EXISTING CANON
The First Founding of the Space Marine Legions, also originally called
the Legiones Astartes, occurred in the late 30th Millennium after the
end of the Age of Strife and the Unification Wars.
In the short story The Lightning Tower, when the Imperial Fists'
Primarch, Rogal Dorn, is in the falls of the Kath Mandau Precinct of
the Imperial Palace and comes upon a series of pillars with plinths that
contain life-sized statues of all the Space Marine Legions' Primarchs:
The second and eleventh plinths had been vacant for a long time. No
one ever spoke of those two absent brothers. Their separate tragedies
had seemed like aberrations. Had they, in fact, been warnings that no
one had heeded?
Games Workshop has shed a little more light on this subject in the
Horus Heresy novel about the Word Bearers called First Heretic. It has
been established that these "missing" Primarchs were erased from
Imperial records at least 43 years prior to the events that would occur
on Istvaan V, as only 18 of the established Legions are referenced
during the events that occurred at Monarchia on the world of Khur,
where the entire Word Bearers Legion and their Primarch Lorgar were
formally rebuked by the Emperor of Mankind for their apparent laxity
in discharging their duties of bringing the atheistic Imperial Truth to
newly Compliant human worlds during the Great Crusade.
There is also a long standing rumour amongst the Astartes Legions
that is revealed that may explain what the ultimate fate of the II and XI
Legions was. Around the time that both these wayward Legions were
expunged from all Imperial records, it was said that the number of the
Astartes in the Ultramarines Legion swelled in size until they eclipsed
all of the other Legions. It is not known if this is merely speculation or
it is established fact that the II and XI Legions of Space Marines were
inducted into other Legions after they were officially expunged from
Imperial records. Though interesting, this still does not explain what
actually happened to the Primarchs of the II and XI Legions.
We are further illuminated on the subject in the novel Prospero Burns
where the Space Wolves Primarch Leman Russ is discussing the
inevitable execution of the Thousand
Sons for Magnus the Red's performance of an act of maleficarum that
drove his sorcery right into the heart of Terra and into the presence of
the Emperor, revealing his own supposed treachery through defiance
of the Imperial edicts banning the use of psychic sorcery at the
Council of Nikaea. When asked if he was concerned over the fact that
the unprecedented was about to take place, namely, Astartes fighting
Astartes, Russ commented that this was not an unprecedented event,
implying that his Wolves had been called on to perform this task once
before. This might be an enigmatic reference to the possible
destruction of the II and XI Legions.
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 maximise 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
Astronomicon, 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 than the gene-
enhanced troops of the Imperial Army he had used during the
Unification Wars. The Emperor had first undertaken 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, 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 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, formalised 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 formalised 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 civilisations.
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 civilisation 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 civilisations 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 amphitheatre
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 recognised 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 favour 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 offence 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' 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 Astartes 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 would cap
his ambitions for humanity. This was the secret Webway Project, in
which the Emperor planned to use a special artefact 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 be
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' homeworld 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 the Primarch Lorgar of the
Word Bearers Legion to discover whether or not the Gods once
worshipped by adherents of the Old Faith of the Word Bearers'
homeworld of Colchis actually existed, Lorgar journeyed with his
Word Bearers Legion's Serrated Sun 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 worshipped 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 worshipped 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
29th 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
despatched 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 Chaos Sorcerers 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 great Battle Barge Vengeful Spirit in orbit of 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 favoured 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 despatched 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 homeworld 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, 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
shields, 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 might,
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
realised truly how far his favoured 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 remaining 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 utilise 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 star ships outfitted with a Warp-Drive by
generating a telepathic signal by which the specialised mutant psykers
known as Navigators are able to navigate through Warp space. 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 travelled 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 Marine Chapters 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 even as the predators draw near...
God-Emperor
In an ironic twist of fate for a man who fought throughout his life to
move Mankind away from superstition and religious faith, the
Emperor of Mankind was already being worshiped as a living deity
before the start of the Horus Heresy. The Primarch Lorgar of the Word
Bearers Legion had penned a book, the Lectitio Divinitatus, which laid
out a compelling case for why the Emperor of Mankind was more than
a man but a God made flesh. It held that no mortal being could have
accomplished all that the Emperor had in uniting the techno-
barbarian tribes and nations of Terra and then reuniting much of the
human-settled galaxy under his rule. Nor could a simple human being
possess his extraordinary command of psychic abilities, his advanced
scientific knowledge which displayed an understanding of the universe
on a primal level or his immense compassion and good will towards all
Mankind.
The argument proved persuasive, and before the Great Crusade had
even ended, a number of different cults dedicated to Emperor-worship
had already sprung up, using the Lectitio Divinitatus as their sacred
book and often adopting the name of the tome for the name of their
faith. The worship of the Emperor as a God was strictly forbidden
under the doctrine of the Imperial Truth and was a serious crime, the
same crime that ultimately led to the humiliation of Lorgar and his
Word Bearers upon the world of Khur and their turn towards the
worship of the Chaos Gods instead to meet their need for faith. While
Lorgar repudiated the Lectitio Divinitatus and replaced it with the
Chaotic Book of Lorgar, millions of other men and women during the
dark days of the Horus Heresy increasingly turned to the worship of
the Emperor as a source of inspiration and strength to survive the
horrors of that time.
The demonstrated power that devout worship of the Emperor gave to
his followers to protect themselves and others from the daemonic
entities of the Warp only furthered the spread of this new religion.
Among the peoples of the Imperium, only the Space Marines of the
Adeptus Astartes, who dimly remember the truth of the man from
whom they are descended, do not worship the Emperor as a God. They
prefer instead to venerate him as the pinnacle of what a human being
is capable of achieving and an example to be followed. This refusal to
worship the Emperor as prescribed by the Imperial Creed is also one
of the reasons that the Astartes often come into conflict with the
Ecclesiarchy and the Inquisition.
At the end of the Horus Heresy, the Emperor's shattered form was
interred within the cybernetic mechanisms of the Golden Throne so
that his mind could still have a physical anchor in the material
universe while his mind extended throughout the Warp, eventually
encompassing nearly the entire territory of the Imperium of Man. As
the centuries passed, the worship of the Emperor only spread further,
and by the 34th Millennium the once small cults of Emperor-
worshippers had been amalgamated into the Imperial Cult, its teeming
trillions of human believers served by the massive interstellar curia
known as the Ecclesiarchy or more formally as the Adeptus
Ministorum after it was accepted by the High Lords of Terra as the
state religion of the Imperium.
The Emperor of Mankind was now truly more than a secular ruler --
he was the God-Emperor, the one, true God of all humanity. His will
was interpreted and executed by the High Lords of Terra of the
Senatorum Imperialis, his laws were enforced by the Adeptus Arbites,
his body and his Imperial Palace were guarded by the Adeptus
Custodes, his Adeptus Astartes defended the Imperium and the
Inquisition that he had directed Malcador the Sigillite to create at the
start of the Horus Heresy had grown into a power unto itself,
protecting the Imperium from the Emperor's enemies from both
without and within.
Despite his protests to the contrary, the effect of trillions of human
beings expressing a deep faith in his divinity has massively empowered
the Emperor's mind and soul within the psychically-reactive

Immaterium, where reality is shaped by the collective beliefs and
unconscious desires of the galaxy's most populous intelligent species.
The Imperial Creed teaches that far from being a defeat, the
internment of the Emperor within the Golden Throne allowed his
divine spirit to ascend so that he could guide and protect all Mankind
more directly, no longer confined by the limitations of the flesh. It is for
this reason that the skull has become so prevalent in Imperial
iconography and architecture, as a symbol of the Emperor's sacrifice of
his own life for the sake of his people.
Whatever he may have been before the Horus Heresy, the Emperor
now truly is a God within the Warp, equal in power to any one of the
four major Chaos Gods, and very likely as powerful as all four of them
combined, as he has become perhaps the strongest spiritual force for
Order in the Milky Way Galaxy. Though his body is a shattered wreck,
more corpse than man, as long as the Golden Throne can maintain
even the barest hint of his life functions, he will be able to maintain his
presence within the Warp, guiding and directing the psychic beacon
known as the Astronomican that is so vital to the Imperium's
commerce, defence and communications even as his mind must claim
the life energies of 1,000 human psykers a day to empower the beacon.
As noted above, it is the Emperor's powerful mind, projected and
amplified in the Immaterium by the arcane mechanisms of the Golden
Throne that guides and maintains the psychic beacon of the
Astronomican empowered by the daily life forces of thousands of
psykers. At the same time, despite his current decayed condition, the
Emperor can still cryptically communicate his wishes to select psykers
through the arcane medium of the Emperor's Tarot as well as through
direct dreams and visions to select non-psychic human beings who
faith in him is strong enough to forge the necessary link.
The Emperor can also provide a number of psychic protections against
the powers of Chaos and its daemons through the connection of faith
and he may be able to influence the physical universe in a number of
other unexpected ways. For instance, it is widely believed in the
Imperium that the Warp Storm known as the Storm of the Emperor's
Wrath that appeared in the Ultima Segmentum during the Age of
Apostasy in the 36th Millennium was directly created by the will of the
Emperor, the incarnate effect of his anger over the usurpation of the
Imperium's government by the tyrant High Lord Goge Vandire. It is
also believed that the Emperor's might within the Warp directly holds
the power of Chaos at bay, and were the Emperor to be absent from the
Immaterium, Chaos would break through the physical boundaries of
the universe, transforming the entire galaxy into a realm of insanity
and horror very much like the Eye of Terror. It is also known to a very
few among the highest ranks of the Inquisition that within his throne
room in the Imperial Palace, the Sanctum Imperialis, the Emperor
possesses the power to directly manipulate reality, including the ability
to relativistically slow or even stop the arrow of time outright.
Yet the God-Emperor is a tormented soul. Unable to interact more
directly with his worshipers, he is horrified by what his Imperium has
become over the last 10,000 standard years in the wake of the terrible
wounds inflicted by the Horus Heresy and the ongoing threats to
Mankind from Chaos, xenos, mutants and the Traitors within. The Age
of the Imperium has not delivered the Golden Age of Mankind that the
Emperor had hoped would result from all his efforts.
Instead, the Imperium has delivered stability, but at the cost of
technological stagnation and intellectual regression, political
repression, constant exploitation of the many by the few, rabid
xenophobia and often savage religious intolerance. All the evils of
humanity that the Emperor had hoped to bring to an end have only
proliferated during the 10,000 Terran years that the Imperium has
ruled the human race in his name. Yet the Emperor endures in his
endless pain, knowing that his death would cripple the Imperium and
deny humanity of both the limited guidance he can still offer and the
protection he provides against Chaos. The Emperor fears that without
him, Mankind will not survive. For this reason, despite all its
imperfections, he allows the Imperium to endure. On rare occasions,
the Emperor works through his chosen servants to make the lot of
humanity a little better. He fans the embers of hope among Mankind
as the End Time draws nigh and the Golden Throne's mechanisms
wind down like a broken watch...
The Star Child
The concept of the Star Child in relation to the Emperor is similar to
that of the Eldar's potential God Ynnead, the Lord of the Dead, who
according to their belief will form in the Infinity Circuits of the Eldar
Craftworlds when the last of their race has died on the physical plane.
The belief in the Star Child is currently considered by the Inquisition
to be a vile heresy spread by Chaos Cultists of Tzeentch, though the
truth of the matter might be otherwise. The concept has two aspects:
the first is that the Emperor's soul exists in the Warp where it will form
a new entity upon the Emperor's death -- the Star Child -- who will
become the Emperor Reborn, and the second is that the Emperor
during his long life on Terra has many living descendants. Over the
almost 50,000 years the Emperor walked hidden among Mankind, he
formed many families and fathered many children. His male
descendants have inherited direct portions of the Emperor's genome
and they are immortal like their father, though unlike him they are
sterile in every case. His female descendants are simply normal human
women, though they may exhibit potent psychic abilities, particularly
forms of precognition.
Unlike the Emperor, who is the greatest psyker ever born in the galaxy,
the Emperor's scions are actually psychic "blanks" or "nulls" possessing
no presence in the Warp. As a result, they are both undetectable by
psychic means and cannot be affected in any way by psychic or
sorcerous powers. A hidden group within the Imperium that call
themselves the Illuminati know of the existence of the Emperor's
scions, and are also aware that the Emperor is failing as his life slowly
gutters out despite the creaking ministrations of the Golden Throne.
They also know of the Fall of the Eldar which gave birth to the Chaos
God Slaanesh and seek to prevent Mankind's own fall to Chaos.
The fall of Man to the Ruinous Powers would create a new, fifth major
Chaos God in the Immaterium, and with its birth, the Warp would
once again intrude into realspace for a number of millennia,
encompassing the entire galaxy in massive Warp Storms, as during the
Age of Strife. The Illuminati, who as a group are those incredibly rare
individuals who managed to actually survive and defeat a daemonic
possession of their bodies through sheer willpower, seek out the
Emperor's descendants and tell them of their true heritage. With the
realisation that this knowledge brings, the biological sons of the
Emperor then become known as the "Sensei". The Illuminati gather
the Sensei together, protect them from the Inquisition, and pave the
way for the rebirth of the Emperor. Their plan is ultimately to sacrifice
the Sensei to the Emperor, possibly at the moment the Emperor's body
finally fails upon the Golden Throne; he will be renewed by the
Sensei's life forces, and will be reborn and regenerated as the Sensei-
Emperor to again lead his race in person, stepping renewed from the
Golden Throne. While the Star Child background was introduced in
the original version of Warhammer 40,000, and dismissed as heretical
in the 3rd Edition in favour of the more vague "Iron Men and Stone
Men" history of an ancient cybernetic conflict between humanity and a
race of artificial intelligences they created during the Dark Age of
Technology, the Thorian faction of the Inquisition believes in a similar
concept concerning the Emperor's eventual rebirth and reincarnation.
The Emperor is the incarnation of the extinct shamans of ancient
Earth who, with their prophetic powers and connection to the Warp in
its natural and uncorrupted form, had guided the various peoples of
ancient Man. According to the Illuminati's beliefs, after Horus rebelled
and mortally wounded the Emperor's physical body during their final
battle aboard his Battle Barge Vengeful Spirit, the Emperor's body and
soul could no longer remain as one; his soul melted into the
Immaterium and only a tiny core of the Emperor's humanity remained
whole. This spark of the Emperor's soul was like a small child in a tiny
reed boat adrift in the chaotic eddies of the Warp.
Since the Emperor's soul survived, there was a possibility that his
whole essence could be reborn into the physical world once more in a
new physical body. In the same way the ancient shamans died together
to reincarnate as the single man who would become the Emperor, the
Emperor's death could herald the birth of a new saviour for humanity.
That time would lie far in the future, when Mankind's collective desire
for a new saviour would strengthen the core of the Emperor's soul in
the Warp and rekindle it to new life. The soul of the Emperor adrift in
the Warp is the being referred to by the Illuminati as the Star Child.
The humans that were left in charge of the Imperium after the Horus
Heresy and the loss of all the Primarchs had no real understanding of
what had happened to the Emperor. Though the Emperor's body
continued to live within the Golden Throne and his potent mind
continued to be a beacon for humanity in the form of the
Astronomican, his soul is a new, benevolent God of the Warp, the God
of Humanity, waiting to be born. The Star Child is also believed by
some Illuminati to be the pure compassion of his soul which the
Emperor thrust from himself into the Warp in order to possess the
determination required to eradicate the soul of his most beloved
Primarch and son, the Warmaster Horus.
The Imperial Inquisition (particularly its daemon-hunting Ordo
Malleus) has always been at war with the Sensei, the "Emperor's Sons".
In 997.M41, Inquisitor Fortez reported that he and his colleagues
Alexio and Credo determined that the Temple of the Star Child on
Levilnor IV consisted of unwitting pawns of Tzeentch, so they
liquidated it. It is this incident which has led the Inquisition to
currently consider any belief in the Star Child to be a heresy
promulgated by the followers of the Lord of Change to lead Imperial
citizens astray.
It has been noted in some Imperial sources that the ammunition for
the Inquisition's Psycannons and Psyk-out Grenades derive their anti-
psychic effect from being impregnated with extremely rare negative
psychic energy; the only known source of this energy being the
byproducts of the Emperor's metabolism removed daily by the Golden
Throne. Other Imperial sources note that the Inquisition has
discovered this energy can also be produced from the rendered-down
bodies of the Sensei.
The Emperor's Purpose
At first glance, the Imperial Truth seems to be a great contradiction:
why would the Emperor of Mankind, an immortal being who had
been alive for millennia and who well knew about the existence of the
Chaos Gods, daemons and all the other psychically-reactive entities of
the Immaterium, promulgate a code of belief that only upheld reason
and science? Particularly when the psychic power within the Warp
generated by the faith of billions of people could be used to protect
them from the influence of Chaos. First, as the priest of the Church of
the Lightning Stone, Uriah Olathaire, had correctly surmised at the
end of the Unification Wars in the late 30th Millennium, the Emperor,
never having been possessed of basic human frailties, simply could not
comprehend the human need for faith, for He had never encountered
a question He could not answer through the application of His
intellect. Bereft of the need for the reassurances only faith could bring
to mortal men and women, the Emperor found it a wasteful and
extremely dangerous distraction, and did not emotionally understand
the comfort it brought to mere human beings, even as he fully
understood religion's role in an intellectual way. This was a deadly
blindness on the Emperor's part that would lead to many of the
mistakes he made that brought on the Horus Heresy and the eventual
stagnation of the Imperium of Man he created.
At the same time, the Emperor saw the continued existence of human
religion and faith as one of the primary reasons Mankind's very
existence was threatened by the hostile forces at work in the galaxy
and the Immaterium. The Emperor's entire purpose in initiating the
Great Crusade and the creation of a galaxy-spanning Imperium of
Man was to seek the destruction of Chaos once and for all, since it
represented the greatest threat to intelligent life in the galaxy. The
Emperor, who had Himself been responsible for the development of
several of the major religions once prevalent on Old Earth, had
dedicated His entire existence to the ultimate benefit of Mankind. Yet
time and time again, He had seen the principles He had propounded
in the form of religion become twisted by human nature, transforming
a faith based on the tenets of love and respect for one another into
bloody creeds of violence, repression, murder and holy war that
actually strengthened the Chaos Gods.
After the onset of the Age of Strife brought an end to humanity's
previous interstellar Golden Age and savagery consumed human
civilisation, the Emperor decided that His long policy of hiding his
true nature from His fellow men as He sought to guide them towards a
better future had failed. He needed to take a far more active role in
shaping His species' future, so He created the persona of the Emperor
and intended to use His own potent psychic abilities, intellect and
extraordinary knowledge to reunite the entire scattered human race,
by force if necessary. The Emperor came to this harsh conclusion
because He feared that unless all of Mankind was united, it would
eventually be destroyed piecemeal by the hideous dangers lurking in
the galaxy, including Chaos and the other alien races. By promulgating
the Imperial Truth on every world inhabited by humanity in the
galaxy, the Emperor ironically hoped to eventually create a psychic
well of belief in reason and science so strong that the Chaos Gods, who
thrived and grew stronger on Mankind's darker psychic emanations,
would be fatally weakened.
Of course, the Ruinous Powers were aware of the Emperor's intentions
and they moved from the beginning to destroy this plan and actually
make it work in their favour. They first corrupted several of the
Primarchs almost at the moment of their birth when they were stolen
from the Emperor's gene-laboratories beneath the Himalazian
(Himalayan) Mountains and scattered through the Warp across the
galaxy. They next corrupted the Primarch Lorgar and used him as their
instrument to corrupt Horus and eventually all of the Primarchs and
Traitor Legions who turned against the Emperor. Their actions during
the Horus Heresy ended His dream of a united Imperium opening a
new Golden Age of reason and progress for Mankind. In the end, the
Emperor miscalculated, deeply underestimating Mankind's basic need
to believe in something larger than itself beyond the stale confines of
science and technology.
Ironically, what ultimately presented the only hope for Mankind
surviving the Age of the Imperium that unfolded after the end of the
Horus Heresy was religious faith in the Emperor Himself. Humanity's
collective faith in the God-Emperor empowers His psychic form within
the Warp, allowing Him to combat the destructive influence of Chaos
and providing His servants with the psychic power to defend
themselves against the threats of daemons, aliens and Heretics alike.
Though the price for the survival of the Imperium has been incredibly
high, a cost far greater than the Emperor hoped humanity would have
to bear, a new version of the Imperial Truth has become predominant
among the million worlds of Mankind. This is a truth whose first
principle is found within the cornerstone of the Imperial Creed -- the
Emperor protects.
Notes
The reach of the Astronomican is said to be around 70,000 light years, which
by default becomes the maximum radius of Astronomican-assisted Warp-
navigable space. According to some sources, the decaying Emperor is a cause
of the Astronomican's slowly weakening intensity. Presumably, this would
progressively affect Warp navigation over the centuries in the outer limits of
the Imperium.
Sources
Horus Heresy: Collected Visions
Realm of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned
Realm of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader (1st Edition)
Warhammer 40,000 Compendium
Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook (6th Edition), pp. 136-139, 141, 144, 158-163,
165-177, 186-187, 195
Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook (5th Edition)
Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook (3rd Edition)
The Inquisition War (Novel) by Ian Watson
Descent of Angels (Novel) by Mitchell Scanlon
Legion (Novel) by Dan Abnett
Mechanicum (Novel) by Graham McNeill
Tales of Heresy (Anthology) edited by Nick Kyme & Lindsey Preistley, "The
Last Church" by Graham McNeill
A Thousand Sons (Novel) by Graham McNeill
Nemesis (Novel) by James Swallow
The First Heretic (Novel) by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
Prospero Burns (Novel) by Dan Abnett
The Outcast Dead (Novel) by Graham McNeill
Deliverance Lost (Novel) by Gav Thorpe
The Inquisition War by Ian Watson
THE EMPERORS MASTER
PLAN
The Emperor, who had himself been responsible for the development
of several of the major religions once prevalent on Old Earth, had
dedicated his entire existence to the ultimate benefit of Mankind. Yet
time and time again, he had seen the principles he had propounded in
the form of religion become twisted by human nature, transforming a
faith based on the tenets of love and respect for one another into
bloody creeds of violence, repression, murder and holy war that
actually strengthened the Chaos Gods.
After the onset of the Age of Strife brought an end to humanity's
previous interstellar Golden Age and savagery consumed human
civilisation, the Emperor decided that his long policy of hiding his true
nature from his fellow men as he sought to guide them towards a
better future had failed. He needed to take a far more active role in
shaping his species' future, so he created the persona of the Emperor
and intended to use his own potent psychic abilities, intellect and
extraordinary scientific knowledge to reunite the scattered human
race, by force if necessary. The Emperor came to this harsh conclusion
because he feared that unless all of Mankind was united, it would
eventually be destroyed piecemeal by the hideous dangers lurking in
the galaxy, including Chaos and the other alien races. By promulgating
the Imperial Truth on every world inhabited by humanity in the
galaxy, the Emperor ironically hoped to eventually create a psychic
well of belief in reason and science so strong that the Chaos Gods, who
thrived and grew stronger on Mankind's darker psychic emanations,
would be fatally weakened.
Of course, the Ruinous Powers were aware of the Emperor's intentions
and they moved from the beginning to destroy this plan and actually
make it work in their favour. They first corrupted several of the
Primarchs almost at the moment of their birth when they were stolen
from the Emperor's gene-laboratories beneath the Himalayan
Mountains and scattered through the Warp across the galaxy. They
next corrupted the Primarch Lorgar and used him as their instrument
to corrupt Horus and eventually all of the Primarchs who turned
against the Emperor and ended his dream of a united Imperium
opening a new Golden Age of reason and progress for Mankind. In the
end, the Emperor miscalculated, deeply underestimating Mankind's
basic need to believe in something larger than itself beyond the stale
confines of science and technology. Ironically, what ultimately
presented the only hope for Mankind surviving the Age of the
Imperium that unfolded after the end of the Horus Heresy was
religious faith in the Emperor himself.
Humanity's religious faith in the God-Emperor empowers his psychic
form within the Warp, allowing him to combat the destructive
influence of Chaos and providing his servants with the psychic power
to defend themselves against the threats of daemons, aliens and
heretics alike. Though the price for the survival of the Imperium has
been incredibly high, a cost far greater than the Emperor hoped
humanity would have to bear, a new version of the Imperial Truth has
become predominant among the million worlds of Mankind, a truth
that lies at the heart of the Imperial Creed: the Emperor protects.
THE PRIMARCHS
The Primarchs were the 20 genetically-engineered sons of the Emperor
of Mankind created in the late 30th Millennium after the end of the
Unification Wars. They were intended to be the immortal and
superhuman leaders who would command the Emperor's Great
Crusade to reunite the scattered human race beneath his leadership.
Their genomes later served as the genetic template from which the
Emperor crafted his 20 Space Marine Legions. They were bred to be
perfect generals, warriors and statesmen; larger, stronger, faster, and
smarter than any normal human could ever hope to be. They
possessed a charisma and martial prowess that made them like the
mythical gods of old, untouchable by disease, old age or supposedly
the petty failings of lesser men. The Primarchs were the Emperor's
answer to reclaiming all the lost worlds of Mankind, and welcoming
them into his new Imperium. The Emperor intended to raise his sons
to be the best military commanders and political leaders Mankind had
ever known, and they would bring the Imperial Truth to the rest of the
human-settled galaxy in their father's name. Yet for all their gifts the
Primarchs were still men, and in the end their very human flaws would
become the primary obstacle to the realisation of the Emperor's great
dream for Mankind.
The Primarch Project
The massive scientific effort to create the Primarchs after the end of the
Unification Wars in the 30th Millennium was known as the Primarch
Project. The means by which the Emperor crafted 20 individual
superhuman genomes using his own arcane genetic code as the base
without resorting to the use of cloning is unknown to present Imperial
science.
There was a 2-stage process involved: first, the Emperor extracted a
subset of his own DNA to act as the foundation for a pure,
undifferentiated Primarch gene-stock. The pure Primarch gene-stock
was then further differentiated into the 20 strands that would serve as
the individual Primarchs' genomes. The data concerning the original
engineering of the individual Primarch strands was later analyzed by a
Raven Guard Apothecary and a Magos Genetor of the Adeptus
Mechanicus during the Horus Heresy. They discovered that certain
samples had gene sequences deliberately deleted from the base
Primarch genome, while other samples showed the addition of clearly
non-human DNA. Intriguingly, the genome of the Primarch listed as
"Subject VI" had added canine-like DNA. Although it is not clear
whether the sample numbers corresponded to the actual Primarchs of
the numbered Space Marine Legions, this could explain the wolf-like
affinity of Leman Russ and the unexpected feral mutation of many
Space Wolves Astartes into the Wulfen.
It is believed by modern Imperial savants that there was more than just
physical manipulation of the genetics involved in the creation of the
Primarchs, and that the Emperor called upon many of the same
techniques of psychic sorcery that had been used in his own creation
millennia before by the shamans of Old Earth. This meant that the
Primarchs were intended to be spiritually as well as physically
engineered and may explain why the Primarchs possessed so much
personal magnetism and charisma beyond what even their enhanced
genetics would predict.
But such arcane techniques also meant that the Primarchs were
unusually vulnerable to the effects of Chaos since their souls would
shine so brightly in the Immaterium and draw the attention of
daemonic entities like moths to a candle flame. This is why the
Emperor carefully inscribed arcane glyphs of protection on each
Primarch's gestation capsule and around the gene-vault deep beneath
the Imperial Palace in the Himalazian Mountains where they were
created. Unfortunately, this protection proved insufficient, for the
Chaos Gods learned of the Emperor's plans and the existence of the
Primarch Project and decided they had no wish to see his attempt to
weaken their power succeed by extending the grip of Order across the
galaxy.
The Scattering of the Primarchs

