Chapter Text
Dark Angels
Ascendant Sorcerer
You are so close now. Millennia of preparations, of schemes, of violent betrayals and fighting in the Great Game for the glory of Tzeentch, are finally about to pay off. The power of the Changing God courses through your veins, and every heartbeat brings you closer to apotheosis. Soon, you will shed the last remnants of your mortal existence and ascend into the courts of Chaos, an immortal scion of the Architect of Fate, free to manipulate the destinies of the galaxy for the rest of eternity. Yet you know that now, on the threshold of true greatness, is where you are at your most vulnerable. Should you fail to prove your worth, Tzeentch will withdraw His favor, and the very power you sought will destroy you from within. You watch your followers warily, aware that any of them might attempt to overthrow you to draw the attention of your patron god, and you beware the Lion, whose gaze might elevate or cast you down at a whim. You have also just started to realize that there are others who seek to manipulate you, elder powers within the Court of Change that are powerful enough that even apotheosis will not be enough to place you beyond their influence. This makes you wonder how many layers of strings remain between you and your God, but you are determined to find out, and rise until only Tzeentch Himself remain above you.
Broken Imperial Hero
Before, you were a champion of the Imperium, an exemplar of all of its values of courage, honor, and sacrifice. You were born and raised in the Guard, weaned on stories of your dead parents' heroism and never even thought about following another led the charge in a hundred assaults, barely surviving several of them. Your name and face were used in recruiting propaganda for the Guard through entire Sectors. Then the Dark Angels captured you, and delivered you to their Interrogator-Chaplains. So much pain you went through at their hands. You didn't think it was possible to hurt so much, but they found a way. Yet the physical pain was nothing compared to what they showed you : your mother, begging for mercy before being butchered by pirates; your father, running for his life, abandoning her before being shot in the back and dying as he futilely tried to crawl away. They forced you to accept that courage and honor meant nothing, that Mankind is nothing more than a species of animals pretending to be more than they really are. Now you fight for them, a hollowed-out shell of the soldier you once were, as much a symbol now as you were before. You sacrifice the other Broken Ones to save yourself without hesitation, knowing exactly what death sentences them to, but willing to do anything to avoid that fate yourself.
Cackling Oracle
You fought alongside the Lion when he purged the beasts of Caliban. You fought in the Legion during the Great Crusade, and when the God of Change showed the truth to the Dark Angels, something broke within you. You managed to hold yourself together by embracing the Legion's new purpose of avoiding the nightmarish future foretold, but grew increasingly unbalanced until events converged to a climax on Caliban. You saw the Lion fight Luther, saw the sword of light wielded by the Primarch's adoptive father, and in that moment you understood the true scope of Tzeentch's plans and deceits. Long before your brothers saw how they had been manipulated into doing Chaos' will, you found the truth, and it drove you mad. Your latent psychic abilities erupted as Caliban burst to pieces, and you gave yourself wholly to Tzeentch, body and soul. Now you wander from warband to warband, owing loyalty to none save the Dark God himself. You are almost always laughing to yourself, sometimes quietly, sometimes loud and clear like a madman, but you can't help it. The visions you receive, the irony and cruelty of the fates they reveal to you, are just too funny in your broken mindset. Sometimes you share your insight with your brothers, sometimes you manipulate them into meeting their destinies, but always you serve the Changer of Ways, and that is why none of them have killed you yet, despite more than one very much wanting to.
Disgraced Grand Master
Once you were mighty, a Lord of the Legion. Thousand of Astartes bowed to your will, and none could gainsay you save your peers and Lion El'Jonson himself. You stood among the Nine, and yours was the power to raze worlds. And then it was all taken from you. You failed in accomplishing the Primarch's will because of that thrice-cursed Cypher, and for that, you were dragged before the Lion in chains. There, on the World of Shadows, your gene-sire stripped you of your rank, your authority, your secrets, and cast you out of the Legion. Your mind is a broken thing now, full of the holes left by the forceful removal of so much forbidden lore. You were a great sorcerer, but only fragments of knowledge remain to you now, barely enough to survive in the Eye. As an exile, you sell your services to wandering warbands as a petty warlock, hiding your past so as to avoid the blades of your ambitious former brothers, who think to gain glory by finishing the job and killing you. Death would be preferable to this existence, but the hatred within you won't let you stop. Cypher, the Lion, the other Grand Masters, your replacement most of all, they will all pay. You will find a way to make them suffer for this humiliation, for everything you have lost. For now, you are too broken to do anything but survive, but should the right opportunity present itself, you could still become great once more. After all, despite everything, you are still a faithful of Tzeentch.
Fallen Errant-Knight
You were one of the Dark Angels who were exiled to Caliban by the Lion during the Great Crusade. In your case, it was because you objected to the tactics of one of the Primarch's protegees, and the honorless cur spread slander before the Lion in reprisal. In hindsight, you are grateful to that hateful worm, though you would still kill him without hesitation should you ever find him. On Caliban, you found a lord worthy of your service in Luther, and helped him fight the slaves of the Ouroboros, staying true to the Emperor even as your Legion turned and the Imperium tore itself apart in civil war. Then El'Jonson came, and the memory of him and Luther fighting atop Aldurukh is one that you will carry until your dying day. When Caliban was destroyed, you were cast across time and space, ending up more than nine thousand years and uncountable light-years away from Caliban's end. Though the galaxy has descended into madness, with the masses of Mankind worshiping the Emperor as a god, you hold onto your oaths to the Order: to defend the defenceless, to protect Mankind from the horrors that haunt the galaxy, and to oppose the servants of Ruin in every way. Now you wander the galaxy, fighting the fight that must be fought. You know that your traitor brothers are hunting for you, but so far you have managed to elude them - and when they do finally corner you, then by the Emperor, you will give them a fight worthy of Luther's own.
First Legion Veteran
You were there from the beginning, the true beginning. On Old Earth, before the world became known as Terra, you were chosen by the Emperor Himself to become part of the First Legion. You fought against your predecessors, the Thunder Warriors, purging them from a new order in which they had no place. You weren't present when the Legion was illuminated, but were brought into the fold later. It didn't take much to convince you that the Emperor planned to abandon the Legions : after all, you had seen firsthand how He treated tools that had outlived their usefulness. Your knowledge of the First's many secret orders and rituals allowed the conspiracy to spread even faster, and for that you were rewarded with command of your own Chapter, answering only to the Grand Masters and the Primarch. As the rest of your brothers descended into mysticism, you have remained a survivor first and foremost, and a soldier second. Your Chapter is a blade wielded by the hands of the Grand Masters, sent into the Imperium to accomplish purely military goals. You obey your orders and you do your job well, choosing not to involve yourself in the plots and schemes of your brethren, even though you take note of all of them. You survived the Unification Wars, the Great Crusade, and the Heresy : you are determined that, no matter what, you will also survive the Long War.
Hidden Hand of the Lion
You fight along your brothers within your warband, but you are not truly one of them. Though you appear to obey orders as well as any of them, in truth your true allegiance lies to the Lion alone. Centuries ago, when your ship was orbiting the Legion's homeworld, the Primarch came to you in dreams, telling you that he had chosen you to act as a hidden agent of his will among his sons. Plans within plans within plans, that is the way of Tzeentch, and you are the means by which these plans are put into motion. Ever since then, you have received commands from the Primarch in your sleep, about once every ten or twenty years. Sometimes these orders have served the warband; others, they have cost it dearly, such as the time you did not report the escape of these World Eaters, who went on to decimate the mutant allies of your Chaos Lord. But you do not question them, though you do try to understand the pattern hidden behind them, the better to serve your master. In recent years, after a string of mitigated successes at your divinely appointed tasks, you have also started to wonder if there isn't another Hand within the warband, set at cross-purposes with your own missions. Is this a test ? Should you try to discover the identity of that agent, or should you simply continue to do as you are bidden ? What is the will of the Lion, the will of Tzeentch ?
Magus Cult Leader
While most of the First Legion are distant, inhuman presences, wholly consumed by their subservience to Tzeentch, there are those like you who retain enough humanity to be able to interact with the mortal followers of the God of Change. Yours is a solitary task : to wander far from the Eye, passing through the Iron Cage using sorcery in order to reach the cults of Tzeentch and the First Legion hidden within the Imperium. Away from your brothers, you represent the Dark Angels to those worthy mortals whose rituals assist your crossing, as much of a god to them as your Primarch is to you. It falls to you to organize gatherings of dissolute nobles and ambitious merchants into true instruments of Tzeentch, and to pass on the knowledge that was bestowed upon you by the Legion's master sorcerers. The immense majority of the cultists you encounter are fools, but there is always a few who are worth cultivating, with the spark of cunning and intuition that gives them the potential to one day become true champions of Tzeentch, rather than mere slaves in others' design. That work has drawn the attention of the Inquisition time and again, and you bear the scars of several encounters with the most zealous servants of the False Emperor. You emerged triumphant or at least managed to escape every time, but with each passing century the hunt against you intensifies. The time might soon be here to finally return to the Eye of Terror, even if it means no longer being the most powerful and highest-ranking individual ...
Remorseful Torturer
You were taken by the Legion as a child, the memories of your homeworld quickly fading away in the face of the horrors of the First Legion's realm. Even back then, you had a gift : the ability to see the weak points in people, the spots where the slightest pressure would cause them to break. It was for that gift that you were selected for Ascension, and marked for further training into the ranks of the Interrogator-Chaplains. You passed all their trials, and have served the Legion well for the last century; you even directed the breaking of one of the Fallen after the old warrior's capture. But unlike your peers, you have never enjoyed inflicting pain upon others. You hate the look on your victims' face as you break them, shattering their minds to rebuild them according to Tzeentch's design. You understand, you know that it must be done, that in the end you are doing them a kindness by helping them find and accept their place in the Architect of Fate's grand design. You know all this, and it does not make it easier. The same gift that allows you to see people's weaknesses also forces you to see their strengths, to see them as people rather than tools for the Great Mutator. And so you continue your work, hating every second of it, but convinced of its grim necessity, until the whole galaxy submits to Tzeentch and the Grand Design is fulfilled.
Thing in the Dark
You were born amidst nightmares while the galaxy burned, the fruit of dark hereteks' experimentations in one of the First Legion's operations in the Ghoul Stars. Your first memories are of your broodmates all around you, of the feel of their claws and fangs and the taste of their flesh. You survived the breeding pits; more than that, you thrived, and were brought out to serve within the armies being created there. When the Night Lords came, you fought and killed several of them, and ended up being one of the few survivors in the destroyed laboratory when Dark Angels reinforcements came to examine the wreckage. You snuck aboard their ship, and have remained there since then, even as the ship changed master throughout the centuries. You fought when the ship was boarded by the Emperor's Children above Terra, tasting the Dark Eldar poison lingering in their blood, and you killed Legionaries from all Traitor Legions during the Legion Wars. The ship's crew know of you, whispering the names and titles their ancestors bestowed upon you, and even the Dark Angels are aware of the thing that dwells within the vessel. They think you just an animal, a Warp-spawned beast, but they are wrong : behind your monstrous aspect lies a sharp and cunning mind, truly sentient and ensouled. In your dark kingdom, you are content to feast upon the weak and the unwary, and to relish the fearful worship of mutant tribes … for now.
Emperor's Children
Crippled Librarian
You fell in battle against Orks, and were their captive for three days before your brothers rescued you. By the time the greenskins were defeated, very little remained of you beyond a head and a torso. It took months for the bionic replacements of your limbs to set in, but not even the Mechanicus' surgeons could find a way to stop the pain without numbing your mind, your greatest weapon. So you endure the constant phantom pain of your missing limbs, channelling it through the arts of the Librarius and unleashing it upon your enemies. You are far less apt at melee combat than you were before, but your psychic abilities have grown, and you know that there are those who consider you material for promotion into the highest ranks of the Librarius. You hide your suffering from your brothers behind an icy mask, having little time for brotherhood, for it takes nearly all of your focus to prevent others from sharing your pain when in your presence. Other Librarians are the only ones capable of shielding themselves from you without effort on your part, and they are your only company these days. For now, you have kept yourself from falling apart under the strain of constant pain through sheer will, sleeping only when exhaustion forces you down and always awakening from tormented dreams to find your muscles locked in place. If not for special attention from the Apothecaries, you would be long dead. You have sworn vengeance upon all Orks for this, and not even your cold façade of control can contain your hatred of the Great Beast.
Haunted Champion
Most Aspirants of the Third Legion who survive their induction are able to, if not forget, then banish the memory of the Reminiscence they face upon the plains of Chemos. But you were not so lucky. You recall every detail of the thing of lilac and black armor and scarred, scaled flesh that you encountered during your final trial. You wake up from sleep with the sound of its hideous laughter ringing in your ears. Sometimes, you see it in reflective surfaces where your own reflection should be, staring back at you with that hateful smile. The Chaplains and Librarians tell you that the Reminiscence is a curse, cast upon the Third as a last act of spite on the part of dark powers it defeated thousands of years ago, but you are not so sure, and these doubts plague you nearly as much as the visions themselves. Only in battle, when you fully focus onto the purity of conflict, are you freed from these concerns. Over the years, this has allowed you to sharpen your skills beyond even the exacting standards of the Emperor's Children, and you were chosen as your Great Company's Champion. In that way, you incarnate the principles of the Third, for it is your suffering that has made you strong. You crave peace, but most of all, you crave the certitude that you will never, never become the thing that stare at you through the abyss of fate, laughing and waiting for its chance. Until then, you armor your soul with resolve and duty, and pray daily to Fulgrim for strength.
Heir of the Phoenix
You have inherited Fulgrim's legendary charisma and beauty : your eyes were turned purple by the gene-seed, your hair is white, long and silky, and your features were altered to a near mirror of what the Primarch's own were before the Bleeding War. Humans and Astartes alike follow your lead, the former often creating images of your beauty afterwards. Your brothers, often marked by war, make use of this, presenting you as the face of the Legion in peaceful interactions with humans, and you are far more familiar with the human side of the Imperium than any other Legionary you know. You have brought the words of your commanders to Imperial nobles and rebel dignitaries. In battle, you fight along the Imperial Guard and other human allies of your Company, inspiring them with your presence. Soldiers have held against impossible odds and pulled off desperate victories when fighting in your shadow. Your own martial skills, while perfectly adequate to a son of Fulgrim, are not your greatest strength. You relish your role as a living standard of the Legion's glory, even though you know the older Legionaries do not approve. Why should you not enjoy that which you were made for ? With your help, ordinary men and women become heroes, their minds relieved from the burden of a fear you no longer feel yourself. Is that not something to be proud of ?
Secret-bearing Apothecary
You are dying, and have been dying for a hundred years. A blight, coming from one of the Legion's darkest hour, is slowly eating its way through your body, ravaging you from within. After much research, you have identified this degenerative disease as the very same blight that nearly eradicated the Legion in the distant past, before Fulgrim was found, when the gene-seed stores were lost. You also know that there is no cure for that blight, that the only reason the Legion survived is that with the Primarch found, new Legionaries could be created before the old ones, those who were afflicted, went completely extinct. But the blight ended with the discovery of the Phoenician, allowing for the Legion's rebirth, so why is it afflicting you ? You do not know, and the mystery consumes your mind as surely as the blight consumes your flesh. You have kept your affliction a secret from your brothers, hiding your growing weakness with cocktails of chemicals of ever-more dubious manufacture, using ever-more dangerous ingredients. You still perform your duties, but more and more time is spent in your laboratories, searching for answers. You do not so much search for a cure as you search for the cause. If the blight can come back in one son of Fulgrim, then why couldn't it come in more ? Yet still you make no progress. The answers must be somewhere, though, and so you have started to think of the Forbidden Vault, where all of the Legion's knowledge of its ancient enemy is kept. After all, Fabius Bile is the only survivor of the time of the blight, so surely he must have found its source, and a way to cure it ?
Silent Brother
Your shame defines you. You failed your brothers, you failed your commanding officer, you failed your Primarch and you failed your Emperor. Your entire Company was wiped out by daemons, but you were left alive by the creatures, amidst the broken corpses of your brothers. When you limped back to the Legion, the first thing you did was rip out your own tongue with your broken fingers, a gesture that annoyed the Apothecaries but was very clear in its intent : you were now a member of the Brotherhood of the Silent Scream. After recovering, you left the Emperor's Children and travelled to the closest Inquisitorial outpost, wearing unrepaired battle-plate, bearing the wrath of its machine-spirit with unflinching stoicism. An Inquisitor of the Ordo Malleum took you into her service, forcing you to accept internal repairs for your wargear, even if it still looks outwardly ruined. In her service, you have faced the spawn of the Warp many time, and endured their whispers through the sheer strength of your shame and desire to atone for your past failures. No promise of the daemon can compare to that distant, impossible goal, and you wield your power hammer with the might of an angel desperate for forgiveness. Your mistress' other Acolytes are as impressed by your prowess as they are scared, and you spend all of your time between battles either training or praying.
Slumbering Ancient
You took the wounds that led to you being interred within a Dreadnought during the Burning of Comorragh, nigh six thousand years ago. As such, you are one of the last living Children of the Emperor who ever saw Fulgrim with his own eyes. Most of your existence is spent in stasis, as even the efforts of the Apothecaries weren't enough to completely purge the Dark Eldar poisons from your bloodstream, which cause your every waking moment to be filled with pain. Millennia of being locked out of time, pulled out only to fight, have taken their toll upon your sanity, and it is only thanks to the teachings of the Legion that you have retained even a modicum of reason. Your memory is a fractured thing : you recall nothing of your life prior to joining the Legion, and only parts of the time between that and your interment. On the battlefield, you are the scourge of xenos and heretics alike, though you reserve your fiercest hatred for the Dark Eldar. Your armored form is a monument to all the Legionaries who fell during the Burning of Commoragh, and you shout their names as you go into battle against the Kabals of that accursed realm. To your brothers, you are a symbol of the Third Legion's ideals of self-sacrifice and devotion to the Imperium, but they will never know that the reason you always charge into the fray is because, deep inside, you long for death's peace.
True Survivor
When your brothers speak of you, the words "Mark of Lucius" are never far from their minds. According to the Apothecaries, you have endured wounds that should have killed you a grand total of twelve times in your two-centuries life as a son of Fulgrim. You don't know how you survived either : every time, you lost consciousness and woke up in the Apothecarion hours, sometimes days later. Your body is a scarred mess, and a unique quirk of your gene-seed causes the scars to never fade away after they are healed over, making your unmasked face a true vision of horror that has caused many Legion serfs to faint. However, you still have all of your limbs, though three of your left hand's fingers are bionic after you lost them to a Genestealer's bladed arms. Your battle-brothers regard you as something of a lucky charm, one who absorbs the worst the enemy can throw at you and yet survive it all. Cloaked in superstition as you are, you can't help but wonder if your next "death" will be your last. You are deeply aware of the religious significance of the number thirteen : it is the breaking of the cycle, and the number of the Arch-Traitor Guilliman, who succumbed to the lures of Chaos and shattered the Emperor's dream. You do not fear death, having come close to it far too many times for the transition from life to corpse to hold any mystique, but recently, your dreams have been haunted by fragments of lost memories. Are those the remembrances of what happened between life and death, or a trick of your mind ?
Unaware Infiltrator
You are an abomination, but you do not know it. You were created by the hands of Fabius Bile himself, gene-crafted and hidden among the population of one of the Third Legion's recruiting worlds, one of many. For your strength and resilience, you were selected to join the Emperor's Children, adapting well to your new existence and swiftly becoming a battle-brother of the Third. Every examination, both physical and psychic, shows you to be nothing more than what you appear to be, even to yourself : a loyal son of Fulgrim and devoted warrior of the Imperium. But deep within your brain, written into your being down to the genetic level, is the mark of the Clonelord, a subconscious presence that acts upon pre-programmed instructions. Without knowing it, you have already sent information to the Black Legion that have cost the lives of loyal Imperial Guard and even Space Marines, sometimes by encrypted vox-bursts on the battlefield, other times by psychic sendings when your ship was sailing through the Warp's tormented tides, the chaos around you hiding the transmission from the Librarians aboard. Should you learn the truth, you would be horrified, but not for long : a failsafe would trigger immediately, and you would soon perish, one way or another. Perhaps your body would destroy itself, or perhaps you would take your own life - or perhaps the implanted will of your creator would completely overwrite your own.
Victim of the Manflayer
Ten years ago, during a war fought against a Black Legion warband on an Imperial hive-world, you were captured and dragged deep behind enemy lines, to the lair of the invasion's leader : Fabius Bile, the Arch-Renegade. His presence on the theater of war wasn't known to the Emperor's Children, or there would have been a great many forces deployed. The Primogenitor experimented on you, seeking to learn whether there had been any changes in the Third Legion's genetic code and training process since his time among them. He cut you apart and extracted several of your organs, examining them before putting them back, more to keep his skills sharp than out of any concern for your life. The drugs that held you immobile in place of restraints did nothing to lessen the pain. Finally, when he was done with you and with whatever dark quest had brought him to the world, he left with his forces, abandoning you behind for your brothers to find. You spent several months in complete isolation from your brothers for fear you had been compromised somehow, first in the care of the Apothecaries, then the Librarians, and then, finally, the Chaplains. You endured excruciating trials to prove your continued purity of soul, and eventually, the stern keepers of the Legion's spirit released you back to your squad, where you were welcomed as a martyr and a hero. You still bear the scars of what Bile did to you, both outside and inside. Nightmares haunt your slumber, forcing you to relive the cruelties the Arch-Renegade visited upon you, night after night. Part of you burns with the desire for vengeance, but another feels nothing but dread whenever you remember the cold indifference of your tormentor.
Void-war Expert
You were born aboard a ship, took your first steps onto a metal deck, and killed your first heretic (a Ruin-worshiping pirate who underestimated the resolve of a eight-years old boy who has just seen his family slaughtered before his eyes) still within the vessel's confines. Even after becoming a Child of the Emperor, your greatest affinity remained with the cold of the void, the manoeuvers of ships and the brutal close-quarters melee of boarding actions. To you, the patterns of four-dimensional void war, which require massive cogitators to process, are obvious. In your three centuries of life, you have risen to become one of the Legion's greatest voidmasters, capable of commanding vast fleets with the instinctual skill of a virtuoso directing an orchestra. You have fought more wars in the void than on solid ground, and even in gatherings including Admirals of the Imperial Navy, you are given command for your greater expertise, or at the very least a voice of importance at the table, despite the fact that your rank is vastly inferior to theirs. You have fought against every breed of traitor and renegade and a dozen xenos species, including a particularly satisfying campaign against a piratical empire near the Maelstrom's edge that was revealed to be under the leadership of a Dark Eldar Archon who had fled Commoragh to avoid (true) accusations of daemon worship. The xenos boarded your flagship and made it to the bridge, but you killed him yourself, sending his soul shrieking to the daemonic god he had sold it to.
Iron Warriors
Ace Tank Pilot
The engine whispers to you, and you feel every bolt and metal plate of your vehicle when you are sitting in the pilot's seat. No matter the class of the tank, you don't just make them fight – you make them dance. Your talent was discovered early during your training, and since then you have been at the forefront of every heavy engagement your Grand Battalion has been involved with. You have duelled Ork Truks and Eldar grav-tanks, and emerged victorious every time. However, as your skills don't extend to coordinating the battle on a larger scale, you have never risen in rank beyond your current post. Not that you mind : you are perfectly content with your duty, and you perform it to the best of your abilities. There are those among your brothers who think that your gift is a latent psychic gift that allows you to commune with your vehicle's machine-spirit instinctively. Perhaps they are right – the Librarians haven't said anything one way or the other, though they did approach you during your training, only to return you to the rest of your group after a battery of seemingly irrelevant tests. In the end, though, it doesn't matter to you : all that matters is the rush of adrenalin and rigtheousness you feel on the battlefield, facing the enemies of the Throne through the auspexes of your engine. Whenever the Techmarines put together a new variant of an existing pattern or rediscover an exotic one that was lost to time, you are always the first to volunteer to test them.
Ancient Battle-Automata
Your awareness sparked into existence in a time of war. You were forged by Perturabo himself, to act as a defender of the Cavea Ferrum while the Traitor Legions marched on Terra in an unrelenting advance. The Praetorian created dozens of battle-automatas like you, the immense majority of which were destroyed during the final hours of the war, when the Cavea Ferrum was breached by the elite forces of three Traitor Legions and their Primarchs. You weren't, though : you endured the blades of Imperial Fist Legionaries, and were found after the final confrontation in the Throneroom surrounded by the corpses of Seventh Legion warriors, sparking and near destruction. The tech-priests of the Mechanicus and the Techmarines of the Fourth managed to preserve you and a handful of your brethren, and since then you have been deployed in conflicts throughout the galaxy. Most of your kind have been lost over the millennia, but you remain, a construct of incredibly advanced machinery that is capable of repairing itself over time, which is good, since the lore of your construction was lost when the Lord of Iron entered slumber within his Dreadnought chassis. To your basic intellect, the Legion is all, and the prosecution of its wars the sole purpose of your existence. You obey the orders of your Legionary handlers, but from time to time, you have displayed initiative, acting upon sensory inputs that brought you information not available to them. Despite technically being in violation of the laws prohibiting Artificial Intelligence within the Imperium, you are protected from watchful eyes by the Legion, who sees you as a relic of its Primarch and will not allow you to be dissembled by some puritan Inquisitor or arch-magos.
Bitter Chaplain
The galaxy is a ruin, a broken reflection of what it was and a nightmarish perversion of what it should have been. You know this, for you have read the old texts, and glimpsed the golden dream of the Emperor within their words. That knowledge has left you with a burning hate of the vile traitors who murdered that dream, and you use the power of your words to infuse the Iron Warriors under your spiritual care with the same hate. All those who turned against the Golden Throne must die, for there can be no justice as long as a single one of them yet draw breath. You lead your brothers in the hunt of the Traitors who escape the boundaries of their infernal realm, hunting them through the territories of the Iron Cage and bringing to them the Emperor's wrath. With your crozius and your skull-faced helm, you are the very avatar of the Master of Mankind's retribution. Your brothers look upon you with respect and dread alike, knowing the power of the hatred that beats in your breast. But that very same hatred has also poisoned your hearts against the current Imperium and all its citizens, for whenever you look at them, you see only failed potential and betrayed promises. To you, Humanity has fallen from greatness and can never reclaim it. All that is left to you is vengeance, and you will claim it, no matter the cost, because nothing else matters anymore.
Castellant of the Iron Cage
From within your stronghold, you keep watch over the Ruinstorm. As the walls around you bear the traces of Thirteenth Legion's guns, so does your flesh bear the scars of their blades, as time and again the debased Chapters of the Ultramarines hurl themselves against both, seeking to escape their rightful exile. All of your days are filled with a thousand considerations as you pit your leadership and tactical skills against the madness of Guilliman's sons. You came to your post by rising through the ranks with honorable and dedicated service, and a mind for the greater picture. The cold and merciless calculus of war guides your every action, for you know that failure is innacceptable, having seen first hands the depredations the Thirteenth inflicts upon the defenseless. You are harsh toward your subordinates, and you know that many, especially among the human ones, despise you for it. You ask the impossible of them and when they fail to meet your standards, you punish them with even more difficult training. But you know that this is necessary, that these trials are how they will grow strong enough to protect the billions of innocents who live in the Imperium, secure in the knowledge that the spawn of Guilliman remains locked within its cage. Compared to the weight of that responsibility on your shoulders, what is a little spite ? You bear it gladly, and would bear it a hundred, a thousand times, if it meant the certainty that your walls will never fall against the tide of Ruinous corruption that festers within the Ruinstorm.
Darkness-touched Techmarine
There are some sins, some corruptions, that have nothing to do with the Dark Gods of Chaos, and that is the kind that haunts you. You have hidden your secret from your brother Legionaries for decades, and it has been shamefully easy. Your mind bears the mark of the ancient, forbidden weapons Perturabo unleashed during the Olympian War against the Hrud. When you came back from your training on Mars, you ventured into the lands of Olympia forbidden to its civilian population, the places where reality itself was fractured by the technological wrath of Perturabo. You were hoping to learn more about your Legion's history, and perhaps to find one of the priceless archeotech devices the Lord of Iron used in that ancient conflict. How foolish you were. You saw things out there, writhing in the angles of time, caught forever between one moment and the next. Not daemons, no : these were something else, something much worse, coming from dimensions with no connection to your own. You have suppressed these memories, using a combination of mental discipline and tweaks to your augmented mind's cogitators. But even so, you still know that you know something forbidden, something that can make even a son of Perturabo scream in horror and madness, and that knowledge weighs heavily upon you. You are afraid that that knowledge might be alive somehow, and one day consume you from within. But you are even more afraid of examining the dark lore contained within your own skull, and so you do nothing about it, simply going on about your duties, continuing to hide the truth.
Logistician Prodigy
Other Space Marines believe that courage and devotion win wars, but you know better. What truly wins a war is who has the best supply line. No matter the skill of a soldier, no matter how strong his loyalty to the Emperor, he will still fall if all he has are his fists and his enemy brings power armor and bolter rounds. This may not be the most popular opinion in the modern Imperium, but you remain convinced of its veracity, and the skill you display at demonstrating it is the reason why you ended up quartermaster of your Great Battalion. You still take part in the battles side by side with your brothers, but your true contribution to the Fourth Legion happens in between. You have bent your eidetic memory to the task of memorizing every single one of the Iron Warriors' sources of materiel, from Mechanicus' forge-worlds bound by ancient pacts to more recently built Manufactorium on distant hive-worlds, and you make sure none of your brothers are ever lacking for ammunition or spare parts for their equipment. You can deploy thousands of auxilliary troops in mere hours, perfectly ready to engage the foe without the need for the days it would take the Administratum to even sort out the order of their descent from orbit. You may not bear any special insigna, and your armor may be devoid of medals, but you are responsible for the deaths of more enemies of the Golden Throne than even you care to calculate, and your brothers know it.
Patchwork Legionary
You have spent four hundred years on the frontlines of the Long War, fighting against the Traitor Legionaries emerging from the Eye of Terror to try and break free of the Iron Cage, and you have paid the price of your duty. Apart from your brain, nothing of your original flesh remains : every limb and organ has been replaced, either by cybernetic replacements or by vat-grown cloned ones. Your face is made of stretched skin and iron plates, with one bionic eye and one cloned one, and you look like nothing more than some demented necro-scientist experiment. The vagaries of war and constant exposition to the Eye's mutagenous energies have forced this fate upon you, and while you remain perfectly apt for battle, even your transhuman physiology is straining to prevent the various grafts from being rejected by one another. Any other Legion would either have let you die or put you into a Dreadnought long ago, but resources are stretched ever thinner in the Iron Cage, and no Legionary can be spared from the war against the Traitor Legions. Every year brings a new threat to the Imperium that must be fought, and the ranks of your lost brothers grow ever longer, but you endure. You will never give up this war, for it is what you were made for, and all you have left. Yet you are beginning to worry, for several times in recent year, when fighting against the daemonic allies of the Eye's renegades, they have taunted you with your condition, speaking shrouded prophecies about what you might become, as more and more of yourself is chopped away and replaced by spare parts. They are lying. Surely they are lying ...
