Horus had become their father's favorite son for no other reason than fate. Had he been the first one he'd found, Jonson believed he would have been the Warmaster. The Lion believed that Horus would inevitably be defeated and that the Emperor would need to choose a new Warmaster very quickly if the Great Crusade was to continue. He asked for Perturabo's support. The two Primarchs reached an understanding -- Jonson granted permission for the Iron Warriors to take possession of the siege guns at their convenience -- on one condition, of course. Perturabo raised an eyebrow, inquisitively. Jonson made his brother promise that the siege weapons would be put to good use. Of that, Perturabo assured, they most certainly would be utilized in that regard.

Thramas Crusade

Following the victory of the Drop Site Massacre, Horus called a meeting of the Primarchs of 8 of the Traitor Legions (minus the participation of the Alpha Legion's Primarch Alpharius) aboard his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit. Five of the Primarchs, including four who had fought at Istvaan V, met in person, including Horus, Fulgrim, Angron, Mortarion and Lorgar. Three appeared through the use of hololithic emitters that transmitted their signals through the Warp, including Perturabo, Night Haunter and Magnus the Red, who had only recently joined the Traitors after the Scouring of Prospero when the broken remains of his XVth Legion had been transported by Tzeentch into the Eye of Terror to the Planet of the Sorcerers. The Thousand Sons, bitter at what they perceived as their betrayal by the Emperor, now willingly became the ninthTraitor Legion. The council of Traitor Primarchs made their plans for the next step in their war against the Emperor and then each Legion went its way according to its assigned role. The Night Haunter's fleet had already departed, bound for the planet of Tsagualsa, a remote world in the Eastern Fringe that lay shrouded in the shadow of a great asteroid belt. From there, the Night Lords' terror troops would begin a campaign of genocide against the Imperial strongholds of Heroldar and Thramas, star systems that, if not taken, would leave the flanks of the Warmaster's strike on Terra vulnerable to attack. This campaign would also delay the Dark Angels Legion from reinforcing the Loyalists. The Thramas System was of particular importance, as it comprised a number of MechanicumForge Worlds whose loyalty was still to the Emperor.

This bitterly contested campaign, known as the Thramas Crusade, dragged on for nearly three standard years. In an attempt to sway his brother Lion El'Jonson to Horus' cause, the Night Haunter left a deep-void beacon in the patrol path of one of the Dark Angels' outrider vessels. The beacon was set to transmit coordinates in advance, so that the two Primarchs could meet and parley on the planet of Tsagualsa. Night Haunter wanted to break his former brother either mentally, physically or both to obtain his objectives. The Primarchs were accompanied by two warriors from their personal Honour Guards to the parley. The meeting began amicably enough between the two as they conversed with relative civility. This amity lasted only until the Night Haunter slandered El'Jonson, and in return the Lion struck his former brother. This melee further degenerated into an all-out brawl between the two sides. As the Night Haunter strangled the life out of El'Jonson, one of the Dark Angels Honour Guardsmen ran his sword through the Night Haunter's back, saving his Primarch's life. Eventually both Legions sent reinforcements in response to this incident. Each side dragged away their respective Primarchs from the scene of the combat. Both Primarchs survived this brutal confrontation and went on to continue the contest between their Legions for control of the Aegis Sub-sector.

Battle of Perditus

Three years later, in 008.M31, the Dark Angels receive intelligence from an Astropathic message from the nearby Perditus System, they act accordingly and move to intercept. Upon arrival, they interrupted the month-long conflict between the Iron Hands 98th Clan-Company, led by Casalir Lorramech and a large Death Guard contingent, led by First Captain Calas Typhon. Both sides had been fighting over an ancient sentient device, known as the Tuchulcha Engine. This device was a part of a triumvirate of similar sentient devices (another being the Ouroboros and a third, unnamed engine) which when combined could create temporal rifts that bridges space and time. On its own, the Tuchulcha was capable of precise and extremely efficient Warp jumps. Faced with the prospect of fighting the entirety of the much larger Ist Legion fleet, both sides retreated from the planet's surface at the Lion's request.