The Ruinous Powers of Chaos somehow spirited the superhuman the Emperor. Whether these flaws were the result of their exposure to
children away through the Warp, however, leaving them scattered the corrupting power of Chaos as infants or were simply the natural
across the galaxy. A massive localized Warp rift was created within the human flaws that could not be excised even from the progeny of the
gene vaults of the Emperor's own palace, deep under the Himalazian Emperor is unknown. Yet, ultimately, it was the Primarchs' all-too-
(Himalayan) Mountains on Terra where the Primarchs were gestating. human flaws that doomed the Imperium to the nightmare of the
The gestation capsules containing the Emperor's unborn sons were Horus Heresy and 10,000 standard years of stagnation, decay,
scattered through the Warp to colony planets long since lost to repression and endless war.
Mankind. It may have been at this time, when first touched by the
hand of Chaos, that the first seeds of corruption were laid in the
breasts of those Primarchs who would eventually turn Traitor to the
Emperor and his Imperium. Whether the Emperor was able to affect
this outcome is unsure, but every Primarch landed on ancient worlds Order of Rediscovery of the
of men, planets long since lost to the light of the greater universe
beyond the stars. This was a massive setback to the Emperor's plans. Primarchs
He had counted on his superhuman generals to lead his army of
conquest out from Terra. Without them, his plans, so many millennia The following is a definitive list of the order in which the Primarchs
in the making, rested on a knife's edge. He needed an edge, something were rediscovered by the Emperor of Mankind during the Great
to give Mankind an advantage as they struck out against a very hostile Crusade starting in ca. 800.M30 as released by Black Library, the
galaxy once more. division of Games Workshop which is devoted to publishing all
Warhammer 40,000 novels and audio books. This is the list that all
Despite this terrible setback, the Emperor was nothing if not adaptive, future Games Workshop projects is likely to be based on, taking into
and He quickly developed another solution. Using the remaining account the most recent canon material from the latest novels used in
samples of genetic material from each of his lost Primarchs, the the creation of this list.
Emperor crafted the first Astartes gene-seed, stem cell zygotes from
which could be cultured genetically-engineered organs that, when Note of caution from the Black Library editors: Please bear in mind that
implanted within a normal human host, would allow that man to take there is a difference between a Primarch being found, and a Primarch taking
on many of the physical and mental properties possessed by each command of their Legion.
Primarch. The Emperor implanted these organs into his bravest,
strongest, and best human warriors whom he intended to stand by his
side as the vanguard of the Great Crusade. Thus were born the Horus Luna Wolves
Legiones Astartes, the Space Marines, and they would reconquer the Leman Russ Space Wolves
galaxy for humanity at the command of the Master of Mankind. +REDACTED+ +REDACTED+
Ferrus Manus Iron Hands
Although an Astartes warrior was but a pale copy of his Primarch sire, Fulgrim Emperor's Children
the technique of implanting human beings with extra organs allowed Vulkan Salamanders
for a certain degree of "mass-production," and where the Emperor's 20 Rogal Dorn Imperial Fists
superhuman sons had been centuries in the making, thousands of Roboute Guilliman Ultramarines
Astartes could now be engineered and trained in the matter of a single Magnus the Red Thousand Sons
Terran decade. These techniques provided the Emperor with the Sanguinius Blood Angels
required numbers of warriors to successfully launch the Great Crusade Lion El'Jonson Dark Angels
in circa 800.M30. Perturabo Iron Warriors
Mortarion Death Guard
It should be noted that Adeptus Custodes gene-seed, which is Lorgar Word Bearers
apparently derived from the undifferentiated Primarch gene-stock, is Jaghatai Khan White Scars
more complex than base Astartes gene-seed as it contains 12 more Konrad Kurze Night Lords
elements. The source of Custodian gene-seed, being only one step Angron World Eaters
removed from the actual DNA of the Emperor Himself, may explain Corvus Corax Raven Guard
the Custodes' extremely heightened sense of kinship with the +REDACTED+ +REDACTED+
Emperor. However, the Custodian genetic code is still far simpler than Alpharius Omegon Alpha Legion
each of the individual Primarch genomes, even though all were derived
from the same source: the undifferentiated, pure Primarch gene-stock.

Rediscovery of the Primarchs
As the new interstellar human empire expanded during the Great
Crusade, the Emperor used his powerful gifts of psychic foresight and
precognition to track down his wayward sons, scattered across the
galaxy, and reunite them with their respective Space Marine Legions.
Each Primarch was both a father and older brother to each Legion, the
source of that Legion's temperament and humours, a being in which
each Legion saw their ultimate perfection and ways of war given
personification. The return of the Primarchs to their Legions marked
the height of the Great Crusade. First thousands, and then hundreds of
thousands, of human-settled worlds fell to "Imperial Compliance,"
their conquest carried out by the newly reunited Primarchs and their
Space Marine Legions. Like the gods of mythic Terran legend the
Primarchs strode the battlefields of the galaxy, and their power proved
irresistible.
Yet the Primarchs, for all their expressed superiority and seeming
immortality, were still men, and they possessed too many of the same
human flaws that have bedevilled Mankind since the birth of the
species. They proved jealous and arrogant, highly competitive and all
too willing to hold grudges against one another and even their father
Horus Heresy
At the height of the Great Crusade, the Imperial Warmaster Horus fell
to the temptations of Chaos, and convinced eight of his fellow
Primarchs to rebel against the Emperor and follow him in his attempt
to supplant the Master of Mankind. During the Horus Heresy, brother
fought brother as the fallen Primarchs led their Traitor Legions against
their former comrades who remained Loyal; Horus himself fought the
Blood Angels' Primarch Sanguinius and the Emperor during the final
battle of the great interstellar civil war. At the height of the final
confrontation during the Battle of Terra, above the surface of Terra on
Horus' own flagship, the Battle Barge Vengeful Spirit, the Emperor
clashed with the Warmaster. The Emperor was reluctant to use his full
power against his most beloved son, and it was not until Horus had
mortally crippled the Emperor and killed Sanguinius that the
Emperor finally utilised the full extent of his unimaginable psychic
powers to bring the Warmaster down and eradicate even his soul from
the Warp so that the Ruinous Powers could not restore him to some
semblance of horrid life. Most of the remaining Traitor Legions fled
into the Eye of Terror following Horus' defeat, and their Primarchs
would sell their souls to Chaos, becoming Daemon Princes, each
ruling a small Chaotic empire within the corrupted realms of the Eye
of Terror.
The Loyalist Primarchs
Today, all the Primarchs are either damned in servitude to the Gods of
Chaos, lost to current knowledge of their whereabouts or dead. As
mentioned before, Sanguinius died at the hands of his beloved brother
Horus, who in turn later died at the hands of his father, the Emperor.
Ferrus Manus, Primarch of the Iron Hands, died on Istvaan V at the
start of the Horus Heresy during the Drop Site Massacre. He was killed
by his most beloved brother, the Primarch Fulgrim, who wielded the
Silver Sword of the Laer, a daemonically-possessed weapon that was
corrupting his own mind to Chaos and that later possessed him, to slay
Ferrus. Fulgrim's body was later wholly possessed for a time by the
Greater Daemon of Slaanesh who resided within the blade before the
primarch reasserted his dominance and regained control of his body.
Rumours abound that Ferrus Manus may currently still be alive on
Mars as his body was restored to a semblance of life through the
cybernetic assistance of the Adeptus Mechanicus. However the
Mechanicus and the Iron Hands Chapter both fervently deny this
speculation.
Over the next thousand years, the other remaining Loyalist Primarchs
died or disappeared one by one. Lion El'Jonson of the Dark Angels
returned to his homeworld of Caliban to find it in ruins, and the Dark
Angel Space Marines he had left to garrison it were "corrupted" by the
bitter Fallen Angel Luther to rebellion. He led a strike force of his own
Space Marines against the Traitors on the surface, fighting with a
burning hate towards his lost sons. The planet was heavily bombarded,
drastically weakening it so that when the Chaos Gods realised they
had failed to claim the Lion, they unleashed a Warp Storm of massive
power and size. All that was left of Caliban's surface was the Tower of
Angels and The Rock, the Dark Angels' former stronghold, with the
rest being either destroyed or sucked into the Warp. When the Dark
Angel Astartes got to the Tower of Angels, all they found was the
unconscious body of Luther. The Lion was nowhere to be found. But
some say that he is still asleep inside The Rock (the floating remains of
Caliban turned into a Battle Fortress) with the Watchers in the Dark
who are healing his injuries. Some Dark Angel Astartes say that he will
return one day to lead them again. This would explain why Cypher,
the Fallen Angel who has avoided capture time and again, has a special
sword with him that he does not use in combat. This blade may be the
Lion's own sword, amongst other possibilities, and the truth of its
origins would be one of the first questions the Dark Angels would love
to ask the most elusive of their fallen brothers.
Jaghatai Khan of the White Scars disappeared through a Dark Eldar
Warp portal whilst he was pursuing those savage xenos after a raid on
the White Scars' homeworld. Rumours abound that he was captured
whilst lost in the twisting paths of the Dark Eldar's section of the
Webway.
Leman Russ of the Space Wolves is one of the Primarchs whose
disappearance appears to be voluntary. The Space Wolves hold a
legend that says Russ went on a quest to find a means to cure the
Emperor with the fruit from the mystical Tree of Life, but the truth is
likely to be far more complex. Others have said that Russ travelled into
the Eye of Terror, to lead his lost 13th Company against Magnus the
Red and the Thousand Sons Traitor Legion. Still other legends hold
that Russ was dying and that he shall return when the Imperium most
needs him, the period called "the Wolftime" to lead the Wolves of
Fenris once more.
Rogal Dorn of the Imperial Fists died fighting on the bridge of the
Chaos Despoiler-class Battleship Sword of Sacrilege alongside a
company of his sons after he led a contingent of Imperial Fists in an
attack on the massed armada of the 1st Black Crusade in the late 31st
Millennium with a vastly outnumbered force. He had launched the
hopeless assault in the hopes of delaying the Chaotic offensive upon
the Imperium until reinforcements could arrive. He was one of the last
Primarchs to die after the end of the Horus Heresy. His skeletal
remains, weapons and Power Armour were recovered from the wreck,
even as most of the Chaos star ship was destroyed during the conflict.
Today, Dorn's skeletal fists have been separated from the rest of his
remains and are housed in the holiest shrine of the Imperial Fists
Chapter onboard their mobile fortress-monastery the Phalanx,
preserved in stasis for all time and inscribed with the names of every
Imperial Fists Chapter Master to have led the sons of Dorn since his
death. Only a Chapter Master has the right to inscribe his name and
heraldry upon their sacred bones. At the same time, Dorn's skeletal
corpse, without the hands, was also placed by the Imperial Fists within
another chapel on the Phalanx, embedded within a block of clear
amber that has been contoured to match the body's form.
Roboute Guilliman of the Ultramarines met his end slowly after
fighting his former brother Fulgrim of the Emperor's Children Traitor
Legion, following a slash across his throat with a corrupted Chaotic
blade which later poisoned him, the legendary Kinebrach Anathame
that nearly killed his brother Horus. Today, his body lies at the heart of
the Ultramarines' Temple of Correction on Macragge, maintained in a
stasis field to preserve it. He is the only Loyalist Primarch to still exist,
in some physical sense, in the entire Imperium. His sons and billions
of pilgrims every Terran year are able to experience the awe-inspiring
sight of one of the Emperor's own sons, the bleeding wounds he
sustained still visible upon his neck and chest. Legend among the
Ultramarines holds that his wound is slowly healing, in spite of the
impossibility of such a thing while in stasis.
There is little known about how Vulkan of the Salamanders
disappeared. He vanished into thin air around a thousand years after
the Horus Heresy. Some claim that he died on Istvaan V, however he
was later present at the Imperial Palace when Guilliman divided the
Space Marine Legions into Chapters during the Second Founding. The
Salamanders Chapter believes that after one of their number finds all
nine relics that Vulkan left scattered around the galaxy for them to
find, Vulkan will return to lead the Salamanders to victory against the
Traitor Legions of Chaos and gain vengeance for the terrible slaughter
suffered by the Chapter at Istvaan V.
Corax of the Raven Guard's end was tainted by guilt and shame. In
order to rebuild the strength of his sons from the devastation of the
Drop Site Massacre on Istvaan V, Corax sought to accelerate the
growth of his Legion's gene-seed organs by obtaining a sample of the
pure Primarch DNA from Terra that the Emperor had used to create
his sons. The Emperor allowed Corax to carry out this mission and the
needed genetic material was obtained, but infiltrators within the Raven
Guard from the Alpha Legion used a daemonic essence to taint the
Primarch DNA, causing many Raven Guard Aspirants to become
hulking mutants. Filled with despair and shame at this outcome,
Corax personally gave each degenerated Battle-Brother the Emperor's
Peace. Riddled with guilt over what he had done to save his Legion,
Corax locked himself away within his sanctum, the Raven's Tower, for
a year. On the anniversary date of his self-imposed exile, he left his
tower, haggard and gaunt, and took a small shuttlecraft. It was last
monitored as setting a course for the Eye of Terror, the realm of the
Chaos Gods. He left only a single word as his legacy - "Nevermore."
Of all the Primarchs, excepting those missing or still present in unique
conditions like Roboute Guilliman, only the damned Primarchs of
Chaos live today, although their bodies, minds and souls have been
completely consumed by the power of Chaos.
Fate of the Primarchs
Traitors
The Warmaster Horus of the Sons of Horus was killed by the Emperor
of Mankind aboard his own battle barge and flagship, the Vengeful
Spirit, in orbit above Terra at the end of the Battle of Terra and his soul
in the Warp was obliterated by the fully unleashed psychic power of
the Emperor's mind. His corpse was later completely destroyed by the
Chaos Lord Abaddon the Despoiler, who took Horus' place as the
overall leader and Warmaster of the Forces of Chaos and the master of
the Black Legion, the former Sons of Horus.
Magnus the Red of the Thousand Sons rose to become a
Daemon Prince of Tzeentch and the master of the Planet of
the Sorcerers within the Eye of Terror
Angron of the World Eaters ultimately was transformed
into a Daemon Prince of Khorne
Mortarion of the Death Guard became a Daemon Prince of
Nurgle
Fulgrim of the Emperor's Children became a Daemon
Prince of Slaanesh
Lorgar of the Word Bearers served Chaos directly and so
was transformed into a Daemon Prince of Chaos
 Undivided, the master of the Daemon World of Sicarus
within the Eye of Terror, an unholy world dedicated to
spreading the worship of the Ruinous Powers across the
galaxy
Perturabo of the Iron Warriors was also transformed into a
Daemon Prince of Chaos Undivided
Konrad Curze, also known as Night Haunter, was
assassinated by the Callidus Temple Assassin M'Shen. He
allowed her infiltration, apparently wanting to die to be
freed of the stain on his soul imposed by his own life-long
brutality
Alpharius of the Alpha Legion was killed by Roboute
Guilliman, but the source which reported his death may
have been manipulated by one of the Legion's schemes. It is
not known if Alpharius or his identical twin brother
Omegon was the Primarch killed in the report. Due to the
report's unreliability, neither may have been killed, or only
one may have been killed. The only truth is that the Alpha
Legion is still led by at least one of its Primarchs
Loyalists
Ferrus Manus of the Iron Hands was killed at the Drop Site
Massacre on Istvaan V at the start of the Horus Heresy by
Fulgrim of the Emperor's Children who presented his head
to Horus
Sanguinius of the Blood Angels was slain by Horus on the
bridge of his Battle Barge and flagship Vengeful Spirit in
orbit above Terra at the end of the Battle of Terra and the
siege of the Imperial Palace after refusing to join him and
serve the Ruinous Powers of Chaos
Lion El'Jonson of the Dark Angels returned to his
homeworld of Caliban only to discover that his friend and
second-in command Luther and the Dark Angel garrison
left on their homeworld had turned against him and chosen
to serve Chaos. He led a strike force of his own Loyalist
Dark Angels against the Traitors, who were called the
Fallen Angels. He disappeared amongst the inferno as the
world was blasted apart by a Warp Storm caused by the
Fallen Angels' adherence to Chaos and a powerful
bombardment from his ships in orbit. He sleeps deep
within the Rock, the biggest remaining piece of Caliban and
the current mobile fortress-monastery of the Dark Angels.
Only the Emperor and the Watchers in the Dark know of
this great secret--a Primarch still lives
Jaghatai Khan of the White Scars disappeared while
pursuing Dark Eldar pirates into a Webway portal after they
had managed to raid the world of Mundus Planus. There
are rumours that he fights there still against the Dark Eldar,
lost in the twisting paths of the Webway. After nine
thousand years, it seems highly unlikely, but not impossible
that Jaghatai Khan still lives
Leman Russ of the Space Wolves disappeared into the Eye
of Terror. The Space Wolves have a legend that says Russ
went on a quest to find a means to cure the Emperor and
restore him to full consciousness. His final words before his
disappearance indicate that he would return during the
Wolftime (the Last Battle between Order and Chaos). It is
also said that Leman Russ led the 13th Company of the
Space Wolves into the Eye of Terror and ordered them to
hunt down the Traitor Legions which had fled into that vast
Warp rift, particularly the Thousand Sons, the Space
Wolves' most hated adversaries
Rogal Dorn of the Imperial Fists died fighting on the bridge
of the Chaos Despoiler-class Battleship Sword of Sacrilege
alongside a company of his sons after he led a contingent of
Imperial Fists in an attack on the massed armada of the 1st
Black Crusade in the late 31st Millennium with a vastly
outnumbered force. He had launched the hopeless assault
in the hopes of delaying the Chaotic offensive upon the
Imperium until reinforcements could arrive. He died long
after many of his Loyalist brother Primarchs had already
passed on. His skeletal remains, weapons and Power
Armour were recovered from the wreck, even as most of the
Chaos star ship was destroyed during the conflict. Today,
Dorn's skeletal fists have been separated from the rest of his
remains and are housed in the holiest shrine of the
Imperial Fists Chapter onboard their mobile fortress-
monastery the Phalanx, preserved in stasis for all time and
inscribed with the names of every Imperial Fists Chapter
Master to have led the sons of Dorn since his death. Only a
Chapter Master has the right to inscribe his name and
heraldry upon their sacred bones. At the same time, Dorn's
skeletal corpse, without the hands, was also placed by the
Imperial Fists within another chapel on the Phalanx,
embedded within a block of clear amber that has been
contoured to match the body's form
Roboute Guilliman of the Ultramarines was struck down
with an envenomed Chaos blade by his brother Primarch
Fulgrim. His body is perfectly preserved in a stasis field at
the heart of the Temple of Correction on the world of
Macragge. It is rumoured that he is still alive and that his
wound is slowly healing, something considered physically
impossible in a stasis field. The truth of this rumour is
unknown but this is seen by many (including the
Ultramarines Captain Uriel Ventris) as mere wishful
thinking
Vulkan of the Salamanders disappeared. The position of
Chapter Master, filled by the Captain of the 1st Company of
the Salamanders ever since, is considered to be a regency as
the Salamanders believe that Vulkan will one day return
and lead them on a great crusade against Chaos
Corax of the Raven Guard was racked by guilt and shame
for what had happened to his Chapter when he had
approved the use of heretical genetic manipulation in order
to rapidly increase the numbers of the shattered Raven
Guard after the Drop Site Massacre. In order to rebuild
quickly the strength of his Legion from the Dropsite
Massacre on Isstvan V, Corax had ordered the Raven
Guard's Apothecaries to accelerate the growth of the
Legion's gene-seed organs, producing more Space Marines
than the process normally allowed, but these changes also
degenerated or mutated the Legion's gene-seed, causing
many Raven Guard Neophytes to become hulking, mutant
monsters. Riddled with guilt over what he had done, Corax
euthanised all of the mutated Astartes and then locked
himself away within his sanctum, the Raven's Tower.
Exactly one year later he left his tower, haggard and gaunt,
and took a small shuttlecraft equipped with a Warp-Drive
into the Immaterium with the words, "Never more." Corax's
shuttle was last monitored setting a course through the
Warp for the Eye of Terror. Corax's final fate remains
unknown, though the Astartes of the Raven Guard and its
Successor Chapters believe their Primarch still lives
The Lost Primarchs
Almost nothing is known about the two unknown Lost Primarchs.
References to the second and eleventh Primarchs are made in the short
story, "The Lightning Tower," in which Rogal Dorn explains that the
plinths on which their statues stand in the Imperial Palace should be
vacant and says that "no one ever spoke of those two absent brothers.
Their separate tragedies had seemed like aberrations. Had they, in fact,
been warnings that no one had heeded?" The Traitor Primarchs'
statues in this story are covered with a shroud, so the fate of the second
and eleventh is undetermined. They may have been found and a
tragedy befell them as the story implies they were spoken about
posthumously.
During a conversation between Magnus the Red and Lorgar, it is
mentioned that both Horus and Fulgrim upheld an oath taken never to
speak again of the two lost brothers.
As for the fates of those Primarchs' Legions, speculation by the Word
Bearers on "rumours" of a sudden swell in the Ultramarines'
recruitment numbers following the decision to remove the two
Primarchs from the Imperial record may indicate that some of the lost
Legions' Astartes were integrated into the remaining Space Marine
Legions.