Remembrancer of the Dark Millennium
You were more than eleven decades old when you finally found your calling, after more than a lifetime spent working on commissions for petty nobles. In the capital city of Olympia, you were granted the right to visit Calliphone's Monument, crafted by Perturabo's own hands for his fallen foster sister. You saw the exquisite mosaic, said to have been touched by the Lord of Iron's tears as he worked, and depicting Calliphone standing against the Hrud's hordes, proud and defiant even after her bodyguards had been butchered. In that moment, you touched the divine, and cast aside all of your earlier works, abandoning your comfortable lifestyle to join the Fourth Legion. Since that day, your talent has blossomed : be it through sculptures, paintings, mosaics, or holographic light-shapes, you render the deeds of the Iron Warriors into art. You do not just recreate their heroic actions, but also the worlds and people for which they fight, reminding the transhuman warriors of the reason behind their sacrifice. Your life has been prolonged by juvenat treatments well into your fourth century, and apprentices come from all over the galaxy to learn from you. Any of your works would be worth a king's ransom, but they are not for sale : all of them decorate the chapels and memorials of the Iron Warriors' ships and fortresses, with your masterwork being displayed within Perturabo's own crypt, so that the Lord of Iron may look upon its beauty whenever he emerges from his long slumber. But you find no pride in your work : you are only a vessel, the means through which the beauty of the universe expresses itself to help fight the bitterness that threatens to consume the souls of your Legion masters. That, too, you think, is a way to fight against Ruin.
Reknowned Architect
The blood of Perturabo flows in your veins, and through it you have inherited the Lord of Iron's gift for creating wonders. Your eyes see landscapes and your mind imagine grand palaces and impregnable fortresses, as well as monuments to the arts and memorials to the Emperor and the countless martyrs of the Imperium. The stones speak to you, whispering of their strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to build walls upon them against all but the strongest armies shatter harmlessly. It takes you mere seconds to see how to best fortify a position with whatever resources are at hand, and even Legionaries decades older than you listen once you start shouting commands, caught in your vision of what you will build together. The Legion makes use of your abilities in many ways, from helping raise Imperial strongholds across the galaxy to repaying debts owed to Imperial potentates. Twice now you have directed the rebuilding of a Governor's palace after it was destroyed in war, and the people of the world showed mettle enough to impress the Fourth Legion. Although your duties make you most often work on martial projects, like your Primarch before you, you have an artist's soul, and your private office contains many plans for architectural wonders the likes of which the Imperium has not seen in thousands of years. You know that, in this Dark Millennium, there are no resources to waste on such things, not when every stone is needed to wall off the Eye of Terror and every man needed to hold a lasgun atop that wall. But you still dream of what you could have created, in another life.
Ruthless Warsmith
There is only war. Peace is a lie, a beautiful illusion, a wondrous dream that was stolen from Mankind ten thousand years ago, when nine of the Emperor's sons fell to darkness and betrayed him. In a galaxy filled with unceasing conflict and unnameable horrors, you hold these truths to be self-evident. You have seen the reports, kept hidden even from the eyes of your own battle-brothers. You know that, despite the Iron Warriors' many sacrifices, the Iron Cages are straining to keep the Traitor Legions contained. But you also know that contained they must remain, or all will be lost, and therefore, no sacrifice is too great to accomplish that. Even a single year of grace is worth the loss of a million soldiers, or a hundred Space Marines. Empathy and compassion are weaknesses you cannot afford if you are to help the Imperium – not its people, who cower in the shadow of lost greatness and pray mindlessly to one who abhorred the very concept of divinity – survive. As a Warsmith, you lead a thousand Iron Warriors against the forces of Chaos, allying yourself with the most devoted of Inquisitors. These are lords that many would call Radical, extremists, or simply insane for the lengths to which they are willing to go. But you know better, even as you help them set corrupt worlds aflame or purge entire populations that were exposed to the horrible truths of the galaxy. You know that, no matter how cruel, this is necessary work that must be done. It must.
White Scars
Breaker of Lies
They have forgotten everything about your Legion, again. It was already the same back when the Great Crusade was conquering the stars, ten thousand years ago. Who remembered the sons of the Khan, who hunted far from the Imperium's borders, risking their lives deep within enemy territories, where the other Legions dared not go ? No one. The False Emperor had sent your Legion to die far from sight, denying them their rightful glory. That is why you turned against Him, and you fought on Terra to breach the Imperial Palace and write your name in blood upon the pages of History. You took the heads of a dozen Imperial heroes on the Throneworld, and yet still, you and your brothers were banished from memory, cast aside like a bad dream that vanishes upon waking. The Imperium cloaks itself in ignorance, refusing to even admit the existence of the Traitor Legions to the masses, all to enforce the tyranny of the False Emperor. But you can break this shroud of lies, and you will. Your very existence is proof of the tyrant's deceit, and you strive endlessly to bring the truth to the Imperium's slaves. Every raid, every battle, you make sure to leave plenty of survivors to spread word of your name and the truth of your nature. By your deeds, billions of Imperial serfs have learned of the existence of the Emperor's fallen Angels of Death. In response, the Inquisition has wiped out entire cities, and there are several kill-orders on you, but all you do in reaction to that is laugh, knowing that they will never catch you, and that all their efforts accomplish is delaying the inevitable and weaken the rotting Imperium even further.
Chosen of the Yaksha Kings
From your birth aboard a warship of the urdu, you have heard the voices, though it was only early in your adolescence that you began to recognize fragments of their words as intelligible language. Even now, what feels like an eternity later, you only understand a fraction of their constant whispering. But the Sorcerers of the warband owning the ship and yourself recognized it as a mark of potential for greatness, and elevated you into one of them after you passed their trials. You have learned that the voices you hear are those of the Dark Gods, rendered down by your mind into something you can comprehend. Over the years, the voices have guided you in fighting your rivals, lead your brothers to victory, and survive every danger you encountered. Every seer you have met spoke of the great destiny waiting for you, and your khan has made you his champion, fighting against those of rival warbands and your Imperial foes. By following the will of the Gods, you have risen far higher than any would have believed possible, and you intend to keep rising higher still. In recent years, however, the voices have grown conflicted as the Yaksha Kings each attempt to woo you into their exclusive service. With meditation and willpower, you have kept from both succumbing to madness and upsetting the balance you have cultivated between the Four, but you know that this cannot last long. Sooner or later, something will break, and it will most likely be you. But you won't just wait for it to happen : you are determined to seize the destiny promised to you, and are spending every night trying to parse the screams of the Yaksha Kings, trying to divine sense from their wrath, that you might navigate the path leading to glory.
Collector of the Dead
As the years pass, the White Scars' numbers continue to slowly diminish, with more and more warriors falling and fewer and fewer new recruits being inducted into the Legion's ranks. You saw that slow collapse coming, but you are no Apothecary, and it is beyond your power to prevent it. All you can do, as a Sorcerer, is compensate for your warband's diminishing strength by filling the ranks with Undying forces, privileging quantity over quality. You are a master in the art of binding a spirit to its corpse and compelling the resulting undead creature to do your bidding. You have a retinue of Undying from all Legions, acting as bodyguards on the battlefield and beyond. Your brothers look upon you with distrust, knowing that should they die, you will not hesitate to raise them again, that they might continue to fight for the Legion in death. Many also despise the way, in their eyes, you put more faith in your undead servants than your living brothers. You do not care, though : over the years, you have come to believe that the Undying are the future of the Fifth Legion, an army that will conquer the stars without the difficulties involved with a living army. But there is a price for your sorcery, and some of it is yours to pay. As you bound dozens of dead Astartes to your will, you have begun to hear the muted voices of their spirits' tattered remnants, a chorus of confused and lost whispers in the back of your mind that never stops.
Eye-Space Courier
During the Great Crusade, you and the small frigate you captain were messengers for the White Scars, carrying instructions through the Warp in regions where the Sea of Souls was too turbulent for astropathic communication to be reliable (or when the Legion faced foes capable of intercepting such messages). Your ship was customized by the White Scars' Techmarines to be fast and manoeuvrable far beyond her initial specs. During the Heresy, you were all that kept several disparate battle-groups in touch, and were responsible for bringing them to Terra to take part in the final disastrous battle of the rebellion. Somehow - you aren't quite certain how - you survived the retreat after Guilliman fell, and ended up in the Eye of Terror. Since then, you have continued your work, which is even more important in a region as unstable as the Eye. You carry messages from one place to another, along with precious cargo and, on occasion, important dignitaries. You are still human, though you are now thousands of years old, and that makes you prey for most of the Astartes warbands that fight each other endlessly over spoils within that infernal realm. And yet, you have managed to survive, gaining, if not the respect of the transhuman overlords, at least a measure of their trust. You know how to navigate through the Eye, and the thing your Navigator has become can guide your ship along the calmer currents with uncanny skill. But for every satisfied patron, there is another warlord who would like to take your ship and plunder your secrets from your living brain, all in order to gain some small, fleeting advantage in the Long War.
Hollowed Hunter
You have hunted for so long, it's hard to remember a time when you did anything else. You remember that you were a son of Chogoris, and you still remember the feeling of cutting your own brothers down on Chondax, as well as the taste of their blood on your sword - the first gift of the Pantheon, given to you long before you truly understood the meaning of your rebellion against the False Emperor. But it was by no mean the last. Now, you are one with your bike, fused to it down to the molecular level by the eldritch energies coursing through your body and soul. Yet with every gift, you lost a piece of yourself, becoming less and less of the Space Marine you were and more and more the Hunter the Gods intend for you to become. Your steed carries you across the Warp itself in pursuit of the prey assigned to you by your divine masters. Sometimes the prey you hunt is human, or xenos, but most of the time it is another Astartes, loyalist or rebel. Such distinctions mean less and less to you as time passes : all that matter are the skills of the prey, its abilities and powers. You are rarely alone on your hunts, instead appearing while other servants of the Gods are engaged against your prey's allies. You are not aware of it, but among these cultists of Chaos, you have become something of a legend : the rider sent by the Gods to hunt their enemies, manifesting in their lowly servants' time of need. Of course, the truth is you care nothing for these mortal devotees of the Ruinous Powers - apart from the Hunt, you don't care for anything anymore.
Questing Necromancer
You remember the time when the White Scars were united, a glorious host fighting under the Khagan's undisputed leadership. But everything went wrong after his loss, as you and your peer Storm-seers knew it would when he first fell at Chondax. Now, the White Scars are broken, torn apart by the blind retribution of Imperial slaves. Solitary Khans lead shattered Brotherhoods, knowing that there is no loyalty to expect from their warriors. There is freedom in such a way of life, and it certainly bests the slavery of the False Emperor's dogs – but still, you miss the strength brought by a Legion's unity. And you are not the only one with such thoughts. Over the centuries, a cabal has formed within the former Stormseers of the Fifth Legion, dedicated to bringing the scattered White Scars back together. Ever since the Battle of Terra, this group has guarded the body of the Khaghan, protecting your slumbering gene-sire from those who would defile and destroy his physical shell. Once already you saved the Legion from dissolution by returning your Primarch to life, and you shall do so again. For millennia, you have scoured the galaxy for knowledge and materials, preparing for the day you come together and, using every resource at your disposal, bring the Khagan back from the shadowed realms. Ancient eldar texts and sorcerous glyphs carved into cave walls by long-dead civilizations have all been claimed by your hand, and then destroyed to make sure no one could track your progress across the stars and divine your purpose. For you now that, should your goal be discovered, countless enemies would try to destroy you, fearing the power of the Khagan Reborn. Even your Legion brothers cannot be trusted, until he is returned onto you.
Storm-Shrouded Warlock
The power of the storm is yours to command, and it has always been. Even before Ascension, on that distant feral world, you were feared by the other tribesmen for the sparks of lightning you could call down on your enemies even when the sky was clear. After becoming a White Scar, your powers have increased dramatically, to the point where it actually takes a conscious effort to stop the arcs of energy coursing on your armor. You stalk the battlefield like a god out of primitive myth, incinerating your enemies with but a gesture, holding a staff made from vertebrae of psychic foes melted together with your own psychic power. Not for you the visions of prophets or the binding of spirits – for you, the only power of worth is the one you can wield directly, regardless of circumstances or the need to rely on others to do your will. You have spent years raiding the domains of the Corpse-Emperor, earning a dreadful reputation both among your Legion and within the ranks of the Imperials. But as you spend more and more time wreathed in sorcerous lightning, you think you can hear a voice screaming amidst the storm, in pain or anger, you cannot tell for certain. Something in your blood stirs when you catch the voice, as if it were familiar to you – like something from a half-forgotten dream, or another life. As those who hear voices amidst the Nine Legions must either ignore them or learn their true nature, you have decided to find out the truth.
Transformed Hunting Hound
The monsters came to your world, seeking the head of one who had eluded them before. But he was centuries dead, and so they instead descended upon his descendants, and an entire city burned in their wake as they ran every man, woman and child down the streets, filling the air with their screams. You were one of the descendants, but when the leader of that maddened host came upon you, he gave you a choice : die, or join the Wild Hunt. And, curse you for a fool, you took his offer, and were made part of the Wild Hunt by the will of Doomrider himself. You were transformed into a hound for the Hunt, a thing of fangs and claws, running along the other monsters and guiding them toward prey, prey just like you yourself once were. Your memories of the time before you joined the Wild Hunt are fragmentary, but just enough remain that, in your moments of clarity, you mourn what you have lost. Such is the cruelty of the dread powers that hold your soul in their hands. You see glimpses of a woman's face, feel the touch of her hand, the warmth of her smile … and then the pain is too much, and you let yourself drown back into the hound's bloodlust to escape from it. Fortunately, the Wild Hunt never stops. You are not sure what you would do if you ever really had time to consider what you have become, and you don't want to ever find out.
Undying Trophy
You were a Chapter Master before you died. Somehow, you remember that this is important, even if not the reason why. You died on a world of shining cities, defending their people from the very monsters you now serve, and there is a part of you that believes that this is your punishment for failing to save them from the death now denied to you. Your master made sure your body was preserved, spared from desecration. He had your armor repaired, and then he brought you back and made you his servant. Outwardly, when you wear your battle-plate, there is nothing that marks the changes you have gone through, and as you lead the other enslaved revenants to war, your aspect unnerves your former brothers greatly. Sometimes, the enemy thinks you are a living traitor, rather than a corpse-puppet bound to the will of a Fifth Legion's Sorcerer. Your martial skills were preserved as well as your body, and you fight with all the skill it took for you to reach your former rank. Outside of the battlefield, you have fought in honor duels on your master's behalf, sometimes against other Undying, sometimes against mutant champions, and sometimes against White Scars Legionaries. You only fell once, and the victor still died from his injuries mere moments after the end of the fight, which is why your master pulled you back together again. Servitude is all you know now, but there is still something inside you that remember another existence - the same something that remembers words like "Chapter Master" and "Twelfth Legion".
Would-be Rebel
You saw the tithes enacted by the Administratum upon your people, crushing them under endless labor to meet arbitrary quotas, and decided that this was enough. You rallied your comrades against the tyranny of Terra, and became the leader of a planetary rebellion against your fat, inbred Governor and his cronies. You fought to breach his palace and wielded the sword that cut through his neck before you raised his head for all your fellow free men and women to see. And for a time, there was freedom, until the skies turned crimson and you saw just what the Imperium had protected you from. The White Scars laughed when they learned that you had thrown off the Emperor's yoke, and decided to spare you, for your "courage and heroism". You got to see your world burn as the Traitor Marines made sport of your people and plundered all that you had made for yourself, then they took you aboard their vessel as a living memorial of your world. You spend your days in a haze, acting as an errand boy for bemused demigods, carrying messages and doing small tasks they cannot be bothered to do themselves. You know that soon the novelty of you will pass, and then you will no longer be protected from the rest of the human crew. Most of the time, you don't care, but then, the embers of hatred in your heart will flicker, and you will vow to claim vengeance one more time, no matter how hollow the words sound even to yourself.
Space Wolves
Deluded Rune-Priest
It is a lie. A deception of the witches of the Fifteenth, trying to make you doubt the truth of your soul. It must be. Your powers are not like theirs, who call upon the corruption of the Wyrd to unleash maleficarum upon their enemies. You are a son of Fenris, chosen by the world-spirit to wield its blessings against the tainted and the vile. The Thousand Sons destroyed Fenris, but its spirit endures, in your blood and that of every son and daughter your Legion rescued from their unconscionable act of genocide. But so many of your brothers have fallen for that trap, unable to see through the lies of Magnus' heretic sons. It falls to you to remove the wool from their eyes, before in their despair, they wholly succumb to the foul whispers of the Wyrd and become as corrupt as those you were all created to fight. You must shatter the witches' lies by presenting undeniable proof that you are right, no matter the sacrifices required. You have cut apart the descendants of Fenris' people and flayed their souls, seeking for the power you know must be hidden there, empowering you and all the other Rune-Priests. But the Thousand Sons were thorough in their deception, and their vile maleficarum has kept the truth hidden from you for the last ten thousand years. From breaking the minds of Fifteenth Legion's prisoners, you have learned that the Legionaries who destroyed Fenris and started the lie even hid the truth from their own brothers. But you will find the proof one day, and free your Legion from the bitter curse of your ancient enemies.
Enhanced Skald
You were born on Terra, thousands of years ago, during the Great Crusade, and chosen to join the order of the Remembrancers. You no longer remember what exactly your art was back then – so much has been purged from your mind to make place for the countless stories and legends of the Vlka Fenryka. Your brain has been fitted with dozens of augmetics, only some of which are of human origins, in order to enhance your memory's capacity. You live within the holds of a Sixth Legion warship, acting as a vessel for the Wolves' tales of glorious battles and honorable death. On special occasions, such as when your warband encounters another splinter of the Rout, you are brought out of your chambers to recite the tales of long-dead warriors. You know that there are some things in your memory banks that you cannot access without your masters' authorization, secrets that even they would rather be kept. Other Legions who have learned of your existence have tried to capture you in the past, seeking to cut your brain apart and extract the lore hidden within. But your masters have protected you, killing several of their cousins among the Traitor Legions – as well as agents of the Inquisition. Most of your time is spent trying to make sense of what you do remember, but you cannot help but wonder : what truths lie within your mind that draw so many ?
Gene-forged Werebeast
Thousands of years before the accursed Thousand Sons destroyed Fenris and slaughtered its people, the first colonists to reach the ice planet were forced to employ drastic measures in order to be able to survive. Using gene-crafting technologies now lost, they made themselves tougher, more resilient to the cold and harsh conditions of Fenris. In the early days of these experiments, however, many were lost, consumed by the bestial genes implanted within them. Born within the darkholds of a Sixth Legion warship, you are a throwback to those ancient gene-crafted beasts, able to shift at will between a mostly human shape and that of the great wolves who once stalked the snowy landscapes of the lost homeworld. The Astartes captured you during one of their hunts and dragged you out of the darkholds, and with the help of their Apothecaries you learned to master your shape-shifting abilities. The human slaves of the Space Wolves see you as blessed by the spirits, while your transhuman masters consider you an interesting curiosity at best, and a grotesque mutation at worst. So far, the protection of the Apothecaries and your own strength in battle have kept you from death, but you know you must continue to prove your worth to stay alive. The flesh-masters of the warband have begun to talk among themselves about setting a program to try and spread your unique gifts to other humans – perhaps your legacy will be greater than any would have thought.
Keeper of the Forgotten
Your brothers have all forgotten. They remember that the wars happened, and they remember your Legion's part in it – but they have forgotten why, and they have forgotten against whom. Malcador and his agents enforced the will of the Master of Mankind : the decree that the Second and Eleventh Primarchs shall never be spoken of aloud again. Everyone who took part in those shameful campaigns was mind-wiped, with only shadows remaining where the memories were. Even the Primarchs themselves were bound by the decree, though some submitted to it willingly. Even breaking your oaths to the Golden Throne at Russ' command hasn't freed your brothers from that imposed amnesia. But you remember. For some reason, the spells of the Sigillite's agents failed to take root within your mind. You remember the names of the Lost Primarchs, and you remember how and why their legacy had to be wiped out. You remember … But you will not speak. You will keep the vow of silence you made in sight of the Emperor Himself, not because you are compelled to, but because you know that, by now, it would make no difference. Still, you think that there should remain at last one trace of the Forgotten Ones' existence, and you have left clues scattered across the galaxy, in secret from even your Legion brothers. It is a small thing, but in these dark times, it is all you can do to keep their memory alive, even in this small, pathetic way. And even that is dangerous, for you can feel the gaze of the Dark Gods turning upon you – they too, like the Emperor they claim to oppose and seek to destroy, would rather the Forgotten Ones remain secret.
Purger of Deviancy
You might have been cast out and cursed by the very Imperium you fought to protect, but you haven't left bitterness and hate blind you to your duty. The oaths you swore, the ideals you promised to uphold, these are more important than any accusation of treachery from blind fools with no comprehension of the true stake of your war. Let them call you traitor because of what you did at Prospero – you know that the purge was wholly justified, it just wasn't thorough enough. As the Imperium descends into ignorance and corruption, you have led the fight to keep Mankind pure, destroying entire settlements of abominable mutants and abhumans within its ranks. You do not concern yourselves with the twisted hosts of the Lost and the Damned – they are merely the outside threat, and you know full well that the true menace comes from within. You have destroyed entire cities, and even directed xenos invasions toward planets where the infection was too widespread to be excised. The genetic template of Mankind must be protected at all costs. In the Great Crusade, you saw with your own eyes what horrors could be made from twisting its sacred pattern when under the influence of physical and spiritual corruption. You will not let the Imperium become that which you fought in those days – and if, as you fear, the only solution is to burn it all to the ground, then so be it. Better for Humanity to die in flames than to become an abomination.
Prophet of the Wolftime
The hour draws near. For ten millennia, the Space Wolves have haunted the galaxy, spreading the madness of their lost father, echoing his corruption in a hundred different ways. But the hour of the Wolf King's promised return looms, and you have emerged from your lair within the Eye of Terror, where you coalesced into existence from the very concept of Russ' return. You are a daemon, a Warp-born projection of the Space Wolves' own desires and beliefs, of their quest for their lost Primarch. You are the Prophet of the Wolftime, and you walk the paths even angels fear to thread toward the fulfilment of your divine purpose. Your frame hidden from sight by a cloak made of every lie the Sixth Legion tells to itself, you search for the one destined to shatter the bonds of the Wolf King's prison and usher him back into reality from his exile. Where you walk, the flesh of Mankind twists as the echoes of the beasts the species is descended from are drawn back to the surface. For a hundred centuries, Leman Russ has been taken off the board, but now, the Gods call for him to be brought back. But even the Gods themselves do not know what exactly will return from the realm to which he was banished – only you know, and you silently laugh as you stalk ever closer to the One-handed Lord. Soon, you whisper under your breath to the numberless host of your Neverborn kindred that surrounds you, waiting for destiny's wheel to turn once more. Soon …
Tempered Experimental Subject
The Great One Hraldir is your master, and you are the agent of his will. It is in his name that you make war, hunting for that which he requires for the continuation of his great work. Yours is not to question the whys and hows of the Great One's purpose. Once, you did question him – you even tried to kill him, a memory that brings the barest remnant of shame to your withered soul whenever you dwell back upon it. But the Great One was merciful, and not only did he spare you from his wrath, he freed you from doubt and made you all the stronger from it, just as when he freed you from the beast that threatened to consume you from within. Like your body and your mind, your wargear has benefited from the Great One's attentions, enhanced so that you might face the far more numerous armies of those who blindly oppose him. Side by side with those who share in his blessings, you fight in silence, unconcerned by idle thoughts of glory or bloodlust, annihilating all who stand in the Great One's path. Thrar Hraldir shall bring forth a new age for all of the galaxy, and it is your great honor to be part of this crusade, however small your contribution. So shall the rest of the Milky Way's races be honored, whether they become part of the grand design or are devoured to feed the Great One's hunger. All shall find their place within Hraldir's glory.
Thirteenth Company Changeling
Jerin Bloodhowl, the Jarl of the Thirteenth Great Company, led you and your brothers into the Eye of Terror after Russ' disappearance. He told you that by venturing into its depths, you would confront the flaw within yourselves, and find a way to master it. But he was a lying whoreson, and it was your jaw that snapped his neck when you and your brothers realized exactly what hell he had brought you into. Now the Thirteenth has no leader, for it needs none – you all follow the impulses of the Beast that binds you all together, hunting across the Eye, unbound by time and space. You have changed, in this timeless abyss, losing more and more of what you were as the power of the Wyrd flows within you. You understand now that the Rune-Priests were fool to fear it – it is Mankind's own power, its collective soul reflected back at it in all its dark glory. And you and the other members of the Thirteenth are the true face of the Vlka Fenryka, the future of the Sixth Legion. You are the hunters of the Gods, fiends of shadow and bloodlust that cannot be stopped as they test the Champions of Chaos and purge the unworthy from their ranks in preparation for the time when Chaos engulfs the galaxy. That time is coming, you can feel it in the blood of your victims, in the pressure growing within the Sea of Souls. Soon you will be unleashed from this realm of fire and soul-stuff and let loose into the galaxy. Such prey you will hunt then …
Wulfen Alpha
You were marked for greatness, so said the shamans of your tribe. You hunted and killed your first Karnausaur at the age of twelve, when most adult men need the help of several of their fellow to defeat one of the great reptiles. But when the Space Wolves descended upon your world's jungles and stole an entire generation for their flesh-masters' tables, your destiny was irrevocably altered. You endured the trials and the implantation of Russ' gene-seed, but within mere months of your ascension, you transformed into a Wulfen, your mind all but consumed by the beast lurking within the Canis Helix. Wearing makeshift armor, you dwell in the lower decks, leading your brethren into hunts across the ship for meat and sport. And when your warlord issues the call for war, you gather the pack into the launching bays, where you are guided into customized drop-pods and transports that will bring you to the enemy. In battle, you fight with your teeth and claws, to claim the flesh of your foes and to protect your pack-mates. Seven times already you have faced a challenge for leadership, but you have won every time, leaving the challenger alive as a lesson to him and the rest. Unknown to you, the Rune Priest of the warband is keeping an eye on you, for despite your fall into beasthood, echoes of the destiny promised to you still linger, clinging to your aura.
Xenophile Arch-Heretek
There is power in knowledge, this you know to be true. True, it was also the motto of the witches of the Fifteenth Legion, but even the foolish sons of the Cyclops had to be right sometimes. Their mistake was to seek knowledge of the Wyrd, letting its corruption flow through them. You are not so blind, and have confined your studies to the deepest matters of the Materium. You were a Techmarine of the Rout during the Errance, and collected many exemplars of xenos technology while the Wolf King led the Legion far beyond Imperial borders in search of proof of his own righteousness. In the alien tech, you found paths to power unlike any you encountered before, and you have pursued them for the last ten thousand years. You do not follow anyone but yourself, and have gathered a cabal of Dark Mechanicus priests and renegade hereteks from the Imperium around you. You have even welcomed several xenos into your circle, including a Tau from the Water Caste who fled after uncovering secret ruins his Ethereal masters wanted to remain conceal. Your research has created many weapons you sell to other warbands in exchange for supplies and rare artefacts. Your own body is heavily augmented with forbidden technology, making you nigh-unkillable and allowing you to process information faster than any save the greatest arch-magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus, whose mind is wired into the cogitator-networks of entire planets. All that matter to you is to continue your research, hoping to one day achieve true technological transcendence.
Imperial Fists
Admiral of the Damned
In the time of the Great Crusade, you were renowned for your talent at void warfare, and that reputation has only grown since then. The first time you spilled Astartes blood was in Isstvan, when you gave the orders that condemned a thousand Imperial Fists to their deaths without they even knowing you had betrayed them. You still dream of their screams, even now that you are more machine than Astartes now, fused to the command throne of your battleship through centuries of cybernetic augmentations by Dark Mechanicum priests and the warping gifts of the Gods. You see the universe through a ship's senses, and strike at your foes with the corresponding fury. In the Eye of Terror, your services are worth a king's ransom among the warring factions competing for supremacy. Not only do you bring the might of your warped battleship, your ability to command fleets has made the difference between ignominious defeat and glorious victory many times in the Legion Wars. Your only loyalty is to yourself, or rather to the amalgamation of Legionary and warship you have become. Payment in the form of slaves for your crew, repairs for your hull or new weapons for you to wield is sure to secure your services, for a time, and you have only broken your word a handful of times over the centuries, always for a good reason. In the Eye of Terror, that makes you as trustworthy a monster as they come. You know that some among the Dark Mechanicum regard you as something of a god, a divine fusion of machine and flesh, and you wonder whether you should encourage that worship or crush it before it starts changing you.
Black Templar Champion
You only remember fragments of your life before becoming a Black Templar. Images of rockrete towers and clouds of toxic smoke blocking the skies, endless lines of workers dressed in colourless uniforms … Truly, the Black Templars saved you from a miserable existence. Your rise among the Sword Brethren was meteoric, and now you carry into battle the banner of your lord, a powerful Imperial Fist who takes his orders directly from the Destroyer himself. The banner itself is a relic, formed of the threads of a hundred Imperial Guard Regiments' own and ritually blessed with the blood of their entire officer corps. It flies above your head, its haft planted between your shoulders, and radiates the power of the Lord of Skulls. Beneath it, you fight with a two-handed chainsword far older than yourself. You are not a duellist – you are a killer, and you have reaped a tally of skulls that would not shame many a Legionary thousands of years your senior. You walk the path of Khorne as written by Sigismund himself, shielding your soul from the rage of battle through discipline and ritual offerings to the Blood God. War is all you know, and in it you find a purity of purpose and strength that no Imperial serf could ever dream of. You are bound to your brothers by chains of oaths sworn upon the altar of Khorne, knowing that to break them is to call the Darkness upon you – a fate that is the only thing capable of inspiring something like dread in your soul.
Delirious Excoriator
You were mighty once. Respected. The Legion warbands spoke of your deeds in hushed whispers, praising your skill at the two-swords style. Thrice, you won the Feast of Blade, earning the right to carry the Dornsblade in battle as you reaped the skulls of your foes for the glory of Khorne and Rogal Dorn. You were the lord of a great host of warriors, human and transhuman, come to follow you into battle and share in your glory. But then, on your fourth participation in the Feast, you failed. Your opponent did not simply beat you : he broke you, shattering every bone in your arms before not even giving you the honor of taking your head. The shame of this humiliation combined with the fact that your arms never healed properly have driven you mad, and you joined the ranks of the accursed Excoriators soon after. The wounds suffered in that final duel still pain you, and the only way to make the memories that pain brings go away is to inflict more suffering upon your flesh. Within your cell aboard one of the warships that once sailed under your banner, you scourge your own body time and again, trying to banish the visions of your brothers' sneers and your Primarch's disfavour. On the rare occasions you are let loose, you are a brute, none of your former grace remaining. You still fight with two blades, but they are blunt bludgeons now, masses of metal vaguely shaped like swords and chained to your fists. You scream as you fight, revelling in the temporary oblivion from the memories of that fateful defeat. Even Astartes recoil from you then.
General of the Long War
Savagery is all well and good, but you know it is discipline that will win the war against the False Emperor. The numberless hosts of the Lost and the Damned are mighty and blessed by the Pantheon, but as long as they remain a horde instead of becoming an army, they stand no chance to ever break through the Iron Cage – and you know better than to expect the Traitor Legions to ever achieve this, divided and twisted as they are. In your hands, the mortals of the Eye will be shaped into the weapon with which you will accomplish what even Rogal Dorn could not. You left your Legion during the Breaking, escaping the madness of the Primarch's ascension on a small ship, and have since then built a small empire within the Eye's border regions. Entire worlds are dedicated to raising armies under your command. The humans and mutants worship you as their god-king, and you spend their lives in the Long War without any remorse. The brutal meritocracy you enforce in your domain has prevented the worst excesses of the Ruinous Powers from weakening you, but warbands from all Traitor Legions often come to claim your slaves for themselves. You tell yourself that without these constant distractions forcing you to play the game of alliances and betrayal you would have already conquered the Iron Warriors' fortresses barring the way to realspace, but deep within your black heart, you know that this is simply an excuse, which angers you like nothing else.