Wary of both sides' motives, especially First Captain Typhon's, the Lion prevented the device from falling into the Death Guard's hands for his own nefarious ends. He then proceeded to serve his own ambitions and requisitioned the device for his own use. The Lion then ordered the destruction of Perditus, much to the consternation of both commanders. He then used the Tuchulcha Engine to make a Warp jump, but during their sojourn through the Immaterium, they were beset by Daemons. The Lion re instituted his Legion's Librarirans to fight these nefarious warp-spawned creatures. As this was in direct violation of the Emperor's Decree Absolute at Nikaea, this caused a dispute within the Legion, that eventually came to head, when the enraged Lion slew Chaplain Nemiel. During the height of the battle, the Lion encountered the Greater Daemon of Tzeentch, known as Fateweaver, who attempted to convert the Primarch to the cause of the Ruinous Powers, but failed miserably, as he had nothing to sway the Lion to their cause. The Lion told the foul creature that absolute loyalty to the Emperor was reward enough, and impaled the Lord of Change through its black heart heart, and quipped whether he had 'foreseen' his actions.

Hunting the Night Haunter

Utilizing the Tuchulcha Engine a second time, the Dark Angels were able to execute a meticulously planned ambush on the Night Lords' fleet while it was in transit across the Tsgualsa sub-sector that saw the back of the Night Lords Legion broken and their Primarch mortally wounded after having faced his brother El'Jonson once again in mortal combat. Thanks to the skilled coordination and superb execution by the Lion, the Night Lords fleet was devastated, losing dozens of capital ships and approximately one-quarter of their Legion fleet to the Dark Angels' assault. Unfortunately, the remainder of the Night Lords fleet fled the Dark Angels' wrath, taking their critically wounded Primarch with them before the Lion could finally end his wretched life.

Unfortunately, the remainder of the Night Lords fleet fled the Dark Angels' wrath, while the recently recovered Night Haunter, First Captain Sevatar and the elite Night Lords Atramentar Terminators led a desperate boarding assault action upon the Dark Angels' flagship Invincible Reason. This resulted in the death of all but a dozen of the Atramentar and the capture of Sevatar and the remaining survivors. Konrad Curze fled El'Jonson's wrath, evading the Dark Angels for months, stalking the shadows within the bowels of the mighty capital ship, and continued to wreak terror and chaos amongst the mortal crew. He also killed every hunter-killer team sent by the Lion to hunt him down. After losing several squads of Dark Angels, the Lion himself took up the hunt for Curze, stalking him throughout the Invincible Reason for the next sixteen weeks. However, he could never find his elusive brother Primarch. At some point, the remaining Night Lords captives somehow managed to affect their escape and fled into the void.

Arrival to Ultramar & Imperium Secundus

With the torrential Ruinstorm raging, blocking out the light of the Astronomican and causing warp travel to be all but impossible, the Imperium was effectively cut in half. The Dark Angels come to the realization that they are unable to return to Terra to assist in its defense, even with the advent of the Tuchulcha Engine. Miraculously, they managed to lock onto the beacon of the strange alien device known as the Pharos, on the world of Sotha, which guides the Ist Legion fleet safely through the Warp and to Ultramar's capital world of Macragge. There, they were greeted by Roboute Guilliman and Sanguinius, whose Blood Angels Legion were also guided to the Realms of Ultramar by the Pharos.

The three Primarchs were instrumental in the foundation of the "Imperium Secundus" as a means of continuing the fight against the Traitors and securing the Emperor's great work. Guilliman proclaims Sanguinius as the rightful heir to the Emperor and declares him the new ruler of Imperium Secundus. Lion El'Jonson is made Lord Protector of this new empire of humanity and supreme commander over all its military forces, a title that is similar to that of Warmaster. Unfortunately, the foundation of Imperium Secundus is marred when Curze escapes from the Invincible Reason and rampages across Macragge, intent on spreading as much terror and chaos as he can. Eventually, both Guilliman and the Lion confront the cornered Curze. Their attempt to kill him are unsuccessful as the Night Lords Primarch had laid a cunning trap. He brings down an entire chapel upon the two Primarchs through the use of planted explosives and flees the scene. Guilliman and the Lion are only saved through the direct intervention of the Loyalist Iron Warriors Warsmith Barabas Dantioch, who was communicating with Guilliman at the time of the attack, through a portal that was opened by the Pharos. On instict, the Warsmith reached through the portal and pulled the two Primarchs to safety on Sotha.