There has been intense speculation as to what the Emperor originally
intended to do with the Primarchs if his plans had come to fruition and
the galaxy had truly become an uncontested human domain.
Unknown even to the Primarchs themselves, a vast underground
cavern deep beneath the Imperial Palace had been designated as
residential quarters for the Primarchs. There were 20 spacious
apartments located there overlooking a large lake, with their design
scaled for habitation by residents of the Primarch's massive
proportions. At least one of the Primarchs, Corax, is known to have
briefly stayed in his designated apartment during a visit to Terra at the
beginning of the Horus Heresy.
The idea that all the Primarchs could be corralled into these
residential quarters during an extended time of peace and prosperity
after the Great Crusade had been successfully concluded was probably
wishful thinking on the part of the Emperor. The Primarchs had been
created for war, leadership and conquest -- they were great men
intended to undertake heroic projects and a quiet life would have held
little appeal for any of them. However, the Emperor kept both the
physical infrastructure and knowledge gleaned from the Primarch
Project intact -- including samples of the original generic Primarch
gene-stock. These were kept in a secret, guarded location, and though
dormant, they could have easily become functional again. Although
the Emperor did not reveal why he was keeping these very sensitive
assets, it suggests that he may have had further use for the genetic
stocks and techniques used during the Primarch Project, perhaps
related to peace rather than war. It is not known whether both the
Primarch quarters and the Primarch Project laboratories in the
Imperial Palace still exist. Additionally, the pure Primarch gene-stock
sample was lost during the Horus Heresy after it was given to the
Raven Guard and contaminated by a Chaos taint, and was stolen by the
Alpha Legion.
Sources
Codex: Angels of Death (2nd Edition)
Codex: Space Marines (5th Edition), p. 8
Codex: Ultramarines (2nd Edition)
Horus Heresy: Collected Visions
Imperial Armour - The Horus Heresy: Betrayal, Book One, pp.
Index Astartes I, II, III & IV
Renegades: Eldar and Chaos Armies for Space Marine (2nd Edition)
White Dwarf 166 (UK), "Codex Imperialis"
Angels of Darkness (Novel) by Gav Thorpe
Into the Maelstrom, "Hell in a Bottle" by Simon Jowet
Malleus (Novel) by Dan Abnett, p. 89
Nightbringer (Novel) by Graham McNeill
Space Marine (Novel) by Ian Watson
Ultramarine Omnibus (Omnibus) by Graham McNeill
Horus Rising (Novel) by Dan Abnett
False Gods (Novel) by Graham McNeill
Galaxy in Flames (Novel) by Ben Counter
Flight of the Eisenstein (Novel) by James Swallow
Fulgrim (Novel) by Graham McNeill
Descent of Angels (Novel) by Mitchel Scanlon
Legion (Novel) by Dan Abnett
The Lightning Tower by Dan Abnett, p. 9
Mechanicum (Novel) by Graham McNeill
Tales of Heresy (Anthology) edited by Nick Kyme & Lindsey Priestley, 'Blood
Games' by Dan Abnett, 'Scions of the Storm' by Anthony Reynolds & 'After
Desh'ea' by Matther Farrer
Fallen Angels (Novel) by Mike Lee
A Thousand Sons (Novel) by Graham McNeill
Nemesis (Novel) by James Swallow
The First Heretic (Novel) by Aaron Dembski-Bowden
Prospero Burns (Novel) by Dan Abnett
Age of Darkness (Anthology) edited by Christian Dunn, 'Rules of
Engagement' by Graham McNeill, 'The Last Remembrancer' by John French,
'Little Horus' by Dan Abnett & 'Savage Weapons' by Aaron Dembski-
Bowden
The Outcast Dead (Novel) by Graham McNeill
Deliverance Lost (Novel) by Gav Thorpe
Know No Fear (Novel) by Dan Abnett
THE LOST PRIMARCHS
The Lost Primarchs of the First Founding Space Marine Legions are
the two Primarchs of the II and XI Legions who, for unknown reasons,
were deliberately expunged from all known Imperial records and
archives before the onset of the Horus Heresy in the early 31st
Millennium. Referred to as "the forgotten and the purged" it is known
only that the missing Primarchs and their Legions are listed as having
been "deleted from Imperial records." This formal censure and erasure
from official records is known as an Edict of Obliteration, also called a
Damnatio Memoriae, a High Gothic phrase meaning "condemnation
of memory." This is the official Imperial policy of deliberately
destroying any records, icons or other symbols or monuments
pertaining to an individual or organisation, usually of the Imperial
elite, who has been declared Excommunicate Traitoris by the Emperor
of Mankind (before he was interred within the Golden Throne), the
High Lords of Terra or the Inquisition. In a galaxy-spanning empire
that stresses fealty and loyalty to the Emperor in return for
advancement, acclaim and spiritual salvation for its elites, this is
perhaps one of the most severe punishments. The complete and utter
erasure of all records of the II and XI Legions is considered by Imperial
historians as the most successful Edict of Obliteration ever carried out
in Imperial history.
History
In the short story The Lightning Tower, when the Imperial Fists'
Primarch, Rogal Dorn, is in the falls of the Kath Mandau Precinct of
the Imperial Palace and comes upon a series of pillars with plinths that
contain life-sized statues of all the Space Marine Legions' Primarchs,
he notes:
"The second and eleventh plinths had been vacant for a long time. No one
ever spoke of those two absent brothers. Their separate tragedies had seemed
like aberrations. Had they, in fact, been warnings that no one had heeded?"
- Primarch Rogal Dorn, in the falls of the Kath Mandau Precinct -
Imperial Palace, Terra
Earlier, less ambiguous sources go so far as to say that information on
the lost Legions and Primarchs was deleted following the Horus
Heresy. The only information Games Workshop has ever released on
this subject that directly addresses the mystery can be found in the
Horus Heresy novels False Gods and The Lightning Tower by Dan
Abnett. This has given way to the theory that the Primarch of the II
Legion could possibly be the founder of the Blood Ravens Chapter.
This theory, however, gives undue importance to the Blood Ravens,
because, outside of the Dawn of War PC games, they are in no way a
significant Chapter in the Imperium of Man's history. This theory also
does not describe why the Blood Ravens would still be present in the
late 41st Millennium -- obviously their forebears had committed some
terrible acts of treachery for their records to be completely obliterated,
to such an extent that even other Legions present at the time
presumably also had any of their own records of the lost Legions and
their Primarchs destroyed or modified.
Games Workshop has shed a little more light on this subject in the
Horus Heresy novel about the Word Bearers called First Heretic. It has
been established that these "missing" Primarchs were erased from
Imperial records at least 43 standard years prior to the events of the
Drop Site Massacre that would occur on Istvaan V, as only 18 of the
established Space Marine Legions are referenced during the events
that occurred at the city of Monarchia on the world of Khur, where the
entire Word Bearers Legion and their Primarch Lorgar were formally
rebuked by the Emperor of Mankind for their apparent laxity in
discharging their duties of bringing the atheistic Imperial Truth to
newly Compliant human worlds during the Great Crusade.
"I fear the Emperor will break the Word Bearers -- and break me. We would
be cast alongside the brothers we no longer speak of."
- Lorgar, Primarch of the Word Bearers talking to Magnus the Red,
Primarch of the Thousand Sons
There was also a long-standing rumour amongst the Legiones Astartes
that may explain the ultimate fate of the II and XI Legions. Around the
time that both these wayward Legions were expunged from all
Imperial records, it was said that the number of the Astartes in the
Ultramarines Legion swelled in size until it eclipsed all of the other
Legions. It is not known if this is merely speculation or it is established
fact that the II and XI Legions of Space Marines were inducted into
other Legions after they were officially expunged from Imperial
records. Though interesting, this still does not explain what actually
happened to the Primarchs of the II and XI Legions:
"But the Eleventh Legion -"
"Is expunged from Imperial record for good reason. As is the Second. I'm not
saying I don't feel temptation creeping over me, brother. A single sword
thrust piercing that pod, and we'd unwrite a shameful future."
Dagotal cleared his throat. "And deny the Ultramarines a significant boost in
recruitment numbers." Xaphen regarded him with emotionless eyes, seeming
to weigh the merit of such a thing. "What?" Dagotal asked the others. "You
were thinking it, too. It's no secret."
"Those are just rumours," Torgal grunted. The assault sergeant didn't sound
particularly certain.
"Perhaps, perhaps not. The Thirteenth definitely swelled to eclipse all the
other Legions around the time the Second and Eleventh were 'forgotten' by
Imperial archives."
- A conversation between Word Bearers of the Gal Vorbak of the
Serrated Sun Chapter
We are further illuminated on the subject in the novels Legion and
Prospero Burns. In Legion it is mentioned that a Space Marine Legion
had gotten in trouble before:
"I believe their operation and conduct should be reported to the Council of
Terra, pending censure or dissolution. It wouldn't be the first time a Legion
Astartes has overstepped the mark, after all."
- Chayne talking to Lord General Namatijira
In the novel Prospero Burns the Space Wolves Primarch Leman Russ
discusses the inevitable execution of the Thousand Sons for Magnus
the Red's performance of an act of maleficarum that drove his sorcery
right into the heart of Terra and into the presence of the Emperor. This
had revealed Magnus' own supposed treachery through defiance of the
Imperial edicts banning the use of psychic sorcery at the Council of
Nikaea. When asked if he was concerned over the fact that the
unprecedented was about to take place, namely, Astartes fighting
Astartes, Russ commented that this was not an unprecedented event,
implying that his Space Wolves had been called on to perform this task
once before. This might be an enigmatic reference to the possible
destruction of the II and XI Legions, or it could be reference to the
event known as the Night of the Wolf as mentioned in the novel
Betrayer. This was a little known incident that occurred shortly after
the massacre of the entire planetary population of Ghenna. The
Primarch Leman Russ had been charged by the Emperor to take his
Space Wolves Legion to Ghenna to bring the World Eaters to heel:
(Kasper Hawser) "There's a first time for everything."
(Russ) "Exactly," he grunts.
"The unprecedented. Like Astartes fighting Astartes? Like the Rout being
called to sanction another Legion?"
"That?" he answers. He laughs, but it is a sad sound. "Hjolda, no. That's not
unprecedented."
- Primarch Leman Russ speaking to the Skald Kasper Hawser
In the novel The Outcast Dead, the character Evander Gregoras, the
Master of the Cryptaesthesians, remarks that because of Magnus'
violation of the Emperor's Decree Absolute from the Council of Nikaea
for performing an act of maleficarum, the Emperor would have no
choice but to make an example of His wayward son and the Thousand
Sons Legion:
"It will mean the Wolves will be loosed again."
Evander Gregoras talking to Kai Zulane
This statement further vindicates the role of the Space Wolves Legion
as the Emperor's chosen executioners -- to enact His will when
carrying out censure against a fellow Space Marine Legion.
In the novel Prospero Burns, the character Kasper Hawser also states:
"A Legion is always strongest at its base. The fortress homes of the Allfathers
eighteen Legions Astartes are the most formidable and impregnable sites in
the new Imperium."
- From Kasper Hawser's account of the Burning of Prospero
This statement implies that the missing II and XI Legions were already
gone prior to the Burning of Prospero, and thus, prior to the Horus
Heresy.
We are further illuminated in the novel Deliverance Lost, where the
Primarch Corvus Corax of the Raven Guard recalls his first meeting
with his father, the Emperor:
(Emperor) "You and your brothers were taken from me by denizens of the
Warp before you were ready."
"Brothers?" Corvus was excited by the prospect, pushing aside the questions
that the Emperor's answer had prompted. Though he had made many
friends amongst the prisoners of Lycaeus, always Corvus had been aware of
his otherness, and when they had started to call him Saviour any hope of
normal relationships had ended. That there were others like him filled
Corvus with hope again.
"Yes, you have brothers," said the Emperor, smiling at His son's delight.
"Seventeen of them. You are the Primarchs, my finest creations."
"Seventeen?" Corvus asked, confused. "I remember that I was number
nineteen. How can that be so?"
The Emperor's expression grew bleak, filled with deep sorrow. He looked
away as he replied.
"The other two," he said. "That is a conversation for another day."
This revelation indicates that the missing II and XI Legions were
already lost and possibly expunged from all Imperial records by the
time Corax was reunited with the Emperor on Lycaeus. This
conversation also implies that the Lost Primarchs were more than
likely lost in the early years of the Great Crusade in the late 30th
Millennium, as the Emperor mentions that most of the other
Primarchs had already been discovered by the time he reunited with
Corax.
Legion/Primarch II
In The Lightning Tower by Dan Abnett, while constructing the
defences of the Imperial Palace on Terra in preparation for the coming
attack by the Traitor Legions, Primarch Rogal Dorn of the Imperial
Fists Legion is walking through the Palace and comes across a corridor
showing statues of all 20 Primarchs. The audio book states that "an
accident befell them" that may somehow be a precursor of what
happened to Horus. In the novel Mechanicum a conversation between
Imperial Fists Primarch Rogal Dorn and Malcador the Sigillite in
regards to the war on Mars and the Heresy:
(Malcador)"... Horus has three of his brother legions with him, you have your
fists and thirteen others."
"Would that it were fifteen," mused Dorn