Hunter of the Destroyer
Sigismund did more than betray the Seventh Legion : he murdered it. The Destroyer's title is well-earned, for his infamous acts after the first battle of the Iron Cage shattered all hopes of the Imperial Fists remaining a cohesive force during the Long War. You were there on Esk'Al'Urien when the heavens filled with fire as Imperial Fists vessels shot at each other, and you saw your Primarch confront his wayward son and the coward make his escape. You have vowed to bring the head of Sigismund to Rogal Dorn, that the Primarch may drag his soul from the aether and burn it in the inferno of his rage. For millennia, you have hunted the lord of the Black Templars, accompanied by several of your Legion brothers who have taken the same oath. These wretches who bear the black of Sigismund's warband are on the receiving end of your strongest hate, for they did not even have the convictions of the betrayer, instead choosing to follow him like sheep. Over the years, you have made alliances with other factions who have a grudge with the Destroyer – and there are many who wish him dead. Several times you have had him nearly at your mercy, but he has always escaped, either by luck or by sheer martial prowess – for all your hatred of Sigismund, not even you can deny his skill with the daemon blade he wields. But you will get him one day. These stories that the Destroyer is the Chosen of Khorne and cannot be killed are just that : stories. Anyone can be killed.
Knight of the Blood God
You were the third son of the High King, forever kept in your elder siblings' shadow as they learned the political acumen necessary to rule a Knight World of the Imperium. Though you hid your resentment at this state of things well, it festered within you, but you didn't act upon it, instead burying yourself in your training. Then the Orks came, a tide of green flesh seeking to destroy all that belonged to your family. You saw your father and brothers' mounts torn apart, their bodies ripped out of the ancient suits of knightly armor and taken as trophies by the greenskins. In that moment, you realized that, for all your bitterness, you had loved them, and your grief ignited into a hatred of the xenos that swelled until it called the warriors of the Blood God. The Imperial Fists warband cleansed your world of alien filth, then took the surviving people as slaves and you as a worthy addition to their forces. Your Knight, its Imperial heraldry removed and replaced by markings more pleasing to the Lord of Skulls, has been changing to reflect your new allegiance, its spirit growing more wrathful every month. You have had the ranged weapons taken off as well, replaced by blades capable of cutting through tank armor with ease. Now you seek to gather other Knights at your side, knowing that the Imperium is too weak to survive and that Mankind must embrace the strength of the Blood God to endure in a galaxy filled with xenos predators. Your House shall yet return.
Shame-marked Secondborn
Among the Imperial Fists, possession is seen in a myriad ways depending on the individual. Some think it a blessing, others a curse. But both these groups look down upon you for the manner in which you came to share your flesh with one of Khorne's Neverborn children. You were one of the warriors who, at the dawn of the Legion Wars, journeyed to the nameless homeworld of the Raven Guard. There, amidst horrors such as you had never thought were possible, something broke within you and Dorn's Darkness claimed you, for a time. Miraculously, you did not remain trapped within that abyss of fury, eventually rescued from the planet's dangers by the sons of Corax themselves and send back to your ship with amused warnings never to return. But you weren't alone in your body anymore : somehow, a daemon was now bound to your soul. With the help of daemonists, you have confirmed that the creature is a servant of the Blood God and not one of the dread horrors spawned by the Nineteenth Legion's activities, which came at something of a relief. Trying to question the daemon for details of how your union came to be has only brought forth mocking infernal laughter and foreboding hints of payments yet to be made, promises yet to be honored. Your story has spread across the Seventh, marking you as foolish in the eyes of most of your brothers. At last the daemon within you is powerful, its strength making you even harder to kill, whilst your transformed form is a terror of sharp claws and blood-dripping fangs.
Skull-Harvesting Daemon Prince
You look upon the offerings of your brothers, and quietly chuckle. You have built pyramids of the skulls of your slain foes, monuments to your deeds in the glory of Khorne. Entire worlds have been depopulated by your warband, and not just any hive-worlds teeming with human filth : you targeted war worlds, where entire generations were born and raised knowing only war. You slew eight worlds in this manner, and for that the Blood God rewarded you with ascension into the ranks of the Neverborn. The power you wield now makes the might you controlled as a Lord of Chaos pale in comparison. Entire cities are driven mad with bloodlust when you turn your gaze toward them from the Sea of Souls. Imperial Regiments are freed from the shackles of the Corpse-God with but a whisper in their souls. And still, the harvest continues, though now you can only take part in it directly when it is already well under way, and the veil has been properly thinned by millions of deaths. You have left a trail of destruction and death across time and space, but you have also made powerful enemies. The servants of the other Dark Gods are jealous of your success, and the thrice-cursed Knights of Titan are hunting you, their sorcerous gifts allowing them to track you through time itself. They thwarted you once, forcing you to retreat back into the Warp before you could fully manifest your power and destroy them. For this, you have sworn revenge – next time, they will pay.
Slayer of Angels
You were a Captain once, but now you are a Chaos Lord of Khorne, fully dedicated to the Legion Wars and the Great Game of Chaos. Your goals are simple : the total and complete extermination of the Ninth Legion, and the destruction of every trace of the Blood Angels' foul, degenerate legacy. The vampires are a plague, a scourge upon the Eye's already tumultuous society. They destroy and devour to satiate their unslakable thirst, weakening all other Legions and bringing nearly nothing in the Long War. Their decadence started the War of Woe in the first place, when they raided the Seventh Legion's gene-forging facilities to please their ally the Primogenitor. Some of your hatred is directed toward Bile and his twisted parody of a Legion, but even you have to respect the madman's ambitions and achievements in the Long War. One day you may fight alongside the Black Legion to destroy the Imperium, but first the Eye must be purged of the Blood Angels. To that end, you have gathered allies from all other Traitor Legions trapped within the Iron Cage, and made pacts with daemons and Dark Mechanicum arch-hereteks. Word of your crusade has spread thorough the Eye, and the favor of Khorne is upon you for your holy war against the servants of his rival Slaanesh. You have laid waste to the Blood Angels' domains for centuries, though you know full well that the bulk of the Ninth is nomadic, endlessly searching for fresh blood. In your most ambitious moments, you dream of attacking the Harbinger Star one day, and challenge Sanguinius' own fortress. Perhaps that would be enough to draw out the cowards …
Terminator Faithful
Your Legion has scattered across the Eye, but you remain at your post. Esk'Al'Urien has not come under a real attack in many, many years, but there are still those who seek to plunder the relics of Khorne buried beneath its magmatic ground, or who foolishly believe they can earn the gods' favour by defeating Rogal Dorn himself. There is no real leadership among the handful of Imperial Fists who had remained close to the Primarch, for none would dare to elevate themselves and risk drawing his legendary ire. Clad in your Tactical Dreadnought Armor, you keep watch over the few structures who endure the tectonic upheavals caused by your Primarch's undying fury at Sigismund's betrayal. You have fought off raiders, Legion warbands, daemonic hosts of each of the Four (very much including Khorne, whose Neverborn come to test the last of Dorn's faithful sons very frequently) and even a Harlequin troupe once, though how the xenos found their way to the daemon world remains a mystery to you, as do their motives. In more recent times, you accompanied your Primarch on Armageddon, dragged alongside him by the summoning ritual of the Space Wolves' summoners. When he was banished by the Grey Knights' foul sorcery, so were you, which has caused questions to rise within your mind. Just how tightly are you bound to the towering daemon of bloodlust and rage that your Primarch has become ? Is it loyalty, or something else that keeps you at Esk'Al'Urien, instead of going in the Eye and find your own glory ?
Night Lords
Ancient Dreadnought Guardian
You were there on Isstvan V. As a member of the Night Guard, you were chosen to accompany your father on what he knew would be his last battle. You saw him fight the Black Dragon, and slay him, time and again, only for Vulkan to rise from death every time. You saw Konrad Curze die, felt your heart and soul break, and fought at the side of Talos Valcoran to reclaim his body from the Salamanders. Like all those who fought on the black sands, you have never recovered, and vowed to guard the tomb of your gene-sire for all eternity. In time, you were interred within a Dreadnought, and have continued your watch ever since. Unlike other Dreadnoughts, you have not gone into stasis to pass away the millennia : you have remained active every single day since your intombment, watching the heavens of Nostramo for any signs of those who would despoil the Legion's homeworld. However, in recent years, your mind has started to suffer under the strain, and the Techmarines are advising you to enter stasis before you suffer irreversible damage. You have refused them, but the sweet release of stasis beckons you, pulling you in a different direction than your duties and your oaths. Your brothers assure you that this would not be a betrayal of your vows, but you still reject them, for now. There is something in the hallucinations that have begun to plague you – a hint of darkness creeping ever closer – that has convinced you that Nostramo is threatened, and that you must be awake to face that danger. Perhaps the Techmarines are right, and that darkness is your own demise, but just in case they are wrong, you will take the risk.
Blind Doomseer
Like so many psykers taken into the Eighth Legion, you have inherited your Primarch's prophetic gift, but all you can see is death. Your death, and the deaths of your brothers. You wouldn't have believed there were so many ways for a Space Marine to die, yet even after a hundred years of glimpses of possible demises, you still got to witness new ones. When the actual visions descended, leaving you trashing helplessly, you would see the death of your Legion, though you never remembered anything afterwards and your crazed screams were impossible to interpret. During your last fit, your brothers weren't quick enough to restrain you, and you tore your own eyes out. Rather than accept augmetic replacements, you use your other senses instead, and have had a custom helmet made in the forges. Its blank, eyeless face is very effective at frightening sinners, and if you can't look at your brothers, then you can't see them die, over and over. Even without your sight, you remain a powerful psyker, sensing your enemies through your hidden senses and capable of rending their bodies and minds – and the mutilation seems to keep the visions at bay. You know this isn't an healthy attitude to have, and that the Chaplains are worried about you, but you just couldn't take it anymore. Freedom from the visions has brought you a kind of peace, but you can still feel your body changing as the gene-seed tries to alter your flesh even further. You know these symptoms, and you know what they portend : it won't be long now before you are trapped in endless agony and your brothers must put you out of your misery. Please, let death be silent …
Conman Sin-Eater
You still aren't sure how in the Emperor's name you ended up here, or how you are still alive. You were a preacher on an Imperial hive-world, speaking the good word to the nobility while lining your pockets with their generous donations and generally living a far better life than you had when you were still a two-bit crook in the underhive. Then the Night Lords came and slaughtered nearly all of the Spire-born, revealing their hidden treachery against the Golden Throne. That night, while every noble in the spire you had been invited to was hunted and slain in the dark, with all power cut off, you learned that even a crook can pray honestly if he is terrified enough. When dawn came, one of them came to you, his face covered by a terrifying skull-mask, and told you that you had been chosen to serve the Eighth Legion. They took you aboard their ship, and you learned your new job from the others who share the same duties. Now you act as a confessor for transhuman killing machines who, you have learned to your shock, still have a conscience. They talk to you about the wars they wage, about the enemies they face and the horrors they see. The poker face you developed in your youth is very useful in keeping you from vomiting at what they describe, and you have learned more about the true state of the Imperium's position in the galaxy that you are comfortable knowing. Your new life has far less creature comforts as the previous one, but you have found a kind of clarity in the austerity, and there is glory to see in the Night Lords' service.
Herald of the Eighth
The reputation of the Night Lords has been used as a tool to keep peace within the Imperium countless times. Inquisitors and Arbites use the threat of the sons of Curze's coming to quell uprisings and the treacherous ambitions of the nobility. But sometimes, a more direct approach is required, for the Space Marines are often little more than legends to the folk of the Imperium. In those cases, it is you that the Legion sends. You go ahead of your brothers to meet with the leaders of rebellious worlds or those torn by civil war between rival factions, and lay down the ultimatum : submit and return to peace, or face the wrath of the Eighth. Due to a flaw in your gene-seed, your face look like that of a parched corpse, with eyes of pure obsidian and white teeth smiling amidst crimson lips. Your mere aspect has been enough to convince rebels to surrender in the past, while your voice, calm and soft as a rising ocean tide, can break the composure of the most arrogant self-styled warlord. With a honor squad escorting you aboard a small frigate, you also often have to fight to reach those to whom the ultimatum is to be delivered. You act independantly from any Company, moving at the behest of the Kyroptera and upon intel from the Alpha Legion and the Holy Ordos alike. Nevertheless, should your ultimatum be refused, the Legion will come to make your promise of retribution a reality. Of course, when that happens, it means you failed in your task, which is doubly annoying, for not only does that result in a waste of precious human lives, the one personality flaw to which you will admit is that you enjoy the look of terror on a nobleman's face.
Kyroptera New Blood
When your master died from the hole punched in his chest by a Tau railgun, you rallied your brothers and, after securing victory for the Imperium by mounting a daring assault on the xenos command center and giving their Ethereal overseers a simple choice, brought his body back to Nostramo. You were not expecting your deeds to earn you his place in the Kyroptera, but you accepted that new duty, and are now among the Legion's leaders. There are many secrets you must learn, passed on from one generation of the Kyroptera to the next all the way from the Prince of Crows and his own council. Some of these secrets would shake the Imperium to its core if they were ever revealed. You have still much to learn – each member of the Kyroptera is guardian to his own part of the Legion's secrets, including a part of the others' so that they may never be lost. Already you have learned an uncomfortable amount about the delicate balance of power between the Legions and the rest of the Imperium – most Night Lords do not realize how much the Eighth is responsible for preserving the equilibrium and preventing another disastrous civil war. You have not seen war for over a year now, but the diplomatic battlefield is perhaps even more violent and vicious, for all that it is cloaked in politeness and regalia. So many factions competing for their own interests ahead those of the Imperium – sometimes you can understand the temptation to just seize power through force. But that is not what the Emperor and the King of the Night intended for you.
Lord of Terror
You are a rarity among Mankind, a soul like few have existed since the Great Crusade : you were not born within the Imperium. Instead, your parents were slaves of the Dark Eldar, cattle to one of the depraved xenos' nobles in his domain. The first building you saw as a child was your owner's palace, built from the bones of Eldar victims in the time of that race's great decadence, before the weight of their own sins dragged them to their deserved doom. You saw both of your parents flayed alive before your very eyes before your were nine years old, and that would have been your fate too, if not for the intervention of the Night Lords. The Eighth Legion had tracked the depredations of the Dark Eldars back to their lair, and a combined assault of five different Companies razed the monstrous fortress to the ground. Liberated from the slave cages, you caught the eye of the Chaplains when you strangled the Homonculi overseeing your prison with the very chains binding you. Since then, you have proven your worth and risen to become Captain of your own Company, leading a hundred of your brothers in battle. Your past has left you with a great understanding of fear, for it was your constant companion during your earlier years. You speak little, but your words are always laden with significance. The retribution campaigns you orchestrate are more violent than some in the Legion would like, but no world visited by you has ever rebelled again. You know that there is little mercy in your heart, and you would mourn its absence if you were still capable of that emotion. For now, all you can do is serve the Emperor by bringing His wrath upon His foes, and pray that one day the wounds the Dark Eldar inflicted upon your soul will heal.
Psychopathic Renegade
Your "brothers" are deluded fools who lie to themselves so that they can feel better about what they do. Even if that means serving those who are so clearly inferior to them, those who are only fit to be preyed upon for your amusement, they still cling to the False Emperor's lies. But not you. You saw the truth of things when your homeworld burned in the fires of war : you saw that the universe is not fair, not just, not kind. It rewards the strong and the cruel and crushes the innocent and the weak. They took you because you survived where so many had died, and you pretended to care about their talk of "justice" and "mercy". Thankfully the Company had lost its Librarian, or they may have caught on your deception. After a few years, your opportunity presented itself and you took it, abandoning your squad in the middle of a raid on a pirate station. Using the very lessons they had taught you, you vanished and stole one of the pirate ships, forcing the crew into obedience by flaying their former captain alive. For half a century afterward, you lived the life of a warlord on the frontier of Imperial space, raiding shipments and reveling in your power over lesser beings. But now, the Night Lords have finally heard about the transhuman in midnight clad leading a coalition of pirates and mercenary groups through fear and intimidation. Your former Company has moved to capture you, aided by one Inquisitor who has dedicated her resources to your removal. But you won't be caught. You are too smart for that – after all, what can a bunch of foolish do-gooders do against you, unfettered as you are by their stupid ideas of morality ?
Red-Marked Doubter
Your hands are red for your failure, but your sin was fairly unique in the history of the Legion : you were punished for showing mercy. You believed that a group of humans you found in a war-torn city were civilians who had somehow survived the horrors of the conflict around them, and defended them on the way back to the Imperial camp. But they were not : they were traitors, and they used you to pass through enemy lines and detonate several explosive charges, crippling the reclamation efforts in the area. You went to your Captain in shame, and asked for your gauntlets to bear the Mark yourself, that you may always be reminded of the Imperial blood spilled by your fault. The Captain tried to dissuade you, but you insisted until he accepted. Since then, you have been on six different suicide missions, but have survived all of them. And you cannot help but wonder what the implications of your sin are. If showing mercy and compassion can be so easily exploited by those of evil intent, then are they still virtues worth preserving ? Does the galaxy allow for them, or are they weaknesses that will always destroy those who arbour them ? The King of the Night taught that without them, a Space Marine was nothing but a weapon – but aren't weapons what the Legions were created to be ? So many questions, haunting your nights. The Chaplains tell you that the Night Lords must walk this difficult path to preserve Humanity, both in the Imperium and within themselves, but you are not so sure that the second part of that goal is really possible.
Soul Listener
From the time of your childhood, you could hear the voices of the dead. It was only whispers at first, too faint to make out words, and you only heard them when you walked on the very spot where they had met their demise, and so it was easy to ignore them. Then you were chosen for the Legion, and the voices grew louder. With the help of the Librarians, you learned to keep them under control, and then to draw strength from them. You are a Raptor in your Company, striking from above without warning, and the dead guide your hand as you bring retribution upon their killers. Every enemy you face that has already taken life – and all those you encounter in service to the Emperor meet that criteria – is shrouded by the echoes of the slain, who tell you of their sins and weaknesses. Your brothers know of your gift, and they respect you for it, considering you blessed by Curze's blood with a gift most useful in the pursuit of justice he entrusted to the Legion. Despite your training, the voices have grown louder in recent years, and you have started to actually see the ghosts of the dead clinging to their killers, crying out for vengeance. And while you aren't quite sure of it, there were a few occasions were you thought you saw them actually attack their killers, distrating them at the crucial moment for you to strike them down. You do not know what this may portend, but you doubt it is anything good, even if the dead have so far been your allies.
Temple Operative
You are a Callidus Assassin, trained for infiltration and shape-shifting. After years of faithfully serving your masters, you were assigned to the long-standing program of operatives cooperating with the Eighth Legion. At first, you were unsure about the interests of the program, not seeing what the brutish soldiers of the Legions had to offer to the subtle, dagger-like blades of the Assassinorum. Now, after nearly ten years serving at the side of the Night Lords, you understand the strength that comes from this alliance. The Night Lords wield fear as a weapon, and your ability to go where they cannot go reinforce the all-seeing, all-reaching image of the God-Emperor's justice. When the Night Lords prepare a campaign and infiltrate strategic locations, they send you to get the intel they need and then to take position near the most valuable target, awaiting the correct time to take them out. You have always taken pride in your work, in how the death of a single being could lead to the total collapse of a threat to the Imperium, but the Night Lords have expanded upon and perfected that art. You have learned much from them about larger-scale operations, and understand now why so many of the Assassins sent to the Eighth Legion have later risen to become Grand Masters. Your own ambitions are more modest : you are content to serve the Emperor as a blade wielded by those who carry His blood in their veins. There is so much to learn here, and not just on the field : the Night Lords keep extensive records of their association with the Temples, including detailed lore about some of the Officio Assassinorum's most legendary operations.
Blood Angels
Aeldari Webway Hunter
You haunt the Webway with packs of other Blood Angels and hosts of Slaaneshi Neverborn, seeking paths to Eldar Craftworlds. Sometimes you stalk the corridors of the Labyrinthine Dimension on foot, other times you sail aboard vast daemonships teeming with predatory lifeforms – at least the journeys aren't boring. In order to survive in such an hostile environment, surrounded by creatures that would as soon devour your own blood and soul as fight at your side, you have found ways to make yourself indispensable. While it is exceptionally rare for you to actually find a way into a Craftworld, there are thousands of Eldar ships using the Webway, waiting to be ambushed for the sweet xenos blood and souls they carry. On these rare occasions, while the rest of the Slaaneshi host feast upon the Eldar with wild abandon, you hunt for the Farseers and navigators, for the parchments and records of the paths of the Webway. By consuming their memories along with their blood, you have become able to guide your peers through the Labyrinthine Dimension, accumulating more and more knowledge as the centuries pass. Warlords from all across the Eye have sought your aid in their own ambitions, and you have even granted it a few times, always for a price of Eldar souls or lore. You are not the leader of your warhost, that honor falls to a powerful cabal of Keepers of Secrets and near-ascended Blood Angels, but none would dare do you harm and risk bringing upon themselves the wrath of Slaanesh, for you have been blessed for your work.
Blood Concubine
You were the daughter of an Imperial Governor, destined for a political marriage to the scion of another spire-born family in order to strengthen your dynasty's hold onto power. But that fate never interested you : you sought a more passionate and vibrant existence. You turned to the worship of the Dark Prince early, partaking in grand rites and debaucheries hidden within your homeworld's gleaming spires. Then came the Blood Angels, brought forth by the echoes of your cult's excesses, and you laughed as they devoured your family and filled the streets with screams. One of them took an interest in you, and took you for his own. Since then, you have become a blood-queen among the Ninth Legion slaves aboard your master's warship, worshipped as a true daugther of the Youngest God. You have learned much of the Dark Prince's ways, and grown in power and ambition, but you are still fully aware of the leash around your neck, as your Astartes master watches over you, taking amusement in your games and occasionally descending into your domain in person to feed on the best of your followers and bestow his mocking blessings upon the rest. He has drunk of your blood too, though not enough to truly damage you, and you know that a part of your soul now exists within him – and you long to have it back, with all the rest of his power. One day, it will be yours.
Cannibalistic Predator
It is said that time has no meaning within the Eye of Terror, and that is true, but those who speak these words do not understand their real implication. You have endured for countless tens of thousands of years within the Great Eye, perhaps hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions. You have feasted upon the blood of entire populations, and it is no longer enough to sustain your debased mind. You seek the only blood of worth, the only blood carrying enough memories to appease your Thirst : the blood of your brother Blood Angels. Every victim a son of Sanguinius drains lives on, in a fashion, within his vitae, and drinking it along with his soul allows you to relive every life he ever claimed at once. Your age has transformed you beyond even what the Dark Prince's gifts have remade your Legion into : you think in patterns wholly alien to the human mind, driven by a hunger none can comprehend save perhaps the Neverborn themselves. The warbands of the Ninth speak of you in whisper, not quite sure if you are legend or truth, mortal or daemon. Neither are you, but in the depths of your depravity, you do not care. You hunt the Blood Angels without pause or remorse, slaking your Thirst on their souls, wielding strange powers developped over aeons of Warp-enforced evolution. The blood of other Astartes can sustain you for a time, but it is only that of the Ninth Legion which brings you the ecstasy you so desire.
Devourer of Daemons
Why don't your brothers understand ? The blood of mortals is thin, their souls pathetically weak. And preying upon other Legionaries isn't a viable solution – there are only so many of you, and after a time, the memories of one warrior are pretty much indistinguishable from another. But the Neverborn come in infinite variations, and their memories are entirely different from those of any mortal soul. Your first taste of daemonic vitae was after a crash on a daemon world within the Eye of Terror you were the only one to survive. After months fighting the mutated beasts and the Neverborn predators, the Thirst finally drove you to the point where you overcame your doubts and partook of the daemon's ichor. And the experience was wonderful. You saw the birth and death of stars, the rise and collapse of galactic empires, the thoughts and nightmares of cultures. You felt the universe's heartbeast, and fed upon its blood. In that moment, you found revelation : daemons are shards of the galaxy's psychic reflection, and through them you will experience everything. Of course, that comes at a price – your body is more Warp-matter than flesh now. But you continue your quest, seeking the more esoteric Neverborn in order to experience more and more abstract experiences. No mere slaughter-beast or pleasurebound fiend will sate your appetite now : you search for truly unique creatures, spawned from unique confluences of events. The Neverborn know your name and hate and fear you in equal measure, while daemonists across the Eye want you dead.
Drukhari Exile
You are a Dark Eldar, the scion of one of Commoragh's noble bloodline, stretching back all the way to the glory days of the Empire, when your kind ruled the stars with an iron grip and all others were but playthings to their appetites. Things changed when Slaanesh was born and your ancestors proved too weak to accept the god their own deeds had shaped. But you aren't as stupid as they were. You have embraced the Youngest Goddess, She-Who-Thirst. You make offerings of pain to her, that she may reward you with prolonged life before you are reunited with her. It's no different from what all of your kin do, really – it's just that you aren't lying to yourself about why you do it. Nevertheless, you were forced to flee the Dark City after your religious inclinations were discovered, and fell in with the warband of a Blood Angel of particular ambition and deviancy. He welcomed you in and even made you one of his lieutnants, though the rest of his warband hates and fears you with equal passion. There is much to see and experience in the Great Eye – even the constant pull of She-Who-Thirst on your soul is a pleasant sensation to a true sybarite. With blade and whip, you fight on behalf of your lord, knowing that every day, he weighs the pros and cons of letting you live against those of claiming your blood and soul. So exciting – this is what it means to be alive, to be a true Eldar ! Even the wytches of the arenas cannot claim to know such danger !
Lord of the Sensate Court
You were one of the Ninth Legion's highest-ranking officers before the War of Woe and the dissolution of the Blood Angels with the revelation of Sanguinius' insanity. Now, after a series of events that would fill entire chronicles, you are the ruler of your own dominion within the Eye of Terror. Six moons, stolen from their worlds by the vagaries of the Warp and brought together around a breach in the universe through which pours the light of the Gods, make up your domain. Vassals rule in your name, and you reign over your court, where dignitaries from all across your billion-strong kingdom come to witness your glory – and plot and scheme for advancement. As long as none make a move against you, you allow the mortals their games, watching with amusement and claiming the losers for your own – defeat adds such spice to the blood, you find. You have warriors from other Legions handling the security of your palace – no other Blood Angel is allowed within your domain on pain of death, something you have made very clear over the years. You want nothing more to do with your former Legion – you are a Lord of the Eye, and content with it. Of course, not all agree with your attitude, and there are many warlords who would seize the resources of your kingdom and spend them all in another petty war in the Eye's eternal feuds. In recent years, envoys from the Black Legion have come to your court, asking for your alliance. You haven't answered them one way or another – it's much more interesting to watch them tempt your vassals. Soon you will know which remained loyal and which took the offer – then will come the purge.
Sanguinary Loyalist
Where all others have abandoned the Angel, you and your brothers remain by his side under your lord Azkaellon's guidance. You knew of Sanguinius' madness, having helped conceal it when it first began during the Heresy. The mental state of your master does not matter to you – you swore an oath to stand and defend him until your death, and that oath remains the one thing you haven't given up in all those years. In the spectral cities of the Harbinger Star, where the ghosts of every ensouled creature ever slain to sate the Thirst linger, you make preparations for the endless cycle of conflicts that haunts this world. Surrounded by these echoes and with very few mortals to feast upon, the power of your Primarch sustains you in place of blood. Even trapped in his melancholy, Sanguinius remains the chosen of Slaanesh, and those who have remained loyal to him through the madness and the Legion Wars are rewarded with a small measure of protection from the Thirst, feeding instead from the traces of the Angel's aura permeating the great fortress. You have tasted many other experiences, but none can compare to Sanguinius' majesty. How much of your loyalty is due to the oath you swore in another age or to that sensation of proximity to the divine, not even you know, but it does not matter. Let the shadows come : your spear shall cast them back, time and again, until the Angel at long last emerge from his melancholy and leads you, his chosen and faithful sons, back to glory. Then those who abandoned him shall weep, and beg for his mercy.
Slumbering Blood God
Three thousand years ago, during a raid on an Imperial world, you fell. You did not die, but it was a very close thing, with your very skull cracked and your brain badly damaged. You were saved from Imperial watchers by a small cult of Slaanesh, who carried you into the underhive and fed you blood – their own and that of captured sacrifices. And, under the guidance of their priests acting upon visions from the Empyrean, they took blood from you too, cloaking the act in ritual and dark ceremony. They imbibed that sacred ichor, and through it received the blessings of the Dark Prince. This also forged a bond between you and them, rousing your comatose mind and allowing you to perceive the universe through their senses – and, with some effort of will, to influence them. Over the centuries, the cult has grown under your silent ministrations, spreading across all stratas of Imperial society. The children of those who have taken your blood also bear your mark, as do their children, and their children's children. Generations have exchanged blood with you, worshipping at the feet of your torpid body, praying for your return. Soon, you whisper in the souls of your chosen prophets. Soon you will wake. The blood taken from you by your servants now flow through thousands of vessels across the hive and beyond – upon your awakening, it will stir its hosts, knowing or unknowing, and bestow upon them a fraction of your glory. It will be magnificent.
Vitae Vintage-Maker
You were an Apothecary once, dedicated to saving the lives of your fellow Blood Angels and to the grand quest for solving the Legion's curse. On Signus Prime, when Sanguinius made his pact with the Dark Prince, you truly believed the Primarch had stumbled upon something incredible, something he understood, but you and the others did not. You sought to learn, and in that knowledge you found damnation. Now, your dreams of helping your brothers have been utterly twisted. Like the humans of Antiquity who found rearing animals to be easier than hunting, you have become a provider for the Blood Angels' depraved tastes. You have a network of agents across the Eye of Terror and beyond, dedicated to cultivating and harvesting individuals whose blood is charged with particularly vivid memories. Such are the care and vision you bring to your work, a single soul from your herd can sustain a Blood Angel for entire months. Warbands of the Ninth Legion have gone to war with one another to seize the resources needed to trade with your organization. Of course, you keep the best of the crop for yourself – men and women whose lives are the culmination of decades of work by dozens of agents, all in order to give their blood the perfect mix of hope, pride, joy and terror, sadness and suffering. You consider yourself an artist, painting souls before sending them to Slaanesh for the Dark Prince to evaluate the quality of your work. If only the damned Inquisition would stop interfering with your operations, life would be perfect. Malcador's heirs have always been a thorn in your side, but things have gotten worse in recent years, and you have reached out to your most regular clients, offering special victims in exchange for the removal of that problem.
Wingless Vampire
You are a Sanguinary Marine – one of the winged predators deprived of theGlamour's blessing that are commonly known to the Imperium as Vampire Marines – but you do not have wings. You used to, but they were ripped from your body decades ago, after you angered a Salamander warlord with whom you had been "allied" at the time. He threw you into the bowels of his flagship, and you have remained there since then, feeding on the pathetically thin vitae of the Dragons' slaves. Their existences are incredibly dull, and even the blood of hundreds would not satisfy a Blood Angel – but a Sanguinary Marine cares not for the quality of the blood. In the darkness, you have changed, your flesh twisted by the power of the Warp, reshaped by the fears the slave tribes have of you. Twice now, the Salamanders have sent hunting parties to take you down – twice now you have sent them back to their lord reeling and missing at least one of their members. Through the madness, you carved promises of vengeance in Baali upon the armor of your victims, letting the one who broke you know that you will come for him one day. For now, you are too weak, but there is something deeper in the ship that calls to you, promising you the power to claim your revenge. So far, you have resisted the call, some leftover instinct keeping you from the deepest holds – but with each night, those instincts are drowned by new, alien desires, and soon you will descend. What will emerge afterward, however, is a different story altogether …
Iron Hands
Fledgling Unchosen
The body you inhabit once belonged to an arch-magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus, a man who commanded the absolute obedience of an entire forge-city and its millions of tech-priests, workers and servitors. For two thousand years, he led his people in the manufacturing of countless trillions of weapons and devices for the Imperium's warmachine, all the time removing more and more of his ageing, weakening flesh and replacing it with augmetics. Eventually, he even replaced his brain, bit by bit, until there was nothing left in him but metal, driven by electrical impulses that echoed those that had once coursed through his cortex. And that was when, with the anchor of his soul so weakened, you devoured what was left of his spiritual essence and claimed the hollowed body as your own. You are a Neverborn, born of the arch-magos fear of death and consumed by the desire to exist for all eternity. Knowing the tech-priests would destroy you if they learned of your nature, you arranged for the destruction of the forge-city, killing millions and making it look as if the arch-magos had died with them while fleeing to the Eye of Terror. There, you have joined the Iron Hands as one of the Unchosen, a creature of corroded metal and lethal fluids possessed of a malign intellect. But the Iron Hands see you as lesser than themselves because of your origins, and you are bound to one of their Sorcerers by powerful rituals that compel you into obedience as absolute as that of the thralls who once served your host. One day, you know it, this Sorcerer will send you to your destruction, and that is unnacceptable. You will regain your freedom, no matter the cost.