Battle of Zepath

Feeling directly responsible for the Night Haunter's rampage on Macragge, the Lion continued to obsessively hunt his wayward former brother for the next two years. In 011.M31, El'Jonson eventually is able to trace a slim lead on Curze's whereabouts to the Zepath System, which had since fallen to the Word Beaers and World Eaters forces during their Shadow Crusade. Farith Redloss, the lieutenant-elect of the Dark Angels' Dreadwing, was charged with leading the hunt for Konrad Curze upon the world of Zepath. The Dark Angels quickly uncovered the horrors perpetrated by the Word Bearers for their dark rituals. Eventually, the Dark Angels took part in multiple engagements against the forces of both Traitor Legions, which culminated in the capital city of Numentis. The Traitor forces were utterly annihilated by the victorious Dark Angels and the world was left in the care of its surviving population.

Exile of the Lion

Continuing his obsessive hunt for the elusive Night Haunter, the Lion and Guilliman continuously clashed over policies, especially in regards to the security of Imperium Secundus, and how best to deal with rebels on Macragge, that the Lion was certain Curze had something to do with. Following a suicide bombing of an Astartes convoy, the Lion used the Ist Legion to establish martial law on Macragge. Certain that Curze was hiding within the rebellious Illyrium region, the Lion advocated the use of a massive orbital saturation bombardment of the region to ensure Curze's death. Facing resistance from both Emperor Sanguinius and Guilliman, the Lion instead, opted to deploy his Legion's Dreadwing in order to flush out Curze and the rebels.

During an attack on the city of Alma Mons, the Lion finally cornered the elusive Night Lords Primarch and the two came to blows. After a brutal confrontation, the Lion eventually emerged victorious, and questions his brother why he had turned away from the Emperor, in which Curze simply replied, 'why not?'. Curze went on to explain that there was a monster in his head that he could not stop. Though he finally had Curze at his mercy, the Lion couldn't bring himself to kill his brother, and instead pummeled him again. He then ripped off Curze's backpack from his battle-plate and then lifted him over his head, and then brutally brought him down across his knee, breaking Curze's spine and paralyzing him. The Lion then brought the grievously wounded Curze before Sanguiniun and Guilliman to stand trial.

A Triumvirate was later held, where Curze defended his actions, but refused to admit his guilt. Since each of the Primarchs had been created to perform a specific function, Curze was merely acting according to his own nature, and therefore had committed no crimes. The Night Lords Primarch then further divided Guilliman and the Lion by accusing the latter of secretly ordering orbital bombardment in direct violation of Guilliman's orders. Enraged, the Lion sought to kill Curze, but was halted by the words of Sanguinius and Guilliman snatched El'Jonson's Lion Sword and broke the blade across his armoured thigh. El'Jonson was furious, but Sanguinius dismissed the Lord Protector and ending the Triumvirate. The Lion was then banished from Imperium Secundus. Taking his leave, the Dark Angels withdrew from Macragge only hours later. Standing in the chamber of the Tuchulcha Engine aboard the Invincible Reason, the Lion brooded over recent events, he questioned his actions over the course of the last few decades -- the banishment of Luther, the death of Nemiel as well as other decisions he had come to regret.

As the Dark Angels made their final preparations to depart back to Caliban, the Lion went back to the Tuchulcha Engine's chamber. He then ordered the device to teleport himself and Holguin, 'Deathbringer', the voted-lieutenant of the Deathwing, back to Macragge. As Sanguinius prepared to execute Curze for his crimes, both the Lion and his lieutenant teleported directly into the chamber and told Sanguinius to stop. As troops entered the room, demanding the Lion to surrender, El'Jonson explained his reasons for the intrusion. He reasoned that Curze had the ability to see precognitive visions of potential futures, and repeated the Night Haunter's claim that his death would one day come at the hands of an assassin sent by the Emperor. If this was true, the Lion reasoned, than it was proof that the Emperor was still alive. Sanguinius knew the Lion's explanation rang true, as he recognized that his own precognitive visions of his inevitable death would also eventually come to pass. When Guilliman demanded to know what would become of Curze, the Lion knelt before his two brothers and promised that he would be Curze's jailer.