"Do not even think it, my friend,' warned Malcador. They are lost to us
forever."
''I know,' said Dorn.
- A conversation between Primarch Rogal Dorn and Malcador the
Sigillite
In any case, it is unlikely that the current writers at Games Workshop
could do justice to the now much-anticipated mystery of what
happened to the Lost Legions and why they were deleted from the
Imperium's historical records.
Legion/Primarch XI
Following his terrible wounding on the moon of the world of Davin by
the Chaotic weapon known as the Kinebrach Anathamae, the
Primarch Horus, in a Chaos-induced vision, apparently went back in
time to the Emperor's gene-laboratory beneath the Himalazian
(Himalayan) Mountains and saw the incubation capsule of Primarch
XI before the Primarchs were scattered through the Warp (the effect
this has on the Lost Primarch is unknown). Before the Warp Rift
opened within the laboratory, Horus put his hand on Primarch XI's
capsule and felt it:
LEGIONES ASTARTES: THE
FIRST FOUNDING
The First Founding of the Space Marine Legions, also originally called
the Legiones Astartes, occurred in the late 30th Millennium after the
end of the Age of Strife and the Unification Wars that founded the
Imperium of Man on Terra. Eighteen known Space Marine Legions
were created from the gene-seed of the 18 known Primarchs
engineered by the Emperor of Mankind from his own genetic code in
his laboratory in the Imperial Palace on Terra beneath the Himalayan
Mountains. In spite of the fact that the Primarchs were separated from
the Emperor of Mankind through the mysterious actions of the
Ruinous Powers of Chaos and scattered through the Warp across the
galaxy, he managed to keep a small sample of each Primarch's gene-
seed, and use this genetic material to create the first Space Marines by
further genetically enhancing his own elite, Terran-born soldiers. With
each Primarch the Emperor re-discovered during the Great Crusade,
he gave command of the Space Marine Legion created from their
genetic material back to them. Each Primarch then set up their
Legion's headquarters on his homeworld, from which they also
recruited new Space Marines into the Legion. Two other Legions, the
II Legion and the XI Legion and their Primarchs, were created by the
Emperor, but nothing is known of what became of these Legions and
their Primarchs and all data pertaining to them has been deleted from
current Imperial records.
First Founding Space Marine Legions:

"He stopped by the tank with XI stencilled upon it ... feeling the untapped No. Primarch Legion Loyalty
glories that might have lain ahead for what grew within, but knowing that I Lion El'Jonson Dark Angels Loyal
they would never come to pass." II +REDACTED+ +REDACTED+
- Horus, during a vision granted to him by Chaos while recovering in III Fulgrim Emperor's Children Traitor
the Temple of the Serpent Lodge IV Perturabo Iron Warriors Traitor
V Jaghatai Khan White Scars Loyal
VI Leman Russ Space Wolves Loyal
Purpose VII Rogal Dorn Imperial Fists Loyal
VIII Konrad Curze Night Lords Traitor
Games Workshop has long explained the game play purpose for these IX Sanguinius Blood Angels Loyal
"deleted" Space Marine Legions: they are available to help those who X Ferrus Manus Iron Hands Loyal
wish to develop their own, custom Astartes Legions. The idea is that XI +REDACTED+ +REDACTED+
because there were 20 Space Marine Legions created by the Emperor, XII Angron World Eaters Traitor
and half turned to Chaos but half stayed Loyal, these two lost Legions XIII Roboute Guilliman Ultramarines Loyal
would represent equivalent sources for new custom-made Space XIV Mortarion Death Guard Traitor
Marine Chapters and Chaos Space Marines warbands. XV Magnus the Red Thousand Sons Traitor
XVI Horus Luna Wolves Traitor
XVII Lorgar Word Bearers Traitor
Sources XVIII Vulkan Salamanders Loyal
XIX Corvus Corax Raven Guard Loyal
Codex: Angels of Death (2nd Edition), pg. 6 XX Alpharius Omegon Alpha Legion Traitor?
Codex: Chaos (2nd Edition), pg. 8
Codex: Eye of Terror, pg. 4
Codex Imperialis, pg. 16
Codex: Ultramarines (2nd Edition), pg. 7
Horus Heresy Chapbook (Anthology)
Horus Heresy: Collected Visions, pp. 18, 20
Imperial Armour - The Horus Heresy Book One: Betrayal by Alan Bligh, pg.
29
Index Astartes I, "Rites of Initiation: The Creation of a Space Marine," by
Rick Priestley and Gav Thorpe, pg. 2
Index Astartes II, "Wolves of Fenris: The Space Wolves Space Marine
Chapter," by Phil Kelly, pg. 5
Index Astartes III, "Warriors of Ultramar: The Ultramarine Space Marine
Chapter," by Graham McNeill, pg. 18
Realms of Chaos: Slaves to Darkness, pg. 241
False Gods (Novel) by Graham McNeill, pg. 238
Descent of Angels (Novel) by Mitchel Scanlon, pg. 201 Sources
Legion (Novel) by Dan Abnett, pg. 384
The Lightning Tower (Audio Book) by Dan Abnett Codex: Space Marines (5th Edition)
A Thousand Sons (Novel) by Graham McNeill, pg. 125 Codex: Chaos Space Marines (4th Edition)
The First Heretic (Novel) by Aaron Dembski-Bowden, pp. 260-261, 265-266 Imperial Armour - The Horus Heresy - Book One: Betrayal, pp. 26-32
Prospero Burns (Novel) by Dan Abnett, pp. 187-188, 208-209, 343, 379 Warhammer 40,000 Compendium (2nd Edition), "Chapter Approved: The
The Outcast Dead (Novel) by Graham McNeill, pg. 164 Origin of the Legiones Astartes," pp. 6-10
Deliverance Lost (Novel) by Gav Thorpe, pp. 224, 229-230 Warhammer 40,000 Rogue Trader (1st Edition), "The Legiones Astartes," pp.
Fear to Tread (Novel) by James Swallow, pg. 19 153-161
The Sigillite (Audio Book) by Chris Wraight Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook (6th Edition)
Into the Maelstrom (Anthology), "Hell in a Bottle" by Simon Jowett Warhammer 40,000 Rulebook (5th Edition)
Malleus (Novel) by Dan Abnett White Dwarf 166 (US), "Space Marines: Codex Imperialis Extract - Legions
Red Fury (Novel) by James Swallow of Adeptus Astartes," pp. 8-19
ORDER
Order is the term used to refer to the universal and sometimes
benevolent metaphysical force that lies in direct opposition to Chaos.
Order is a force that seeks to impose structure, stability, harmony and
hierarchy upon the universe. Order is served by certain entities that
exist within the Warp, such as the Emperor of Mankind or the former
Eldar Gods who were mostly lost during the Fall of the Eldar, but at
the present time Order is a waning force in the Milky Way Galaxy, as
Chaos becomes ever stronger and more omnipresent, both within the
Immaterium and in realspace. The term also encompasses those
mortals who have thrown in their lot with Order, such as the devoted
servants of the Imperium of Man, the Eldar of the Craftworlds and the
Exodites, the Tau Empire and even the soulless Necrons and their
former C'tan masters, though the Order they would impose on the
galaxy is very different from that of the other factions.
Order is a great force of stability and power, and is neither physically
nor spiritually corrupting like Chaos, though it is not in itself
necessarily "good." While its adherents and servants act in ways that
could sometimes be considered benevolent, some devotees of Order
like the Necrons are more dedicated to the service of structure,
stagnation and imposing their will upon the galaxy than the
selflessness that Mankind and most other intelligent species define as
righteousness. However, more often than not, the service of Order
rewards sacrificing one's own desires and wants in the service of a
larger group in such a way that the implementation of stability and
structure leads to forms of self-sacrifice, heroism and compassion for
others that most cultures characterise as benevolence. Unlike Chaos,
which is the very embodiment of the Immaterium, Order is best
represented and embodied by the physical universe of realspace,
which is defined by concrete natural laws and a stable reality that does
not constantly shift to match collective psychic whims like that of the
Warp.
The most powerful current entity of Order is the Emperor of Mankind,
whose potent mind resides within the Warp, always acting to
circumvent the growing power of the Chaos Gods and their attempts to
have the power of Chaos bleed into and destroy the stability of
realspace. The collective pantheon of Eldar Gods was also once a
powerful representative of Order, but of its number only Isha, Khaine
and Cegorach remain. However, a nascent Eldar God and perhaps a
force for Order equal in power to the Emperor is even now gestating
within the Infinity Circuits of the Craftworlds, known as Ynnead, the
Eldar God of the Dead. The C'tan are also powerful forces for Order,
though they serve what other species might consider the "evil"
incarnation of Order, determined as they are to impose a regime upon
the galaxy in which all sentient organisms feed their never-ending
hunger for living energies.
There is no generally accepted iconic symbol for Order, but the Eldar
have often used a rune in the Eldar Lexicon that stands for "Harmony"
as a representative symbol of Order. As this symbol was also once used
by ancient groups of humans to represent the order of the universe
brought about by balance, it could be considered a universal symbol of
Order just as the Chaos Star is the universal symbol of Chaos.
Ultimately, Order and its servants seek to strengthen the rules and
architecture that bind the physical universe together, so that all of
Creation is defined by a rigid structure of natural laws and a hierarchy
in which everything in existence knows its rightful place, whether it is
living or inorganic. In general, Order is a spiritual force that can
represent the more benevolent, selfless impulses that exist within the
psyches of every sentient being in the galaxy, though it can also lead to
stagnation, repression and corruption, as has happened over the last
10,000 Terran years to the Imperium of Man. Because Mankind is by
far the most populous intelligent species in the galaxy of the 41st
Millennium, the greatest embodiment of Order is the Emperor of
Mankind, who serves as the God of humanity. The Emperor is known
as the "Anathema" to the Chaos Gods and their servants because he
alone represents the greatest current obstacle to the overwhelming
victory of Chaos over Order in this corner of the universe.
With all the obvious dangers associated with Chaos, such as mutation,
daemonic possession, and spiritual damnation, some might wonder
why anyone would willingly choose to turn their backs on Order to
serve the Ruinous Powers. The answer is actually simple. Chaos judges
its servants solely on their abilities and their records of success and
failure in promoting the agenda of the individual Chaos Gods and of
Chaos Undivided as a whole. Chaos also offers those who serve it the
opportunity to perhaps one day wield power and respect far beyond
the dreams of most mortals' avarice.
For so many people, particularly in the oppressive, feudal Imperium of
Man, whose untrammelled Order has ultimately bred stagnation and
corruption, too often family connections and inherited wealth are
rewarded rather than ability. It is impossible on many Imperial worlds
for a talented individual to ever better their lot. As such, Chaos
actually offers a substantial degree of freedom and the only real
meritocracy that many citizens of the Imperium have ever known.
But Chaos is not a benevolent force, and for the vast majority of those
who fall to Chaos' temptations, they will never know either power or
position and will be little more than faceless puppets in the endless
schemes of the Dark Gods. While Chaos may reward success with
power, even the mightiest Chaotic servant becomes a slave of Chaos,
never its master. Most Chaotics will fail, eventually ending up as
possessed daemonhosts, mindless Chaos Spawn, or simply as just
another corpse in the heap, a pawn whose usefulness to the Ruinous
Powers has ended. Those who serve Order may never know the sheer
power and freedom that a devotee of Chaos can wield, but neither will
he fall to damnation. His body and soul will always remain his own,
and in service to something larger than himself he may actually earn
the mantle of the hero.
Forces of Order
The Forces of Order are generally those factions in the galaxy that
stand against Chaos directly or whose pursuit of stability, harmony or
just sheer domination enhances the power of Order within the
universe. The Forces of Order include:
Imperium of Man - All of the Imperium of Man's major
factions, including the Space Marines, the Imperial Guard,
the Inquisition, the Imperial Navy, the Adeptus Mechanicus
and the Adepta Sororitas are powerful servants of Order
Eldar - The uncorrupted Eldar of the Craftworlds and their
Exodite counterparts who have chosen to live a more rural
existence are all servants of Order
Tau - The Tau Empire and its many human and xenos
allies, in pursuit of its ideology of the Greater Good, is a
growing force for pure Order in the galaxy. The Tau Empire
might become a potent ally of the Imperium against Chaos
if the two species could forge some form of cooperation
rather than constantly seeking to defeat the expansionary
plans of the other
Necrons and C'tan - The Necrons and their C'tan masters
are also powerful servants of Order, as they wish to impose
their control over the entire galaxy and forever cut off the
Immaterium from realspace, thus dramatically reducing if
not outright destroying the power of Chaos. However, the
Necrons would do this only so that they could more readily
carry out their "Red Harvests" of all living creatures in the
galaxy, which makes the other servants of Order more likely
to stand against the Necrons and their Star Gods than aid
them in their fight against Chaos
Forces of Disorder
The Forces of Disorder, in the eyes of a servant of Order, are generally
those factions in the galaxy that directly serve Chaos or whose pursuit
of disruption, destruction and sheer instability enhances the overall
power of Chaos in the universe. The Forces of Disorder include:
Forces of Chaos - The Forces of Chaos is a term applied by
Imperial scholars to all the myriad servants of the Ruinous
Powers of Chaos who seek to destroy the Imperium of Man
and the other servants of Order and replace them with the
utterly anarchic predominance of Chaos, a state of affairs
that would likely result in the eventual extinction of the
human race and indeed of all sentient life in the Milky Way
Galaxy. For clarity's sake, most scholars divide up the Forces
of Chaos into three major components, including the
 inhuman daemons that are native to the Warp and only
rarely impinge upon the physical universe, the Lost and the
Damned which includes among their numbers Chaos
Cultists, Traitor Guardsmen, mutants and the other mortal
devotees of Chaos and finally, Chaos' most potent servants,
the Traitor Legions of the Chaos Space Marines and their
counterparts among the Traitor Titan Legions of the Dark
Mechanicus
Orks - The Greenskins of the Ork race are powerful
servants of Disorder, for while they do not serve Chaos
directly, their love of battle and destruction for its own sake
directly serves the goals of Chaos to spread anarchy across
the universe
Dark Eldar - Those Eldar who walk the Path of Damnation
as raiders, pirates, torturers and dark hedonists directly
serve the interests of the Chaos God Slaanesh, and so
indirectly enhance the power of Chaos across the galaxy
Tyranids - The Great Devourer seeks to consume all other
life forms in the Milky Way Galaxy so that it might simply
reproduce itself and create ever more perfect bio forms. By
attacking all structure and existing hierarchies in the galaxy,
the Tyranids are a potent force for the spread of Disorder,
even as they would not hesitate to devour all the servants of
Chaos as well as those of Order. Though the Tyranids are
more a force of nature than servants of any ideology or
philosophical force, their actions have only further
weakened the Forces of Order across the galaxy and so they
are rightly counted among those who perpetuate Disorder
DISORDER
Chaos, also known to its servants as the Primordial Truth or the
Primordial Annihilator, and to the Imperium of Man as the
Archenemy, is the universal and usually malign spiritual force
embodied by the malevolent intelligent entities comprised of psychic
energy that live in the Warp. Chaos is the equal and opposite of Order.
The entities who embody Chaos are mostly daemons, but the term
also encompasses those mortals who have thrown in their lot with
Chaos, ranging from simple peasants and/or manufactorum labourers
who serve as Chaos Cultists, to Traitor Imperial Guardsmen, planetary
militia, Imperial nobles, Planetary Governors, and even the mighty
Chaos Space Marines and Traitor Titan Legions of the Dark
Mechanicus.
Chaos is also itself the turbulent psychic energy that comprises the
Immaterium and gives shape to the nightmare domains of the
individual Chaos Gods that are collectively called the Realm of Chaos
by savants of the Inquisition. Chaos is almost synonymous with the
Warp -- the two concepts are inseparable, for Chaos is the limitless
ocean of spiritual, psychic and emotional energy that defines the
Immaterium and underlies the 4-dimensional material universe of
space-time. It is a great and raw force of change and power, and is both
physically and spiritually corrupting, though it is not in itself
necessarily "evil." While its adherents and servants act in ways that are
often malevolent, some devotees of Chaos are more dedicated to the
service of freedom and change than of the pure selfishness that
Mankind and most other intelligent species define as nefarious.
However, more often than not, the Chaos Gods reward individual
accomplishment in such a way that the ends justify the means, and the
absence of hierarchy and emphasis on individual freedom leads to the
pursuit of excess and personal aggrandisement that can only be
characterised as damnation.
The most evolutionarily-advanced mortals, psykers, can utilise this
energy, thus making them capable of abilities which transcend the
standard physical laws of the material universe as humanity
understands them. However, the malevolent power of Chaos can
gradually corrupt a psyker, tainting his mind and body and turning
him into the slave of the Ruinous Powers. The most powerful entities
of Chaos are the four great Chaos Gods, also known as the Ruinous
Powers, who each embody one aspect of the greater force of Chaos and
can be worshipped individually or as an entire pantheon. The iconic
symbol of Chaos is the eight-pointed star, representing the infinite
possibilities of Chaos.
Ultimately, Chaos and its entities seek nothing less than the complete
destruction of the material universe and its hated Order, so that all of
Creation is once more consumed by the primordial and uncontained
energies of Chaos. In general, Chaos is a malevolent spiritual force that
represents the collective negative aspects of the psyches of every
sentient being in the Milky Way Galaxy, and most likely in the wider
universe. Because Mankind is by far the most populous intelligent
species in the galaxy of the late 41st Millennium, the Chaos Gods
particularly embody Humanity's myriad and particular flaws as a
people.
Chaos corrupts Mankind so easily because it speaks to the character
flaws inherent in every man and woman and seeks to exploit the
weaknesses of their all-too-human natures. It takes an extraordinary
individual of truly iron will and selflessness to resist the serial
temptations of Chaos. It is also these inherent character flaws that
produce the rampant physical and anatomical mutations of individuals
exposed to Chaotic energies, as these mutations are driven by the inner
flaws of the person's psyche being made manifest in their physical
person as Chaos bridges the gap between the Immaterium and
realspace.
With all the obvious dangers associated with Chaos, such as mutation,
daemonic possession, and spiritual damnation, some might wonder
why anyone would willingly choose to serve the Ruinous Powers. The
answer is actually simple. Chaos judges its servants solely on their
abilities and their records of success and failure in promoting the
agenda of the individual Chaos Gods and of Chaos Undivided as a
whole. Chaos also offers those who serve it the opportunity to perhaps
one day wield power and respect far beyond the dreams of most
mortals' avarice. For so many people, but particularly in the
oppressive, feudal Imperium of Man, where too often family
connections and inherited wealth are rewarded rather than ability, and
where it is impossible on many worlds for a talented individual to ever
better their lot, Chaos actually offers a substantial degree of freedom
and the only real meritocracy that they have ever known.
But Chaos is not a benevolent force, and for the vast majority of those
who fall to Chaos' temptations, they will never reach either power or
position and will be little more than faceless puppets in the endless
schemes of the Dark Gods. While Chaos may reward success with
power, even the mightiest Chaotic servant becomes a slave of Chaos,
never its master. Most Chaotics will fail in their quests for power,
eventually ending up as possessed Daemonhosts, mindless Chaos
Spawn, or simply as just another corpse in the heap, a pawn whose
usefulness to the Ruinous Powers has ended.
EQUILIBRIUM
Law and Chaos are the dominant metaphysical forces in the fantasy
stories of Michael Moorcock, inspired by the work of Poul Anderson
(especially Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions). Law and Chaos
are in constant struggle, but they are kept in check by the Cosmic
Balance, an even more powerful force for neutrality. The Eternal
Champion is doomed to be a pawn for the Balance. In order that he
can oppose Chaos and serve the interests of Law throughout the
Multiverse, he is reincarnated in the virtually infinite planes of
existence.
The Elric series contains the most information about Law, Chaos and
the Balance, as well as the beings called the Lords of the Higher
Worlds: the deities who serve and represent Chaos or Law. This may be
explained by three reasons. (1) Moorcock has written more about Elric
than any other character. (2) Elric spends more time interacting with
deities and cosmic forces because he is a powerful sorcerer. (3) The
Lords of the Higher Worlds are more numerous in Elric's world or
interact with it more frequently. In an episode mirrored in The
Vanishing Tower and The King of the Swords, Elric meets another
incarnation of the Eternal Champion, Corum Jhaelen Irsei, who
explains to him:
There are many planes of existence. In some the Lords of Chaos are strong.
In some they are weak. In some, I have heard, they do not exist at all.
Corum Jhaelen Irsei
In the world of Hawkmoon, for example, Chaos is powerful but is
seldom personified. The Lords of the Higher Worlds appear mainly in
the series about Elric and Corum.
Variations exist in the allegiance of intelligent races to Law or Chaos.
In Elric's world, humans are naturally inclined towards Law and must
pervert themselves to gain the assistance of Chaos, while the inhuman
Melnibonans feel a natural sympathy with Chaos. But in Corum's
worlds, the humanoid Vadhagh as the creations of Law tend towards
good. The Mabden (humans), though creations of Chaos, are capable
of both good and evil without the manipulations of the gods.
Chaos
Chaos (disorder, entropy) expresses the principle of possibility
unfettered by rules. In general, magic and sorcery draw on the powers
of Chaos because they break the laws of nature. The effects of Chaos
can be beautiful, but left unchecked, they become too disruptive for
life.
Pure Chaos stuff manifests in Stormbringer and "The Dream of Earl
Aubec". It is swirling, constantly changing, multicoloured matter with
the power to melt and twist anything with which it comes in contact,
including living flesh. Mortals find the sight of pure Chaos disturbing.
Ironically, a realm controlled by Chaos becomes stagnant: the state of
constant change lacks meaning, and eventually all possibilities are
exhausted. Corum encounters a similar state of nature when he visits
the realm of Xiombarg in The Queen of the Swords. In Stormbringer,
when Chaos takes over much of the world, Elric and his companions
observe that the sun is motionless and time seems to stand still.
Just as the Eternal Champion can be a servant of Law, though he is
often more the servant of the balance, so Chaos also has its own
champions. The most formidable is Prince Gaynor the Damned,
formerly a servant of the Law but condemned by the Balance to aid
Chaos after an unspeakable betrayal. He is completely hidden in
shining armour that constantly changes hue from gold to silver to blue
and so on, emblazoned with the symbol of Chaos an image of eight
arrows, radiating in all directions from a central point, to represent the
many possibilities Chaos offers.
Elric's sword Stormbringer is a Chaotic being, but not a god; it is
powerful enough to slay Chaos Lords, and apparently feels no bond of
sympathy with them. It is typical of Chaos to be at war with itself.
Lords of Chaos
The Chaos Lords have the powers of gods but the behaviour, and often
the appearance, of demons. When they appear at their worst, they
deliberately inflict pain and suffering on mortals for amusement; even
at best, they are not concerned with the harmful effects of their
creations. The Revenge of the Rose openly portrays Arioch as insane.
Sorcerers often gain power by entering into diabolical pacts with
Chaos Lords. Mortals who ally with Disorder gradually become
misshapen or corrupt.
Chaos Lords are sometimes restricted from acting directly against
humans. In The Queen of the Swords, for instance, it is said that
Xiombarg (as all the gods) is not permitted to strike directly against
others unless they attack her, and must instead act through
intermediaries. At other times, they may act without prohibition (as,
for example, when Elric calls upon the aid of Arioch; the god may
attack mortals without hesitation). Similar limitations are probably
placed upon the Lords of Law. They are also restricted in their ability
to move between planes. For instance, Arioch must be summoned by
Elric before he can manifest on Earth.
In the Elric series, there are many Chaos Lords, some more powerful
than others, but the relationships between them is not always clear. In
Corum's world, by contrast, there is a well-developed hierarchy of
Chaos. The Fifteen Planes are divided into three groups of five planes,
each governed by one of the three Sword Rulers, who are some of the
"Old Gods": Arioch ("Knight of Swords"), Xiombarg ("Queen of
Swords"), and Mabelode ("the Faceless", "King of Swords"). These gods
also appear in the Elric series, but their character is slightly different.
Arioch, the first Corum encounters, is the weakest of the three. He
appears for much of the time as brutish, crude and direct, in contrast
to his sophisticated, subtle nature as Elric's patron and perhaps less
intelligent, though he also shows a different form to Corum. The
crudity may be a result of interaction between him and the Mabden.
Xiombarg appears as an unspeakably beautiful woman. She is more
powerful and is more active in controlling and manipulating the
planes under her control. However, when her anger is aroused, it leads
to her downfall. Mabelode is most powerful of all. Much of his realm is
constantly changing chaos-stuff. He appears as a literally faceless man
bearing a golden sword.
The Sword Rulers have vassals; it is possible that similar relationships
exist between the deities in Elric's world though this is not made
explicit. Arioch's vassals include Urleh, a minor god of Chaos serving
the sophisticated Mabden (humans) of Lwyn-am-Esh; and the Dog
and the Horned Bear, the savage beast-gods of the barbarians. A
former priest of Urleh tells Corum that these gods are omnipotent and
omniscient only over their spheres of influence; the Dog and the Bear
are knowledgeable chiefly about Mabden affairs. Mabelode has a host
of Dukes of Hell under him, but the only one named is Duke Teer. He
has a vaguely pig-like head and takes great pride in his "Castle Built of
Blood".
Law
Law provides order, structure, and justice to the world. Without it,
nothing material could exist. Law appears friendly to life, but a realm
controlled by Law alone becomes just as stagnant as one overrun by
Chaos. In "To Rescue Tanelorn", the Realm of Law is a barren
wasteland; without wrongs to right and injustice to correct, Law
becomes meaningless. In The Dreamthief's Daughter, Law goes mad
and tries to overrun the world. Ordinarily, however, Law is benevolent
and beautiful in its perfect regularity.
During the time when most of the Eternal Champion cycle is set, Law
is weak and is in fact banished from most mortal planes of existence.
Elric must summon the White Lords to his plane by blowing the Horn
of Fate. In Corum's realm, the destruction of first Arioch, then
Xiombarg permits the return of Law. At the end, all gods are swept
away leaving the races to make their own destinies.
Besides the Eternal Champion, Law has servants who aid Law by
advising the Champion or in other ways. Myshella, the Dark Lady of
Kaneloon, Empress of the Dawn, is a servant of Law in Elric's world.
She serves Law by tempting or guiding heroes to pit their wills against
pure Chaos, by which process the lands of Earth are extended. In The
Quest for Tanelorn, Hawkmoon comes upon a unique "Gathering of
the Wise," messengers of Law brought together from many planes.
Present at the gathering are Sepiriz of Nihrain, who advises Elric in
Stormbringer; Abaris of the Magi; Lamsar the Hermit, who guides
Rackhir to the Grey Lords in "To Rescue Tanelorn"; the Warrior in Jet
and Gold (who also appears in The Dragon in the Sword); Aleryon-a-
Nyvish of the Temple of Law, a priest of Ilah in The Queen of the
Swords; and the Silver Queen from Phoenix in Obsidian.
The Symbol of Law is a single Arrow of Law.
The Sword Trilogy introduces two beings who are beyond even the
balance, Kwll and Rhynn, also known as the "Lost Gods". The only
thing that binds them is their brotherhood. In the King of Swords it is
they who first destroy Mabelode and his Dukes of Hell, then the gods
of Law as well.