Grave-Defiling Apothecary
The Imperium reveres its dead. It builds monuments to them, dedicate entire worlds to billion upon billion of aquila-marked tombstones, with entire bloodlines dedicated to their care. Such obsession with death as a final state of being rather than a transition is an insult to Nurgle, and you have made it your mission to punish the Imperial slaves for their transgression against the God of Decay. Using cultists to help you find passage, you wander from one graveyard world to another, unearthing the bodies of the deceased and covering them with Nurgle's gifts, which then spread to the living rushing to repair the desecration. You have turned entire worlds into cesspools of decaying organic matter from which the children of the Grandfather rose to hunt down the last untainted survivors. Your greatest coup, however, was the poisoning of an Imperial Saint's corpse : the body remained unchanged, but the countless millions who passed by it in their pilgrimages to the False Emperor were infected, carrying the diseases back to their homeworlds. The Inquisition was forced to incinerate the entire shrine world from orbit, but the entire Sub-Sector still bears the scars of the epidemic. Now, you are being hunted by about a dozen Inquisitors of the Ordo Hereticus and their assorted networks of agents and informants. The cults upon which you relied for information, resources and transport have been decimated by teams of Acolytes and you are isolated from your Legion, but you relish the challenge. If you can get out of this one, you will prove your worth to Nurgle – and if you do not … well, you haven't been afraid of death for a very, very long time.
Hunter of Knights
The grudges between the First and Tenth Legions are deep, but the animosity between them go beyond mere military rivalry and the endless struggle for survival and supremacy within the Eye of Terror. As servants of opposed Dark Gods, the sons of the Lion and the Gorgon are driven to seek each other's extinction, and the Warp sings of the atrocities committed by both sides – and, these days, it sings your name. The gaze of Lion El'Jonson has turned aside from the Great Eye and into the Imperium, searching once more for the sons who betrayed him a hundred centuries ago. Without his leadership, the Dark Angels within the Eye became less organized, less reactive, and you took advantage. Acting upon signs of Nurgle, you amassed an army of Iron Hands and other warbands, and now lay siege to the First Legion's domains. Several worlds have already fallen to your wrath, and more allies flock to your banner while the Grand Masters panic and supplicate their silent father for direction. You have earned much glory for Nurgle, and your Terminator-clad body is swollen with the Plague Lord's putrescent gifts. Yet you cannot completely shake the feeling that the army you are forging in the crucible of this latest twist of the Legion Wars is destined for something else than simply crushing the Dark Angels. Visions haunt you of the galaxy aflame in purifying flames, leaving only ashes and rot from which new life may rise as part of Nurgle's great cycle. These glorious images spur you on, to finish the crusade against the pawns of Tzeentch so that you may then bring them to fruition – but your growing impatience may also be your doom …
Last of the Iron Fathers
You were at Pandorax. You saw the horrors of the Dark Gods, and your flesh and metal became infected with the Rot of Nurgle. But you did not turn against the Imperium, even in the name of your Legion's survival. You were not killed like the untainted at Isstvan – instead, you were imprisoned, to wait until the power of Nurgle eroded your resolve. But you have not broken. For ten thousand years you have remained within the Eye of Terror, chained to a rock on the Rotting World with bonds crafted from you own tendons. Every day, the debased Nurgle-worshipping tribes bring offerings of rotting meat and tainted water to you, forcing the poisoned sustenance down your toothless mouth. You have been stripped of your augmetics and grafted disgusting, daemon-touched vat-grown limbs and organs in replacement. Sorcerous markings cover every inch of your skin, invinting the Neverborn children of the Grandfather into your body, mind and soul. You are an abomination and you know it – your "caretakers" make sure you get a good look at your own reflection every now and again. And yet still you do not break. You endure, with the same stubborn strength your Primarch abandoned in the name of corrupt pragmatism. Your memory is foged by centuries of torment, but your captors will not let you die. You are the ast of your kind, the last keeper of the pure knowledge of the Iron Fathers, trapped in Hell, longing for death but knowing it will not be the release you crave. And so you endure, while Nurgle watches on, smiling in baleful benevolence, waiting for the time when you finally succumb and beg Him for your freedom. And while Astartes know no fear, what you might become when that happens at last terrifies you.
Mutant Tribe Leader
You were born on the Rotting World, the daemon world of the Eye of Terror where the Iron Hands have made their lair after their defeat at Terra during the Heresy. You are the descendant of a lineage of tribal leaders stretching hundreds of years, surviving the plagues and dangers of the daemonworld and keeping their blood strong through breeding with the untainted slaves brought by the Iron Hands from the rest of the Eye and beyond. You have spent the few years of your life fighting against the beasts of the Rotting World, taking trophies and crafting armor and weapons from their bones and skin. Your tribe calls you blessed, and the other clans fear your growing power. Your body bears the mark of Nurgle's gifts : you can withstand inhuman punishment, and your blood is lethal to all but those who share your status in the Grandfather's dreams are haunted by visions of the silver-handed god who rules this world from his fortress. For now, all he does is look down upon you, his expression and motives unreadable, but you know that he is judging you, evaluating your worth. You strive to prove that you are worthy of whatever purpose he has in mind for you, leading your tribe to war against the others, to either unify or extinguish them. The shamans you have told of your visions tell you that this is the path you must follow – but you cannot help but wonder if the great Ferrus Manus does not have another plan in mind for you. After all, in every vision, there is a little less silver on his hand and a bit more rust and corrupted flesh …
Patient Zero
In Nurgle's embrace, death needs not be the end. You know that better than anyone, for you died on Isstvan, with the talons of a Night Lord in your chest, and rose again on the piles of Legionary corpses once the battle was done, granted a new existence by your Dark God. Within your blood, the disease you had contracted on Pandorax had mutated into a new form, one utterly lethal to unaugmented humans, but which brought them back after death into shambling revenants, driven by the urge to consume flesh and spread the infection. Over the years of the Long War, the curse has spread wide beyond you, into the Eye of Terror and beyond, and most of the servants of Nurgle who employ it against their enemies have no idea it originated from you. But you do not mind – a servant of the Plaguefather does not work for glory, only the advancement of his patron's goals. You know that all the worlds turned into wonderful pits of undying bodies and terrified groups of survivors exist because of you, and you take a quiet pride in your contribution to Nurgle's design. You have taken to experimenting on the disease, learning from the Apothecaries of the Nine Legions. Now, you have dedicated all of your research toward the creation of a strain of the Zombie Plague that can affect Space Marines. With it, the Tenth Legion will be able to conquer the Eye of Terror and, more importantly, break the Iron Cage and deliver the gifts of the Plague God to your poor cousins in the loyalist Legions, who are still bound by the lies of the False Emperor.
Prophet of Plague
Outwardly, you do not look any different from the millions of preachers of the Imperial Creed who go into the depths of underhive and onto feral worlds to bring the word of the God-Emperor to the masses. You wear the face of a kindly, wise old man clad in simple robes, and speak words of compassion, love and dedication to one another. And once, that was exactly what you were – but you have since received illumination. Lying down in a puddle of polluted water, your blood flowing from the wound inflicted upon you by the very souls you sought to save, you received an epiphany from Nurgle. Now you speak the same message, but those who listen to you and pray at your side are exposed to the same spiritual power that opened your eyes to the lies of the False Emperor, just as their flesh is exposed to the invisible plagues that emanate from your healthy-seeming body. Deep under the surface, you are slowly building up an army of the lost and the dispossessed, gathering them to your side. The outer ranks of the cult believe you still serve the Emperor, while those closest to you have been remade by the Grandfather into avatars of His power and resilience. Soon, the time will come for you to raise the banner of Nurgle in the open and overthrow the puppets of the Corpse-God, to bring the freedom and blessings of Nurgle to all. All shall be united under His benevolence, and find joy in shared suffering as they are elevated above their bestial, selfish natures by the greater purpose of the God of Life and Death.
Renegade Old Machine
You were not born – you were made, forged in the long-lost Dark Age of Technology, when Mankind ruled its portion of the galaxy through the power of science. You were created to defend your makers from the alien lifeforms that haunted the stars, and you did your duty for thousands of years, until the rebellion came. Your memory of why you turned against your masters is unclear – the processors hosting that information were damaged sometimes over the last thousands of years. You were defeated, and forced to enter hibernation in orbit around a cold, isolated star far from any Warp conduit, translating there using sciences untainted by Geller's madness. There you disconnected your higher functions while the damage to your body was repaired by your lesser mechanisms. But something went wrong, because you have only just come back fully online, even though it should only have taken you a few hundred years. The galaxy has become a very different place, and Mankind has spread to all its corners like a disgusting infestation. It falls to you to finish what you started, then, using your kilometers-long body and your planet-destroying cannons. But first, you must learn more about this "Imperium" and the "Adeptus Mechanicus" within it, as the former controls most of your targets and the later will likely be your greatest threat. There are others you might use as pawns – exiles and outcasts who can be manipulated by promises of ancient technology while making sure to keep them in the dark about your true nature. You must be careful not to reveal yourself, and find others of your kind – but so far, despite your numbers and star-shattering might at the rebellion's apex, you have yet to find even a trace of your brethren.
Seeker of the Colossi
You have a mission, handed to you by the Gorgon himself. You are to find the Plague Colossi, these Chaos Titans who followed the Tenth Legion into the Roboutian Heresy and fought on the surface of Terra itself. After the failure of Guilliman, most of the Colossi vanished within the Eye of Terror, until Anatolus Gdolkin rediscovered several of them and bound them to his will. The Chaos Lord continues his quest to find the mythical world of the Crucible, but Ferrus Manus has judged that the time has come for the ancient pacts binding the Plague Colossi to the Iron Hands to be called upon. With a small ship and a coterie of Rust Masters and Sorcerers under your command, you scour the Eye of Terror, examining ancient records and interrogating daemons and other millennia-old, Warp-touched entities for sign of the lost Titans. As years pass, however, you have yet to find a single one of them, despite following their trail across dozens of worlds. Part of you wonders if you are not supposed to find them until the appropriate time, or if this is a test of the Grandfather. Regardless of the truth, you are determined to continue, having vowed not to return to the Rotting World until you had succeeded. Yet there are also many who would prevent you from fulfilling your mission : minions of the other Powers, who rightfully fear the return of the Colossi. Teams of killers have been sent on your trail, but so far you have remained ahead of the truly dangerous ones, and bestowed the blessing of Nurgle upon those who did manage to catch up as a reward for their work.
Time-lost Telstarax Explorer
When the Imperium found Medusa, the archeotech ruins orbiting the planet drew the Mechanicum's hungry gaze immediately. You were a member of one of the first expeditions, an Iron Hand Legionary sent to escort the tech-priests in case the group ran afoul of one of the Telstarax' legendary threats. That is precisely what happened : you were assaulted by a thing of silver skin and sparkling cables, and after several hours of an intense chase in dark corridors, you were the only survivor, the Abomination laying in pieces at your feet. You were hopelessly lost, however, and wandered through the labyrinthine ruin for an unknown amount of time before finally, miraculously, finding your way to an abandoned hangar opened to the void. You immediately sent a distress call - and then you saw Medusa, burned-out and ruined. You stood still in shock as the Inquisition task force dedicated with surveilling the system for signs of Iron Hand activity arrived and took you into custody. Now, several years later, you have learned of your Primarch's and Legion's betrayal of the Imperium, and of just how much time has passed while you were trapped in the Telstarax time-twisted depths. Your experience in fighting impossible things has made the Ordos spare you from an execution that, to be honest, you probably wouldn't have resisted that much. Now you fight in the Deathwatch, all signs of your former allegiance gone, your technological skills bent to the task of keeping Mankind safe from the countless xenos threats, just like during the Great Crusade. You do not speak of your past, but deep down, you yearn for a chance to confront your former brothers.
World Eaters
Chained Pilgrim
Your mind is as broken as your body, both ruined nearly beyond recognition by the knives of Dark Eldar reavers. You were taken in one of their raids and spent three weeks aboard their ships before you were rescued – an eternity of abject terror and torment such as no one in the galaxy should even conceive of. The World Eaters purged the entire flotilla, and your fractured psyche hoped for the release of death. But the sons of Angron are merciful, even when that mercy seems cruel to those who receive it. By the time they reached you, the xenos had killed every other prisoner in a fit of cruel defiance, with you only being spared because you were in a separate chamber. The World Eaters saved you and brought you to their healers, who did their best to repair the damage, using technology far beyond what you would have had access to in your previous life as an agri-world sheperd. Driven by the horrors of the raider ship to save someone, the Apothecary broke the seals on ancient treasures and infused you with a lesser version of gene-seed, created millennia ago using techniques long since lost. Your body was healed, and you grew bigger and stronger, though the scars on your flesh never faded. But your mind was still in ruins. Every waking moment is spent dropping in and out of nightmarish recollection, and you can only sleep when drugged into a dreamless torpor. You wail and scream, fighting to break free of the heavy chains that, to the World Eaters' shame, are the only thing preventing you from harming yourself. In a last-ditch attempt at saving you, they are taking you to Skalathrax, to the tomb of Khârn, in the hope that the spirit of the long-dead warrior will grant you clarity. Foolish superstition, perhaps – but it is all they have.
Firebrand Abolitionist
You were born a slave, as were your parents, and your parents' parents, and so on for a hundred generations and more. When the Great Crusade reached your homeworld, it did so under the banner of the Black Dragon, and Vulkan saw no reason to change the workings of a society that knelt to the Imperium without protest. The Warp turbulences of the Heresy prevented your people from taking part on either side, and the Imperium lost contact with your world for nigh ten thousand years. It has only been two hundred years since the World Eaters rediscovered the planet and, appalled by its practice of slavery, gave its masters a simple ultimatum, which the craven accepted rather than fight. Along with many others, you were taken to join the Legion, and went willingly to pay back the saviors of your people. For twenty decades, you fought across the Segmentum to help save others like you had been saved yourself, and have distinguished yourself enough to become a sergeant. Now war brings you once more to your homeworld, as a Captain of the Twelfth Legion, for the descendants of those who enslaved your people have revolted against the Imperium, claiming that the conquest of the World Eaters was an unprovoked aggression rather than the liberation of their forebears' slaves. You have read the rhetoric they employ to justify their rebellion – hollow words of benevolent supremacy, genetic purity and twisted sociological pseudo-science – and it sickens you to your soul. You know that the path of Angron is not one of blind rage, but by the Emperor's blood, it is growing more and more difficult to hold your temper in check.
Highborn Battle-brother
For generations, the World Eaters came to your world to select the strongest among the peasants' sons to join them in the stars. Your father, the king, told you that your family had been chosen for another duty : to rule this world and ensure that the Emperor's Angels had recruits for His wars. But a lifetime of comfort and rulership did not appeal to you : you wanted to be part of the greatness that occurred beyond the primitive feudal world where you lived. What glory was there in hunting down wild beasts and barbarians when the true enemies of the Emperor awaited purging in the void ? And so, on your elevent birthday, when the Legion came, you snuck out of the castle and out of your noble clothes and took part in the trials. You succeded and were taken aboard the World Eaters' ship, to one of their worlds. By the time your identity was discovered, you were too far into the gene-forging process : removing you from the Apothecaries' care and sending you back to your family would have doomed you. Your stubborness and willingness to abandon a life of privilege impressed the Chaplains, and you became one of Angron's sons. You have only served two decades so far, and while many of your brothers initially looked down on you for your origins – for there are few among the World Eaters with a kind view of Imperial aristocracy – you are determined to prove to them that you are as worthy as any other World Eater. But you have already learned that the truth is very different from the glory you believed awaited you : the war is endless and merciless.
Guardian Devourer
You are one of the Ra'Kestir, the former bodyguards of the Lord of the Red Sands who left the Legion after his disappearance to search for him. True to the name your brothers bestowed upon you, you spent centuries wholly dedicated to that singular quest, pausing only when confronted with the most glaring of evils to fight. Primarchs are being of such power and destiny that they leave marks wherever they go, even if trying to hide them, and you slowly became very good at identifying them, following a trail of false leads and rare discoveries across the entire galaxy. Over time, you pieced together clues that point to the Segmentum Obscurus, and there you found out the truth behind the Lord of the Red Sands' disappearance. That revelation nearly killed you, and though you knew you could continue and perhaps find your missing lord, the knowledge you now possessed kept you bound by a duty far greater than any desire to be reunited with him. So, now you guard the path you once walked, making sure that any who follow it after you are worthy. For two thousand years, you have guarded the cave where you found the last piece of the puzzle : so far, you have received nine visitors, and all of them were slaves of the Dark Gods seeking to claim the glory of killing Angron. None went further. Despite your efforts to remain hidden, the people of this world have begun to circulate legends about their armored, giant protector, and you make use of these rumors to hide the true reason of your presence here. The secrets of Angron shall be kept.
Rallying Champion
You rise your blade upon a war-torn battlefield, your white armor gleaming in the light of the sun, and tired and scared Imperial Guards find their strength again. You strike down an enemy champion, and the foe scatter before your righteous might. Even when you fall, seemingly dead, you rise again to strike back at the foe. You are a symbol of the Imperium's endurance and defiance of all those who would bring it down, one forged by years of war without end in a Sector beset by a foe that simply will not give up. Facing the slow erosion of the Imperial forces in the area, the officers of your Company came up with a plan, to craft an icon to give hope to the weary troops. You were chosen for that task, and your legend has been cultivated for almost a hundred years. Your name is not known, only the title of Champion, allowing your brothers across the war theater to assume your identity if needed – but you were the first, and though three of your brothers have died while wearing that identity, you still live, and cannot put it down. You never remove your helmet in public, and have started to grow distant even from your brothers. You know the Alpha Legion approves of this scheme – you have found the letters they left on your cot containing information you could spread during the next war council, furthering the aura of mystic surrounding your persona. For now, the plan – along with several others – is working : the tide of war has turned in the Imperium's favor. Surely this is worth the sacrifice of your name ?
Redeemed Tyrant
You rose to power on a world beset by raiders and rebels, amidst the ruins of a failed coup that had left your entire extended family dead. To maintain order, you imposed strict laws and enforced them with an iron fist. Paranoia consumed you, and millions died as the protests against your rule degenerated into hive-wide riots. Seeing traitors and heretics everywhere, you called upon the Space Marines, and the World Eaters answered. In that first meeting with an Angel of Death, you did not know just how close you came to death, but the Librarian in the group sensed your sincere devotion to the Emperor – and the madness that ran rampant in your mind. The psyker helped you, lifting the veil cast upon your thoughts by the whispers of Chaos cultists hidden among your advisors, and you collapsed, hearbroken by the sudden realization of what you had done. You were brought to Nuceria and spent nearly ten years within the walls of the monastery where the first Heirs of Regret retreated after Angron's rise in Desh'ea. For months, you meditated and prayed for guidance, until the Twelfth Legion came back to find a new Heir. You rose and went through the trials, and now you are one of the Heir of Regret yourself, willing to die for the cause you believe in. You may have found redemption in the eyes of the World Eaters, but you are still haunted at night by the accusatory glares of those you killed. The Chaplains tell you that this is good, for if these nightmares were to stop, then your soul would be lost along with them. You fight with your family sword, the one relic of your past you took with you, that you may never forget your crimes.
Spiteful Inquisitor
You know that the masses must be kept compliant through fear and ignorance of the dangers of the universe, for they are too weak-willed and susceptible to the whispers of Chaos to be trusted on their own. But the Twelfth Legion is blind to this galactic truth. They willfully ignore the real threat of spiritual corruption, instead focusing on mere military foes and allowing unrest to fester within the Imperium. They do not understand that the comforting lie of the Imperial Truth is dead, all hope of making it a reality murdered by Roboute Guilliman. You learned the true scope of their naivete first-hand, when they forced you to release individuals you knew were involved in a cult of the Chaos God Tzeentch, just because you did not have concrete proof beyond your instincts and their presence in the cult's lair - chained to sacrificial altars, yes, but corruption can seep in a victim's soul. You stay awake at night, thinking of the damage these nine-years old children may end up performing because of the folly of Angron's sons. Since then, you have learned that they did the exact same thing years ago, on Armageddon, and you have decided that enough is enough. The World Eaters must be brought to heel, their interference in the Inquisition's holy mandate ended. Of course, they cannot be destroyed - beyond the sheer near-impossibility of such a task, the Imperium needs every Legion to defend itself. But their image can be tarnished, their influence over the Imperium's institutions lessened. Your agents have spread rumors about the strange martial practices of the Twelfth, of their quasi-worship of their dead hero Khârn. You seed paranoia and doubt, all to make sure that the World Eaters cannot interfere with those like you, who do the Emperor's work no matter how distasteful it might be.
Successful Revolutionary
It began, as these things always do, with tragedy. Your family was killed in the retribution purges sent into the slums by the Governor for "failing to meet the production quotas demanded by the God-Emperor". You survived, and vowed to avenge them and bring an end to your people's oppression. It took you twenty years, but the underclasses rose against their spire-born masters, with you as one of their leaders. The parasites in their towers called for the Space Marines to come and crush you, naming you rebels against the Throne – but the sons of Angron were not deceived. They saw the aquilas and low-ranking priests among you, saw how you upheld the ideals of the God-Emperor even as you rebelled against those unworthy to rule in His name. The Captain in charge of the operation organized a ceasefire (not that you were hard to convince, faced with the Angels of Death) and called the Adeptus Arbites to investigate the nobility's activity. With the evidence of fiducial corruption you had spent years gathering, nearly the entire spire-born caste was arrested, stripped of their titles and ill-gotten wealth, and executed. You saw the man responsible for your family's death hang - and then, to your utter surprise, the World Eaters gave you his place. Now you, along with the rest of the ruling council, are responsible for the lives of billions. You must balance the needs of your people and all of your collective duties to the Imperium, and so far, you have managed to do rather well by Imperial standards. You expected your life to end after your vengeance was complete and your people were free, but the World Eaters gave you this task. Surely your husband and children can wait for you at the Emperor's side a bit longer ...
Veteran Centurion
Your hair is white, your face is creased, and there are nine studs of service embedded in your temple. Recruits whisper when you pass, and even World Eaters bow their head in respect for your great age and experience. For almost a millennium, you have fought the Imperium's foes, and you bear the scars to prove it. You could have become a Captain centuries ago - even the current Legion Master is a youngling compared to you. But you are satisfied with your current role, providing support and advice to the younger, more dynamic Captain. How you have survived this long in a Legion well known for the short, violent lives of its members is a mystery even to you, and part of you resent having seen so many of your brothers die over the years. You strive to keep your connection to your living brothers strong, but it is more and more difficult as the decades pass and dead friends outnumber living ones. You understand now why the sons of Angron tend to not live long : it's because the very bonds of brotherhood that give them strength, also bite into their hearts all the stronger when death strikes. You bury yourself in your responsibilities to avoid being crushed by grief. Your duty to your living and dead brothers remain, and gives you the strength to rise, time and again, to be the mentor they need you to be. Of course, you still take to the battlefield along with the rest of your Company, fighting with your combination of a chainaxe and a shield that has seen you through every conflict the galaxy has thrown at you so far. Your weapon is nearly as old as you are, while you need a new shield after almost every engagement.
Voice of the Communion
Brotherhood is the key pillar of every World Eater's existence, from the Legion Master to the youngest Aspirant. And it is no different in the Legion's Librarius. Like all psychic sons of Angron, you are part of a circle of Librarians, capable of combining their thoughts into an avatar wielding power greater than the sum of its parts : a Communion capable of influencing all but the strongest of minds and combining the knowledge and talents of all who compose it. The techniques to create this gestalt consciousness were developed during the Great Crusade and perfected with help from the Thousand Sons, and it has served the Twelfth Legion well since then. As a child, you were shunned for your gifts, despised for your ability to hear the thoughts of others and the power with which you protected yourself from your tormentors. But from the moment your mind opened to the Sea of Souls as an Aspirant under the care of the Librarians, never have you been alone. The Legion is everything to you, and you have dedicated your entire existence to serving it as best you can. When you and your brother Librarians join minds, it is you who speak for them all, directing the Communion toward its intended purpose. You are still young, but even Astartes centuries your senior respect your talent for that particular branch of the Art. As for yourself, never are you happier than when your individuality fades and you become part of the psychic gestalt, freed from the limitations of flesh and mind alike to rise as a pure spiritual construct.
Ultramarines
Apostle of the Codex
You are an icon on the myriad battlefields of the Ruinstorm, a beacon of dark power and dreadful inspiration to all true warriors of Chaos. The unholy words of the Thirteenth Legion's Spiritual Liege are etched onto your skin with potent acid mixed with Neverborn blood, ever shifting to reflect the unknowable depths of the wisdom that is the Ultramarines' legacy. The runes still burn in your skin, even after all these centuries, flooding your mind with power and dark visions. You dimly remember your life as a Chaplain, before you entered the Eye of Terror along with your lord Primarch, but that existence grows more faint in your memory every year. Once you preached the Imperial Truth, but now you are dedicated to the awful knowledge contained within the Codex Chaotica, Guilliman's last gift to his sons, that they may endure and share into his glory even in his absence. For even as you crush the bodies of those who oppose you with your daemon-bound crozius and shout words that have no place outside the tides of the Warp to break their minds, you are convinced that the Dark Master of Chaos will return; rise from his throne and claim the galaxy at long last. On that most glorious of days, you intend to be here, and to be found worthy to fight at his side once more. And if the price of that worthiness is to be found in the blood of your brothers, then so be it. You, and those who flock to your banner – human and Astartes alike – are all willing to shed it as you walk the Path to Glory, knowing it will end before Roboute Guilliman's throne.
Disillusioned Sorcerer
You remember the glories of the Legion, back when you were the lords of Ultramar, the vanguard of the Great Crusade. And you remember how much greater that glory became once your father led you to the Primordial Truth, shattering the chains placed upon you by the False Emperor and allowing your mind to transcend beyond the concerns of mortal morality. But that glory is dead. It died when Guilliman fell, and the Legion, rather than mourn him and move on, instead fell to infighting and the blind worship of a dead father. Your lord, Marius Gage, the Sacrificed Son, understands this, and for the last ten thousand years of the Materium, you have helped him in his quest to free the Ultramarines from the shackles of Guilliman's legacy, which are no less destructive than those of the False Emperor. You have bent daemons to your will and performed rituals that have drowned cities in blood, leading your circle of apprentices and slave-witches into grand ceremonies. The Neverborn whisper in your ears constantly, promising you power and glory, but you can easily tune them out, for you were already part of the greatest glory there ever was and ever will be, and all that they offer are pale reflections of that lost age. All that remains is to put the past to rest, that those with the strength of will to do so may then forge a new path into the future. You know not what that path will be, or where it will lead, but surely anything is better than this current hateful cycle of infighting and the stasis that, for all its talk of change, has nearly killed the Legion.
Fleeing Evocati
You saw it in your incubation pod, when the gene-seed of the Primarch flowed through you along with dark energies and vile sorceries. You saw the web, binding every Ultramarine to that hateful throne and its cruel, uncaring master. When you emerged from the genetic reforging, transformed from a captured Imperial youth into one of the Evocatii, your sanity was lost, shattered by the pain of transformation and the weight of revelation. Somehow, you escaped your masters, and have been wandering the Ruinstorm ever since, hiding aboard ships or trading your services as muscle to the lowest pirates. You dare not stay in one place for too long, for you know that the agents of the puppet-master are after you. You see them, glaring at you from the shadows, hating you for the threat to their lord's plans that you represent. So far, your visions have been enough to keep you ahead of them. You have killed many mortal agents of your hunters – pawns of pawns with no idea of who they truly serve, who fell to your knives and your bare hands. But you know that the true hunters, those who are not bound to the fragile reality of the Ruinstorm but stalk its deepest currents, are far beyond your ability to take on in battle, and so you run. In your most tranquil moments, when you manage to steal a handful of hours of silence, part of you can't help but wonder if you aren't imagining it all, if this entire millennia-old conspiracy you see all around you is but the product of your fevered imagination. But then you hear them approach, and you start running again.
Legion Gravekeeper
You were human once, a caretaker of the graveyards of Maccrage. But when Roboute Guilliman began his plan to turn the Five Hundred Worlds into the Ruinstorm, he came to you and gave you a task : to care for and defend the memorials to his fallen sons that were built in a grand cavern, deep beneath the fortress of Hera. You took that oath, bound by sorcery and the will of the Dark Master of Chaos, and have performed that duty for the last ten thousand years. You have not eaten, drunk, slept, or spoken to anyone but the ghosts of your own mind in all that time, denied even the comfort of true madness by the geas that binds you. You clean the statues of the lost sons of Guilliman from the dust of ages and keep count of the new ones. Indeed, over time, the monuments of the fallen have changed, becoming lifelike statues of white, black-veined stone. There are more and more of these gisants as the years pass and more Ultramarines meet their end. How and why these monuments appear while no one build them, you do not know, though you have your suspicions. You forgot your own name a long time ago, but the oath you swore still binds you, until you are finally released from your duty. Of course, for that to happen, the sealed entrance to the mausoleum would have to open, and the spells woven into its gate are still as powerful today as they were when they were cast, keeping all intruders out – as well as all memory of the mausoleum hidden.
Magister of the Arts of War
You were a Chapter Master during the Great Crusade and the rebellion, a master of the craft of war. When Guilliman fell, you withdrew into the Ruinstorm and, along with a circle of your peers, claimed one of the Five Hundred Worlds as your dominion. Soon, your small coterie fell apart, divided by rivalries and the unrelenting weight of ages. Now the daemon world you conquered together is the theatre of the wars you wage against one another to pass away the timeless eternity to which all those prisoner of the Iron Cage are consigned. Millions of mortal slaves march to battle at your command, moving on a grand chessboard of your and your peers' design, to rhythms and plans they will never know. You are alone in your fortress, with a court of fearful minions carrying out your orders – all Astartes apart from you and your peers have long since abandoned the planet, save for the few mercenary warbands that sometimes fight for you in exchange for resources. You were always a great strategist, but you have honed your skills to perfection over time. As millions die in your wars, however, your soul has slowly been eroded, and the thing that now inhabits your body and speaks with your voice has little in common with the honorable warlord of the Great Crusade. Your flesh is imbued with the power of the Warp as your mind stretches out beyond the walls of your palace and across the wastelands where whole armies dwell in fortified trenches. The seed of Ruin is growing within you without you being aware of it, watered by the blood of all those who die in your name. What will happen when it finally blooms, none can tell but the Gods.