Return to Caliban

Jonson, wracked with grief over the inability of his Dark Angels to reach Terra in time to prevent the fall of the Emperor during the Siege of Terra at the end of the Horus Heresy, returned to Caliban to reinforce his Dark Angels and recover from the shock of the Heresy. When the star ships arrived in Calibanite orbit, they were fired upon by a savage salvo of defensive fire from the surface. The fleet pulled back and Jonson tried to find out what was happening. He learned from a merchant ship that Luther had poisoned the minds of the Space Marine garrison on the world and taken control. It could only be seen by Jonson as the taint of Chaos. Jonson's fury was let loose and the planet suffered. He ordered a systematic orbital bombardment of the planet, to rid the world of Chaos for all time.

The planet burned and its defenses were whittled down to nothing. Jonson led his forces personally against the defenders who had taken refuge in the Order's Fortress-Monastery. Jonson found Luther and saw him to be completely corrupted by Chaos, almost nothing of his old friend had survived. Luther, now a Chaos Champion, had been elevated to a strength equal to that of Jonson by the Chaos Gods and the two met in a combat the likes of which would not be seen again. They leveled the monastery around them but the planet was also taking a heavy toll. The bombardment began to crack the surface of the planet, the Dark Angels in orbit unable to see the damage they were doing.

Final Battle

The battle between Luther and Jonson was titanic, but ended with a psychic attack which appeared to mortally wound Jonson. Luther then realized what he had done, as if a veil of deceit had been lifted from in front of his eyes. He fell to the floor, unwilling to fight any more, but it was too late for Jonson. The enraged Ruinous Powers of Chaos realized they had lost again, and sent a massive Warp storm to wrack the surface of the planet. It then broke apart under the strain, destroyed all but for the monastery of the Order which had been protected by potent defensive force-fields. When the Dark Angels descended to what remained of Caliban, little more than an asteroid upon which stood the Order's fortress-monastery, they searched the ruins and found Luther mumbling that Jonson had been taken by the Watchers in the Dark and would return one day and forgive Luther for his sins. The Dark Angels could not find any trace of their Primarch. The rest of the Dark Angels who had been converted by Luther to the worship of Chaos were sucked into the Warp and scattered across the galaxy. From that time forward they were named the Fallen Angels or simply the Fallen.

Fate of the Lion

During his duel with Luther on Caliban, Lion El'Jonson suffered a severe psychic blow which left him mortally wounded. He was then briefly pulled into the raging Warp vortex. Luther survived the contest, but proved mentally unhinged and was taken prisoner by the Dark Angels. He was placed into a stasis cell deep within the bowels of The Rock (the remains of the Order's mightiest fortress-monastery and all that was left of their world Caliban), to contemplate his crimes against the Chapter's Primarch, his continued existence a secret known only to each successive Supreme Grand Master of the Dark Angels, whose cell can only be accessed through the use of the Sword of Secrets, the Chapter artifact which is the mark of the Supreme Grand Master's office. Jonson, who had been briefly spirited away into the Warp during the destruction of Caliban, eventually emerged and was taken into a hidden and unreachable chamber deep within the heart of The Rock by the Watchers in the Dark and placed into stasis to keep him alive. This is a secret known only to the Emperor of Mankind Himself who, despite his living death, still sees all upon the Golden Throne. Even the Supreme Grand Master of the Chapter is not privy to this last and greatest secret of the Dark Angels. Some amongst the Dark Angels whisper that one day the Lion will return to lead one final Crusade intended to achieve the Dark Angels' greatest victory for Mankind and finally bring justice and redemption to the remaining Fallen Angels. None know that this legend has more truth to it than they realize, or that their lost Primarch now sleeps peacefully at the heart of their own fortress-monastery.

Source: http://warhammer40k.wikia.com