Lords of Law
The White Lords of Law are much less developed than the Lords of
Chaos. Most of the stories are set in a cosmic cycle when Chaos is most
powerful. When they appear, the Lords of Law are usually more
benevolent than the Chaos Lords, who are seductive but also sinister,
and prone to losing their temper. However, mortals who meet with the
Lords of Law are wise to remember that what benefits the gods does
not always suit the aims of mortals.
Donblas is the only Lord of Law to appear in Elric's World. In Corum's
world, there are three chief Lords of Law, corresponding to the three
Sword Rulers. The first is Arkyn, counterpart to Arioch. When first
met, his powers are weak and he has difficulty manifesting in Corum's
plane and appears as an indistinct but tall figure. When his powers
return, he appears as a gigantic (as tall as the sky) handsome figure. He
is the creator of the Vadhagh, his favourite race. There is a brief
reference to "Lord Shalod" (the ruler of the second five planes of the
Corum mythos), presumably the counterpart to Xiombarg, but he is
not described. A counterpart to Mabelode is not named. Like the
Chaos Lords, the Lords of Law have their vassals. The only vassal deity
of Law named is Ilah, a servant of Arkyn.
Cultural Influences
Law and Chaos in Michael Moorcock's fiction inspired the alignment
system in Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games. In
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Law, Chaos and Neutral (Balance)
are combined with Good, Evil and Neutral to create a total of nine
alignments.
Moorcock's conception of Chaos also heavily inspired and in some
cases was lifted verbatim by Games Workshop in the creation of its
Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 fictional settings. Notably,
however, they only briefly used Moorcock's conceptions of Order or
the Balance. The descriptions of Chaos, of the eight-pointed star, of the
Chaos Lords, the strange multicoloured hues of energies, mutations
and warping of matter and flesh, and so forth found in the
Warhammer settings are all derived directly from Moorcock's works.

The Cosmic Balance

The Cosmic Balance maintains the balance of power between Law and
Chaos by keeping both sides from overstepping the rules of war. It
rarely manifests directly, but when it does (as in Stormbringer, The
Queen of Swords, and The Quest for Tanelorn) it appears as a great
pair of scales suspended in the sky. In The Queen of the Swords, it also
manifests to pass judgment between two Lords of the Higher Worlds.
The Balance is the power most beneficial to life, which needs a
mixture of Law and Chaos to exist. It is also the agent of Fate. The
Runestaff is a sentient object associated with the Balance, as
Stormbringer is associated with Chaos.

The Grey Lords appear in the story "To Rescue Tanelorn," where it is
said that they are pledged neither to Law nor to Chaos, but will
sometimes help either side if the whim takes them. The Grey Lords
take pride, ironically, in their humility. These purposefully neutral
gods are gods of the Balance and caretakers of Tanelorn, the city of the
Balance.

Eternal Tanelorn exists in all planes of the Multiverse. It is neutral in

the war between Law and Chaos, so it serves as a place of rest and
retreat for tired heroes. As a general rule, they can only find the city
after a long and difficult search. Its inhabitants are happy and
productive because they are free to pursue their own interests instead
of the desires of gods. People in Tanelorn feel intense peace.

The fate of Law, Chaos, and the Balance is revealed in The Quest for
Tanelorn, in which the history of one cycle of the Multiverse is
concluded during the Conjunction of the Million Spheres. After
defeating the sorcerers Agak and Gagak, Hawkmoon and Erekose
reach Tanelorn where they meet the Runestaff and Stormbringer in
humanoid forms. Hawkmoon learns that the Black Sword and the
Black Jewel are two aspects of the same creature. At the beginning of
the Great Cycle, powerful smiths (the Chaos Engineers) created the
Sword, the Jewel, the Runestaff, and finally the Balance to preserve
Order between Law and Chaos, especially to limit the power of
Stormbringer.

Erekose takes up the Black Sword and destroys the Balance; then
Hawkmoon smashes the Jewel with the Runestaff, which breaks. Thus
the last symbols of Authority are destroyed, leaving humanity free to
make its own fate, but Erekose is also killed by the release of power.
Hawkmoon is the last surviving incarnation of the Eternal Champion
and, with all gods dead, his function as Champion is ended.
THE FALL OF THE
ELDAR
The Fall of the Eldar is the name for the terrible catastrophe that befell
the Eldar race early in the 30th Millennium of the Terran calendar and
ended their domination of the Milky Way Galaxy after millions of
standard years, leading to the birth of the Chaos God Slaanesh and the
emergence of the present-day Eldar factions including the Craftworld
Eldar, the Dark Eldar and the rustic Exodites.
Ancient and mysterious, the Eldar are enigmatic humanoid aliens who
never speak openly of their terrible past. Before Mankind had even
begun to walk upright, the Eldar Empire spanned the galaxy. Their
whims decided the fate of worlds and quenched the fiercest suns. Now,
they are all but extinct -- the last fragments of a shattered civilisation
plunged into constant warfare. They have been reduced to a scattered
and nomadic race, as those who had retained enough sanity to flee
before the Fall did so on mighty vessels called Craftworlds. It is on
these worldships that the last remnants of the ancient Eldar
civilisation now drift amongst the stars.
The Eldar will not describe their downfall to any member of a "lesser
race," but much of the story can be gleaned from fragmented sources.
The Eldar succumbed to extremes of experience, their senses so finely
attuned they perceived the heights and depths of agony and ecstasy.
Throughout a long period of decline, the intensity of emotion
generated by the Eldars excess began to coalesce within the
Immaterium. A new Chaos power was being formed, growing stronger
with every indulgence. This entity dozed fitfully, its dreams fed by the
Eldars deeds. These dreams leaked back to the Eldar psyche and the
race plunged into further extremes.
In time, the Eldar people sank to the lowest depths of depravity and
the sleeping power awoke. The Chaos God Slaanesh was born and its
birth cries decimated the race, drawing the spirits of billions of Eldar
into the Warp to be consumed by the newborn god. The worst
destruction occurred at the heart of their galaxy-spanning empire,
where the Warp erupted into realspace. An area almost twenty
thousand light years across was engulfed in the very stuff of Chaos,
known today as the Eye of Terror. The Eye is an area of Warp/realspace
interface -- a vast, open wound upon the very fabric of reality
constantly weeping filth and corruption.
The Eye of Terror is now home to the darkest evils of the galaxy. At the
height of the Horus Heresy in the early 31st Millennium the Chaos
Space Marine Traitor Legions were driven from Terra and naturally
sought shelter within the Realm of Chaos. Some of these corrupted
Space Marine Legions claimed new homeworlds, moulding each to
their own perverse designs. The followers of the different Ruinous
Powers now fight one another in an eternal struggle for supremacy
known as the Great Game for the resources to be found within the Eye
of Terror, but they are at their most deadly on the very rare occasions
when they cease fighting one another and turn their attentions to the
material universe outside the Eye. Few have managed to unite the
disparate factions in this manner, but Abaddon the Despoiler, once the
chosen lieutenant of Horus, is such a being, moulding the Traitor
Legions, mutant armies, and daemon hordes into Black Crusades that
pillage and destroy the Imperial sectors around the Eye.
The Eye of Terror, created by the shame of the Eldar and the price of
their Fall, now provides the means by which the Traitor Legions have
terrorised the Imperium for ten thousand standard years, as time
within that impossible realm is as distorted as it is within the Warp
itself. Ten millennia after the events of the Horus Heresy, the very
same Traitors who fled from the armies of the Imperium still embark
upon their Black Crusades, while the Eldar mourn for what was lost,
and fear that Mankind, the foolish Mon-keigh, will replicate their
arrogance --and its terrible consequences for the galaxy -- a thousand-
fold.
Decay and Degradation
The Eldar were a technologically advanced humanoid race, generally
considered the most powerful intelligent species in the galaxy before
the founding of the Imperium of Man. Their ancient empire spanned
the Milky Way Galaxy, and the only intelligent race that could have
challenged them, the Necrons, lay in hibernation on their Tomb
Worlds across the galaxy in the wake of the end of the War in Heaven.
They had unparalleled mastery of the Immaterium, so much so that
they could even mould the mystical energies of that hyper-
dimensional nether realm into physical materials like Wraithbone.
When Mankind was still long millennia away from building the
Egyptian pyramids, the Eldar already ruled a vast, unchallengeable
interstellar empire. The fall of this empire came not from the actions
of another species, but literally from the conflicts that lay within the
Eldar themselves.
Eldar technology had advanced so far by the height of their empire
that little or no work was required by individual Eldar. As a result, at
some point around the 24th or 25th Millennium, groups of Eldar began
forming groups known as Pleasure Cults dedicated to the pursuit of
experiencing every sensation, pleasurable or painful, that life had to
offer.
As the Eldar's emotions are often more powerful than those
experienced by Mankind, they were capable of the dedicated pursuit
of sensation in a way that even the most sybaritic members of the
human race would find difficult to comprehend. These pursuits
became more extreme, hedonistic and depraved as time went on.
Torture and murder came to be seen as art forms every bit as worthy as
poetry, music and painting. The Eldar were extremely long-lived (even
immortal before the Curse of the Nightbringer), never suffered from
senility or disease, and their superior intellects, deep emotional
resonance and potent psychic powers allowed them to perfect their
skills to a degree far beyond that of even the most talented humans.
The Eldar were able to devise cunning new ways of torturing and
killing their fellows at rates never imagined.
Government within the Eldar empire soon collapsed and the
degeneration of their homeworlds and colonies into utter depravity
continued unimpeded. As the pursuit of ever more extreme
experiences reached its height, death reigned in the streets of Eldar
cities, hunter and hunted each being part of a twisted ritual of
destruction which consumed millions of lives. Some Eldar were able to
see that their now-corrupt society was destroying itself, and fled in
disgust; these refugees would settle in the distant planetary colonies of
their empire and would later be known as the Exodites.
The Fall
Upon dying, the soul of any sentient deceased being traverses the
bounds of the physical realm and goes to rest within the Warp.
Generally, this has no effect on the physical realm. The Eldar, however,
are quite different. The psychically-gifted Eldar have powerful souls
and register a much stronger presence in the Warp than do the vast
majority of humanity, most of whom possess no psychic abilities.
The deaths of hundreds of thousands of Eldar in extremely
pleasurable and/or painful ways -- and the concomitant entry of huge
numbers of their souls into the Warp -- had an unintended, and
catastrophic, side-effect: The restless souls of the dead Eldar caused
the formation of terrible Warp Storms, which made interstellar travel
extremely difficult in the physical realm (This was one of the factors
that precipitated humanity's Age of Strife). A far worse effect, however,
was that these souls began to somehow coalesce into a larger entity, a
living, psychic embodiment of the corruption that had taken their
lives. As more and more Eldar died to fuel the decadence and
depravity of their society, this entity continued to grow, and the Warp
storms continued to grow worse.
In the early 30th Millennium, this great Warp entity finally attained
full sentience. In the last few years before its birth, many Eldar were
driven insane by the uncontrolled psychic energies possessed by this
embryonic entity. Many Eldar who had stayed behind on their
homeworlds to try and turn their race away from the decadence that
had consumed them saw what was happening and knew that
something terrible was about to occur. These Eldar left the empire
behind, fleeing aboard colossal spacecraft called Craftworlds and
taking any plants, animals or other pieces of the Eldar culture and
their homeworlds' environments with them.
At last the entity suddenly came to life, and was said to have "taken its
first breath"; this first 'breath' instantly slew the overwhelming majority
of the Eldar who lived in the empire as their souls were 'inhaled' by the
entity. The death toll was so massive within the Eldar empire that
Warp energy literally spilled over into the physical realm, creating a
permanent interface of realspace and Warpspace later known to the
Imperium of Man as the Eye of Terror. Even the Eldar who had fled
their empire were affected - many Exodites and Craftworlders fell
dead as their souls were also sucked from them. As well, many psykers
of other races were also driven insane or killed by the power that had
been unleashed. This new entity became the fourth major Chaos God,
Slaanesh, the Prince of Pleasure, and the Eldar empire was no more.
The Prince of Chaos
Slaanesh's first act after annihilating so many Eldar was to hunt down
their gods, who also existed in the Warp. As they had with Slaanesh,
the psychically-gifted Eldar had previously created their own
pantheon of gods from their collective desires and beliefs' affect upon
the energies of Warpspace. With the sudden deaths of so many Eldar,
the old gods were drastically weakened. Slaanesh took advantage of
this weakness and destroyed them, assimilating them within itself.
Unlike the other intelligent races of the galaxy who see the youngest
Chaos God as male, the Eldar consider Slaanesh to be female, and
refer to her as "the Great Enemy" or "She Who Thirsts." Ancient Eldar
Gods, such as Kurnous, Isha, Vaul, and Asuryan were hunted down
and consumed by Slaanesh.
factions are reviled by other races for their tendency to focus on their
own survival, often at the expense of those other races' well-being, and
for the treachery and subterfuge they have often employed in this
effort.
The birth of Slaanesh had the side-effect of clearing the galaxy of the
Warp Storms associated with the era immediately prior to its birth.
This allowed interstellar travel and communications to resume; the
human leader known as the Emperor of Mankind was able to take
advantage of this to unify humanity under his leadership on Terra and
Mars, end the Age of Strife, and begin his epic Great Crusade. The
Great Crusade would see the forging of the galaxy-spanning Imperium
of Man, which would attempt to fill the power vacuum in the galaxy
left by the near-annihilation of the Eldar.
Some Eldar did learn from their mistakes. Knowing that their psychic
prowess has profound effects upon the Warp, some far-sighted leaders
among the Craftworld Eldar have noticed the slow growth of a new
deity, Ynnead, the Eldar God of the Dead, within the safe confines of
all the Eldar Craftworlds' Infinity Circuits. The Eldar hope that if and
when Ynnead is finally born, he will confront Slaanesh and defeat it
once and for all. But as the great Farseer Eldrad Ulthran has noted, this
will take thousands of years at the very least, and Ynnead's awakening
will require the passing of every Eldar soul linked to the Eternal
Matrix-eeffectibely destroying the Eldar's past even as it might
guarantee this faded species a new beginning.