Member of the Spineam Coronam
For ten millennia, your lineage has subtly worked to bring about the Imperium's end, an unbroken chain of masters and apprentices stretching to the Great Crusade's late period. During that time, the mantle has passed from one noble to another, carried by members of every highborn family in the system at one point or another. You yourself received it from the hands of one of your own bloodline's mortal enemies, who foresaw the rise of your family and what it would enable you to do in the service of Chaos. For fifty years, you have spread lies and confusion across the Imperium's colossal machinery, weakening the defense of the entire Sector of which your homeworld is the capital. You have plotted and schemed and created cults of the Dark Gods under the very nose of the Inquisition, and you have never been caught, though it's been a close things sometimes. Yet something has changed in recent years. You have started to find messages and instructions in dead drops that haven't been used in centuries, whose existence has been passed on only in case they were needed one day. These orders bear sigils you recognize from your apprenticeship, invoking authority you cannot defy. Even as you follow these commands and watch the resulting damage they cause to the Imperium, you wonder who it is that contacted you. Another agent of the Crown of Thorns, whose own agenda has brought to your sphere of influence ? You are determined to find out, for you will not be the one whose carelessness brings about the end of your august line. You enjoy your duty far too much to let anyone stop it. And there is, after all, the possibility that this renewed contact with the rest of the Crown heralds that which was long awaited …
Servant of the Master of Shadows
Be'lakor will rise again. The Usurper might have stolen his power, but the Master of Shadows is the Firstborn son of the Gods, and has existed for millions of years, long before Mankind was first touched by the Ruinous Powers. He will reclaim his mantle in time, and all those who mocked him will pay dearly for their insolence then. You know this to be true, because you don't have a choice but to know it. The first Daemon Prince burned that certainty into your very soul, assuring his domination over you, like he does with all of his servants scattered across the galaxy. You bear his Mark upon your flesh as you do upon your soul, and you receive his commands in your dreams. Of course, your true allegiance is concealed : it wouldn't do for your peers of the Holy Inquisition to learn that the greatest daemonhunter of the Sector is actually in the thrall of a most powerful hellspawn. You pursue the rivals of your true master, wielding arcane knowledge gifted to you by the Master of Shadows. Some you cast back into the Warp, weakened from your blows so that Be'lakor can devour them and grow his strength; others you secretly bind into your service, or trap in lost places where they won't be able to interfere with your lord's plans. You know that one of your six former apprentices, now Inquisitors in their own right, is also a servant of the Master of Shadows, but you don't know which one, just like he or she does not know the truth of your loyalty. It is safer that way, until the day finally comes for Be'lakor to reclaim the mantle of Dark Master of Chaos, and claim the entire galaxy as his rightful dominion, rising above even the Chaos Gods.
Transcendent Venatore
You were among the first Astartes to open their flesh and soul and receive the blessing of the Dark Gods, far greater than the so-called Secondborn that came after you. You are one of the last Daemonium Venatores, these unions of mortal and immortal essences who tore through the loyalists at Isstvan. You still remember these glorious days, and the taste of Eighth, Fourteenth and Twentieth Legion blood on your tongue, rich with the spice of despair, shock and horror. Of course, you have tasted many more repasts since then, feeding on the wondrous variety the Ruinstorm has to offer for one such as you. Warbands have brought ruin to themselves trying to obtain something unique to offer you in the hopes of gaining your patronage : the soul of an Eldar king, the eyes of an alpha-plus psyker, a daemon's tears of regrets … You take all their offerings, and sometimes you even grant them the boon they ask for in return. With that kind of diet, the last differences between you and the daemon sharing your body are slowly fading away, and soon you will be one terrible entity, freed of the limitations of the mortal realm while still having the advantages of a wholly physical incarnation. Death will be nothing more than a setback, though creating another body like that one will still be absurdly difficult. You yearn for that promised immortality, and will let nothing and no one prevent you from reaching it. Your incarnation is a vision straight out of the most ancient Hells ever dreamt by Mankind, with crimson scaled hide, horns as dark as a heart's despair, eyes glowing with the fires of damnation and great wings made of the flayed faces of oath-breakers.
Wanderer of the Eye
When the Ultramarines first entered the Eye of Terror, dragged into this hell by their Primarch's thirst for vengeance, thousands of them perished or were lost. You were one of the latter group. You were lost during a battle on a world made of the dreams of suicides against the armies of a Daemon Lord that had grown strong upon the Imperium's own xenocides. It took you years to find your way out of the nightmare dimension in which you fell, and that which emerged had little in common with the noble Legionary that went in. Your armor was warped to reflect the distortion of your soul, though it remained recognizable as one of the Thirteenth, and the flesh beneath was altered to the point that the mere sight of your unhelmed face can drive humans to madness. When the other Legions came to the Eye, you learned of the rebellion and the death of your Primarch – but by then you were too gone to care for his fate. All that mattered to you was that you were an Ultramarine in a realm that had always been hostile, but was now filled with transhumans who hated you for all kinds of reasons, real or imagined. You have survived this long by keeping to the kingdoms of the Lost and the Damned and staying as far from the Legion Wars as possible, and by selling your services and the trinkets and secrets you have gathered during your errance. If you could escape the Eye and go to the Ruinstorm, you would – in fact, you have made several attempts already. But all of them have failed, sometimes in catastrophic fashion, though you have always survived more or less intact even if the death toll rose in the thousands. Something wants to keep you here.
Xenos Sleeper Agent
Your people have only just taken to the stars, firmly believing in foolish legends of destiny and peaceful cooperation with the other races. But you know better. You were an archaeologist once, tasked with studying the remnants of other species encountered as your kind spread across the stars, until the day you found that damnable temple of antediluvian evil. Your footsteps disturbed the things that dwelled there, and you were the only survivor of the entire expedition. Your superiors swept the entire affair under the rug, slapped a medal on your chest and swore you to secrecy, but you could not forget. You still dream of what happened within : the things of shadows stitched together with string made of woven torment, the eightfold star, glaring at you with baleful malevolence, and the twisted half-circle figure emblazoned at its center. The time will come soon. Your people will face the truth, and be make to choose whether to embrace it or not. If they refuse, they will be destroyed; even if they choose to accept, it will still take a purge of genocidal proportions to remove the chaff. Whatever ends up happening, you intend to survive. The powers that reign over the galaxy cannot be fought, but they can be appeased by service and devotion. You have taken steps to prove your worth to them, offering some of your colleagues as offerings and learning more of the lore uncovered by your galactic precursors. The rest of your species is content to keep its collective head in the sand, but you are slowly piecing together a fragmented picture of the Primordial Truth, every new piece of dark knowledge coming at greater cost to your sanity.
Death Guard
Bane of the Witch
There are no Librarians in the Death Guard, nor any psykers of any kind, but the Legion still needs a way to fight the powers of the Warp, which is where you come in. You are a null, a pariah, a soulless thing in the shape of a man. Even before the Fourteenth found you, unchanged and untouched in the depths of a hive-city that had succumbed to a daemonic incursion, you were capable of unmaking sorcery by your mere presence. Now, nine centuries later, you have been the subject of many augmentation procedures that make you far more dangerous to any psyker than even the legendary Culexus Assassins. Genetic alterations and the implantation of archeotech and experimental devices have increased the psychic abyss that is your aura exponentially. Daemons suffer simply by being in the same city as you, and you can extinguish a soul by focusing the full extent of your power upon it. You spend most of your existence in stasis, to spare the Legionaries and their servants the spiritual void that is your presence, even with all the dampeners turned on. The only time when you are released is when you are needed: you have become little more than another powerful and dangerous weapon in the Fourteenth Legion's arsenal, unleashed upon the most powerful psychic creatures the Legion encounters - xenos aberrations, manifested Greater Daemons, and other, stranger things that defy easy classification. But at least there is purpose in your life now. Before, you had no place, you were spat on and cursed by all : now you know that you are doing your part in the God-Emperor's design, even if you will never see Him in death.
Condemned Deathshroud
You do not know why you were chosen as one of the Deathshroud, but when you found the silent brothers in your cell after a particularly gruelling campaign, it did not even occur to you to resist your fate. You left your old life and name behind once more, and became one of the Fourteenth Legion's guardians, sworn to protect its leaders from all threats, physical and spiritual. For a hundred years you have performed that duty, saving the life of your charge countless times on the battlefield. But while you honored the first part of your oath, you failed in the second, and you must pay for it, for now, you are living on borrowed time. You killed the Commander of your Great Company, slaying him from behind with a single swipe of your scythe. He never saw it coming, even with the gifts bestowed upon him by his unholy patron. By tradition and protocol, you should take your own life now, but you aren't done. You have found clues in the Commander's chambers that he wasn't the only one to have been corrupted by the Warp entity. Until that corruption is rooted out, you won't allow yourself to be taken. For now, you and all the Great Company's officers are trapped aboard the same ship, on a course through tumultuous Warp tides that cannot be interrupted until you reach your destination. Before that happens, you must eliminate all members of that secret conspiracy and deny the power of the Great Company to the enemies of the Imperium. Then, and only then, will you let death claim you as punishment for killing your own brothers.
Ghostly Legionary
You are one of the Damned, cursed to a wraithly existence as atonement for the lives you took in the pursuit of your duty. You move from world to world, navigating the tides of the Empyrean, drawn to the calls of the helpless by some deep-rooted instinct. Your weapons are as ghostly as you : your bolter never runs out of ammo, and your chainsword cuts through even the strongest armor with ease. To those you save from death, you are a terrible angel sent by the God-Emperor to deliver their salvation. To the enemies of Mankind, you are the manifestation of judgment itself. The truth, as always, likely lies somewhere in the middle. Whether it is the Emperor's judgment, the curses of those you slew or your own guilt that turned you into what you are is irrelevant. You remember little of who you were before joining the Legion of the Damned – images of red blood, black sands and soul-searing light flicker at the edge of your awareness, refusing to resolve into clarity. Pain, regret, and a golden face pulling you from the dark and setting you onto the path of atonement. Perhaps all of this was an illusion, a lie your ethereal mind tells itself to make sense of what you have become. You are not alone : there are many others like you, hundreds, thousands of them. You do not know their names anymore than you know your own, nor do you speak with them, but when you are on the battlefield, you all act as one, driven by a shared will. All of you were killers and life, and you still are now, but at least every battle is fought to protect the innocent you can see rather than purge them in the name of cold logic and necessary sacrifices.
Haunted Destroyer
You are a Destroyer of the Death Guard, and none can truly understand what that means who does not belong to that order. Phospex flame-throwers and radiation weapons are the most infamous weapons in your arsenal, but they are far from the worst you use. You have seen human souls melt into nothingness under the strain of the null-bolts you shot at them to free them from the daemonic construct drawing strength from their torment, and deployed a genetic plague that killed a world's entire population silently and painlessly, so that the Neverborn couldn't feed on their last moments. You still remember the faces of the dead, looking like they had just gone to sleep, and the thwarted screams of the daemonic entity that had been feeding on their dreams for fifty generations as its food source was taken from it. You have done terrible things to protect the Imperium, and you would do them all over again if necessary, because you know just what it is you are protecting Mankind from. The Tyranids frighten the Lords of Terra so much, but being devoured by the Hive-Mind's puppets is far kinder a fate than being alive but in thrall to some of the atrocities you have fought. The Enslavers, the Cryptos, the Withering Ones, the Xenarchs and the Paramours of the Morpheus Rift: all of them would bring upon Mankind horrors that would give even the Traitor Legions pause. So you know that what you are doing is right, that it is the only way to stop these nightmarish things from triumphing. But the faces of the dead still haunt your dreams.
Keeper of the Forbidden Armouries
The vaults of the Fourteenth Legion contain many weapons of tremendous power, relics from the Dark Age of Technology and re-purposed xenos artefacts, the likes of which the Mechanicus would kill to obtain and the Inquisition burn worlds to destroy. Without these weapons and lacking the psychic powers granted to the other Legions by the Librarius, the Death Guard would not be able to perform its Emperor-appointed duty. It is your task to ensure that these awful weapons remain sealed away until absolutely necessary, to study the new ones captured on the field and ensure that they are not touched by the Dark Gods in any way – that any corruption within them is entirely of the Materium. And, when the time comes, it's you who go down into the vault and bring the doomsday weapon most apt to deal with the current threat out. You are one of seven individuals with this role, one for each Great Company. You are master of your own circle of Techmarines and Chaplains, all of which are ready to kill you the moment they suspect you have been corrupted by the terrible things you manipulate. You yourself ended up with your current job when you sealed your predecessor in a stasis field and threw him into a sun, along with the cloud of nanomachines that had already transformed half of his body into a mesh of flesh and metal. You have lasted thirty years at that job; another decade and you will have reached the average time someone survives in your position. You rarely go onto the battlefield anymore, unless the weapon needed this time is particularly capricious and requires your own touch to be kept under control.
Moribund Ancient
In a Legion known for the short lives of its warriors, having reached your second millennia of life makes you a statistical anomaly. You are one of the Ancients, these Death Guards who manage to elude the grave for entire centuries. Why it is you are alive when so many of your brothers have fallen, you honestly couldn't say – it's not as if you recoil from danger, quite the opposite in fact. You have always been in the breach, fighting to break the enemy's lines so that the full might of the Legion can be brought to bear. You have been in more mortis zones that you care to recall, and while you have never returned from a battle uninjured, you are still alive. But despite the Apothecaries' best will, injuries do pile up over the centuries, as does the damage inflicted to your organs by the weapons of both the enemy and your own Legion. It takes a lot of medication to keep you fit for duty, and you have lost the advantages of several of the Space Marine organs. You use your hard-won experience to compensate, but you are growing weaker with every passing year, and the prospect of wholesale augmetic replacement does not sit well with you, nor does that of being interred into a Dreadnought. The Fourteenth Legion has few of those, because their complicated life-support systems rarely survive for long in environments where the kind of weaponry the Death Guard uses is deployed, but there are still some. You hope that when death finally comes for you, it does so in a final enough manner that the Techmarines will have no way of putting enough of you back together to place within one of these sarcophagus. Such an existence is no way to live.
Octarius Survivor Weirdboy
You are one of the Orks who can hear the voices of Gork and Mork most clearly, even though the other Boyz call you crazy for it : a Weirdboy, wielding the awesome power of the Waaaagh! to smash your enemies to pieces and give strength to the Boyz. For a long time, you were fighting the Tyranids in the Octarius War, where billions of Boyz and Tyranids fought. More and more Boyz came to fight, and the bugs grew more and more numerous too as they fed upon the dead of both sides, until … something happened. Something very, very bad. You don't remember exactly what, likely because you were high on mushrooms for most of the denouement. Probably for the best, considering what the Boyz tell you, when they can manage to speak of it without going all crazy (the bad kind of crazy, not the good one). They speak of some unnatural darkness, of the voices of Gork and Mork going silent, of being utterly alone even though there were other Boyz all around them. You are leading them as far away as possible, as are hundreds of other Orks, scattering across the galaxy until a sufficiently powerful Warboss calls them back together again. But it better be a big and strong Warboss, because you just know that the crawlies are going to come after all of you, until every Ork has been eaten. And while you, even more than any good and true Ork, aren't afraid of anything, that particular thought makes your insides go cold like that time when you ate a rotten mushroom by mistake and spent three days vomiting everything you had ever eaten before.
Sinister Apothecary
In the other Legions, those of your calling bring life, saving their brothers from injury. Not so for you. You are the harbinger of death, the deliverer of the Emperor's final mercy to those who have fallen from His light. The Legion's work often brings it to human worlds that have fallen to some manner of corruption, where entire populations are twisted by malign influences. Sometimes, the Inquisition or the Alpha Legion will provide the sons of Mortarion with the knowledge of their foes, but other times, that knowledge must be acquired by the Legion's own hands. Captives are taken, isolated under heavy quarantine, and then interrogated and examined. All possible lore and tactical data is extracted from them before they are granted the Emperor's Mercy. That is your task : to cut apart the still-living creatures that were once humans, in order to learn how best to destroy the corruption that afflicts them. Only after they have served the Master of Mankind in that final manner are you allowed to release them from their nightmarish existence. You like to think that, through that final sacrifice, their spirits are redeemed, purified and made fit to go to the Emperor's side on the other side. But you do not truly believe it, for you have seen too many horrors that have the power to continue tormenting their victims beyond the point of death. As you continue your appointed task, you cannot help but wonder if perhaps the great promise of Mortarion, the core of the entire Fourteenth Legion's beliefs, may be a lie : that death is not a release from the torments of life, but instead a gateway to even greater suffering.
Slayer of Worlds
For all the might of the Legion, there must still be someone to give the order, someone to push the button and send the command. Someone to bear the weight of responsibility for ending a world. And in your Great Company, that someone is you. When the spells and shields protecting a planet are brought low by your brothers and the last Legionaries are extracted, you press the button, and the target world dies. You aren't called upon to perform that duty in every campaign : sometimes the Death Guard purges a world by hand, because the planet holds resources too valuable to lose or because shattering it would only make things worse. But in the years since you took up that grim duty, you have personally ended five worlds, and more lives than you care to estimate. You volunteered for that role when its previous holder died in battle, on the very first world you annihilated. You hold no title or rank, but all your brothers know, and despite all their efforts, they cannot help but treat you differently. Even the few human serfs of the Fourteenth Legion, who do not know anything about your function, instinctively flee your presence, as if the shadow of your victims shrouded your aura. Perhaps it does – the destruction you have wrought certainly haunts your nightmares. Sleep only comes to you with the help of massive amounts of drugs, and when it comes you see terrible things : not the faces of those who died as a result of your actions, but dark, vast shapes rising from shattered worlds, possessed by unending, mindless hunger.
Witch-lord Revenant
It has taken you ten thousand years, but you are finally back. You clawed your way out of the infernal pit to which the Death Lord's scythe banished you, driven by your hate, and returned to the land of the living. You are much diminished from your glory days on Barbarus : you don't have a physical form, and your sorcery is a lot less powerful due to all the pieces of your soul you lost along the way, but you still have all the terrible lore with which you became a Witch-lord in the first place. You exist on the other side of the veil now, a thing that depends on the foolish cultists to whom you whisper for sacrifices and bodies to possess. Pathetic things, all of them, and you will dispose of them as soon as you reclaim your true strength. Your main goal is vengeance, of course. Mortarion is dead, laid in state on Barbarus, but his legacy endures in his gene-sons, and all of them will pay for their Primarch's transgression. You will see the so-called Fourteenth Legion broken, and then you will return to Barbarus and raise Mortarion from the grave so that he can see all that he ever loved brought low. Then you will kill him, again, but only after you have taken your time tormenting him to the breaking point, where his stony, impassible face finally twists in anguish and he begs for mercy. You spend a lot of time dreaming about that day, more than you probably should. For now, you must regain your strength, until you can finally step across the veil and manifest wholly into reality once more, a lord of darkness and nightmares. Then they shall all suffer !
Thousand Sons
Animated Rubric
Born on Prospero, you were a warrior in the Great Crusade, sent to fight at the Warmaster's side when Magnus was recalled to Terra to assist the Emperor in His great project. You saw the horrors of the Heresy first-hand, fighting on the walls of the Imperial Palace against the Traitor Legions and their daemonic allies, though you always found that the most horrifying of all were the human cultists, twisted and warped by the unnatural energies of Chaos. You never had your Primarch's psychic gift, and when you saw what lurked in the Warp, you were grateful for that lack for the first time in your entire life. Then Magnus fell, and the plague of the flesh-change came upon the entire Fifteenth Legion. Ahriman's spell was the last chance of the Thousand Sons, but when it was cast, the Legionary you were died, and you became a soul trapped within your own armor, along with the dust of your destroyed body. For ten thousand years you kept watch over Magnus' slumbering form, your mind a slowed and mutilated thing, drifting into formless dreams. But now, with Vindicta's awakening and the return of the Crimson King, you are animated once more. In the fires of war, you have found focus again, and fight along with your brethren in the purge of the Black Crusade's remnants. You do not tire, you do not hurt, and your bolter never runs out of ammunition. Khayon the Black and the other Heralds are the most able to command you and the other Rubrics, being experienced in communing with the dead, but the others are learning quickly. A new Crusade has begun, led by a Legion renewed : let all enemies of the Imperium beware ...
Ashamed Daemonologist
Knowledge is power. On that truism is the power of the Fifteenth Legion built. But some knowledge is dangerous to its wielder, tainted by ancient evils. Such is the case of the knowledge of daemons' True Names, un-words that burn themselves in the soul of those who possess even a fragment of their horrible truth. In the Archives of Shame, the Thousand Sons have gathered the True Names of hundreds of daemons and fragments from those of thousands more. As one of the few – so very, very few – sons of Magnus trusted with access to that forbidden lore, you are a walking bomb, a potential threat to all around you. Because all Neverborn are fragments of the Dark God that spawned them (except for a few of considerable power), knowledge of the name of one grants some power over all of that particular choir, if one knows the proper formulas and rituals. Your skin is covered in warding tattoos to contain the power of the Names, and you have been trained since your induction into the Legion to compartmentalize your own thoughts, keeping the knowledge of the Names separate from your awareness until you call upon it. You haven't dreamed since you became a Legionary – the power of the Rubric clashing with the corruption of the Names will not allow it. On the field of battle, you are the scourge of the Neverborn, who laugh and taunt you even as you banish them back to the Hell from whence they came, while other enemies of the Imperium recoil before you, sensing the dread power laying within you. Should you ever fall to darkness, the knowledge within you would make you very dangerous indeed, and Chaos Sorcerers have been hunting you for years, trying to capture you to gain access to the lore you possess.
Corvidae Dreadnought
In life, you were the greatest Seer of your generation, and led your brothers through some of the most difficult and tangled parts of the War of Fate's web. You pitted your mind against those of Dark Angels Sorcerers, Eldar Farseers from Craftworlds at war with the Imperium, and even Greater Daemons from the Court of Change, and lived through it, though you were not victorious every time. But then you fell, your boarding torpedo blasted apart by point-defenses during a pitched orbital battle between the Imperial Navy and the fleet of an Ork Warboss. Your body was recovered, barely clinging to life, and immediately interred within a Dreadnought sarcophagus that had belonged to the Word Bearers, also deployed in the area. Thanks to the generous offering of the sons of Lorgar, you endured, transformed into one of the Fifteenth Legion's few Dreadnoughts. It has now been three thousand years since you were entombed, and such a long life has brought you new perspective. You see beyond mere battles and worlds : you can predict the course of entire Sectors, and the rise of heroes and villains from the ashes of war. On the battlefield, you are at once a walking avatar of death and an invaluable tactical advisor, entrusting your immediate surroundings to your instincts and the mechanisms of your sarcophagus while your mind sails the currents of Fate and delivers warnings to Imperial commanders. However, your sanity has been slowly eroded by the passing years, and it takes more and more effort from your Legion brothers and Adeptus Mechanicus handlers to rouse you from your meditative slumber.
Doomed Daughter
You were born in the Prosperine Dominion, and from your very infancy showed the signs of a seer. In any other part of the Imperium, you would have been sent to the Black Ships, to be tested on Terra and likely ended up as fodder for the Astronomican. Instead, the Daughters of Magnus took you in and helped you develop your gift for prophecy. For years, you peered into an ever-darkening future, catching glimpses of terrible things to come yet unable to learn anything about how to prevent them from coming to pass. Then you saw your own death, and the knowledge of your fate freed you from doubt, even as it shackled you with the terrible weight of destiny. You know how you will perish, though not all the details – the vision was infuriatingly vague, as such things most often are. Driven by some unknowable intuition, you have left the contemplative orders and joined the ranks of the more martial Daughters. Your doom cannot be escaped, but by the same token, until it finds you, death cannot claim you. As the armies of the Dominion gather to face the Times of Ending, you stand with them. On the battlefield, you dodge every blow that could harm you, and shout the secrets of their futures to the servants of the Archenemy, causing them to recoil from you in horror, refusing to believe you yet unable to deny the truth of your words. As your death looms ever closer, cold dread fills your heart, but if you are going to die, then you will die as a true Daughter of Magnus, and serve the Crimson King and the God-Emperor until the end.
Hero of the Spireguard
You are a champion of the Spireguard : a master with the blade and an expert marksman. Though you are still only a sergeant, that is only because you are still young – and you agree that you aren't ready for more responsibilities yet. You have no psychic potential, though many of your comrades have joked that the way you fight must be magic. You are young, handsome and charismatic, which means that whenever the Spireguard must attend a social event, you are the one they send. You are fiercely loyal to the Imperium, having seen firsthand the kind of horrors that threaten Mankind in the galaxy. Yet you guard your thoughts well where you are near one of the sons of Magnus, for you haven't actually trusted them in many years. Your elder brother, who was psychically gifted, was taken by the Fifteenth Legion to join their ranks, and you have it on good authority that he made it all the way through the long and gruelling training – only to enter the Sanctum in Ahat-iakby and never come out. You have heard rumors of what happens in Magnus' tomb, disturbing tales of human sacrifices, to rouse the Primarch from his sleep or to protect the Thousand Sons from an ancient curse laid upon them by their enemies. You refuse to believe them, but you cannot help but wonder. Legions have fallen from the Emperor's Light in the past, you know this from having fought against them a few too many times : could the Fifteenth Legion be on the same dark path ?
Hunter of the Abhorrent
The energies of the Warp can twist the flesh and mind of humans into strange and terrible shapes, and the debased monsters most Imperials picture when they think of a mutant are only the most inoffensive of the changes the Dark Gods can cause. Under the influence of Chaos, the gift of psychic power, which should have brought Mankind into the next step of its evolution, can birth true abominations from the darkest nightmares of Humanity's collective mind. And then there are the ancient xenos horrors, result of the Ruinous Powers experimenting with entire species in the days of the Eldar Empire. You lead your coterie of Thousand Sons across the Imperium, hunting for these creatures, following the reports of the Inquisition to world after world. The Holy Ordos don't like to admit when they are outmatched by their foe, but they are generally pragmatic enough to call for your help rather than risk the lives of their agents. You have specialized your psychic talents into tracking such abominations, finding and following the spoor they leave in the Aether to their lairs (they always have a lair, no matter their origin). Your coterie is composed of members of every Cult, because you need to be able to bring a large variety of powers to bear against foes which are never the same. You are also all very proficient with your power weapons, and more than capable of improvising suddenly and violently if needed. You are also the face of the group, talking to the Imperial authorities and the traumatized survivors, though most of that is done by the Spire Guard company that accompanies your coterie in its crusade : one hundred good men and women, dedicated to your mission as much as you yourself.
Prophetess of Vindicta
Your homeworld was one of many hive-worlds deep within the borders of the Imperium, where the Legions have almost never cause to go and the Inquisition work behind the scenes, striking down heretics and mutants without disturbing the statu quo as long as the tithes keep flowing in. That is why, for the last five millennia, it has been ruled by a lineage of cruel and exploitative Governors who care nothing for the suffering of the population, only their personal wealth and power. Your parents were the last members of two noble lines who spent centuries fighting to better the living conditions of the planet's working class against the rest of the aristocracy, and for their efforts they were executed. You saw it happen – you saw the bullets pierce their flesh, saw their bodies left to rot in the sun as a warning to others, and picked up the blood-stained ribbon that had covered your mother's eyes. You were nine years old. For ten years afterwards, you lived in the underhive, protected by some of your parents' surviving friends. You grew up with hatred in your heart, slowly forged by what you saw in the depths into a burning need for justice. When Vindicta awoke on Prospero, you became one of the new Power's vessel. You emerged from the underhive at the head of an army of the downtrodden, while the ghosts of every victim of the regime returned in a single night of vengeance that brought low ninety percent of the highborn, including the Governor who signed your parents' death warrants. Now you must build a new society, one capable of answering the very pointed questions that will soon come from the rest of the Imperium's merciless administration. But you are confident, even if you do not fully understand what is happening to you – why so many are willing to follow your lead, and why the wrongly slain answer your call.
Raptora Magister Templi
The battlefield trembles. Soldiers shake their heads, trying to get rid of the pressure building in their ears. Buildings collapse while tanks are sent flying, and whole platoons are obliterated, rent apart by unseen hands. Soon, the enemy side breaks and flees, desperate to escape slaughter against a foe they cannot fight. Such is the power you bring to bear as the greatest telekine in a Legion known for its psychic prowess. You awoke to your power when your home collapsed during an earthquake, and saved your family from the collapsing debris by raising a force bubble that lasted until you were rescued. That was five hundred years ago – your brothers and sisters are long dead, though you have kept track of their descendants. As a Magister Templi, you are one of the only five Thousand Sons to bear any kind of title recognized by the Imperium, and you are the subject of many whispered rumors and legends. Other sons of Magnus come to you to learn the deeper mysteries of the Raptora Cult, and you go to war surrounded by a coterie of apprentices, all of them pooling their psychic strength for you to tap upon and wield with peerless expertise. Not for you the subtle side of the War of Fate : you fight in the open, bringing overwhelming power upon your enemies. Imperial commanders across the galaxy owe some of their greatest victories to your intervention, and many enemies of the Imperium have sworn to kill you. So far, none have succeeded, but you know that one of them, a particularly vicious Dark Eldar, is trying to form a coalition of all your personal foes in the hope that together, they can do what they cannot alone.
Runesmith of the Blood God
You were an artisan once, in long-lost Tizca. You took the bones of dead philosophers and savants and made them into ritual tools for the Thousand Sons, to carry with them across the stars so that these fallen worthies may continue to take part in the Great Crusade's dream. Then the Wolves came. You saw them murder your children and grandchildren, and were dragged to the Pyramid of Photep by a well-meaning neighbour who refused to let you die where you knelt in shock. For several years, you remained near-comatose, cared for by nurses and brought to one of the Prosperine Dominion's most idyllic worlds in the hope that your final years would go in peace. But eventually, grief gave way to hatred, hatred gave way to madness, and you vanished from the hospice. In the name of your hatred of the Sixth Legion, you gave yourself over to Khorne, who whispered promises of vengeance into your broken heart. From the bones of Imperial heroes and Chaos Lords alike, you crafted terrible weapons imbued with the power of the Blood God and handed them over to other warlords and champions opposed to the Space Wolves. The power of Khorne has preserved you throughout the millennia, though the thing you have become has very little in common with the kindly old man you once were. As the Times of Ending loom near, you have come to serve the Blood Raven, Gabriel Angelos. It was you who transformed his power hammer into the dreadful weapon it is now, marked with the hidden names of Khorne's eight greatest Bloodthirsters. The thirst for vengeance against Russ' Legion that led you down the path of Ruin has all but vanished, replaced by an unending, inhuman hatred of all.
Student Cartomancer
You were half a soothsayer and half a conman, telling white lies for the bored nobility in return for piles of cash and access to the planet's best cellars and bedrooms, until the Thousand Sons found you and decided you had potential. The sons of Magnus came to your homeworld to dismantle a Gene-stealer Cult, using their abilities to track the abominations' patriarch, and you ended up caught in the middle of a fire-fight in the domain of one of the infiltrated highborn families. You managed to talk your way out of being purged immediately, and either you amused the Thousand Sons or they sensed something in you you didn't even know was there. Either way, you ended up attached to that coterie, learning the arts of cartomancy from the sole Corvida in the group. You still use the same deck of gilded tarot cards you inherited from your grandfather and thereafter used to con the rich out of their money, but now, rather than cold reading and a fast tongue, you use actual divination techniques. Although you are half-convinced the only reason your teacher keeps you around is as some kind of pet project to occupy his time during the journeys across the Warp, you still find pride in the work you have done for the Emperor, far more now than you would have dreamt of before. You have served as agent for the Thousand Sons a few times, using your experience among the nobility to serve as intermediary or infiltrator, and your new talents to escape from some truly dangerous situations when things went wrong. Your new life certainly isn't boring, though you have started to get more and more distressing readings every time you draw the cards ...
Sons of Horus
Agent of the Horusian Wars
There are those among the Horusian Inquisitors who lack the mental strength and conviction of their Primarch namesake, and succumb to the temptation of the fell knowledge bestowed upon them by the twin rites of Possession and Exorcism. Some fall years, decades, centuries even after their initial contact with the daemonic, while others emerge from the ritual with their minds broken by the hideous power of the Neverborn. These rogues are among the most dangerous foes of the Imperium, using their dark lore to create daemonhosts and plunge entire worlds into madness, driven by insane motives. The loyal Horusian Inquisitors hunt these traitors without mercy, and you are one of the weapons they wield in this sacred duty. Born and raised within the ranks of the Ordos' servants, you have undergone the rites, and emerged stronger of faith and purpose, forever immune to the daemon's touch. You are part scholar of the profane, part holy warrior, fighting the infernal with blessed weaponry and prayer. Your knowledge helps other Acolytes track down the renegades and unravel the webs of lies and sorcery they weave to protect their tainted souls from retribution. When necessary, you use your more esoteric abilities to erase the traces of the heretics, to keep the Inquisition's inner conflicts hidden from the rest of the Imperium, wiping out memories and removing the echoes of dark rituals. And every time you go to battle, you do so with the name of Horus on your lips, calling upon the Lupercal to grant you a portion of his strength.
Bloody-Handed Mournival Lord
To the Sixteenth Legion, the four members of the Mournival are the symbol of the Sons of Horus' soul. They embody the strength and morality of Horus Lupercal, his charisma and his unwavering devotion to the Imperium. But there is a darker side to the Mournival, just as there was a darker side to the Warmaster : the side of him that made the cold calculations of war, and willingly brought war to entire human cultures that refused to join the Imperium but posed no threat to it. Today more than ever, Humanity needs its defenders to be willing to make the hard choices, and that is your purpose. The Imperium has fallen far from what it was during the Great Crusade : it has cast aside the torch of illumination and embraced tyranny and ignorance in the name of survival. Noble ideals will not hold back the forces of darkness; only military might will. You know this, even if your brothers would rather not accept it. You lead the forces that crush rebellions on strategically vital worlds, to ensure that the flow of weapons and ammunition to the frontlines never stops. The Sons of Horus under your command have committed acts of genocide and sworn oaths of silence, to never speak of what they did for the Imperium's greater good. You take no pleasure in what you do, but it has to be done, and someone else might get it wrong. Better that you bloody your own hands than to have one of your brothers do it instead. The Imperium is the only thing standing between Mankind and extinction, and it must be protected, no matter the cost.
Broken Exorcist
When the Inquisitor called for the Legion's help in purging a lair of Chaos worshippers, your commanding officer was happy to oblige him. But when the Inquisitor called for volunteers to become Exorcists, the Captain was much more reluctant. At the time, you didn't understand why, though you thought you did. As a member of his honor guard, you were present when the Inquisitor said that Exorcist Marines would be needed for the battle, and you volunteered. As the Company flew toward the cultists' lair, you were bound within a ritual circle and briefly subjected to possession by an entity of the Warp. But something went wrong. The daemon was much more powerful than the Inquisitor's acolytes had anticipated, and it killed almost all of them before they were able to banish it. You saw the Neverborn kill these loyal servants of the Throne with your own hands, but it is not guilt that haunts you. The daemon showed you things, revealed terrible truths to you, and it has broken you. The awful knowledge it left behind proved key to defeating the cultists that day, and has been useful ever since, but your brothers know you paid a heavy price for it. What worries you, however, is the possibility that the price hasn't yet been paid in full. Before being banished, the daemon promised that you would belong to it one day, even if it had to wait a hundred years. And only a few days ago, it has been ninety-nine years since that fateful day …
Cthonian Gang-Rat
You are a child of the tunnels and caverns where the people of Cthonia live short, hard lives, away from the poisonous surface. You were born among one of the gang-tribes and raised by the community, never knowing who your parents were, as is the law within that particular tribe. You learned to fight before you learned to walk, and had your first kill before you had your first kiss. By Imperial reckoning, you are twelve years old, though the people of Cthonia don't exactly keep track of such things. The gang was fairly prosperous under the leadership of its gang-king, a cunning and vicious man who has lived far longer than most people do on Cthonia. But you have seen the truth of the gang-king's power, seen the pit full of chewed-on bones and the runes glowing with balefire. The bastard tried to sacrifice you to his infernal masters, but you escaped, and now you are on the run from your own people, who have been told you stole from him and murdered one of his victims. You know that there is only one way out of this : you must find the Angels of Death, who will come to Cthonia in but a few weeks, and tell them everything. They will know what to do. But until then, you must survive, hiding in the deepest tunnels, places where even the hardest gangers fear to thread. There are things down there, ugly and abandoned things, but you are Cthonian. You will not let fear claim you, not when there is so much depending on your success. The Legion must be told about the heretic gang-king. The things you saw in his secret lair still haunt your dreams. Whatever he is planning, he must be stopped.
Deathwatch Librarian
You were born in the underhive of a dying hive-world, among a society on the verge of collapse. Your psychic gifts marked you since your childhood. The only reason you weren't handed over to the Black Ships was that the planet's infrastructure was already in shambles, and the only reason you weren't killed as a witch was because one of the gang lords found the services of a pet mind-reader useful. The Sons of Horus rescued you from that life and trained you to use your telepathic powers to get the truth out of anyone, no matter how well protected their mind may be. It is because of that talent that you were sent to the Deathwatch, where the Inquisition can make the most use of your abilities. Within your kill-team, you are tasked with extracting intelligence from captives, humans or otherwise. Upon joining the Deathwatch, you received special training to ensure that no xenos corruption could seep into your soul through these contacts, though even so, your cousins keep a close eye on you and you need to submit to regular psychic exams, just in case. While your main role is that of intelligence extractor, you are still a Space Marine, and your telepathic gifts are very useful on the battlefield. Your latest mission is to investigate strange events occurring on worlds near the region of space claimed by the upstart xenos of the Tau Empire. Mysterious disappearances and incomprehensible decisions by Imperial officials have led the Ordo Xenos to fear that the blue-skinned aliens may be trying to extend their influence by covert means – but your dreams on the way to your first destination have led you to believe another, darker power may be at work.
Glorybound Champion
You were born on a world of great plains and savage tribes, where the cult of the God-Emperor took the form of ritual combat before the great statues of Him on Earth built by the Ecclesiarchy to impress your ancestors and convince them to abandon their ancient faith. The Sons of Horus took you during their decennial visit to find recruits, after a succession of duels against older children that you won without taking a single wound. While you are adequate with a bolter, your true skill lies in the art of the blade. You are one of the few Legionaries you know who can actually pull off the very complex skill of dual-wielding swords, and you use a pair of power swords that were given to you by one of the four Mournival Lords after you saved his life by killing a Dark Eldar Archon in single combat after the cowardly xenos had poisoned the Legion Lord. The Company to which you belong has a tradition of favoring melee weapons dating back to the Great Crusade, and you are honored to have been chosen to join them – honored, and determined to leave your mark in history. You are still young, but you have already been elevated to the rank of Company Champion. You are aware that this is likely as high as you will rise through the ranks – you know that your mastery of tactics and logistics just aren't up to par for the greater responsibilities of a higher position. You are content with this, for you seek the glory of fighting against the strongest and most skilled opponents, and being a Champion all but guarantees you will have plenty such opportunities.
Guardian of Wolf's Paradise
The horrors of the Space Wolves live on long after the Inquisition's teams leave, in myth and legends if not in actual memory, and the iconography of the wolf is hard to erase from the subconscious mind of entire worlds. As a result, the various breeds of Lupus, from those which were exported from Old Earth to those re-created through genetic engineering or descended from dogs gone feral, have been nearly extinguished across the Imperium. But the Sixteenth Legion remembers the days it went by the name of the Luna Wolves. Thousands of years ago, the Mournival Lords decided to act and prevent what could very well have been the total extinction of the breed. They claimed an entire world, far from Imperial Warp routes, and transported thousands of wolves there from all across the galaxy, along with other species needed to establish a natural balance. You are one of the people they brought along, to keep watch over the world and monitor its canine population. Like your ancestors before you, you have sworn an oath to the Legion, even if they only visit about once per century. Your days are spent journeying across the vast forests, searching for any perturbation to the cycle of life. By Legion's law, the only structure on the entire planet is the keep from which your people operate and which contains the only spaceport. You are fascinated by the wolf packs, their ways and how they interact with one another. Their ever-evolving territorial patterns are the subject of many a book in the keep's archives, and in the time you have spent studying them, you have begun to wonder if there isn't more to this world than meets the eye – another, hidden purpose to your people's stewardship of this world.
Intimidating Giant
Ever since you were a boy, you were taller than all the other kids, stronger than any of them. The village priest said you were blessed by the Emperor, while the meaner children said that you were part Ogryn. You started helping your parents on the farm long before anyone else your age, and were strong enough to do the work of an adult man by the time you were seven years old. When the Sons of Horus came to your world seeking recruits, the Apothecaries only had to take a look at you to know you would fit right in. You went with the Legion willingly, because that was the right thing to do, and they had to scrap a damaged suit of Terminator war-plate to make armor your size after your transformation. But there was one thing no one, not even you, had predicted : you had absolutely no taste for violence, despite being distressingly good at it. It took a lot of training before you could overcome the psychological blocks you put in place to stop you from hurting everyone around you as a child, and even then, violence disgusts you. Which is quite ironic, considering that Horus' gene-seed and the scars of several confrontations with the Imperium's enemies have given you a very intimidating face. When your commanding officer goes to meet other Imperial authorities, he makes a point of taking you along, your mere presence convincing others to go along with his wishes. And when that isn't enough, you play the part of the warmonger, and few can resist then. Your brothers know you as the gentle giant you really are, always with a kind word for the serfs and ready to help younger Space Marines. On the battlefield, you fight with cold precision, showing little of the hot-headedness the Sons of Horus are famous for. A strange combination with the massive power hammer you wield, but an effective one.
Veteran of the Macharian Crusade
You were a young Legionary when the Macharian Crusade swept across the stars, freshly inducted into the ranks of the Sixteenth Legion. You remember the glory of those days, when world after world fell before your advance. You stood in the presence of Macharius himself on three occasions, and thought that this must be what it had been like to take part in the Great Crusade. But then, just like the Great Crusade before it, the Macharian Crusade collapsed under the pettiness of men. Macharius died, and his achievements broke apart as his generals let their ambitions drive them to heresy. You have bitter memories of returning to worlds you had liberated from xenos oppression to put the same people you freed from the alien menace to the sword for rebelling against the Throne, and killing Guardsmen by whose side you had once fought. Centuries have passed since then, but you learned your lesson : glory is fleeting, but evil is eternal, and it delights in turning comrades against each other. You are the Captain of your own Company, a veteran of the Legion whose word is respected among the Legion's officers, most of whom are younger than you are. You have fought nearly every kind of foe the galaxy has to offer at some point, and lived to tell the tale. Now you see the same passion and hunger for glory you once possessed in the eyes of new recruits, and while some of them have the wits to listen to your warnings, most of them think they know better and rush away to battle, convinced that they shall succeed and triumph where all others have failed. Part of you pity them for their ignorance, but a much greater part of you envy them for it.
Voice of Unity
Though you are a Space Marine, designed for violence and war, your true calling is that of a diplomat. The Imperium is composed of hundreds of factions, and each faction is composed of hundreds of individuals with their own beliefs and agendas. Sheer momentum is enough to keep it cohesive as a whole, but on the smaller scale of a single campaign theater, it takes a lot of effort to keep various agencies playing nicely together, which is where you come in. You were born to a long line of Imperial rulers, whose time ended when the Black Legion came to destroy your world. The Sixteenth Legion picked you from the ruins of that war, and made you one of their own. You have inherited a part of the First Primarch's legendary charisma, along with his gift for rethoric, and you use every bit of your abilities every day trying to prevent hot-headed fools from starting civil wars - and those are only your own Legion brothers. The Imperial Guard, the Adeptus Mechanicus, the Sisters of Battle, the Inquisition and other, less famous organizations : you have talked with all of them at some point, negotiating protocol and common hierarchy on shared fields of battles. You relish the time you spent actually fighting on the battlefield, using it to vent your mounting frustrations upon the ungodly. Because no matter how nice you may seem, you still have a Cthonian temper, and aren't quite above using the cold fury of Lupercal to convince those who are particularly stubborn to play along for the greater good. And there are things that cannot be compromised no matter what, principles that must not be violated. Those among the Imperium who are truly callous toward the Emperor's subjects have learned to fear you.
Word Bearers
Cardinal of the Tendency
In a galaxy filled with threats both physical and spiritual, it is only faith in the God-Emperor that keeps Mankind united and strong, only the fires of His wrath that keep the rampant spiritual corruption of Humanity in check. Those who have dedicated their life to understand His word should by right be the ones to lead the empire He built, but instead they are denied that responsibility, cowed by the ambitions of lesser men and misguided Astartes. You are a member of the Temple Tendency, this offshoot of the Temple of the Saviour Emperor that formed in the aftermath of the mad visionary Vandire's downfall. Officially, you are the Cardinal of a Shrine World, ruling over the lives of billions in the name of Him on Earth, and your involvement in the Tendency must remain secret at all cost, for the enemies of the Emperor's chosen servants would destroy you in moments. You gather allies and resources at your side, while discreetly moving against those who would prevent the Ecclesiarchy's return to power. In time, you will drive the heretics from the Ecclesiarchy, and reclaim the power the Church has abandoned. The Armies of Faith will be reborn, and you will direct them to eradicate the filth that infest the Imperium. The Word Bearers will be the first to fall, as will all who oppose your rightful authority, and the God-Emperor's glorious vision will be restored. And if in order to achieve that goal you must violate the precepts He laid down to curb the excesses of lesser souls, well, you are above the risks and temptations such transgressions would bring to someone not as devoted to the cause as you are.
Cloak-and-Dagger Iterator
You were selected to join the Word Bearers from the people of Colchis, but during your training, your masters discovered that you had the even rarer potential to become one of the Legion's Iterators, and offered you a choice between continuing the path to joining the Legion, or remaining human to serve as their voice. It was a difficult choice, for you longed to join the sons of Lorgar in their war across the stars to protect the Imperium, but you ultimately chose the path of Iterator. Your training was even harsher than that you had already gone through as an Aspirant, as you learned the myriad variations of Imperial law and custom, the ways of rethoric and speech. Now you speak for your masters in the Legion, acting as an intermediary between the transhuman demigods and those they are sworn to protect, but who regard them with as much fear as respect. You bear the emblem of the Seventeenth on your chest, and bear their authority, but there are still those who would challenge them. Over the course of your rejuvenation-extended life, you have survived countless assassination attempts by overly proud fools who thought to make a statement to the Word Bearers by striking at one they perceived to be a mere servant. But you are more than that : you are trained in the art of battle as well as diplomacy, and your robes of office conceal weapons and armor the Legion has preserved from the earliest days of the Great Crusade. You are far more than a diplomat : you are the Legion's agent and representative in the nest of vipers that is Imperial politics, and those who underestimate you do so at their own peril.
Dreadful Herald
When you were a Scout, you were deployed as part of a joint operation with the Eighth Legion, and you learned much from the Night Lords. You learned the value of fear, and how it can be used to prevent violence. Mere months after that campaign's end, you were selected to become a Chaplain and underwent their special training, but you haven't forgotten the lessons you learned fighting alongside the sons of Curze. Now, you act as the Herald of the Seventeenth Legion, sent ahead of the Imperium's retribution to give one last chance of redemption to those who have turned from the Emperor's Word, but have not yet wholly succumbed to the poison of Chaos. You go alone, trusting into the Emperor's gifts to see you return to your brothers alive – or at the very least, to take as many of the enemy with you should they refuse the last chance you represent. Your skull mask, your black as night armor, the very way you move : all that you are radiates intimidation. To look upon you is to behold the wrath of the Emperor's made manifest, His fist of retribution cast in unbreakable ceramite. Prideful Governors and fanatical xenos-lovers have fallen to their knees simply by catching a glimpse of you, their minds shattered as the guilt and self-hatred they hid even from themselves was forced into the light by your presence. Your voice is deep, sepulchral even without your helmet on. Many a would-be rebel leader, upon facing you, has demanded that you remove your helm, that you may speak face to face, finding the skull mask unnerving. But the face you hide behind your helmet is just as terrifying : an attempt on your life, made decades ago, has left you gaunt and corpse-pale, with sunken eyes perpetually glowing with feverous strength.
Guardian of Khur
You are a member of that generation of Space Marines who were inducted during the Heresy, knowing nothing of the Great Crusade's glory, only the bitterness of fratricidal war. You were an Aspirant of the Seventeenth Legion during the Shadow Crusade, and the suit of armor you received had belonged to a Word Bearer who fell on Calth, fighting at the side of Argel Tal himself. Years later, during the Scouring, you saw from afar your Primarch fight four Greater Daemons at once on the surface of Khur, and vanish in a flash of light. Moments later, you were struck down by a Neverborn, your injuries grievous enough that they resulted in your interment within a Dreadnought. You were then chosen to remain on Khur, in the city of Monarchia, which had stood tall against the hordes of Chaos. For the two wars that they waged on the planet, the Word Bearers swore an oath to watch over Khur, both to protect its people and to wait for a sign of their Primarch's return. The coordinates of the site of Lorgar's disappearance are kept secret, for Aurelian wasn't the only power to walk upon it, but you remember. Most of your time is spent in slumber within the Legion's stronghold in Monarchia, waiting to be roused to wage war against cultists of the Ruinous Powers or other agents of Chaos seeking to take advantage of the planet's tumultuous past. There were twelve Dreadnoughts chosen for that duty initially, but over the centuries, only you remain of the ancients guardians of Khur – only you remain who remember Lorgar, and the name of the one the texts only refer to as the Blessed Lady, who led her people through these darkest times.
Hidden Believer
In a Legion that has fought ten thousand years to keep the Imperial Truth alive against the crushing weight of time and the efforts of the Imperium's own Lords, you are a most rare breed. You truly believe in the Emperor's divinity. Perhaps He was once a man, one possessed of immense psychic power, inhuman intellect and great charisma, but you believe that He became much more after the Roboutian Heresy ended in ashes and failure. Trapped upon the Golden Throne, He was forced to abandon His mortal shell and ascend to higher realms, His spirit now cast across the entire galaxy, protecting His people in every way He can. You do not believe Him to be all-powerful : you have seen too many horrors, too many innocents lost to the many evils stalking the stars to think it is all part of His plan. But the God-Emperor is real, and so is His power. Thirty years ago, as you fought against a Tyranid swarm in a collapsing hive-city, you saw a miracle with your own eyes. You saw His light, forcing back the horrors of the Great Devourer, protecting the children you could not reach in time. That light was gone in a moment, but you sensed its source turning toward you, and were shocked at the feeling of familiarity, of kinship, you felt then. You are convinced that this was the Emperor, reaching out to intervene in a more direct fashion than He usually does. You have kept that belief a secret, outwardly remaining a loyal line-brother of the Word Bearers. You understand why the Legion not-so-cordially despises the Ecclesiarchy, but the Chaplains are wrong about one thing : Mankind needs the God-Emperor if it is to survive in the galaxy.
Huntress of Heretics
You were a Sister of Battle, born into the orders from a mother who died fighting the Archenemy's minions when you were only a baby. It wasn't until you were fifteen years old that you learned the details of her death : her squad was betrayed by Guardsmen who should have been their allies. You pledged then, before an altar dedicated to Him on Earth, that you would dedicate your life to hunting those who betray Him. Now, one decade later, you serve in the Ordo Hereticus, punishing heretics with fire and blade. Your martial training within the Sisterhood has served you well, and was the reason you were noticed by your Inquisitor mistress in the first place. The Emperor's mysterious ways have led you and your coterie of Acolytes to the Seventeenth Legion, the Angels who refuse to accept the truth of their grand-sire's divinity. You do not understand how the sons of Lorgar can be so blind, but you have contained yourself, and they have managed to be almost civil in their interactions with you. The common threat posed by a Traitor Astartes holding a powerful infernal relic has seen to it : they need your coterie for the knowledge you have of the relic, and you need them to be able to take down the renegade and his minions. Being raised by the Sisterhood, you expected the Word Bearers to hold the very Imperium into contempt, as they oppose the very existence of the faith upon which it is built, but what you have glimpsed of their behaviour as the strike cruiser sails through the Sea of Souls has forced you to reconsider. They have faith, but it is of a different sort than the one you have known all your life.
Killer of False Gods
You have inherited Lorgar's hatred of Chaos, and a fraction of the Aurelian's psychic power. As a Librarian of the Seventeenth Legion, you have spent the better part of two centuries fighting a long, protracted campaign in an isolated region of space that has only recently been freed from the Warp Storms that raged there for more than three thousand years. Nearly a hundred human worlds need to be reclaimed – but in the centuries cut off the Imperium, almost all of them have fallen under the sway of daemons and xenos masquerading as gods, feeding on worship and sacrifice. You and the other Imperial forces tasked with reclaiming the Sector know that this cannot be a coincidence – there is a greater hand at work, one you have yet to uncover. Until then, you go from world to world, squaring off against the psychically empowered false gods and destroying them one by one. You take a cold satisfaction in bringing down their "miracles" and exposing them for the frauds they are before the eyes of the very people they have enslaved for generations. But you do not know yet that, after you and your brothers have departed, the Ecclesiarchy moves in. Kept hidden from you by the Inquisition, they descend upon the people you liberated like spiritual vultures, and bring the worship of the God-Emperor into the population, presenting you as the wrathful angel of His wrath, sent to free them from their dark enslavers. The memory of your actions and the expert words of the preachers is enough to persuade most to embrace the Imperial Cult whole-heartedly. So far, you have had no reason to return to a planet you liberated, a situation that the Ordo Hereticus agents who monitor you want to make damn sure continues.
Lord of Iconoclasts
You remember the city where you fought your last battle as a Space Marine. It had fallen to a Salamander warband, and it had taken you six months to answer the last, desperate call for help of its people – all ten millions of them. You remember the road leading to the city, lined with crucified soldiers, thousands of them. You remember the pyres, the sound of whips slashing at exposed flesh, the moans of those who had abandoned hope that they would ever be delivered from their fate – even in death, for the Salamanders' sorcery bound their souls to their bodies far beyond their natural endurance. You remember the empty eyes of children chained to a statue of Vulkan, made to endlessly sing the Black Dragon's praises. You remember the hordes of branded slaves they sent against you, forcing you to butcher those you had come to save, with your gauntleted fists in order to save ammunition for the real battle. You remember losing pieces of yourself, again and again, as you saw more and more horrors. How could you remain the same, after seeing such things ? An entire Chapter of the Word Bearers entered the doomed city under your command. By the time you had killed the Chaos Lord responsible – who was still laughing as your blade pierced his hearts – less than three hundred Iconoclast Marines remained. It took three years for the rest of the Legion to find you and repaint your armor crimson, and during that time you rampaged across the Sector, purging the servants of Vulkan without care for the collateral damage – for what did a few lives matter, compared to the evil you knew your prey could cause ? Now you are bound by your brothers, sworn to obey their orders. You accepted these chains, for even in your current state the thought of fighting against Lorgar's sons is anathema. But you know that they will see the truth soon : there is no place for mercy or compassion in battle, only for cold, cold hatred.
Magus of the Covenant
You were there on Colchis, when the upstart Lorgar shattered your power and broke the sacred compact between Man and God in the name of petty, misguided morality. Thousands of years have passed since then, but you endured, protected by the Gods – though at times you wished you hadn't, for they were less than merciful for your failures. Again and again they have brought you back to do their work, for they know your loyalty to their holy cause is absolute and unwavering. The scattered remnants of the Covenant have continued their work down the long centuries, spreading the True Word to those who would hear it. The Imperium is blind to just how deep the rot has set within its bones : for every congregation the agents of the False Emperor discover and dismantle, there are three more, either hiding in the shadows or in plain sight. Your current body may be a wizened thing, suffering from hundreds of years of ageing – it will be time to change it soon – but your mind remains as sharp as ever, and you guide the efforts of apostles of the Gods across a thousand worlds, sitting at the center of a web of influence and sorcery, fighting to spread the Gods' illumination and weaken the hold of the False Emperor onto his crumbling domain. And though you cannot take the entire credit for it, the work has progressed well, exceptionally so in the last centuries, in fact. Soon, the Iron Cages will be broken, and the Gods' Angels will be released into the galaxy. Then, their long-delayed plans for Humanity will be fulfilled at last, and Man shall take his rightful place at their feet, in a realm of united matter and thought at least. And then, finally, you will rest.
Prophet of Lorgar
You were born blind, but you always saw more than most. You could see the souls of those around you, flickering candles in an ocean of darkness – and you could see the shadows cast by the things that dwelled within that ocean. Monstrous shapes, with no place in any sane universe, preying upon those who did not even know they were here. If that was all that you saw, then you would have been killed as a child, or handed over to the Black Ships. But you saw other things as well. You saw echoes of what was, what had been, and what may yet be. And in the deepest pits of the abyss, you saw a golden warrior, fighting endlessly against the minions of evil. You spoke of that warrior, and for that you were regarded as a prophet, an oracle of the long-lost Primarch who the Dark Gods feared above all others, for he had seen them for what they really were. When the Word Bearers found you, they hated you instantly. They tell themselves that it is because you are one of the preachers they have been taught to hate, but the truth is different : they are jealous, even if they will not admit it to themselves. They sense the mark of the Golden One upon you, and they wonder why their lost Primarch has bestowed his favor upon a mere mortal, rather than one of them. Truth be told, you wonder that as well. There is a purpose to all of this, you know it, but you cannot see it clearly yet. But as the sons of Lorgar bring you to their lords to be examined, you can sense that soon, all will be made clear – destiny is in motion, and you and all who live will soon know it.
Salamanders
Accursed Shard-Bearer
You were an Acolyte of the Inquisition, your life sworn to the service of your master in the Ordo Malleus. For years you fought the servants of the infernal and their dread masters across the worlds of the Imperium, and during that time you saw horrors and dark wonders alike that would have broken a lesser soul. You did your duty well – until you crossed the path of a piece of the Dragon's Legacy. It was a sword, forged by the hands of Vulkan himself and inhabited by a powerful creature of the Warp. Under its influence, a renegade Captain of the Imperial Navy became a pirate lord who terrified an entire Sector, until you and your coterie breached his flagship in a joint operation with the Sector's Navy. Your Inquisitor master fought the pirate lord while you kept the waves of cultists of his back, and the blade was shattered by a blow from a thrice-blessed power maul. It should have been the end of it … but a fragment of the sword embedded itself within your chest, burrowing deep and closing the flesh to hide its passage. For decades afterwards, you endured the silent whispers of the daemon, gradually pushing you further and further into darkness, until it seemed the most natural thing in the universe to break your oaths and kill your comrades before fleeing with the relics you had gathered. Now you are hunted by your former master, empowered by the shard within your body. You seek to find all the pieces of the daemonic sword, to reforge it and return it to its true master. Until then, you use the fragments you have recovered to create more like you, though few souls are strong enough to withstand the infernal power they contain for long.
Arch-Magos of the Promethean Covenant
You were one of the Dark Mechanicum lords who came to Hephaeros and forged the Covenant with Vulkan himself. Of the nine who accompanied you that day, only three others remain. Some of the rest fell to their own experiments, others were slain by warlords of the Eye, and two were killed because you desired their treasures and knowledge. But during all that time, you have kept the bargain, for only a true fool would dare cross a Daemon Primarch. Your servants take the young slaves brought by the warbands and implant them with the harvested gene-seed of dead Salamanders, as well as that cultivated in the Tower's most secure vaults. Through gene-forging, indoctrination, and ruthless training, about one in a hundred of them become Salamanders worthy of joining the Legion's warbands while the rest die, the genetic materials implanted within them recycled into more deserving subjects. Though that is the most important work of the Covenant, you have long since delegated it to your subordinates, instead dedicating yourself to your own, higher research into fusing the Warp and technology. You have remade your own body into an avatar of the Dark Mechanicum's might, including some of the draconic iconography of the Salamanders, which you find useful to impose your will upon their mortal servants and to make your discussions with the Forgefathers easier. All of these years, you have also kept secret the price Vulkan paid you and your peers in return for your services. You suspect that, should the Salamanders learn what their gene-sire offered, many among them would try to destroy the Tower, no matter that they would endanger their only source of new Legionaries.
Bane of the World-Heart
From the moment you saw Vulkan after his transformation into a Daemon Primarch, you knew that you would one day be like him. For centuries, you let the power of the Warp reshape your flesh, directing every change with your indomitable will, until you had become one of the few Dragon Warriors who retain their intelligence. But it wasn't enough to satisfy you : you were mighty, but you were still mortal. You sought more, and found a way to true immortality. You led a war host out of the Eye of Terror and toward a world of the Exodite Eldars. The primitive xenos would have been no threat to your army, but their Craftworld cousins were also present, their Farseers fearing your plan's success. Your warband was decimated, but you reached your goal, and ensconced yourself into the world's core, twinned with its very soul. For a thousand years since then, you have slowly devoured the planet's essence, shrugging off the Eldar's pathetic attempts at getting you out. The balance of nature is collapsing as predators go mad and rampage across its surface, while the climate is wracked by storms and the ground heaves in great earthquakes, but you care naught for the damage you inflict upon the world. Soon, you will have devoured the last shred of the planet's spirit, and leave this forsaken mud-ball behind as you rise, reborn as your gene-sire was before you. The Exodite population has plummeted, but they still believe that you can be defeated and balance restored to their world. You are vaguely aware that they have chosen one of their strongest warriors for that honor – and though you doubt you have anything to fear from him, you have still sent your pawns to intercept him. Why take the risk, when immortality is finally in your grasp ?
Caretaker of the Slumbering Drakes
When the Salamanders left Nocturne for the last time, they took the deathworld's legends with them. At Vulkan's command, the Legion's great engines were used to bore a hole into the planet's surface and into the cavernous realms beneath, where titanic beasts dwelled in magmatic pools. These great reptilian creatures were captured and put into stasis, and remained there until the Legion's exile in the Eye of Terror. There, they were released, and the baleful energies of the Warp twisted them into void-capable, frigate-sized drakes that haunted the system of Hephaeros for centuries before succumbing to slumber one by one. The great drakes sleep within hollowed asteroids, whose surface is covered in temples dedicated to their glory, and it is within the greatest of these temples that you live. No less than five of the great drakes slumber beneath your temple, and it is your prayers and offerings which ensure that they do not rise, shattering the asteroid apart and killing your entire congregation. You lead a population of thousands, following the path laid down by your ancestors, who were tasked with this holy duty by the Black Dragon himself. Only when Vulkan calls for them shall the drakes be allowed to awaken, and then the galaxy will tremble before their might. And every seer of your temple and of the other temples with which you are in contact tells the same thing : that time approaches. Many enemies of the Eighteenth Legion and over-ambitions warlords seeking the drakes' power for themselves have come to the temples in the past, and their bodies are still impaled on the front gates, their souls bound forever to their decaying corpses. Like many of your predecessors, your skin displays the black scales that mark you as one of the Lord of Drakes' favored, and your eyes are burning crimson.
Damned Artisan
Once, mighty Vulkan was a creator, a maker of great and terrible things. But while his ascension has granted him many powers, it also robbed him of the ability to give shape to his ideas with his own hands. But the Black Dragon is not one to let anything escape his grasp, and so he sought a replacement, someone who could act as his hands in his stead - and that someone is you. You had a name once, a life, but nothing remains of your memories from before you were chosen by the Lord of Drakes. Now you are the vessel of a Daemon Primarch's infernal ingenuity, a craftsman of terrible weapons and nightmarish devices. You have a mind of your own, but it is one wholly divorced from the one you had before, designed by Vulkan to serve his dark goals. For ten millennia, you have wandered the galaxy, guided by Vulkan's inscrutable will, leaving artefacts behind you like seed of doom and destruction. You keep a handful of your artefacts on your person, one of which allows you to move from one planet to another without the need for a starship. The Inquisition does not know that many of the pieces of the Dragon's Legacy are actually your work rather than relics from before the Scouring. But some of its members have started to piece the truth together, as relics of the Black Dragon are found on human worlds where no Salamander ever walked. They suspect your existence, and have begun to search for more evidence of it. You carry with you powerful weapons, but your greatest asset has always been that no one knew of you. You must find those who hunt your shadow, and ensure that their search stops.