However, among the death and destruction, two of the original Eldar
Gods survived. It is said that the Eldar God of War, Kaela Mensha
Khaine, fought Slaanesh, and neither was able to defeat the other
Khaine, being a War God, could not be defeated in battle, but Slaanesh
was far too powerful for Khaine to defeat. Some tellings of the story
state that in the end, the Chaos Blood God, Khorne, interceded on
Khaine's behalf, likely with the aim of absorbing the Eldar god of war
himself. Regardless of the actual events of the battle, the result is clear:
Rather than be absorbed by the more powerful Chaos Gods, Khaine's
form was shattered and exiled to rest in the mortal realm in the form of
great statues called "Avatars", which rest in the hearts of the various
Craftworlds, while pieces of Khaine's soul reside in the Infinity Circuit
of the Craftworlds and can be called upon in times of emergency to
animate the Avatar--though the price is high in blood for this boon.

The other Eldar god to survive the Fall was the trickster God Cegorach,
also called the Laughing God. He is said to have hidden himself
behind Khaine during the great duel with Slaanesh; when Khaine was
finally banished, the Laughing God hid himself within the
labyrinthine confines of the Webway, where he still resides.
Occasionally he reenters the Warp in order to play pranks upon
Slaanesh, most famously to rescue the souls of certain Harlequins
from consumption by it.

After Slaanesh's birth and its war with the Eldar gods, the few
surviving Eldar found their society in ruins. They were split into
factions, and were forced to find ways of protecting themselves from
Slaanesh; with Slaanesh's existence so closely tied to the Eldar race,
any Eldar who subsequently died had his or her soul instantly
consumed by the ever-hungry "Great Enemy". The new Eldar factions
the Craftworld Eldar, the Dark Eldar, the Harlequins, the Eldar
Outcasts, and the Exodites each found their own ways of dealing
with the curse of Slaanesh.

Legacy
The Fall of the Eldar was a major event on the galactic stage. Firstly,
the Eldar Empire was extinguished, leaving behind the hell-region
called the Eye of Terror that has threatened Eldar and the Imperium
alike for ten thousand standard years. The forces of Chaos gained
another powerful patron in the new Chaos God Slaanesh, making the
Ruinous Powers a further threat to the existence of mortals; however,
Sources
Khorne's interference in the Slaanesh-Khaine duel caused a rift Codex Imperialis (2nd Edition)
between Slaanesh and Khorne, and is one of the reasons why the two Codex: Eldar (2nd Edition), pp. 5-7, 14-17
gods and their followers continue to be enemies. The Eldar went, Codex: Craftworld Eldar (3rd Edition), pg. 48
virtually instantaneously, from being the most powerful force in the Codex: Eldar (4th Edition), pp. 4-7
galaxy to being a species comprised of a relatively small groups who Codex: Chaos Daemons (4th Edition), pg. 7
struggle to survive and preserve their culture. The various Eldar Black Crusade: Core Rulebook (RPG), pg. 322
ELDAR OUTCASTS
Eldar Outcasts are those rare members of the Eldar race who have left
their home Craftworld to wander the galaxy when they find the rigid
Eldar lifestyle suffocating or because they have committed some
unforgivable crime against their fellow Eldar, such as walking the Path
of Damnation that leads to consumption by Chaos. Many Eldar
Outcasts often take up daring lives as pirates or raiders and thus are
sometimes confused with their Dark Eldar counterparts.
Sometimes the rigid constraints of the Eldar Paths are intolerable even
for an Eldar to bear; such individuals leave their Craftworlds and
willingly become Outcasts. Many Eldar spend years or decades as
Outcasts before they return to the Eldar Paths, though most do
eventually feel the need to return to Eldar society unless they have
been forcibly exiled from their former home. Outcasts must bear the
terrible burden of their heightened Eldar consciousness and psychic
abilities without the mental protections offered by the Eldar Paths.
Only Eldar of remarkably strong characters can survive for long as
Outcasts. After years of adventure and wandering, or sailing the seas of
space with the Eldar pirate fleets, most Eldar eventually return to the
sanctuary of the Eldar Paths and the warm collective familiarity of the
Craftworlds.
There are many kinds and degrees of Eldar Outcasts. They can serve as
Rangers, the scouts of their Craftworlds, well-trained survivalists and
marksmen able to find the eye sockets and neck joints of even the most
heavily armoured enemy troops with their Long Rifles. The most
skilled of the Eldar Rangers are known as Pathfinders. Others choose
to leave their Craftworlds and live elsewhere, often wandering the
galaxy and visiting the worlds of Mankind or the Exodites. They are
not welcome aboard Craftworlds except briefly, for their minds are
dangerously unbounded and attract predators from the psychic realms
of the Warp. Daemons or other Warp entities can home in on the
undisciplined and extremely powerful mind of an Outcast and lodge in
the psycho-supportive environment of the Craftworld's Wraithbone
core and Infinity Circuit, threatening the very survival of a Craftworld.
Outcasts are also disruptive to the highly structured societies of the
Craftworlds in another sense, for their presence can distract the young
and inexperienced from the Eldar Paths through their romantic tales
of travel, plunder and freedom. The Outcasts rarely divulge the
hardships of their lives or their constant mental struggle to maintain
themselves uncorrupted by the darker impulses of the Eldar nature
without the aid of the Eldar Paths.
Eldar Outcasts are extremely pragmatic realists and are often very
tough, sinister individuals. In their manner and actions they are often
complete opposites of the Craftworld Eldar. Those Outcasts who walk
this path for too long may ultimately be consumed by the Path of
Damnation and so begin to be enslaved by the same lust for suffering
and death that corrupted both their Dark Eldar cousins and the
ancient Eldar pleasure cults that led to the Fall of Eldar civilisation
more than 10,000 Terran years ago.
Eldar Corsairs
Eldar Corsairs are those Eldar Outcasts who have deliberately chosen
to make their living by raiding the commerce of the other star-faring
intelligent races of the Milky Way Galaxy, particularly the shipping of
the Imperium of Man. They are a constant threat to Imperial merchant
shipping, though they lack the ability to face off against a true Imperial
Navy battlefleet of any real size.
Aware that it was the ineffable power of their own whims and desires
that brought about the downfall of their species and led to the birth of
Slaanesh, the survivors of the Fall of the Eldar, the Eldar of the
Craftworlds, have developed a way to control their own inner natures.
Every Eldar chooses for himself a discipline which he then makes it
his task to master. It may take many standard years to successfully
accomplish this, perhaps more than a single human lifetime. Each
discipline is called a Path, and each Path may necessitate further
choices and specialisations. For example, the Path of the Warrior has
many Aspects, and whilst all enable the Eldar to master the skills of
combat, each Warrior Aspect brings with it its own special techniques
and abilities. Other Eldar Paths include that of the Bonesinger, as the
psycho-technicians of the Craftworlds are called, who craft
Wraithbone and other psycho-plastic materials to fashion the material
artefacts of the Eldar civilisation. There are innumerable Paths, some
of which are chosen only rarely, but each offers its followers a
complete way of life during the time which they tread upon it.
Sometimes the rigid constraints of the Eldar Paths are intolerable even
for an Eldar to bear; such individuals leave their Craftworlds and
become known as Outcasts. Many Eldar spend years or decades as
Outcasts before they return to the Eldar Paths. Outcasts must bear the
terrible burden of their heightened Eldar consciousness without the
protection of the Eldar Paths. Set free within the universe they are
dangerously vulnerable. Only Eldar of especially strong character can
survive for long as Outcasts. After years of adventure and wandering,
or sailing the seas of space aboard the pirate fleets, most Eldar
eventually return to the sanctuary of the Eldar Paths. Eldar Pirates are
always followers of the Path of the Outcast - Eldar who have turned
away from the Paths and abandoned their Craftworld.
These eldritch wanderers live quite apart from the orderly, disciplined
Eldar of the Craftworlds, and form ravenous bands of pirates, corsairs
and raiders. As with other outcasts, some of these eventually Eldar
return to the Paths, or may retain some ties to their Craftworld of
origin. However, the willful and unaccountable actions of the Outcasts
stand far apart from the carefully scryed and considered actions of the
Craftworld Eldar, and for the most part the Farseers show great
reluctance for their own peoples to mix with the wayward and
dangerous Outcasts.
Outright alliance between fleets acting on the will of a Craftworlds
Seers and the more volatile, self-serving Eldar Corsairs is relatively
rare, but certainly not unknown. It usually only occurs when a
knowledgeable Corsair leader of great influence is present, able to
both satisfy the measured desires of the Seers at the same time that he
can prove his raw might to the more aggressive Eldar pirates. Such
leaders, like the legendary Prince Yriel of Iyanden, are rare, but the
fleets they command are invariably very powerful and capable of
giving even the most potent forces of the Imperial Navy substantial
opposition.
Some Eldar Corsairs have been known to hire themselves out as
mercenary forces for various foolish and often very wealthy human
factions within the Imperium. A fleet of Corsairs can prove to be a
powerful force on the battlefield for their patrons. But the fickleness of
Eldar Corsairs is legendary and more than one group of these xenos
pirates has been known to suddenly change sides or even turn on their
human patrons after a battle is won to seize a greater share of the
rewards. In these situations, the Corsairs' employers usually find their
own blood coating the Outcasts' potent blades.
Eldar Corsair Organisation
Corsair Prince - An Eldar Corsair band is usually led by a member of
the Eldar nobility with the title of prince (or princess) who has chosen
the Path of the Outcast. To a human these Eldar might seem aloof and
arrogant, but the remnants of the lost Eldar empire's ancient
aristocracy are natural leaders, brilliant tacticians and bold warriors in
battle.
Blade Sworn Retinue - A Blade Sworn Retinue serves as the personal
bodyguard of a Corsair band's prince or princess and is composed of
the finest warriors in the band. They accompany their sworn leader
wherever he or she goes. The retinue is composed of close kinsmen,
bridge officers or Outcasts whose skills have made them infamous
enough for their master to seek them out and swear them to his or her
service.
Void Dreamer - Void Dreamers are the helmsmen and navigators of
Corsair starships. They are powerful Eldar psykers, closely related to
Warlocks, but use their powers of divination and prophecy to guide
their vessels and protect their crews from the Daemons of the Warp
and other dangers.
Voidstorm Squad - During raids a Corsair prince will gather hand-
picked veteran Corsairs together to form a Voidstorm Squad. Equipped
for close-quarters combat, these veterans will be in the thick of the
fighting or the first to storm a breach during a boarding action.

Corsair Squadron - The rank and file of the Corsair band are its ship
crews, led by their Felarch (a rank broadly equivalent to the bosuns of
the Imperial Navy). They are lightly equipped for fast raiding, utilising
Corsair Jet Packs, Venoms and Falcons for rapid insertion and
battlefield mobility. Corsair squads tend to be much more experienced
and battle-hardened troops in comparison to Craftworld Guardians.
Wasp Assault Walker Squadron - Wasp Assault Walkers are light
vehicles that provide Corsair bands with mobile heavy fire support.
Corsair bands adapt them for rapid insertion mission alongside the
Corsairs, fitting them with jump jets, and jet-supported anti-gravitic
systems that enable them to rapidly redeploy where needed as part of
a Corsair raid.
Corsair Jetbike Squadron - Jetbikes form an important part of Corsair
attacks, speeding ahead as scouts or sweeping around enemy flanks to
encircle the foe before plunging into the melee with deadly effect.
Sources
Battlefleet Gothic - Yriel's Raiders
Chapter Approved - The Book of the Astronomican (Background Book), pg.
43
Codex: Dark Eldar (5th Edition), pg. 51
Codex: Eldar (4th Edition), pg. 53
Codex: Space Wolves (5th Edition), pg. 52
Dark Heresy: Creatures Anathema (RPG), pg. 82
Deathwatch: The Outer Reach (RPG), pp. 64-65
Imperial Armour Volume Eleven - The Doom of Mymeara, pp. 147, 160-163,
165-166, 171
Rogue Trader: Core Rulebook (RPG), pp. 357-359; 376
White Dwarf 119 (UK), "Battlefleet Gothic: Concept Art - Eldar Crew
EXODITES
The Exodites are those Eldar who, millennia before the Fall of the
Eldar, predicted the coming of the Great Enemy, She Who Thirsts,
Slaanesh, born of the decadence of the Eldar. Some, the more far-
sighted, noticed the growing decadence of Eldar society. These few
"dissidents" from the dark path the Eldar were beginning to trod
openly criticised the lax morals of their fellow citizens of the Eldar
homeworlds, warning them against the hedonistic effects of the
growing pleasure cults. These people were mostly ignored by the
mainstream of Eldar civilisation, and were often seen as deluded
puritans at best, their cries for restraint completely ignored. Soon the
general collapse of Eldar society into hedonistic excess convinced even
the most resolute amongst these dissidents that their species was
racing towards an inevitable disaster. Fearing this impending doom,
some Eldar decided to leave their homeworlds behind and settle new
colony planets so recently terraformed that they were completely free
of the creeping corruption.
These Eldar, like their counterparts of the Craftworlds, remained
untainted by the all-consuming corruption of what later generations of
the Eldar would call the Path of Damnation, though by the time they
left the Eldar homeworlds behind, they represented a tiny fraction of
the Eldar population.
These dissident Eldar became known as the Exodites; there were
uniquely far-sighted and pragmatic members of their race. They were
reviled by their fellow Eldar as dour fanatics obsessed with misery and
self-denial. Some were actually insane -- their dire premonitions
haunting their dreams, most likely an effect of the psychic abilities that
all Eldar were blessed to possess. Others were genuine survivalists who
chose exile over degradation and destruction. The Exodites
abandoned their homes and began their exodus in an assortment of
different Eldar spacecraft. Many died in open space during the course
of their journeys. Some reached new worlds only to be slain by
marauding Orks or their chosen colony planet's natural predators. But
many more persevered and survived, heading into the galactic east, as
far from the Eldar empire's core worlds as they could reach.
The Exodites made new homes upon worlds on the fringes of the
Milky Way Galaxy beginning as early as the 26th Millennium. These
savage worlds were harsh and life was brutal for a people unused to
any forms of physical work and self-denial. When the final cataclysm
of the Fall erupted in the 30th Millennium and the psychic birth pangs
of Slaanesh consumed the Eldar homeworlds, most of the Exodite
worlds were far from the psychic epicentre and survived. Out on the
fringes of the galaxy the Exodites were safe, as the resultant psychic
implosion wiped out the rest of the Eldar race, leaving the yawning
hole in the fabric of space that became the Warp rift known as the Eye
of Terror. Many Eldar Craftworlds rode out the psychic shock wave
and survived, but the Exodites had already reached places of safety --
or else they perished, their souls consumed by She Who Thirsts along
with the rest of their race.
Culture
Since they first settled their new homes, the Exodite homeworlds have
not changed a great deal. These Eldar live a more primitive and austere
life than the Craftworld Eldar or even their surviving corrupted kin
who lived in the Webway before the Fall, the Dark Eldar. The Exodites
have learned how to cultivate crops and harvest other natural
resources. Exodite societies are more rigorous and physical than those
of the Craftworlds, which still make use of the Eldar's advanced
technology to maintain their labour-free existences. Where the
Craftworld Eldar cling to the past of their race and preserve all they
can of their fallen civilisation, the Exodites have turned their backs
upon ancient tradition in favour of a simpler and harder way of life.
Their psychic defences are tougher and more straightforward but not
as subtle and thus ultimately less powerful than those of their
Craftworld cousins. They have survived, and of all the Eldar they seem
the most likely to continue to do so.
The Craftworld Eldar regard the Exodites as rustic and rather simple
folk -- vigorous and wild compared to their own introverted and often
hermetically sealed societies. The system known as the Eldar Paths do
not determine the way of life for the Exodite Eldar as they do for those
of the Craftworlds. The Exodites are wild and individualistic and are
more independently-minded and adventurous. They survive in this
austere fashion because of their extreme distance from the Eye of
Terror, which still acts as a psychic focus for the destructive influence
of the Eldar's most hated enemy, Slaanesh. Though this alone does not
protect them from the Chaos God's desire to consume all Eldar souls, it
is a significant factor in the Exodites' survival.
Exodite Worlds
The worlds of the Exodites are savage and untamed. Their few meagre
settlements coexist with wild beasts of all kinds. The Exodite
settlements are too few and scattered to disrupt the delicate balance of
nature. Many are only occupied for a few months of the year, because
on many worlds the Exodites are nomadic, moving with the seasons
and the herds. They time their migrations according to when they
must collect and plant their crops, remaining only long enough to
collect what they previously planted in the spring and staying until it is
time to plant the following year's crop and move on.
The wild creatures that inhabit these worlds are many and varied.
Most of the Exodite worlds are home to large herds of Megadons and
other gigantic reptilian beasts, which the Exodites refer to as "dragons."
These creatures are not native to the region, as the early Eldar settlers
intentionally spread them throughout all their worlds so that they are
now quite common. The Exodites follow these herds as they graze,
carefully managing them for their survival. They eat their flesh and
even drink their blood, and utilise their skins to make clothing and
leather. They even make use of the bones and horns, which act as a
part-substitute for the psycho-plastic substances like Wraithbone used
by the Craftworld Eldar.
There are many different kinds of dragons, some unique to specific
worlds, and they are used in different ways according to their size and
nature. The Megadons are massive herbivores, slow-witted and easy to
manage, although deadly if panicked or mistreated. These creatures
provide most of the material resources used by the Exodites. Smaller
ones are used to transport cargo and people across the great plains of
their worlds. A large Megadon can even carry a massive structure on its
back, and they bear the most enormous weights without concern. The
smaller, carnivorous dragons ridden by the Exodite warriors are used
to herd and control the herbivorous Megadons. These warriors are
practically born into the tall dragon saddles -- as they are consummate
riders, wielding their long lances with ease. A stab with one of their
lances will turn or stop a Megadon without causing it any harm, but
the same blow would knock the most hardy Eldar to the ground dead.
Warriors are an integral part of Exodite societies. They play an
important role as protectors of each community as well as acting to
safeguard their valuable beasts from predators.
Technology
The psycho-plastics like Wraithbone that is the cornerstone of Eldar
technology are rare and precious on these remote planets so the
Exodites utilise other substances and rely upon simpler methods of
doing things and physical labour that is all but unknown to the Eldar
of the Craftworlds. Although this lifestyle is in many respects a
primitive one, the Exodites still possess many advanced technologies
and are familiar with all the sophisticated materials used on the
Craftworlds. It is by choice that they live as they do, and their way of
life has proven every bit as successful as that of the other Eldar.
Every Exodite homeworld has its own equivalent to the Craftworlds'
Infinity Circuit which they refer to as the World Spirit. This immense
store of psychic energy is where the minds of the dead Exodites are
preserved forever after their passing from the physical world. Like
their Craftworld kin, the Exodites also wear Spirit Stones, and when
they die they are taken beneath the earth into one of their great tribal
barrows. There, they are laid to rest; their Spirit Stones broken upon
the altars of the World Spirit so their souls can become a part of that
potent psychic collective.
This complex psychic energy grid extends over the entire planet,
stretching between the tribal barrows, stone circles and standing
stones. The Spirit World (the Warp) and the Material World
(realspace) can interact at these special places; the spirits of the dead
flowing together as one network of pure psychic energy, a vortex of
power where the living can talk to the dead if they possess the psychic
ability to interact with the World Spirit. The stone circles and standing
stones scattered all across Exodite worlds are made from psychically
interactive crystal. These towering stones are essentially gigantic Spirit
Stones that anchor the World Spirit's psychic power into the earth.
The links between these stones form a part of the Eldar Webway, but
the paths from the Webway into the different World Spirits are well-
hidden and closely guarded. This enables Eldar to move between the
Craftworlds and the Exodite Maiden Worlds by means of the Webway,
with interlinking paths over the Exodite worlds themselves. Because
their worlds are home to their departed spirits and shelter them from
the predations of Chaos, the Exodites will fight very fiercely to protect
their worlds. To abandon a world is akin to abandoning the souls of
their ancestors to the Warp and She Who Thirsts, for without constant
replenishment the World Spirits diminish slowly and become
vulnerable.
Society
While individual Exodite societies vary, across worlds as well as
between them, common to almost all of those known is a social
structure based around small, independent tribal communities. The
reasons for this are unclear; it is a commonly-held belief amongst the
scholars of the Imperium of Man that tribalism is the natural state of
the Eldar (evidenced by what little information is known to the
Imperium of the Dark Eldar). The life of the Exodites is thought by
these thinkers to bear the closest resemblance to the Eldar societies of
their lost interstellar empire before the Fall began. Exodite society is a
tribal one. Each tribe owes allegiance to a local ruling tribe which in
turn owes fealty to the planet's king and his royal tribe. Despite the
claims of Imperial scholars, this tribal social structure more than likely
developed out of necessity, as small, scattered communities were the
most efficient way to utilise the sparse natural resources of the newly
settled Maiden Worlds. As there are relatively few Eldar on these
worlds there are also few territorial disputes. Open wars between
tribes are rare but skirmishes between rival young Dragon Knights are
common. Although not openly warlike, the Exodites are a robust, self-
confident people and still possess the legendary pride -- some would
call it arrogance -- of the Eldar race.
Dragon Knights frequently try to steal away a rival's beasts or may
attempt to move their herds over the grazing areas of other tribes. Such
matters are seen as part of a Dragon Knight's training, and the dangers
of death or serious injury are an accepted part of a young warrior's life.
These raids and occasional deaths do not embitter the tribes, and it is
notable that no matter how hard-fought their disputes might be, no
Eldar would despoil or steal the crops of a rival tribe even though these
lie unprotected for months at a time.
Outcasts
The Exodite societies are a common destination for Eldar Outcasts
since they are less hostile to outsiders and those who forsake the Eldar
Paths than the Craftworld Eldar. Often these rogue Eldar seek the
patronage of one of the Exodite tribes. In return, they fight alongside
the tribe's warriors and, for a while at least, enjoy the freedom of mind
which is often impossible to find on the Craftworlds. To the Exodites,
the Outcasts are strange romantic figures, the masters of a hidden lore
and way of life which is arcane and archaic. They bring skills which
the Exodites value highly, and so are always made welcome at the
courts of the tribal Eldar.
Sources
Codex: Eldar (2nd Edition), pp. 16-17, 30, 76
Codex: Eldar (4th Edition), pp. 4, 7, 11, 14-15
Timeline JHAELEN VADDAR, THE
STORMBRINGER: PRIMARCH
OF THE 11TH LEGION
- Late 30th millennium The primarchs are created by the Jhaelen (taken from Corum) Vaddar (from Vadhagh) is the primarch of
Emperor, but are scattered throughout the galaxy by the the 11th legion; The Sky Born. His nickname The Stormbringer was
ruinous powers bestowed upon him by Ishtar when he pledged allegiance to the
- Late 30th millennium The First Founding of the Equilibrium in the early 41st millennium. Prior to this, his legion
Legiones Astartes called him The ??? although he also held the moniker The Exile,
which was often how he referred to himself during his 10,000 years
- 800.M30 The start of the Great Crusade to reunite
banishment.
humanity
- ? The first primarch, Horus, is found. He will become the To create this primarch, I will be drawing from the styles and
Emperors most beloved son, but also the one who rises mythologies of:
against him
- ? XX years after Horus is reunited with his father, Jhaelen The Ancient Greeks
Thael is discovered on a desert death world. He tells his The Romans
father of his strange recurring dreams and the name Ishtar, The Mesopotamians
and the Emperor warns him against seeking this being out. The Babylonians
Jhaelen is given command of the 11th legion and almost
immediately heads out on crusade I will attempt to successfully merge these divergent cultures into a
- c.900.M30 The Castigation of Khur balanced, mutually complimentary whole. For role models I will
- c.950.M30 The Emperor comes to Colchis to rebuke especially be looking at:
Lorgar for his beliefs
Greek heroes Ulysses, Hercules etc
Greek pantheon Zeus, Ares etc
Enkidu & Gilgamesh