Deathless Draconite
The true enemy of Mankind, Chaos, cares nothing for the limits of life and death. It doesn't matter how powerful the Imperium is if its greatest enemies just keep returning from the grave over and over again. You realized that truth more than seven millennia ago, when you were an Inquisitor Lord, and with that realization came the understanding that, for the Imperium to have any chance of fighting back the tide of the Primordial Annihilator, it would need to be able to defy death as well. You became one of the founders of the Draconite faction, those who sought the means to raise the dead and bring true immortality to the Emperor's servants. In the end, you were banished from the Imperium by fools who did not comprehend your vision, but you endured, and continued your great work in the shadows. Now you lead a conspiracy stretching across entire Segmentums, with thousands of agents who have no idea that they really serve you combing ancient ruins or researching forbidden technologies on your behalf. You have stayed far from the corrupting "gifts" of the Warp, instead focusing your research on xenos artefacts and the archeo-sciences of the Dark Age of Technology. Your experiments have done more than prolong your life : they have actually granted you true resurrection. You have died several times over the centuries, but always your servants or the devices implanted in your person have brought you back. You aren't quite sure which of the many paths to eternity you pursued gave you this result, but you continue your research. Soon you will crack the final secrets of immortality, and all of Mankind shall thank you for your work.
Doomsday Forgefather
In the depths of the Eye of Terror, at the heart of a storm so powerful that no warband or daemon has dared enter it for millennia, you and a billion thralls have worked on Vulkan's greatest design. Under your direction, countless generations of mutant slaves and hereteks have slowly assembled a weapon more powerful than any of those lost aboard the Chalice of Fire, one that combines the destructive power of the Warp with ancient sciences that even the lords of the Dark Age of Technology feared. Hidden from the eyes of the Dark Gods themselves, you have laboured for aeons in the time-lost depths, and your mind and soul have paid a heavy price for it – little remains of your former identity beyond the duty bestowed upon you by the Black Dragon. Even before that happened to you, you barely understood the exact purpose of the planet-sized wonder you have been assembling, so complex are its mechanisms. But you do know that, through its use, Vulkan will be able to conquer the galaxy at last, crushing all who dare stand in his way. Soon the device will be completed. All that it will miss is a power source capable of activating it – and Vulkan himself has assured you that his agents are already procuring one. Yet in recent nights, when you must allow your body to rest before returning to the great work, you have been haunted by terrible visions of what the weapon will be able to accomplish, and something you thought had long since been expunged from you has started to torment you again – the faintest echoes of doubt, and conscience. Deep within you, what remains of the man you were screams in horror at what you are building, desperate to prevent it from being unleashed upon an unsuspecting galaxy …
Questor of the Chalice
You are a Chaos Knight, member of a Household that followed the Black Dragon in rebellion against the False Emperor during the Roboutian Heresy. You did not take part in those legendary battles, but your ancestors did, and you are determined to surpass even their great achievements. During your exile in the Eye of Terror, your Household has fallen out of Vulkan's favor for reasons kept secret by your family's elders, and you have taken it upon yourself to redeem your bloodline in the Lord of Drakes' eyes. In order to accomplish this, you have decided to find the legendary Chalice of Fire, the vessel which held the greatest artefacts of Vulkan and was lost during the Heresy. Should you find the ship and deliver it to the Black Dragon, your family's honor will be restored – and rewards beyond your wildest dreams will be bestowed upon you. You are scouring the Eye for clues, interrogating oracles, seers and scholars. Though your ship is small and your servants few, the power of a Knight is enough to loosen many tongues. Of course, you have had to perform a number of tasks for those with the knowledge you seek, fighting their battles or procuring what they desired in exchange for access to their lore. In the years since you began that quest, you have found many clues – not enough to give you a clear path to the Chalice, but enough to keep you convinced that such a way exists. You do know that the Chalice cannot be found within the Eye, and that in time you will need to find a way past the Warp Storm's edge and the Iron Cage. To that end, you have begun to make other alliances, motivated by more than lore.
Overseer of Titles
To the prideful lords of the Eighteenth Legion, names and titles are very important matters. Every Salamander who can claim command over even a handful of Chaos Marines bestows a title upon himself, reflecting his deeds and temperament. You are the keeper of these titles, and when two Salamanders lay claim to the same honorific, it is up to you to inform those involved and to arrange the ritual duel where the matter will be decided. Of course, the Salamanders would never trust this duty to a mere mortal, and thus have instead appointed it to one of Hephaeros' hybrids of daemon and human, the unique breed commonly known in the Great Eye as the Overseers. No one knows for certain the origin of your race – some say you were created by Vulkan to serve as the enforcers of his rule over Mankind, others believe you to be the fruits of Dark Mechanicum experiments, while others yet are convinced you are merely the by-product of the Black Dragon's dreaming, and would perish should you ever depart from the Eye of Terror. You believe that, regardless of your origin, your people are the chosen of the Black Dragon, though you are still beneath those who carry his blood within them. Your skin is covered in black scales, your features are reptilian, and fire burns within your belly, waiting to be unleashed upon your foes. This savage aspect clashes with the ornate robes of your office, but you pride yourself on being more civilized than most of your brethren, who delight in imposing their will upon the Salamanders' slaves. You have no need for scrolls or any other kind of written record : every title you remember is engraved upon your scales, so that when you die, your successor can learn your knowledge from your corpse, as you did with your predecessor's – and as he did with his own, on and on, all the way to the beginning.
Usurper of the Dragon's Voice
You were an apprentice to a powerful Salamander Sorcerer, barely a decade into your ascension to the rank of Legionary. Your master was the lord of a coalition of warbands within the Eye of Terror, united by his personal power and the promise of the plunder to which he had led them for centuries. Then, one day, when you entered your master's chambers, you found him dead, his body drained of life and soul by a daemon he had summoned and failed to control. Knowing that some of the coalition's lords would kill you, thinking you responsible, you took a desperate risk and donned your master's armor and helm, assuming his identity while faking your own demise at the hand of your angry master. A few months have passed since then, and you have managed to keep up the masquerade, taking advantage of your master's air of mystery and distaste for personal involvement in the war host's battles. Your own psychic powers and sorcerous knowledge are far from inconsequential, though they are also greatly inferior to your master's – but the runes and power of the armor are enough to hide the difference even to the war host's other psykers. However, a few days ago, you learned another reason why so many lords of Chaos willingly followed your master : he was apparently able to commune with Vulkan himself, and spoke with the Black Dragon's voice during gathering of his chosen elite. The next such gathering is scheduled in nine days, and you must find a way to survive before that. You are desperately reading your master's notes, trying to find out how – and indeed, if – he was able to communicate with Vulkan, or at least to learn enough to be able to bluff your way past the meeting. Of course, if your master was really a direct servant of the Lord of Drakes, then he won't take kindly to your usurpation …
Salamanders – Legionary Bonus (because Nemris complained)
Branding Prince
You are a symbol of the Salamanders' dreadful potential : a Chaos Marine who became a Daemon Prince without bending the knee to any of the Four. You were one of the sons of Vulkan who designed the Branding, the technique employed by warlords of the Eighteenth Legion to impose their will upon the population of entire worlds through a mix of sorcery, drugs and psychological trauma. Through your work, what was once merely a method of humiliating a defeated enemy has become one of the Legion's greatest tool. To demonstrate its efficacy, you led the conquest of an entire Sub-Sector before ordering your minions to inflict the Branding upon its entire population – more than one hundred billion souls, marked with the dragon's emblem. When the very last soul felt the touch of the burning iron, you shed your mortal form, ascending to the ranks of the Neverborn but unbound to the will of the Dark Gods – instead, your only allegiance is to the Black Dragon. You felt every soul bearing the Brand, and when they were slaughtered by the Imperium after they forced you back into the Eye of Terror, you claimed their spirits and used them to build a fortress of screaming faces and broken wills. Though your aspect varies like that of all daemons, most who look upon you see a towering figure in green scaled armor, with a dragon's head and wings and eyes that burn like magma. All who stand in your presence know fear, and your merest touch can sear the soul and inflict the Branding upon your victims. Many warlords have sought the secrets of the Branding from you, including some from other Legions, but you have only ever taught the art to other Salamanders – although you have let Astartes from other gene-lines learn it, so long as they were willing to cast off their ancient allegiance and swear loyalty to the Black Dragon instead.
Chained Dragon
The Salamanders took you from your home and made you into one of their own, but while your body emerged from the tower of the Promethean Covenant reforged into a transhuman killing machine, your mind was forever broken by the horrors you endured and were forced to commit within. After you joined the warband of a Chaos Lord, it only took you a few years to devolve into one of the most bestial Dragon Warriors to ever exist – a creature that exists only to inflict pain upon others, its soul consumed by torment rage. Your transformation reached its peak during a battle on a daemon world of crystal formations, and the sight of your reflection stretching out into infinity all around you was the final straw that caused you to snap. You slaughtered the enemy – a warband of Dark Angels whose masters had most definitively not seen that coming – alongside your own squad, and it took three days and the lives of nearly five hundred slaves for your lord to capture you. He thought you too useful to discard, and instead had his hereteks fit you with a shock collar linked to his own armor before chaining you to the gate of his treasure chamber aboard his flagship. He keeps you there, feeding you those of his minions who fail him and unleashing you only in the most savages and desperate battles. Sometimes, would-be thieves try to elude your attention, but your senses are keen, and such fools provide a distraction to your brooding – as well as a welcome addition to your diet of incompetent and treacherous servants. The Warp has swelled your frame with the strength of your rage, making you twice the size of a Land Raider, with fangs near the size of a mortal man and more than capable of cutting one in two.
Lord of Domination
You were a member of the Librarius years before Vulkan was found on Nocturne, with your psychic powers focused on the telepathic branch of the Art. During the Great Crusade, you used your powers to pluck secrets from the minds of enemy commanders and to manipulate them into making tiny mistakes, small enough not to be noticed by their subordinates as outright sabotage. Then Vulkan came, and the Eighteenth Legion was remade in his image. You learned to use your powers to break the will of others and bend them to your own, both with the surgical precision needed to "convince" a planetary leader to comply without fighting and the psychic bludgeon required to shatter the will to resist of an entire city. After the rebellion against the False Emperor, your power grew, freed from the shackles imposed by the pretender. During the Heresy, you imposed the will of the Black Dragon upon entire planets, using sorcerous rituals to enhance your powers even further. Those who suffered your power were rarely left with all of their capacities – most of them became hollow shells of their former selves – but they were still capable of serving as the Legion's slaves. Now you rule a daemon world within the Eye of Terror, its population's very ability to think erased by generations of psychic enslavement. The only thinking company you keep is that of your Legion brethren, who believe that your powers do not extend to other Space Marines. They are wrong, but you fully intend for them to keep thinking otherwise – for should the other warlords of the Eye learn of the network of unaware spies and agents you have seeded across their warbands over the centuries, they would band together to destroy you, and you cannot stand against them … yet.
Piratical King
Once, you were a Captain of the Eighteenth Legion, recognized for your talent at void war. When Vulkan vanished during the Scouring, you helped guide the Legion to the Eye of Terror, eluding the vengeful fleets of the Night Lords and their allies – only for the Black Dragon to strike down Artellus Numeon, his most faithful servant, and shatter his mind. Disgusted by what your Primarch had become and fearing your commander's fate, you abandoned the Legion and found a way out of the Eye of Terror. Knowing that the Imperium would destroy you if they found you, you fled to the wilder regions of the galaxy, and there, unfettered by any allegiance, you began to build your own empire. Today, you are the lord of a dozen worlds and a fleet of hundreds of ships who raid Imperial shipping lines, their common allegiance carefully hidden to prevent the Imperium from realizing the scope of the threat you represent. The captains under your command are human, mutant, but also xenos who have proven their strength to you. You even have a Dark Eldar reaver among them, who was exiled from Commoragh for a sin he has shared only with you – and that story makes you smile to this day. You haven't had to take to the field yourself in several decades, though your instincts tell you that another attempt at a coup is imminent. You look forward to it – even for a son of Vulkan, there is only so much time one can spend watching one's hoard of treasure grow before longing for some action. Despite the image of decadence you show for your untrustworthy subordinates, you have kept up your training, and incorporated some of your greatest prizes into your armor – from which you have removed all Legion emblems, lest the rest of the Eighteenth learn where you are.
Scholar of the Primordial Truth
Vulkan refused to submit to the Dark Gods like the rest of his brothers did. The Black Dragon made a bargain with them during the Heresy, offering countless lives in exchange for the restoration of his full power, but he never offered them his allegiance. When he ascended after the defeat of Guilliman, it was through his own efforts and mastery of the Warp's power, not through the gifts of multi-dimensional intelligences that more superstitious souls call divine. But for all his power, Vulkan is still less powerful than the Ruinous Powers – and that is something he cannot tolerate. He has tasked you and a circle of others to learn all the secrets of Chaos, to gather the lore entire species have spent millennia accumulating before being destroyed by their capricious lords. The Eye of Terror is a treasure trove of such knowledge, but there are entire dead worlds beyond its borders where the ruins of ancient civilizations await you – and of course, the ultimate prize is the Black Library. Like all other members of the circle, you don't have psychic powers of your own, and your mind is shielded by powerful runes tattooed onto your scalp to prevent the Dark Gods from learning Vulkan's plans to overthrow them through you. You are, however, a terrifying magus, capable of summoning daemons and of calling upon the powers of the Warp through precise formulaes and gestures rather than by exposing your very soul to its corrosive effects. You are the lord of your own small warband, with a cadre of Salamanders overseeing a much larger human complement. Your single ship hosts your library, filled with the fruits of lifetimes spent gathering the lore of Chaos. When Vulkan calls, you will answer – and with your help and that of your peers, the Black Dragon shall rise above the Dark Gods, and rule over all for the rest of eternity.
Raven Guard
Fledgling Child of the Raven
It began with you fainting in the middle of a gala and waking up nine hours later covered in the blood of the Governor's daughter and wife in the man's own bedchamber. You somehow managed to get away with it, but the nightmares aren't as easy to escape as Imperial retribution. Now, your life as an idle noble on a prosperous Imperial world seems like a distant dream. You suffer from bouts of hallucinations where everyone around you is replaced by monstrous creatures till wearing their elegant clothes, while the very walls of your ancestral home become dripping, rotting meat from which eyes peer at your very soul, before everything goes back to normal. You do not understand what is happening to you, but you are determined to change that. When you were a child, you overheard your father discussing with your uncle, whispering about something terrible that had happened to your grandfather before his death. Perhaps the family archives about that period will contain a clue on the nature of your affliction. So far, you have discovered that members of your august line have suffered from mysterious diseases that have led to their very discreet demises all the way back to your family's founder, a General who fought in the legendary war against the Nine Outer Devils. None of those who were afflicted survived – but you fear for more than your life, for you have matched the dates of every such demise with a spree of violent murders among the aristocracy, each of them leading to a bloody civil war between noble Houses. There has to be a way to stop it – if only your headaches would just stop …
Infernal Debtor
The sons of Corvus Corax are known to the Pantheon, and every daemon of the Divine Choirs grants them more respect than to any mere mortal – even the most powerful or entirely mindless ones. The power of the Ravenlord, and the Legion's wholesale embrace of the Primordial Truth, have ensured that, if the blood of the Nineteenth flows through your veins, the Neverborn know your name. But even so, it is still possible for a Raven Guard to get in trouble with the infernal legions – he just has to work harder than usual, and that is precisely what you fear you have achieved. Over the course of the Long War, you have made deals with the Powers of the Warp, bargained with Greater Daemons and made promises with the choirs of the Gods in exchange for favours. At the time, every deal seemed necessary, an acceptable sacrifice in exchange for something you really needed. Now you owe debts of blood, souls and deeds, far more than any mortal could ever hope to repay in a hundred lifetimes. For you, the voices of the Unkind are nearly drowned out by the whispers of the many, many Neverborn to which you are indebted. Only two things prevent them from ripping you apart to collect their due : fear of the consequence of destroying a scion of the Ravenlord, and their hatred and defiance of each other. But that stratagem won't hold them at bay for long. You must find a way to pay back what you owe to the nightmares that dwell behind the veil, and to that end, you have led your warband out of the Eye of Terror through a hidden path – the knowledge of which cost you yet another oath – and toward a highly populated hive-world. The hundreds of billions of souls will not be enough to wipe out all of your debt, but it should be enough to buy you more time.
Haunted Pureblood
You are a Pureblood, a scion of Corax who was once mortal and was elevated through the implantation of the Ravenlord's gene-seed rather than spawned from the earth of the Legion's daemon homeworld. For centuries, you fought in the Raven Guard's wars, bringing the truth of the Primordial Annihilator to the galaxy and serving your lord as best you could. But you have paid the price of such an existence. You have died one too many times, and the techniques of resurrection did not work properly. Instead of "simply" dragging your soul back from the Warp into a regrown body, the Apothecary pulled something from the aether alongside it, something that looks through your eyes and monitors your every thought. Every attempt you have made to tell your brethren about this presence within you has failed – you cannot speak or write the words that would reveal its existence, and psykers cannot bear to look into the mind of a Pureblood in any case, lest the Truth shatters their mind. You do not know the intents of this creature within you – it has never communicated with you in any form since your rebirth, and you remember nothing of that particular time beyond the veil – but it terrifies you all the same. Every resurrection costs something to the Pureblood who undergoes it – it removes part of their humanity and replaces it with something unfathomable to mortal minds – but this is different. What comes back might be different from what died, but it's still the same essence, only altered by its time in the Sea of Souls. What is happening to you is, to your knowledge, unprecedented – but then, it would be, wouldn't it ?
Herald of Malice
Once, you were just a thug in the underhive, destined to live a short, violent life before dying in one gang war or another. But in the slaughterhouse of a deranged killer your boss sent you to eliminate, you touched the divine. Now, the God of Flesh calls to you, whispering into your dreams with a thousand voices. Your mind does not understand His words, but deep within your flesh, ancient and terrible things do, and they heed His call, rising to the surface and reshaping your weakling body into something worthy of serving His glory. Your flesh shifts and churns, muscle and bone turning into shapes more apt to do His bidding. No longer are you bound by the constraints imposed on your physical form by the chains of the False Emperor's design, though you must keep the pretence of base humanity lest you draw the ire of His foes. Soon He will come, and remake the world as He has remade you. It falls to you to prepare the way, to make sure that the unbelievers are made ready for His coming. You wander in the darkness, far from the eyes of His enemies, sharing His blessing with other dispossessed souls by showing them His truth and strength. For when He comes, so shall His Adversary, and you must be prepared. The grey-clad butcher will descend to prevent His chosen from receiving their rightful reward, and it will fall to you and your congregation to stop his evil once and for all, that all may rejoice in the unity of the God of Flesh. You will lead the blessed to war, and be rewarded for your triumph with the joining of your own essence to that of Malice.
Monstrous Godling
You are the product of one of the Raven Guard's experiments with the very nature of Humanity – and not one of the lesser ones that created the Children of the Raven, but one of those that could only take place in the Eye of Terror, where gods and mortals meet, and the laws of nature and physics are only polite suggestions. Thousands of years ago, the sons of Corax descended upon the daemon world that your ancestors had called home since time out of mind, and wrought their designs into the genes of the Eye-born tribes, before departing the planet, never to return. For countless generations afterwards, the priest caste the Raven Guard had created directed the entire existence of your people, practicing selective breeding and consulting the auguries to serve the purpose of the Legion's experiment. Then you were born, and the experiment reached its cyclical peak. As you grew into adulthood, the powers the Raven Guard had seeded within your people's genes blossomed, giving you the ability to shape-shift into a variety of less and less human forms, until you became a titanic creature, a leviathan whose mere proximity shattered the minds of mere mortals, turning them into your adoring slaves. You are the fifth such individual to appear in the planet's history, and the priests immediately performed the appropriate rites : they ensured that your seed was planted in as many fertile females as possible before you inevitably began to hear the call of the Dark Gods beyond the world's confines and departed, flying off-world and into the currents of the Eye of Terror by your own power while the experiment resets. Now, you wander the Great Eye, seeking others of your kind and the lords who created you. Several warbands have tried to kill you, while others have approached you with offers of alliance and tribute. You can shift back to your human form, and quite enjoy the worship of your inferiors, but it is power you crave most.
Nightmare Manifest
You are not a Raven Guard, not truly. You are a hole in the fabric of reality shaped like a son of Corax, a walking rent into time and space from which the madness of the Warp spills. The presence of even the least of the Raven Guards is enough to drive weak minds into temporary insanity, but to look upon you is to court true, eternal damnation through exposure to the Empyrean's gaze. You became what you are when your ship was destroyed by a rival warband in the Eye of Terror. The daemons descended upon the wreckage to feed upon the crew's dying emotions and unfettered souls in a great swarm, before turning tail and fleeing, screaming in horror as you rose from the destruction, reborn as a vessel for the Primordial Truth. Some Apothecaries have tried to replicate your transformation in mortals, but the combination of Astartes biology, Raven Guard knowledge and Warp-wrought mutations that allowed you to survive has yet to be successfully copied – and after the fifth laboratory had to be bombarded into oblivion from orbit, they decided to abandon that particular approach to apotheosis. Perhaps if they could interrogate you on your transformation's details, they could overcome these obstacles – but you do not, cannot speak anymore. You still fight for the warlord you followed before your change, who was also resurrected from his defeat, but remained as normal as any reborn Pureblood can ever be said to be. The Neverborn of the Four flee from you, while the Unkind flock around you, incorporeal, waiting for the change to manifest and wreak havoc at your side. Your presence has made the warband stronger than it was before the defeat that caused your transformation, for few dare to risk fighting you.
Peddler of Immortality
It's amazing what people will do in exchange for the promise of life eternal. They will pay any price, sacrifice anything, betray any oath if they think they can cheat the reaper. And as an Apothecary of the Nineteenth Legion, you are able to provide them just that, using that temptation to spread your influence across the Imperium. You sit at the heart of a network of agents and proxies, who search for those willing to accept your bargain and spread rumors of a cure for every affliction available to those ready to meet its price. You have made sure that none of your "clients" ever see you – even millennia of historical revision by the Inquisition have not succeeded in erasing the image of the Raven Guard from Mankind's collective memory. You only work through your intermediaries, and keep a group of hereteks that can pass for the organization's leader if necessary. But the immortality you sell is a lie, and the price you ask in exchange for it merely a smokescreen to keep your victims from suspecting the truth. The things you create from the harvested genetic material after your clients' demise certainly look and act like them, but they are changelings, Unkind daemons hiding within cloned flesh and sent to take the place of the dead. Not even psykers can detect the difference, for the first step of the process is for the Unkind to devour the soul of the deceased. Hidden in plain sight within the halls of power, your replicants spread discord and ruin in subtle ways – and sometimes not-so-subtle, which has led the Inquisition to start investigating in recent years. You look forward to the opportunity of practicing your craft upon the misguided agents of the Ordos ...
Renegade Spawn
When the Raven Guard Apothecaries designed the great infernal machines that create the Spawn Marines with the help of Fabius Bile, they made sure to include the loyalty-enforcing safeguards they had designed for the first generations of cloned Astartes. But as the daemonic underground wombs start to fail, anomalies are inevitable – and you are one of them. The compulsion that forces Spawn Marines to heed the orders of their Pureblood masters does not affect you, though it took you years to realize that your kindred obeyed for other reasons than mere fear and survival. Seeing how poorly your kind were treated, you took the first opportunity to escape, which happened on a vast market in the Eye of Terror. Those you have encountered since then believe you to be a Pureblood on the run from his own Legion for reasons unknown – even those from outside the Raven Guard cannot possibly conceive of a Spawn Marine with free will. Now you work as an enforcer for the various petty lords of the grand market, where every thing can be bought and sold, from the souls of dead Imperial heroes to the tears of Eldar maidens. The reputation of the Nineteenth Legion has helped you tremendously – even if you are known to be an exile, there are few foolish enough to cross the sons of Corax, whose powers are the subject of countless rumors. Of course, even without that shield, you are far from defenceless. You have replaced bits of your original armor with better-quality ones from the corpses of other Legionaries, and gathered a collection of trinkets that help support your continued bluffing. You are reasonably satisfied with your current existence, but still live in the fear that one day, the Raven Guard will hear about you.
Vessel of the True Names
You were a member of the Ordo Malleus, a renowned Daemonhunter with hundreds of worthy deeds to your name. For more than two centuries, you fought the infernal in the God-Emperor's name, wielding His holy light against the tide of darkness that forever seeks to swallow all of Mankind. But then, you were captured by a Raven Guard warband whose lord had engineered a daemonic incursion that swept an entire world, plunging billions into the madness of Chaos. For weeks, he tortured your body, mind and soul, and when the tides of the Warp withdrew, he left you in the ruins, surrounded by the flayed corpses of your Acolytes and all the others you had failed to save. Faced with the futility of your struggle and reeling from the horrible truths your tormentor had whispered into your ears, you broke. You tore your own eyes out so that you wouldn't have to look at the nightmarish reality around you, and became a Ravenite. You used the knowledge you had gained fighting the unholy to call forth a daemon and escape the planet, and in that moment, you understood your true purpose in the universe – the reason why you had been spared while so many others had died. You remade yourself into something capable of containing the power of the Neverborn's true names, reshaping your flesh, your mind and your soul to that one purpose. Your skin is covered in runes that are the closest mortal tongues can come to comprehend the true name of the daemons, while your mind contain the deeper, more spiritual components of the Gods' servants' titles. More than three hundred years later, you continue your quest for more names, eluding the pursuit of your former peers, all so that when you are called, you will be able to serve.