In addition to this, I want to incorporate Elric as the Eternal

Champion, but especially his intelligence, sorcerous (i.e. psychic)
abilities, melancholic nature and flawed character (emotionally, if not
physically). After 10,000 years of trying to come to terms with his
banishment, only to discover that his father was as good as dead, and
the Imperium was a dark and terrible autocracy, it stands to reason
that Jhaelen Thael would be prone to melancholy!

So, Jhaelen is a gloomy, morose character, who spends time in between

restoring the balance brooding in his throne chambers aboard the
Spear of Heaven. During these periods of inactivity, he seldom accepts
audiences, apart from his First Captain, Iacon Vaddar, Commander of
the Keraklion Terminates, or perhaps the enigmatic Eldar reaver, Zaira
Shivaa when she elects to come aboard.

Could Enkidu be adapted to be the primarch of the Sky Born legion?

After 10,000 years in exile, Jhaelen and the 11th legion return to the
Imperium, millennia since the Emperor of Man banished him after
some terrible mistake/misunderstanding From far beyond the
reaches of the Astronomicon, and with no contact with the Imperium
whatsoever, Jhaelen has no knowledge of the Horus Heresy or, indeed,
of the death of his brother primarchs and the internment of his
father

Although it pains me greatly, I hereby banish you and your seed for ten
thousand years. The Emperor of Man

Alternative names for Jhaelen: Ikuden, Nediku, Udiken, Edikun,

Dikune

Or from Elric: Ecril, Elcir, Ercil, Eclir, Relic, Rilec, Lecir, Icler, Ilrec,
Lirec, Cirle, Crile, Creil

Or from Eternal Champion: Ion Iacon Thael Tael Phael Arcon Chale
Chrale Chraal Rai Ra Chiamat Tiamach Chaeen Naeen Naero Taero
Haero Aerioch

Iacon Thael, Arcon Thael, Thael Arcon, Ion Chiamat, Iacon Ra

Tane, Thane, Chrame, Chrom, Ion, Ion-Ra

Elteran, Eltrane, Letrane, Lenarte, Erantel, Letraen, Laetern

Camphion, Phionmac, Macphion, Phinmiac, Phamnioc, Caphonim,

Imhopac, Nophacim

Camphion Letraen
Or maybe the Emperor struck Jhaelens name from all Imperial
records, and renamed him simply as The (First/Second?)
Exile/Unnamed. His legion was also dubbed The Exiled, although this
did not officially come from the Emperor but from Jhaelens own lips.
Out of love and respect for his father, Jhaelen accepted his name and
has used it ever since, with no one in his legion even knowing his
original name (except perhaps for one venerable contemptor
dreadnought who used to be Jhaelens 1st captain during the Great
Crusade)
However, his legion got a new name when they arrived at a human
world in the far reaches of the Eastern Fringe, beyond the reach even
of the fabled Astronomicon. They were called Sky Born by the
primitive culture that existed there, since they came quite literally from
the skies.
BANISHMENT
The 11th were banished during the Great Crusade of the 31st
millennium. Jhaelen was in fact the penultimate primarch to be
reunited with the Emperor, less than a Terran year before the final
primarch Alpharius was discovered, and he was given the 11th legion as
they were his sons. In fact, the Emperor rushed off to find Alpharius
Omegon, leaving Jhaelen to take his legion back to his homeworld.
Jhaelen went on to lead his legion on crusade, bringing many worlds
to compliance in the name of his father. However, he could not get
away from the dreams of Ishtar, and the persistent thought that
everything he had come to believe in was fundamentally wrong
Then came banishment.
It took the 11th legion fleet almost a thousand years to reach their new
homeworld, since once they were beyond the beacon of the
Astronomicon, they had to travel under conventional plasma drives in
realspace; a journey that would be high in adventure as they visited
new worlds and experienced many xenos cultures, often waging wars
or repelling alien attacks. Despite these encounters, much of the time
was spent drifting slowly through space, with only their primarch
seeming to have any inkling as to where their ultimate destination
might lie. Sometimes, whilst traversing a particularly wide expanse of
the void, it might be ten or twenty years before they would make
planetfall or see any action again. These periods were extremely taxing
even for an astartes, where after a couple of years of relentless training,
sparring and maintaining their weapons, most were put into stasis to
slumber through the remaining decades. Jhaelen would spend much
of this time in his chambers in complete solitude. Sometimes he
wouldnt be seen for several years.
During the initial years of this great voyage there was some dissention
amongst the ranks, with some astartes feeling aggrieved to the point of
heresy with how the emperor had cast them away. This divided the
legion to the point where fully a third of the chapters were pushing
their primarch to turn back and, if not to make peace with the
emperor, then to declare war. Jhaelen was aghast at these notions and
there ensued a brief but bloody mutiny aboard the primarchs
battlebarge, Spear of Heaven. After a month of bitter fighting, the
renegades were defeated and destroyed to a man, their bodies
jettisoned to the void.
THE CHAMPION ETERNAL
Jhaelen might be more like Elric of Melnibone; naturally melancholic
and increasingly at odds with the Emperors views on how humanity
should be the masters of the galaxy, and xenos must be eradicated as a
deadly threat. When the Emperor discovers Jhaelen on his primitive
homeworld, he spends the following months educating his son. Like
all the primarchs, Jhaelen is a fast learner, and quickly picks up the
language, history, politics, socio-economics and the art of war. He
spends some time on his fathers flagship and witnesses the successful
invasion and subsequent compliance of one planet, before heading
back to his homeworld with his own legion and supporting personnel,
including a small mechanicum flotilla.
He is also similar to Magnus the Red, insomuch that he is a great
philosopher more than a psychic. In fact, instead of being psychic he
has something similar to the pariah gene, making him a psychic void
and sucking all psychic powers into himself and rendering them
powerless.
His legion are also great scholar-warriors, some of whom have
inherited his pariah gene.
Mini timeline
1. Jhaelen is the ruler of his planet, after uniting the world
under his banner after defeating chaos-worshipping
warlords and sending them across the seas to the Sundered
Continent. Despite calls from his lieutenants to follow the
enemy across the ocean and eliminate them forever, Jhaelen
says that they have been soundly defeated and would not
bother them again. It would take the enemy centuries, he
said, to regain their strength, and besides, his own peoples
were weary of war and now had the task of rebuilding their
ravaged lands and ruined cities
2. A decade after uniting his people and being named King of
Erech, Jhaelen is reunited with his father when the
Emperors fleet comes to their world
3. Spends several months on his fathers flagship, witnessing
the invasion of a human world; he is utterly aghast and
engages into a deeply philosophical debate with the
Emperor. After several days of debate, the Emperor finally
convinces Jhaelen that humanity must be united, or face
being lost forever to the powers of Chaos. However, it is
clear even at this early stage that Jhaelen has a very
different ideology to the Emperor, in some ways similar to
Lorgar
4. The 11th legion fleet links up with the Emperors fleet and
30,000 elated astartes warriors are presented to their
primarch
5. Jhaelen heads back to his homeworld with his legion and
sets about not only educating them, but also learning their
ways of war. His homeworld is partially rebuilt by the
mechanicum
6. After a year he leads his expedition fleet in the name of the
Emperor to conquer and reunite human worlds
7. Three years in to the voyage, Jhaelen is getting increasingly
uncomfortable with the Emperors desire to conquer all. His
dreams of Ishtar are getting more regular and more vivid
8. He comes across the ruined civilisation of some elder race
(possibly Eldar in the ruins of their civilisation, in the Eye of
Terror need to check whether this is before Lorgar gets to
Cadia). Ishtars siren call has lured him and his fleet off
course and they travel to the edge of the Eye, despite the
Emperor forebading Jhaelen from ever going there
9. On this world he uncovers the Spear of Heaven* (in fact this
is, or more correctly was, the spear of an ancient Avatar of
Khaine). Ishtar then appears to him in a vision, and she
explains that with this spear he can unlock the gates to her
physical and immaterial prison
10. When Jhaelen sleeps that night aboard his flagship, the
Emperor comes to him in his dreams, appearing as a
mighty, furious giant who blasts through Ishtars aura and
causes her to vanish. The Emperor then gives Jhaelen a
right b0ll0cking about going to the Eye of Terror and tells
him to turn back. Jhaelen refuses, stating that he must find
Ishtar. The Emperor is not impressed and gives him one
final warning before disappearing: Follow your current
course and I will lose you again. Although this time it may
be for eternity. Oo-er.
11. When he wakes, Jhaelen is more resolved than ever, and
immediately orders his first captain to set a course directly
into the Eye. Whilst his first captain wants to blurt out My
lord? The Eye are you sure? he successfully manages to
suppress this urge and instead responds with Aye, my
lord. What a loyal lad.
12. The adventure into the Eye is fraught with danger, from
terrible storms to fell creatures that attack their ships.
Eventually he makes it to the planet that Ishtar is
 incarcerated upon. He finds her and frees her from the
physical and immaterial bonds, and she then proceeds to
explain in length about the balance and how Jhaelen must
help restore the balance before the galaxy is consumed.
Both order (the Emperor, Eldar, Tau and Necrons) and
chaos (the ruinous powers which your father didnt tell you
about, plus orks, Dark Eldar and nids) want to destroy one
another absolutely, creating a perilously unbalanced realm
that will end up destroying all. Jhaelen is at first extremely
sceptical, and attempts to ignore the visions she presents
him with, explaining that they are just psychic imagery and
trickery. But she brings him round when she asks: And is
this Eye of Terror trickery and illusion? Are the terrible
losses to your fleet only imagined, or are they real? Or
something like that. Anyway, long and the short of it; hes
convinced.
13. Jhaelen leaves the Eye with instructions from Ishtar to
destroy his father. Jhaelen refuses, saying he could never
kill the Emperor, and is angry and turns the Spear of
Heaven on Ishtar. This has the effect of sending her back
into the warp, but as she evaporates, she cries out that, the
Emperor of Man will not be turned, neither by words nor
by deeds. He must be destroyed for the balance to be
restored
14. Jhaelen tries to persuade his father, but the Emperor is not
amused. He gives Jhaelen a bit of a kick in, ranting about
how he tried to warn him not to follow his dreams.
15. Jhaelen is banished for 10,000 years by his father. Jhaelen
asks what will become of his people on his homeworld. The
Emperor replies quite simply: They will become as dust.
16. Jhaelens homeworld is attacked by the Wolves of Russ and
is laid to waste. One chapter of his legion and all aspirants
are completely wiped out
* The Spear of Heaven appeared to him in his dreams from birth, where
Ishtar is seen holding the spear and presenting it to him, saying that it is his
destiny to wield the perfectly balanced, twin-bladed weapon, in the eternal
conflict against order and chaos. When the Emperor gifts Jhaelen with his
own flagship, he asks his son what name he would give it. Without
hesitation, Jhaelen says, I will call it the Spear of Heaven.
JHAELENS FLAGSHIP: THE
SPEAR OF HEAVEN
The Spear of Heaven is a heavily modified astartes battlebarge, built in
the 30th millennium by Mechanicum shipwrights. Constructed in the
classical industrial style, it has been altered and improved over the
millennia by Sky Born techmarines, adepts and even xenos engineers;
most prominently Eldar reavers. The vessel has improved weaponry,
speed, manoeuvrability and star drives, making it capable not only of
warp travel, but also to traverse the Eldar Webways. It should be noted
at this point that the Eldar reavers who accompany Jhaelen on his
quest for the balance travel in their own ships. Should the Spear enter
the warp, the Eldar will not follow, due to the small matter of She who
Hungers waiting for them
TRINITY WEAPONS
Jhaelen wields in total three primordial weapons of incredible power.
Depending upon whom he is fighting, he will wield the weapon that is
the antithesis of that particular enemy. These weapons are:
The Spear of Heaven (Equilibrium)
Heldenhammer (Order)
The Black Sword (Chaos)
Except from the spear, which was shown to Jhaelen before he released
Ishtar from her eternal prison, the other two weapons were revealed to
the primarch when he announced the All War in the 41st millennium.
He still had to quest for these artefacts, and this took several years to
complete. These quests were fraught with danger, and many of his
faithful astartes companions were destroyed on these epic voyages.
The Black Sword is essentially the same sword of chaos wielded by
Elric of Melnibone, the Woman Slayer. It appears as a great,
grotesquely embellished double-handed sword of black metal, with
ever-changing runes of a most malignant design constantly writhing
and twisting up the length of the blade. Whilst it is a two-handed
sword, the Sky Born primarch can wield it deftly with either hand.
In this universe, the Black Sword is far larger than that carried by Elric,
since it can change its size, shape and weight to perfectly suit its
chosen bearer. Jhaelens blade is fully two metres long and can cleave
through the armour plate of a Land Raider as if it were paper. It also
possesses the soul-sucking abilities of Stormbringer.
The Black Sword serves no particular chaos lord, although it embodies
facets taken from each of the four lords of entropy. It has Khornes
thirst for blood, Slaaneshs hunger for souls, Tzeentchs need for
change (the blade can increase or decrease in size at the will of its
wielder) and Nurgles longing for decay (anything killed by it, whether
they be of flesh or machine, will rapidly rot away). Since it is a chaos
blade, it does not discriminate between who or what it kills; it will just
as happily and with terrible effectiveness destroy and consume any
creature from the empyrean.( In which case, perhaps Heldenhammer
is redundant?)
ISHTAR
Maybe Ishtar is a powerful creature from the warp, but neither good
nor evil, but more neutral and fickle in her dealings with mortals?
Jhaelen may have released Ishtar from some prison inside a warp
storm, and was granted boons by the pseudo-goddess; but this greatly
dismayed the Emperor, who had warned Jhaelen against such an
undertaking, and as a consequence banished him and his legion to
some distant corner of the galaxy
After going into exile, Jhaelen is visited by Ishtar in his dreams,
although her approaches are always rebuffed by the loyal primarch. To
this day, 10,000 years after his banishment, Jhaelen no longer dreams
of Ishtar, and his heart has remained fiercely loyal to his father.
DOOMWORLD: ISHTAR IN THE
EYE OF TERROR
When Jhaelen releases Ishtar, she explains at length what she had
already hinted at in his dreams. Jhaelen has many questions for the
goddess of the balance, all relating to these dreams, and Ishtar happily
answers all his questions, although some answers may be a little
cryptic.
In due course, she explains the Emperors ultimate plan; namely to
unite the entire galaxy under his banner, destroying or expelling all
xenos and permanently closing the warp, and thus destroying the
chaos gods forever. This is why he will head back to Terra after
Ullanor, to create the Imperial Webway and therefore remove the need
for warp travel. This will tip the balance completely in favour of Order,
which will result in the destruction of this galaxy.
She will go on to say that the Eldar another race who served Order -
tried something similar many millennia in the past, and the resultant
failure was all around him to see in the Eye of Terror, where the
remains of the Eldar Empire lay in twisted ruins. This was the Fall of
the Eldar.
At some point she will cryptically mention in passing other realms in
the multiverse, mentioning other galaxies that have been utterly
consumed by the forces of Order or Chaos. As the last surviving
guardian of the balance in this galaxy (the Eldar imprisoned her aeons
ago), she had to do everything in her not-inconsiderable power to
maintain equilibrium.
Sky Born Empire
Jhaelen has carved out a mighty empire in the far reaches of the
Eastern Fringe; an empire that encompasses fifty systems and more
than a hundred planets. This realm is spread across many light years of
space.
The human population of the empire is 80 billion. Unusually, there is a
small xenos population, but they are not much better than slaves (?)
and serve at the very bottom of society. These aliens include tau, kroot
and demiurg, amongst other more esoteric races, including jokaero.
The Sky Born legion operates at full strength (23,000 warriors spread
across the surviving 23 chapters). They safeguard the realm from all
would-be invaders, which includes orks, dark eldar, necrons and even
tyranids.
Intro 3rd edit
I suppose I see Lord Jhaelen as similar to Elric in many ways, including
appearance (albeit with the height and power of an astartes primarch).
Idea: Perhaps the goddess* Ishtar dwells in stasis at the heart of the
mountain? Jhaelen could release her from her million year slumber
(against the advice of the elder dakaarits, it must be said) and she sees
the horrors that Jhaelens people have created, so in her shock and
dismay, she uses her immeasurable powers to destroy the world, only
keeping Jhaelen and Gilgamesh alive. She wipes Jhaelens memory of
all the ill he has done, as well as the knowledge to use his many potent
cybernetic implants, and leaves the two to survive a hundred thousand
years of ice age.
* Ishtar is not really a goddess, but one of the original ancients to arrive on
Earth 80 million years ago. She has tremendous powers though, and
Jhaelens people fear her as a deity. She is as tall as Jhaelen (about 9 feet) and
appears as an incredibly beautiful, yet alien, woman.
The Bull of Heaven
In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Bull is sent by the gods (demanded by
Ishtar for Gilgamesh refusing her advances) to devastate the world. A
cool idea would be to have the Bull as some sort of biomechanical
titan-like behemoth, such as a four-legged mecha snorting billowing
clouds of noxious black smoke and ash from its nostrils. Maybe Ishtar
activates the dormant monster once she sees what humans have done
to the world, and it rampages through Erech, devouring metal, stone
and flesh after breaking out of its aeons-old tomb under the mountain.
The Bull is more than a kilometre tall and almost as wide. It carries
bizarre and unbelievably potent weapons that basically disintegrate
everything. It is also very fast; much faster than its million tonne bulk
should be capable of. When the sleek and agile aerial Knights of Erech
(themselves piloted mecha suits standing at up to 50 metres) tried to
defend their city, they were obliterated in a matter of minutes; either
disintegrated, consumed or crushed under foot.
The Emperor's entire purpose in initiating his Great Crusade, and the
creation of a galaxy-spanning Imperium of Man, is to seek the destruction of
Chaos once and for all. If he succeeds in this plan, the eternal balance
between the material and immaterial planes will be undone, and a
catastrophe of unimaginable magnitude will befall the entire galaxy. This
cannot come to pass. You must destroy your father. The word of Ishtar,
spoken to Jhaelen in the warp rift
Technology
Since the 11th have spent 10,000 years away from the Imperium, it
stands to reason that they will have vastly different technology and
culture from the grim dark Imperium. It is highly likely that Jhaelen,
upon returning to Imperial space, will be viewed as an enemy, perhaps
even as a creature of chaos. Since there are no records of the 11th
legion, no Imperial officials will have any clue as to who Jhaelen really
is.
It is also probable that Jhaelen will see the Imperium for what it is: a
festering autocracy ruled by power-hungry bureaucrats, with a
populace that can be considered no better than enslaved a vast
domain of cultural stagnation, political repression and ever-increasing
warfare. He will also be aghast at the Imperial Creed and the discovery
that the Emperor is worshipped as a god will shock and sicken him to
the core. Eventually, he will discover from a defeated Imperial enemy
(the Imperium attacked him first) that the Emperor was betrayed by
Horus and is now a dead thing, sat for all eternity upon the Golden
Throne.
Jhaelen will be utterly horrified by these discoveries, and 10,000 years
of hope will be dashed upon the jagged rocks of despair. A solitary tear
trickles down his cheek as he declares to his first captain:
Awaken the Bull. We go to war.
Champion of the Balance (The Champion Eternal,
Stormbringer)
Jhaelen returns to his chambers and invokes Ishtar for the first time in
millennia. Going into a meditative state, he calls out to the eternal
being. After eleven days of meditation, she finally answers.
Jhaelen exits his chambers resplendent in the most magnificent
armour of silver with cobalt filigreed. Fine machine wings of Eldar
design fan out from his back and a conical war helm sits in the crook of
his left arm. In his right hand is his mighty spear, again of Eldar design
(once belonging to an Avatar of Khaine, no less), fitted with a terrible
D-weapon. Twenty three captains bend their knees and lower their
heads as he walks purposefully down the steps and onto the floor of
the war room. Then he tells his captains the truth of what has
befallen the Emperor, the death or disappearances of his brothers, and
the great betrayal of the High Lords of Terra, who rule a despairing
Imperium from its blackened heart.
The Imperium embodies Law (Order?) almost at the height of its
powers. Chaos strives to destroy its age-old nemesis, gnawing at the
bloated Imperium from without and within. Jhaelen announces to his
loyal captains that it is their role, as the champions of the balance, to
help restore the universal equilibrium between order and chaos.
The first captain glances sidelong at his comrades before speaking.
My lord, we are eternally loyal and would follow you into the jaws of
the abyss itself, should you desire it of us. Forgive me, as I have one
question that I believe plays upon the minds of my brothers also: who
are we at war with?
Jhaelen smiled and placed an armoured gauntlet upon his first
captains pauldron.
All of them.
Xenos technology
As has been mentioned, Jhaelen and his Sky Born legion have lived
beyond the borders of the Imperium for 10,000 years. During this time
they have encountered many vastly different human cultures, as well
as many xenos. As the centuries wore on, Jhaelens attitude towards
xenos with the assistance of his knowledge of the Balance naturally
mellowed, resulting in trade and eventual alliances, especially with the
Eldar. Even though the Eldar travelled more-or-less freely throughout
the galaxy, and therefore knew of the Emperors death and what had
become of the Imperium, being the enigmatic species they are, they
didnt tell him any of this! Or perhaps they did, but it was typically
cryptic and Jhaelen was disbelieving?
Of the human worlds they encountered and which eventually
became part of the Sky Borns realm many were uncivilised, barbaric
cultures, often enslaved by vicious species like the orks or dark eldar.
These human cultures had lost all of the ancient technology their
ancestors had once possessed when they first came to the Eastern
Fringe many millennia hence.
But for every ten barbarian worlds, there was one enlightened planet
of technologically-advanced humans who retained some or all of their
STC machinery. Culturally these worlds were diverse, and ranged from
mercantile leagues to theocratic hegemonies. The Sky Born took what
they wanted, either peaceably or with force. Those worlds ruled by
tyrants experienced the wrath of Jhaelen and his Sky Children.
At the point of leaving his realm, after 10,000 years of expansion and
repelling the occasional xenos invasion (including one Tyranid
splinter fleet that devastated half the realm, leaving billions dead in its
wake), the Realm of Jhaelen (working name) contained hundreds of
planets across almost a hundred star systems, and a population of 140
billion souls (including several billion xenos tau, kroot, Eldar reavers,
demiurg, ugruk (similar to ogryn) and so on).
As the centuries have passed, the Sky Born have had to rely more and
more on ancient STC and even xenos technologies to provide
munitions, repair armour and vehicles, and to refit the fleet. Much like
with Squat technology, which owes a lot to the Eldar, the Sky Born
have also resorted to using Eldar tech. This began through the simple
trading of parts, but evolved into co-designed technologies.
This combination of technologies has resulted in a unique look for the
Sky Born legion, their weapons, armour, vehicles and equipment.
Power armour, for instance, has been gradually redesigned over the
centuries using xenos tech, due to the lack of any Mechanicum forge
worlds. This armour has evolved so much that it now has a very Eldar
look, although still retains much of the original bulk of Mk III and IV
armour. The entire suit is far more streamlined and flexible, allowing
for greater mobility but not at the expense of protection or strength
amplification. In-game there would be no difference just your
standard 3+ save.
Bolters have been all-but phased out over the millennia, replaced with
shuriken weaponry and powerful d-lance technology.
Possible names for the Sky Born realm (anagrams of
Melnibone):
Ebonnelim, Menil Ebon, Menebonil, belemionn, melbeionn
Eldar Reavers (Knights of the Balance,
Eternity/Eternal Knights)
Yep thats right. After exploring the unfathomable depths of the
Eastern Fringe for 2000 years, Jhaelen comes across a small but
ancient Eldar reaver craftworld. These reavers serve the balance, and
launch raids through the webways into the Imperium and against
other races, including chaos. Jhaelen forges an alliance of sorts with
these reavers, and he learns much from their farseers.
The Bull of Heaven
This is an ancient machine that was gifted to Jhaelen by Ishtar (in fact
she basically told him where it was buried, on some lonely planet light
years from anywhere). This bull took the form of a titanic metal beast,
loosely resembling a bull, and about the size of an Imperator titan.
Ishtar told Jhaelen that this beast with its artificial intelligence
would be a great asset to him in the coming war against order and
chaos. At first, Jhaelen refused to use it, marking it as an abomination;
although he did take it aboard his battle barge.
The Bull is in fact a machine of the Balance that takes on the opposite
aspect to whatever it is fighting. So, when fighting against Chaos, it
appears as a noble beast of Law; when fighting the forces of the
Imperium, it appears as a raging and chaotic manifestation of
Disorder. This is one of the main reasons why the Imperium believes
the Sky Born to be in league with Chaos (not to mention their
primarchs Black Sword).
Jhaelen only calls upon the Bull in times of direst need, when he faces
an enemy so powerful, he doubts that even 23,000 astartes can deal
with it. He wakes the Bull at the beginning of his journey towards
Terra.
The 11th in Tank Girl Koteps
mission for von Beck
Kotep requires von Beck to venture deep into the Eastern Fringe, far
beyond the borders of the fledgling Imperium, to recover a mysterious
artefact from none other than the primarch of the exiled 11th legion,
Jhaelen Thael. On his way, von Beck encounters agents from the Alpha
Legion who try to convince him to instead bring the artefact to them.
Are they loyalists or traitor? Or do they serve another master
altogether...?
Jhaelen had been banished from the Imperium decades ago; taking his
entire legion and war fleet with him. The reason for Jhaelens
banishment? It is possible that when he liberated the void goddess
Ishtar from within a warp rift, she educated him as to the balance of all
things, and how for the sake of the galaxy there could not be a tipping
in favour of either law (the Emperor) or chaos. Similar in many ways to
Alpharius working for a greater good when he declared his legion
traitor, Jhaelen saw the vital importance of the balance. When Ishtar
convinced him that the Emperor already knew of the ruinous powers
and how he sought to destroy them (or at least keep them imprisoned
within the warp; a task made easier by removing religion from the
galaxy), Jhaelen went to the Emperor and questioned his father as to
why he had not told his sons. Suffice it to say, the Emperor was not
amused by these accusations and was extremely disappointed in his
son.
This was 43 years before the fateful events on Istvaan V; 43 years before
the Horus Heresy. The Emperor was on his way to Khur and the capital
Monarchia, to rebuke his son Lorgar for failing to bring worlds into
compliance correctly (i.e. not stopping the natives from worshipping
the Emperor, but instead encouraging it). Jhaelen, travelling in just his
battlebarge Spear of Heaven with one chapter of his 11th legion aboard,
intercepted his fathers battleship as it entered the Khur System.
The Emperor was surprised to see his son and halted his fleet on the
edge of the Khur System. Jhaelen came aboard his fathers ship and
entered into his throne room alone, the massive doors closing behind
them so that the two immortals would be truly alone. No one knows
what words were exchanged in there, but after less than an hour, the
great doors swung slowly open and a distraught Jhaelen, sporting a
great welt under one eye, limped out of his fathers throne room, head
hung low and tears streaming down his cheeks.
His father had banished him for 10,000 years.
What was said between the Emperor and his wayward
son?
As the primarch approached the Emperors throne, the Master of
Mankind instantly saw that something was very wrong, and
immediately asked his son as much (remember that Jhaelen is a
pariah, and as such the Emperor could not read his mind). Basically,
Jhaelen responded by stating that his heart was heavy because the
Emperor had not trusted his sons with certain knowledge, asking his
father about the ruinous powers of the warp. What other secrets did
the Emperor keep from them?
He went on to confess that he had gone against something his father
had warned him against many years ago; namely the quest to find the
mysterious being who had been haunting his dreams since birth.
Jhaelen had told the Emperor about these dreams, and the irresistible
urge to find this being, when his father found him on his homeworld.
The Emperor knew what this being was, and also what it represented,
and warned Jhaelen against following the siren call. In fact, the
Emperor went so far as to place a powerful warding device in a jokaero
ring that he made Ikuden promise to wear at all times. Naturally,
Jhaelen saw no reason why he should not cede to this request, and so
agreed to wear the golden band.
The Emperor listened to his sons confession for that is how he saw it
with growing dismay. When at the end of his monologue, Jhaelen
accused the Emperor of understanding the great importance of the
Balance, his father stood to his feet in an instant rage, hurling his son
back down the long throne room to slam into one of the hundred
massive pillars that supported the vaulted ceiling. Enraged, but
managing to barely contain his fury, the Emperor gave Jhaelen one last
chance to renounce what he believed and to return to his fathers arms.
Weeping, Jhaelen rose slowly to his feet and shook his head.
I cannot, father, for I have seen the truth. It shames me that you do
not.
The Emperor sighed. Then you leave me with no choice, my son.
Though it pains my heart greatly, I hereby banish you and your seed
for 10,000 years. For ten millennia you are to roam the stars beyond the
borders of my realm, and only when this time is passed may you return
to seek my forgiveness. You, your legion and all your deeds will be
expunged from all records. In time, no one will know that you ever
existed.
The Null Zone
When Jhaelen was exiled by the Emperor, he took his legion and fled
into a little-known region of space known simply as the Null Zone.
This small region lay way out on the Eastern Fringe, and consisted of
an area of space that appeared as an empty hole to the astropaths of
the Imperium. Not even the Emperor could look into the Null Zone,
for it was the complete antithesis of the Warp, and as such no psychic
powers would work.
In Tank Girl, Isson Kotep of the Thousand Sons charges the rogue
trader, Captain von Beck, with a quest to enter the Null Zone and
locate a mysterious artefact (in fact the Spear of Heaven). The
Thousand Sons can/will not enter, since their psychic powers would
cease to work, and in a strange way they feared the place, as much as
an astartes can know fear.
Samoan type names for the Sky Born
Aiono, Aku, Nua, Luiga, Tuitama, Talakelei, Fiame, Makaafa, Tauloa,
Mannu, Maletau, Makko, Makka, Tamoa, Vaomalo, Tamasau,
Vainikalu, Tuigamau, Toma, Tua, Umaga, Tana, Tiafau
Characters
1st Captain Tamasau Umaga 1st Battalion
2nd Captain Maku Vaa
3rd Captain Aku Aiono
4th Captain Laiga Vainikalu
5th Captain Makko Tamoa
6th Captain Tuitama Vaoma
7th Captain Manu Dranui
8th Captain Tana Tua
9th Captain Makko Vaiienga (The Twins 9th & 10th Companies often
battle side-by-side as they possess a near-telepathic ability to predict
each others movements)
10th Captain Makka Vaiienga (The Second Twin)
11th Captain Salefu Mavai
12th Captain Loma Joma (called The Rhino because of his immense
bulk and stubborn nature, Captain Joma is absolutely massive. Hes so
big, they had to put him in terminator armour, even though hes not 1st
Company. Wields a ginormous spear and heavy storm bolter)
13th Captain Talakelei Faiome
14th Captain Vaiana Maletau
15th Captain Nuatama Volo
16th Captain Vaiana Vaa (younger brother to the 2nd Captain)
17th Captain Aku Sivatu
18th Captain Tua Tuai
19th Captain Haka Manoa
20th Captain Roko Daguna
21st Captain Samu Halai
22nd Captain Tai Maafu
23rd Captain Aku Faletai
1st Company Sergeant Tana Manoa
Venerable Dreadnought Captain Viir Shaddon (Viir served as 1st
Captain when Jhaelen was first banished from the fledgling Imperium,
and continued to do so for another three centuries until he has
mortally wounded fighting tyranids. Now he is entombed within a
modified Contemptor pattern dreadnought chassis that shows obvious
signs of xenos upgrades)
Legion Equipment & Armour
The Sky Born changed over the millennia, as they absorbed and
became part of the cultures around them including xenos (Eldar). As
such, they wield some unusual weapons, from huge spears to duel-
wielding unusual katana blades (based upon Eldar design).
The primarch himself carries the Spear of Heaven (Law) as well as the
Black Sword (Chaos). He still carries the ornate heavy pistol gifted to
him by his father millennia ago.
Legion Tactics
Sky Born tactics are very much assault-minded, and they favour swift,
lightning attacks to strike at the jugular of the enemy. Sky Born employ
tactics that could be compared to White Scars, Space Wolves and even
Eldar Aspect Warriors.
As a rapid assault legion, the Sky Born utilise a lot of Scimitar pattern
jet bikes, jump packs and fast attack craft. Unlike the White Scars, who
abhor heavy vehicles and devastator squads, the Sky Born do employ a
small number of these support units, deeming them necessary in
certain combat theatres, for instance siege breaking. However, during
sieges the Sky Born also employ the services of their own former-
Mechanicum and Imperial Army artillery and titans. Not to mention
Eldar reavers.
The Sky Born fleet is also very fast and highly manoeuvrable, due to
millennia of upgrades and xenos-inspired technology. Whilst the fleet
still maintains a number of 10,000 year old Imperial vessels, it also
includes many more that have been constructed over the ensuing
centuries. These ships appear quite different from the Imperial craft,
and can best be described as combining the ships architecture of the
Mechanicum combined with xenos designs, in particular Eldar.
Legion Structure
The Sky Born legion consists of 23,000 active astartes. The legion is
divided into 23 chapters, and each chapter consists of 10 companies of
100 men each. The chapters are numbered from 1st through to 23rd,
and also have a traditional name inspired by the culture of the core
worlds of the Sky Born Empire, where creatures of legend were held in
high esteem, and even worshipped.
As you can see, when the Sky Born begin their voyage to Terra, its
going to take a LOT of space marines to halt their advance, considering
that the 11th legion is 23 times bigger than a contemporary Imperial
chapter! If you were to bring the combined might of the Ultramarines,
Space Wolves, Dark Angels, Blood Angels and Salamanders, for
instance, thats still only 5000 space marines vs. 23,000
No Space Marine forces were equipped solely with this mark and
surviving examples are seen even in the 41st Millennium, many
modern Chapters still use Mk III armour for boarding actions, tunnel
fighting and similar combat situations, though these may be modified
to individual chapters tastes.
Whilst a successful solution to a specific need, the Mk III was
considered too clumsy and uncomfortable for everyday use. As the
most visually brutal of all Marine armour, it did get used as a basic
uniform for ceremonial guards.

The name Armorum Ferrum, or Iron suit, derives from its great

Armour marks strength.

Much of the following is taken from The First Expedition forum, and Mk III and Xenos modifications
specifically from Laurie Goulding, so it can be considered as close to
canon as youre going to get. When the 11th legion were exiled along with their primarch some 43
years prior to the outbreak of the Horus Heresy, they were almost
Laurie Goulding: All the primarchs met each other at least once, so exclusively equipped with suits of Mk III Iron Armour. There were still
we're guessing that the II and XI Legions disappeared after Alpharius a few examples of Mk II Crusade Armour being used, plus a small
was discovered. We know that to have been in "the last few decades" amount of brand new Mk IV plate. For the elite 1st Company,
before Ullanor. Make of that what you will. Cataphractii armour was the norm, since Terminator armour was yet
to be issued.
From the official Primarch discovery order (posted by Laurie)... Over the millennia, the standard Mk III armour was improved upon by
the Mechanicum adepts who had been taken into exile with the 11th
1. Horus (against their will and without knowledge of Jhaelens exile, it must be
2. Leman Russ said). Additionally, Eldar reaver armour smiths combined their
3. [DELETED FROM IMPERIAL RECORDS] technology and skills with that of the Mechanicum, to create a new
4. Ferrus Manus suit of armour that is worn today, that appears as a combination of Mk
5. Fulgrim III and Eldar aspect armour. It is lighter and more flexible than
6. Vulkan standard astartes plate, yet retains the ablative durability of Mk III.
7. Rogal Dorn
8. Roboute Guilliman
9. Magnus the Red
10. Sanguinius
11. Lion El'Jonson The Fleet
12. Perturabo
13. Mortarion The 11th legion fleet is massive, even when compared to a major
14. Lorgar Imperial war fleet. They have had ten thousand years to build their
15. Jaghatai Khan ships, and are still very much thinking on a 31st millennium scale,
16. Konrad Curze where everything was bigger! They also have in their possession more
17. Angron than one or two STC devices
18. Corax
19. [DELETED FROM IMPERIAL RECORDS]
20. Alpharius Battleships
The Spear of Heaven Heavily modified Gloriana class
Mk III Iron Armour Emperors Fury
The Ion-Ra
Mk III armour dates from the Inner Galactic wars between the The Vanguard
Emperors forces and the inhabitants of worlds close to the Galactic Star Hunter
core. Mk III armour was never intended to replace its predecessor, but Dauntless Victor
to provide an optional heavy armour type suitable for fighting on Grieving Nemesis
board spacecraft and in tunnel complexes. High casualties suffered in Foehammer
such situations demonstrated a need for such armour, and thus the Mk Doom of the Enemy
III was born. Considerable emphasis was placed on frontal protection, Guardian of Lortanne
whilst the rear armour plates were lightened to compensate. This Guardian of Iacon
armour was believed to be ideal where cover was limited and combat
was a matter of frontal assault. Cruisers
The basic design of the suit is a heavily modified Mk II, with the
Scourge
addition of fixed armour plates to the body and limbs, flexible joints
Smite
for the limbs, as well as a new heavily armoured helmet. The sloping
Blood
plates of this new helm were intended to deflect shots to the left or
right, and was to inspire similar features in the Mk IV and Mk VI
helmet designs.

Some examples of the Mk III helmet had a design drawback. Like its
predecessor the Mk II, the helmet could be fixed in place. And like its
predecessor it is probable that this was part of the original design, and
was due to the belief that it provided greater protection without the
neck seals. It is also possible that like the Mk II, this was a feature
unique to certain examples where a higher level of protection was
needed, like those Mk III suits used specifically in Boarding Units.
Codex: Sky Born
Since the missing 11th legion are a complete mystery, and there are no
extant records relating to them (either Imperial or GW), Id like to take
more of a fluffy, narrative approach to writing the codex. This means
that the introduction will be more of a history lesson, as opposed to the
regular GW codex intro.
Contents
Intro fluff one-pager Journeys Eve
Introduction
o Who are the Sky Born? The missing 11th legion
o Where are they from? The Sky Born Empire, far
out on the Eastern Rim (original homeworld
Lortanne)
o When were they banished? 10,000 years ago,
during the Great Crusade
o Why were they banished? For choosing the
Balance
o How were they banished? By the Emperor, prior
to the Castigation of Lorgar at Khur
Back story
o Early 11th legion campaigns in the Great Crusade
o The discovery of their Primarch, Jhaelen Thael
o Jhaelen is educated by the Emperor, before
being sent to his homeworld with the 11th legion
along with a Mechanicum construction flotilla
(to rebuild Jhaelens mediaeval fortress)
o Lortanne (Tanelorn) Jhaelens homeworld
(capital Ebon Menil, anagram of Melnibone)