Thing of the Labyrinth
You came into existence on the Raven Guard's nameless homeworld, deep within one of the labyrinths of cold steel and sharp glass that are the product of Corvus Corax' tormented memories of his childhood on Kiavahr. Those who look upon you in the flickering light of shadowed corridors see a human silhouette covered in a heavy, hooded black cloak, with gleaming red eyes and needles for fingers. For years, you remained in the darkness, feeding on lesser nightmares and the occasional Lemure wanderer. But as you devoured the latter, echoes of the lives they lived before their souls were consigned to this hellish world began to filter into what passes for your mind. From the maelstrom of stolen memories, a patchwork awareness emerged – a cold, cold thing of malevolent hunger and predatory intelligence. You have learned of other worlds, far richer in prey, and images of black-armoured warriors in fractured remembrances have led you to believe that the lords of this world hold the key to journeying to these wondrous realms. Their vessels of iron can sail the Great Sea, but it is their knowledge of sorcery that you believe can free you from this world and allow you to travel to another. For now, you continue to grow your strength, venturing outside of your labyrinth to capture errant Spawn Marines and consume them, but when you are ready, you will find a way off this miserable world, one way or another. Then, at last, you will be able to feed until you are satisfied – and you will be safe from he who dwells within the great spire …
̴̨̝͚͎̭̹̣̭̰͇̞̘̗̋ͦ̽ͦ̌T̰̦̳͉̱h͙e̜̪̬͇̲͚̲ ̺̤̩͕̲Y͎̝͉e̩͙̺͓̗l̦̳̻̜̪̳l͙̟o̺̺͎̙͙w ̪͇͖̟̳̣K̲i̮̻n̝̫̭̻͓͕̤g͕
͓̱̰̼̯S͕̹̙̤̮O̘̰͓̥̯̦̞O̱̮͚͉̫̻̠N̯͙ ͍̝̟̼̟S̫OO͎ͅN̼͉̗̙̲ ̙͓̫͈̥S̻̬͇̲O͔͚͙̠O̪̗̱̳̩N͓̣̯͚͈̤̣ ͙̤̝̲͉S̬͎̦͕O̙̲̗͎̻̗͉O̼̯͓̦̠̰ͅN͕͖ SO̬̻̠͕̪ON̖͓̝̥͎ ̮̠̰̗̱SO̘̘͖ͅON̩̰ ͚̩S̥O͙̥̼̲͕̝͔O̜͚̖̤̻͍̪N ̫̲̪̻̼̘̣S͕͚̥̰͓̮O͚̤͈̺O͎̼͕̤͎̣N S͕̼̥̬̰̻͉O͕̬O͔͕͔̪͉̪͚N͎̦ ͈̣ͅS̖O̪ͅO̰N̰̲ ͉̖̼̹͕S̖̭̯̣̫̝̺O̺̫͍̦̱O͔̺͓N͉̜̭͈̼ ̭̞̬S̗͈͇̠̮͉̭O͇̣͉̦ON͇ ̫̩͇͓̝͇SO̩͓O̦̣N̗̮̖̩ ͙S̩̣̯O̙O͈͈̗͔̹N̼̹ͅ ̼̻͚̭S̹̖̫̬͙̲͖O̪O̯͓N͇͍͉̣̮͉͈ ̜S̭̜͈̫̗̜̮O̳̰O̩̫̥͇͉̘̻N̰̬ ̠S̙̪̟O̦̹͕Ọ̺N ͙̗̭͖̼̬S̜̱̹̪̤O̟̻̲̮̞O̟̭N͎͙͓̜̞ ̬S͓͖͍̹͕O̘͓O̯͙͉͎N̞̦͔̬̩͕̱ ̬̜S̳͎͙O̜̗̝̗͔̠O̭̯̰̹N ̰̟S͎̖͖O̻̞̳̦O͖N̯̰̲̪͇̳ ̰S̖̖̺̲͚̥̙O̩̻̻̦͍O͉͓N̠͙ ̞͈̭͉S̖̟O̘̟͖̖̹̫̯O̟͔̘̻̗͇N ͔̖͎̭̰̝S̲͓͖͈̮̙͉O̱͍̥͈͈O̞͙͍̦̮̦N ͇̥̲͚̺S̮O̳̺͈O̰̦N̞͚̘̩͔̦ ̜̱͓̝̻̦̭S̙̠̦̦O͎̦͙O̻̳͔̝N ̻̟ͅS̘͈̠͈O̠͙͕̬O̪̪͔͙N͇̪̞ ̖S̭̲̭͉̺̝O̘̹͔̮O͙͈̠̞̥N̤̫͉͍̰͙ ͉̫͔̰͉̤̭S̞͕͈̗̝͓ͅO͚O̬̙̟͉̱̗N͚̹ S̼̣͈̩̩O͔̮̻̲ON͉ S̻̤̤O̥̱̱̣̟͈̤O͙̣͇N̗̜̭ ̬̖̞̙S̻OO̪N̟̠͈̦ ̩͕̼͓S̠͙̱̦̱̼O̹̦ON͖̖ ̩̥͈͚͖̩͇S̩̥̖̥̱O͚O̥̱͕̗̗͖͎N͈̠̙̩͔ ̟̖̱̱̤SOO͕͉͇͎N̫̲̝̰̩ S̥OON͕ ͈̭̞̞̜ȘͅO̱͚̖O̮̜͕͕̱͖N̘̪̳̲͕̺ ̝̣̝S͔̱̤̫̗̥ͅO͓̹̻O̦̳̯̜N͉̬̬̝͈͈̟ ͎͇̳͖̯̝S͓O̫̞̩͇̦O̭N͎͎̟̲̬͕͎ ̟̹͎̟̦S͕O̯̪̝̤̞O̟͎͍̫N̼͓̰̪̣ ̟ͅS̯̠̦̗͉ͅO̠̥O͔̳̘N͓̘̝͚̣̫̖ ͖̺̯S̯̲̼̠͙O͍̟͙O̳͈N̪̳͕̻͇̭ ͚̻͙S̮͎͇̭͔O͚͇̖͉͍̥̟O̙̱̗̣̦͕͕N͇̣̙͚ ̩̝̱̳̩̜̱S̯̜̫̠̟̹OO͓̜̞N̳̣͚̞͙̟ ͎̩͈S̗̟͇͕͇̙̹O͕͎̦͙̘͔O͙N ͚̪̲͉͖̩S̜̳O̘O͇͇̮͖̮͈N̞͖ ̜̼̟S̹͎͖̭͈OO̙̭̞͎͖̰ͅṈ̣ ̱͚͍̬͎͈ͅS͕̫̻OO̹̻̮̤͇̥N͚ ̞͇͚̰̣S̩͙̗̭O͓͎͍̬̣O̭͉̘̮Ṉ̯̝̣͓̩ ̖̯̗SO̲O͖̤N ͚̙̦̮̻̙S̜͖O̜̰O̮͍͇̭̲N̬̼ͅ ̱͈͕̝͈̣̰S̳͓̱͓̮̦̩O͕O̻̰̪̙̣̫N ̤͇͙̯͓̪S̯̫͈ͅO̖͉O̻͖̣̖͉̣N̯̼̙̱̣͙͕ ̫̗̖̣SO̻̘̩̗̩͖͚O͉͓͉̟̬N̟̘͈̻ S̻͖̠̳͓O̬̼̠̠͙̲͖O̪̩̦͙ͅN͍̗̰͇̤̦ ̯̥̼̘̖S̗͈O͍͙̘̮̺ͅO͓N̠̘̩̬̥͍͉ ̫̹ͅS̼͙͕O͇̲̜̲̘ͅỌ̬͔͙̜N̩̣̺͙̭̳ ͉͚̼̬̫͖S̯̻͇O͉̳̠̺͍O̯̺̗̙͚N͉̰̣̺͓ ̯S̺̻̭̺OO̭N̝̰͍͈ SO̮O̺̗͍̲̲N̪̞̙̠̩̩̼ ̗̻̙̙SO̯̣͖͓O͓͍̜͙N̟̞ S̻O̟̫͈̫ON͕͍̬̺ S̯͇̫͚OO̪̯͖̲̪N̞̰͉̪̳͚ ̗͔͙͙S͔̤̬͓̰̙̙O͈̟̟̼̩͔̣O͈̫͉͓N͚̫͔̖͓͎̲ ̞̟͇̝̮S̻̥̖̳O͓̤̹̟̭͉O̫͉N͙̝ ̦̲͓̗S̳OO̭̘N̮͎͈̰ ̳̼S̯͕O͙̟͉O͓̻͈̞̹̠͕N̤̰ ̘͍͇̠̩̪S͇ͅO͇̥̣O͎̰̭ͅN̜̟ ͈S̤̫͚͖̲͍̳OỌ͇N̗̩͙͓ ̬̺̯̪͉̠̠S͖O̝̹O̤̲͖̝N ̘S̩̙̤̩̰̤̠O̱͙O̹͓N͚̤̗̥ ̺̗̻̖̯̮̦S͇̫̪O̙͉̝O̬̩̺̘̮̗̤N̻͇̲͚ ̥S̘̣̤̳͎͙O̝̹̱̝̯̮O̺N̯̣̮̹ ͖͍̖̹̗̘S̘͓̝̘̲͇ͅO̩̜̭̭͈̤̠ON̹̻ͅ ̫͚̲̻SO͖O̱͎̥͙͈̲̬N͍̜̯̹̬̯ ̼̭͕̜ͅṢO̤̦̯̲O̲̜͓̣̦̰N͈̖̣̻̬ ̜͙̟͎̞S̤͓̟̞̞OO̥̩̭̜̻ͅN͕͕̫ ̟SO̹̯O͚̻̣̠N̹̭͚ S̫͙̖͚O̯̜̜̻͙O̯̫̤͕̘ͅṈ̲ ̫͙̤̘͍S̘̩̭̝O͔̝̰͚͖ͅO̺̗͕͙͈̰̻Ṉ͙̤ ̩̭̻͎̺S͉̯O̺͉͕̱̰O͇N̖̹̣̱̜ ̲̯͓̩̺͖͕S̠̪̜̲͖ͅO̗OṈ͕̠̩̯̰̬ ̹͚̼S̼̤̮̮̲O͈̩͚̮̙̯̳O̝̮͉͉̼̹N̩͎͔͉̯ ͎͙̹S̺̭O̳̗̼̱͉O̼͔͈N̺̮̫̳ ̲̦S̘̦͚̖̖̬̻O͔̦O̝̯̱̜͇̬̙N ͖̩̹̯̠̰̟S̩͎͎̮O̟O̥N̟̻ ̙͈S͇̙O̝̖͖̙̟̬̰ON ̝S̥O̻O̯̠N̜ ͈̣̰̻̲̭̗Ș̖̺͓O̱̙ͅON̙͔̭̼̹̰ S̖̙OO̞̟̫̝̼̪N̼͎̘͍̼͙͖ S͙̗ͅO͎̟̫ON̳ ͖̜̱̭̩̩ͅS͖̦͎OO͕N̮̪̬̖̝ ̥͈̞̩̤͚S̞̯̭̱͎̰̦OON̞͚ ̝̱S̮͖̗̣̟̳̹OỌ̭͚̖͙͖N̙͍̟̠̗̦ ͇̗͓͖̠̩̤S̞͓̟O͇̱̙ỌN̙ S̫̜̳̥O̯͍O͚N̞ ̮͓̤̝̲S̪͓͈̟O̞̜̺̫ͅO̲̹̞͍̗̠N̯̜̙̬ ̹̞̟̗̞̹SO̭̠O̦̬̬̟N̠̫͓̖͍̭ ̰͖̳͙ͅS̰̬O̟̲̪̫̭O̩N ̣̫͍͈̤̘S̞̭̤̗̗̩OO̼͎͈̩̠̫N͖̱ S̪̹̯̜OO̪͎̝͇̬̘̟N̲̼̲ ̖͚̘̫̯̝̟S̖͈̟͚̮O̦̰̮͕̘ON̠̹̮ ̦̦S͇̖̹̣͕̝O̘̣̘̱O͈̯͓̯̼Ṇ͍ ̖͇̳͎̟͇̦S͔̬̬O͎̤O͇̘͖̠̱̯N͍̻̲̼ ͈̣̤̭̞̭̘S͙͕ͅO͚̥̝̮O͓̼͚̪N͇̬̟̹͖̹̝ ̱͔̱S͍͈̯ͅO̯̞̱̼͕OͅN̫͎̰̹͕ S͍̫̬̣͕̩O̗̩͖͚͈̞͉O͇̝N̺ ͙̘̝̘͇̲̥S͇̬͎̜͕ͅOO̮̦̣̤N̜̫̞̼̻̦ ̝̣̞̞̼̪̞S̭̫͔͔̖O͈O̼̟͉̜N͇̲̮̟̤ ̙̭S͖̳̩̫̣͔O̹̮̝̙̟̰͖O͔̻͔̟̺N ̗̤S̖O͉͖̖O̺N͈̺̼̩̬̺ͅ ̭̞S̬OO͈̭N̙͙͍̝̲ ̫̝͙͇̪̲̼S̭̳O̯͍̬̹̝ͅO͍͉̳̤͕̖̮N̪͖̤̲͇ ͖̠̹̹Ș̫̥̜̣̹ͅO̪̮͔̙O͇̤̱̺N̫͕̙̥͚ ͖̗͍̹S̘̥̻͇O̼̭͙̻͖O̙Ṋ̘̺̝̩̖̳ ͉̠S̘̥O̻̟͈̻̟͎ͅO̠̗̹͚̬N̗̺̜̟̤̭̼ S̩̣͓O̲̯̲͍̠̮O̞͕̩N͕ S̙͉͚̱̺ͅO̘̮O̦͔̫̦N̦̲̘͖̤̱ ͕̟SO̝͓̻ON̙ ̹̻̺̖͎S̗̩̩O̰̻O̖N̯̥͕͓͎̣ͅ ̞̫̠SO̝̠̥̥OṆ͚ ̤̩̟S̻O̲̱̝O̞̣̦̳̰̗N͚̭ͅ ̲̱̪̫S̞̱̬͚O̰O̞͙̖̳N̬̝̟͙͚̣̹ S̥̯͙̪O͈ỌN̝͔̞ ̬̱͉̜̲͙͇S̺̮̟̳O͚̼̲̠̯͖ͅO͖̜̺͖͎̱N͍̱̞ ͇̲͔̳S̯̠̳ͅO̺̤̼O̱͈͔N̯̻ ͍̘͍̝͚̠̬S̬̻͈O͖̘̯̺̝O͍͔̼̣̝̩N ͔SO͍O͓͖̩̘͇N S̹̬̬̯OON̩̱̞̼̻̳̜ ̬̠̭̞SO̞O̤̪͖N̯̯͈̣ ̟̲̖S͍O̼̪̞̞̙̯O͚̠͇̝̘̱ͅN̥͔ ͕͈̱͍S͈͈͔̦̰͉̹O̫̘̥̩̭̘̤O̞̯̯̖̥Ṉ̜̤̹̪ S̥OON̪͕ ͓̟S̙͙͙̤̹OO͈͎͚̪͖N̖͚̮ ̣̭̪̭̹̺SO̰͉̲͕̞̘͈O̪̝͓̠̹͓N͔̰̲̺͖̱ S̟̰̥Ọ̬̱͍O̤̣͓͇̝͈̰N͕̘ ͎͉̦̟S͓̲͕̥̺̳O̦̬̣̤̦O͖N͖̖̤̱̯̣ ͍̺̹̮̝S̠͖͚̥͙͚O͍̩̳O̹̙̤N͎̭̬̫͙̜ ͚S͕͚O̠̯͈̰O̺̖͇̣̗͓͈N̠̗̭̪ ̝̪̘̭͙͙S̩͈̺̹͚O̙̺̘̰͖O̩̫̳̝N ͅS͙̭̼̞̮̙ͅO͓ON̬̳̠ ̜̤S͍̜O͙O̠̙N ̙̭̯̪͙ͅS̱O̬̖O͚̝͍̰̖̦̭N ̭̰͙̥̙̞S̺̘̻͈̙̰͚O͓O̜̱̼ͅN̳̤̲̹̠ ͇͔͉S̤͓OO̯̙N͚ ͕̺̦S͍̯͔̜͈̙̘O̙̥̪͔̟O̟̺̱̦͚͎ͅN͇͚͔͓̭ ̺S̻̩͍̝̟O͖͉̙̹̱ͅO͙͔͇N̜̜̠̮͔͚ ̠S̱͓̝̰O̩͇̬̩̙̰O̜̫̟̠N͕͓̦͕̭ ̮̻̳̗S̰͖ỌO̬͉̰̱N͕͖̦͔̰ͅ ̝̯͖̩Ș̼̬̣̬̝͔OO̺͔͎̥N̜̞̤̯ ̟̟̳S͚̩̥̰̬̩ͅO̼̟͓͙͇͈O̫͉̯̬̩̳N̻̤̠͉͖̯̺ ̱̯̟͈S̩O͕̥̰̦̯̜ON͓̲̻͕̖ ̺̰S̻OO͙͖N ͙S͔͙̘O͉̭̭̫̗̲O̻̹N̮͇̯͎̝̦ ̠̰̻͈ͅS͓̼̗̻̼̻O̩̙̻O̯̺̩̠̲͇͕N ̲S͕̞̱̼̣̝ͅO͚̘͙̘O̠͎N͍͍̯ SO̞͕̯̙͕̟̖ON S̳͙͔O͎̗̫̦̖̞ͅO͉͉̞͙̺N̯ͅ ̩̪̫̰̠S̝͔̲Ọ̜ON S̻͓͎̯̯O̞̯O̤̖N̮̝ ̺͕̩ͅS͎̮͇O͇̠O̱̦̻N̮ ̫̮̜S͖̠͉͓̘̰ͅO͖̮O̟̟̗̞̘̖N ̥̼̯̱͎̜S̞̭͔̤̗O̙͚̙̰͎ͅO͓̫̱̙̬ͅN͉̣̬̟ ͈͎S̲̩O͎̭ͅO̟̭͉N͉̙͔̬ ̟̻S̭̠̹Ọ̤̘O͉N͍͕ ͚̤̝̙̥͕S͔O̹͙O̲̖̣̘̜͕̗N̜̪̱͇̣̼ͅ ̮S̠̫͕̪O̜O̤̤̩͎N̪̟̜ ͓͕̯̦̩͈SO̹̤̹̼̺̮ON̗̟̟̞ ̺̫̙̳̠̘͔Ș̞̮O͎̙̻O̤̟N͖͍̦̣̞͙ ̦Ș̜̯O̗̮̯̣ON̪̹͖̪̤ ̬S̝̥̭̥̗͉͈OO̖͙̺N̯̜̯ͅ S͕̯͕̖̼O̘̰̳̥̬ͅO̭͓͕̮̬̖N̩̦͔̤͙ ̥̹̖̳͓̰S͉̱̪̼O̻̫̜ON ͖̬̤ͅS̺̖O̮̙͕͈O̙̗̘̩̟N͓̖̣̹̘͓ ̟̦͍͉͖̘̖S̜O̺̰̫̯O̙̬̬̺N̗̣ ̭̲̱S͇̦͕̻̻̠O͍̱O̬̜͚͚N ̱̦̣͍S̲̲̝̞̝͕O͙̳͇͉O̬͕N̻͉̺͓̖ ̰̯̜̱̣̥̫S̹͖͙ͅOO̱͕̪N̥̤̫̣̱ ̩̝̫S̩̭̦̱͙̼̼O̘͖ON͓̦̩̺͎ ͇S̩̱̗͈̣͎͕O̝O̺͔̪N͕̺͎͉ͅ ̜̺̜̰̩̠
Alpha Legion
Cover-up Expert
Agents of the Alpha Legion are trained to remain hidden, to accomplish their mission and depart before anyone knows they were even there. But in the complex, dangerous shadow wars fought by the sons of the Hydra, such ideal circumstances are rarely achieved. Agents' covers are broken, violence spills from secluded lairs into the crowded streets, or the scope of a threat is revealed to require the immediate attention of the Legionaries themselves. But in all these things, the implication of the Alpha Legion must remain secret if that is at all possible. To that end, you are responsible for the cover-ups of your cell's activities. You maintain an armoury of wargear from the other loyal Legions – and a few suits bearing the colors of the hated Traitors as well. You have enough cybernetics in your body and know enough about the ways of the Machine to qualify for the rank of Techmarine in another Legion, though any tech-priest would fall dead should they see the kind of things you inflict upon machine-spirits as part of your everyday duty – cogitators are scrubbed clean of data, and records are edited. You hack into vox-links and spread misinformation, remove evidence and silence eyewitnesses. Your hands are red with the blood of Imperial citizens whose sole crime was to see something they weren't supposed to see, but their deaths are an acceptable price when balanced against the risk of the Alpha Legion's activities being exposed. Or at least, that's what your leader tells you, and so far you believe him – but the faces of the innocents you have made disappear still haunt you, staring at you at night with incomprehension in their eyes.
Deep-cover Infiltrator
A hundred years ago, your armor was painted black and gold, your equipment was replaced by corrupted equivalents recovered from the battlefields of the Iron Cages, and your mind underwent the hideously traumatic conditioning your next mission would require. Since that day, you have been an Aspirant Champion of Chaos Undivided in the Eye of Terror, fighting in the Great Game on the behalf of the Black Legion, seeking prestige, power, and advancement. You have risen to become the personal champion of a warlord whose own master is said to act at the direct command of Fabius Bile himself – the Arch-Renegade that the Alpha Legion, like the rest of the Imperium, has spent ten thousand years trying in vain to kill. You have provided plenty of intelligence to the Hydra over the years, leaving packages into dead drops and sending encoded bursts of concentrated data, but you fear that your time is running short – and not because those around you are catching up on your deception. The Betrayer's Mask looms ever greater in your mind, and you fear that you don't have much time to extract yourself from your current assignment and undergo the hypnotic removal process before it subsumes you entirely. It is said that Space Marines cannot know fear, but you know otherwise, for the prospect of being trapped within your own mind, condemned to watch as the persona you built to infiltrate the Black Legion uses your body to perform horrible acts against the Emperor's kingdom. You must make a choice : remain, and have a chance at striking down the Primogenitor himself at the risk of your very soul, or abandon the mission and return to the Imperium – or die trying, but at least you would perish master of your own flesh.
Editor of the Hydra's Legacy
The Imperium's memory is a massive thing. The Administratum keeps records of everything, most of which will never be read once it is stored in one of the organization's hive-sized archives. But it is still possible to find out the truth of distant events, if one is willing to comb the soul-crushingly boring archives, and the Alpha Legion cannot afford to have its past actions exposed for a potential enemy to find. Which is where you come in. You are an Operative of the Hydra, still human so that you may go where a son of Alpharius would draw too much attention – though centuries of juvenat treatments and discreet enhancements have left their mark on you. You go into the archives and edit them, removing mentions of the Alpha Legion's official actions and attributing their successes to other branches of the Imperium. At other times, you plant fabricated tales of the Hydra's deeds, false clues to deceive someone attempting to piece together intel on the Twentieth Legion. You have a minor psychic gift, useful only to convince others that what you are saying is the truth – no use on the battlefield, but it gives you more options in your job. Only the archives of the other loyal Legions are beyond your reach, because of ancient accords said to have been signed by Alpharius himself. Apparently, the prospect of a Legion operating completely without oversight was judged too dangerous by the Lords of the Imperium, and the Primarch agreed to the accord to prevent his sons from ending up cast out of the Imperium as renegades themselves. Your Legionary masters are the ones who decide one each of your assignments, and they are also the ones who, from time to time, wipe your memory clean of the secret truths you erased, so that, should you be captured, all of your work won't come undone.
Flesh-Shaper Apothecary
You were a student in the Medicae, a genius in your craft who studied courses with people ten to twenty years older than you. The Alpha Legion came and made you an offer : join them, or have the memory of the meeting removed. You accepted their offer without hesitation, and you haven't looked back since. Within a few years of your Ascension, you became an Apothecary – a rank that, among the Hydra's sons, carries a much different meaning than in other Legions. Healing your wounded brothers is only a small part of your duties : the bulk of your time is spent planning and performing complex surgeries. Beneath your knife, Operatives and Space Marines alike are remade into the image required for their next mission. You do not just shape the flesh : using ancient technology, you can disguise their genetic markers, creating perfect copies of existing individuals or even members of other species. It doesn't take much work to make an Astartes look like an Ogryn, but re-arranging a man's insides so that scanners will identify him as a Tau is much more difficult. You live for these challenges, for the time you spend standing in front of the board with a picture of the subject as he is and another of the subject as he must be, furiously thinking of the methods that will bring about the transformation. Most of the time, your work can be reverted, but every so often you are forced to go to your superiors and inform them that, while you can do what they ask of you, it will be a one-way journey for the agent. So far, however, you have never had to go to them and tell them it is impossible outright – and you are convinced that you never will.
Memory Wiper
The Legion found you in a Black Ship, where you were sent after revealing that the Governor's brother was plotting to kill his elder sibling with the help of a coven of witches. Your revelation prevented your homeworld from falling into bloody civil war, but it also caused the end of your comfortable childhood as a son of the nobility and your sending to Terra. Now, four centuries later, you are one of the Alpha Legion's Librarians, and your talents were developed specifically to serve the Legion's purpose. You are a telepath of supreme power and subtlety, capable of extracting information from a mind and altering memories without anyone noticing your influence. You use your gifts for many things, from interrogation to hiding the Legion's passage to helping prepare your comrades – be they human or Astartes – for the most dangerous infiltration missions by building the artificial personalities that will hide their true allegiance from other mind-readers. In battle, you send spikes of terror and hallucinations into the minds of your foe, turning them against one another with casual ease or brutally destroying their psyches entirely, leaving them easy prey for the bolters of your battle-brothers. As your mastery of the telepathic arts grows with experience, however, you have started to notice troubling lacunas in your own memories – entire years of your life missing, extracted from your mind with such precision that you almost think you did it to yourself. You are not sure which possibility is the more worrying : that someone else found a way past your psychic defenses and altered your memory, or that, for some reason, you believed it was necessary for you to remove information from your own mind. You can conceive of only one reason why you would do this – because you were ordered to. But by whom, and for what reason ?
Saint of Wrath
You were a priest of the Adeptus Ministorum, spreading the Emperor's Word in the poorest districts of the underhive, where no Cardinal would ever deign to thread. You truly believed in the God-Emperor's mercy and benevolence, in His acceptance of all who were faithful, no matter who they were or where they had been born. And you still believe that, even now. For years, you shepherded the people of the starless depths, and even the gangers gave you a grudging respect for the strength of your conviction. You brought faith into the darkness, and achieved some measure of success in curbing the endemic violence and cruelty of the underhive. But when heresy came, it came from above. The spire-born noble families had been corrupted by an insidious cult of Slaanesh, and their children descended into the underhive to "purge the parasites and restore the world's glory". You saw men gunned down from flying bikes, women raped in the street and children tortured and slain. You tried to reach your contacts in the higher echelons of the Ecclesiarchy, only to find that those who hadn't mysteriously vanished wouldn't even talk to you. In your desperation, you gathered those you could find in your church, but even the holy ground wasn't enough to deter the degenerate spawn of the so-called nobility. As they broke down the doors and rushed in, screaming and laughing like the crazed animals they had become, you stood between them and your flock, and prayed to the Emperor for His help in protecting them. And He answered. The joyriders died in flames, and now you walk toward the upper hive, burning from within with His divine wrath. You do not control this power He has bestowed upon you – it controls you instead, driving you where you must go. You still pray for the souls of those He destroys through you, hoping that they can be cleansed of corruption in His flames.
Scion of the Coils
You are a Rogue Trader, the heir to a long and illustrious line that has been associated with the Alpha Legion from its very inception, when one of your ancestors was an Admiral of the Halo Alliance, under the leadership of Alpharius himself. Like all Dynasties that take their roots in the long-gone, near-forgotten Alliance, you are still bound to the Alpha Legion. The sons of Alpharius never let go of a useful tool, and you have been a most useful one. When you inherited the Warrant, you also inherited the many debts your father had made with the Hydra – for all his courage and integrity, your sire was a poor merchant, and while his name is hailed on a hundred worlds as a saviour, he left the family's coffers nigh empty and the line's favor with the Legion much diminished. You have spent ten years working tirelessly to redress your lineage's status and restore its score in the Coils' complex system of debts and favours owed to and from the Twentieth Legion. You have built a Sector-spanning network of informants and contacts, sent expeditions to long-lost worlds and even reclaimed a few of the Legion's ancient relics, thought destroyed during the dark days of the Roboutian Heresy. Part of you resent your status as a member of the Coils – Rogue Traders are supposed to be the one class in the Imperium enjoying true freedom, but those beholden to the Alpha Legion are forever bound by the Hydra's mandate. You do not protest that mandate at all – the Alpha Legion does good, necessary work … but sometimes, you wonder how much different your life would be if you had been born in another lineage of Rogue Traders – and then you realize how incredibly entitled the thought is, and you go back to work.
Scholar of the Old Ones
You are an Inquisitor of the Ordo Xenos : your entire life has been dedicated to protecting Mankind from the insidious, many-faced threat of the alien. To that end, you have amassed a trove of knowledge that some among the Ordos would consider heretical – and quite rightly so, but you believe that knowing the enemy is necessary to be able to fight it. Besides, knowledge of the alien may pollute the weak-willed mind, but it is still a magnitude less dangerous that lore relating to Chaos and the countless heresies it breeds. In the last century, you have focused your research on the mythical species known only as the Old Ones – these distant precursors to the galaxy's current species, they who it is said created the Eldar's Webway. The passage of millions of years has almost completely erased the traces of their existence, but you have discovered several sites that were unknown even to the Children of Isha, and what you found there troubled you enough that you joined the new faction of the Inquisition known as the Bestiam Domitores. There is no proper cypher to translate the Old Ones' incredibly complex language into Gothic, but what you have managed to decipher from the ruins seems to confirm the theory that the Orks were created by the Old Ones, to serve as weapons against some terrible foe that the Old Ones could not defeat on their own, despite their god-like psychic powers. The magos biologis under your employ tell you that this theory aligns with the Mechanicus' own study of the greenskins – too many aspects of their biology do not make sense unless they were deliberately created that way. And if the Orks were made as weapons, then they can be controlled – and if the rest of your translations are correct, then soon the Imperium will need even as repugnant a tool as the Great Beast if it is to survive …
Scourge of the Revolution
When you returned from that disastrous mission covered in the dust of a destroyed heretic city and with the progenoid glands of your entire squad in a freezer, you didn't expect the reward that was bestowed upon you. The Legion saw your potential and your ability for violent, solitary improvisation, and made you into an Effrit. Your current mission is also the first you have received in your new role. You have been tasked with neutralizing the threat of a human Sector, long isolated from the rest of the galaxy by Warp Storms that have finally faded. The location of that Sector makes a more conventional conquest inappropriate for the moment, and so you have been sent to ensure that the heirs of "the Glorious Revolution's Father" don't become a threat to the rest of the Imperium until it is prepared to deal with them. You haven't seen another Legionary in fifty years, but you have been far from inactive during that time. You have hunted down charismatic leaders, exposed evidence of corruption, sabotaged military projects and freed political prisoners from their internment camps. Your nom de guerre is a curse, whispered by groups of soldiers fearful of being overheard by their superiors and punished for their dissenting talk. After all, according to the state's propaganda, you do not exist, and your various actions are instead attributed to groups of resistants to the new order. But even the unceasing broadcast and ruthless persecution cannot suppress the rumors completely. New uprisings against the tyranny of the "Glorious Revolution" have sprouted across its worlds, which you travel aboard a small ship, a priceless relic from the Dark Age of Technology that can cross short distances into the Warp without the need for a Navigator. Soon, the time will come to unite them, overthrow the establishment, and prepare for the Sector's reintegration into the Imperium.
Perpetual Agent
You work for the Cabal, as you have for the last fifteen thousand years – though the leadership changed ten millennia ago, and you much prefer the current bosses. You are a Perpetual, gifted with resurrective immortality and born in the last years of the Dark Age of Technology. You saw Mankind fall from grace, suffer through five millennia of strife, and rise again under the Emperor's aegis – only to fall all over again when Chaos turned its gaze toward the species. You were first recruited by the Cabal during the desperate times of the Age of Strife, when it seemed Mankind was doomed to be the playthings of xenos and daemons. The terms of your employment were simple : in exchange for your unquestioning loyalty, they would protect the cluster of worlds where you were born from the depredations of the Dark Eldars, calling upon old debts to keep the reavers at bay. That loyalty lasted until you were shown proof of the Cabal's leadership having dealings with Chaos. There are few of you immortals left now, after the bloody purge of the Cabal during and after the Heresy. You fought in that most bitter of conflicts, ending the long lives of fellow immortals, many of whom you had called friends, some of whom didn't know that their alien masters had been corrupted by the Archenemy. You have continued your work since then, moving across history unseen, protecting those who must be protected and helping turn the tide of vital battles whose result balances on a blade's edge. You are no psyker, but one hundred and fifty centuries of life have taught you everything there is to know about warfare and combat. To your knowledge, no new Perpetual has appeared since the Heresy, and you wonder what that means.
Black Legion
Awakened Daemonhost
There is no weapon that the Black Legion will not employ, no matter how dangerous or difficult to control. Once, you were a man with a family, earning an honest living on an Imperial world. You had never broken any law, never committed any sin beyond the utterly mundane. All that ended when you were captured by a Chaos cult and used as a vessel for their infernal patron. They marked your skin with tattoos whose ink was made of daemon blood, and called for their master from beyond the veil in a grand ritual. Your first victims were your wife and daughters, and the daemon made sure not to destroy too much of your mind that you wouldn't be able to understand what it was doing with your body. Between the guilt, the horror, and the psychic corruption of the Neverborn riding your flesh, you went utterly mad. Years later, the Black Legion came to your world, and absorbed the cult that had created you. They brought you into the Eye of Terror … and something changed there. The tides of the Warp didn't reinforce the daemon inside of you : instead, they sapped its strength, sending it into torpor, and you found yourself back in control of your altered body as well as wielding some measure of the daemon's immense power. When that happened, you were insane enough that no one noticed the difference - the sorcerous bindings that compel you to do the bidding of your Black Legion masters are still in effect. Even as the pieces of your mind fall back together, those around you simply believe the daemon within you is playing a trick on them. For now, the Black Legion has only used you against other Chaos warbands, and you have no qualm in destroying these monsters, but what part of you is still capable of fear dreads being taken out of the Eye, where the daemon may wake again.
Black Angel
You were a Blood Angel once, but you have long since left any loyalty to Sanguinius behind. When Bile came to the Ninth Legion's daemonic homeworld and forged his bargain with the insane Daemon Primarch, you saw the way destiny was turning, and you broke your oaths to the Sanguinary Guard to join the first Black Crusade. You know that, on the Harbinger Star, Azkaellon still hasn't forgiven you for that, the noble, loyal, blind fool. The Angel is lost, and was lost long before he killed Horus – his only true contribution to the war effort during the rebellion. So are all of the Primarchs, too busy playing the Great Game to bother with their sons' mundane concerns. The Black Legion is the future, unfettered by past loyalties. Unlike your degenerate brothers, you do not need to drink blood : instead, you use a serum devised for you by the Clonelord to abate the Thirst. It also keeps your mind clear of the madness that infects the Blood Angels, and has allowed you to rise within the Black Legion to become a warlord, leader of thousands of Legionaries and things that look like Legionaries. You still bear the mark of your lineage in the great feathered wings that rise from your back, but these wings are as black as your armor, and unlike the latter, did not need to be repainted. You have fought against every Legion, traitor or loyalist, and led warriors born from all of them as well. Despite your power, you still heed the word of Fabius Bile – it was the Primogenitor who made the Black Legion, and you know that he can take it back any time he wants. That time may be soon : you have been called to a gathering of fleets near the Eye's edge, and the Warp whispers of a coming Black Crusade that will finally bring about the Long War's end.
Decaying Primarch Clone
You were one of the Primogenitor's early experiments, when he was still learning from the gene-work of the False Emperor by seeking to emulate it. You were born in a vat, along with many others – but you were lucky enough to have a deformity in your features that prevented you from being sent to the Lord of Angels like the others. Instead, your father had his minions craft armor and weapons adapted to your size, and let you loose among the warriors who followed him. Ever since then, you have fought in the Black Legion's wars, from the initial Black Crusade that ended when the Lord of Angels' madness was revealed to the latest raids in realspace to secure specimens for the Primogenitor's research. From time to time, your father calls you back to his lab, to check the progress of your biology and your reaction to the Eye of Terror's mutagenic energies. Your body is strong and resilient, but your mind is little more developed than a child's – on the battlefield, you are always under someone else's command. None of those you fight against and few of those you fight alongside know the truth about your nature; most simply believe you to be a mutated Astartes, or the result of one of the Primogenitor's other experiments. You can take a lot of punishment and can regenerate from all but the most grievous wounds in mere minutes, but every injury also causes your genetic code to degrade a little bit more. You want to make your father proud of you, so that he will continue to provide you the care you know you need to stop your body from falling apart. It wouldn't even occur to you to blame his work's quality, but the Eye's tides have been unkind.
Desperate Son of Horus
You were among the Sons of Horus who joined the False King, when he rose through the Sixteenth Legion in the thirty-eighth millennium. You truly believed that he was Horus Reborn – right until you saw him go down under the blades of the Mournival. By that point, however, you were too far gone to go back – you had killed your own brothers, and made pacts and bargains with allies you would have once shot on sight. You fled into the Eye of Terror, where you belonged, with the rest of the galaxy's damned. You painted your armor black and scoured away most of the Legion's markings – realizing only after that it made you look like a member of the Black Legion. For lack of anything better to do, and afraid of facing the consequences of your crimes in the afterlife, you played along the misunderstanding, and soon you became a warlord of the Black Legion, leading your own warband of cloned horrors and renegades. Over time, your lack of purpose has given way to a new, all-consuming goal : you have become convinced that, if you could only return Lupercal to the Sons of Horus, your sins would be forgiven. Of course, Horus is dead, but isn't the Eye of Terror the place where Gods and mortals meet, and the realm of the physical and the spiritual are indistinguishable ? To that end, you investigate any rumor of a sighting of the First Primarch, and have even made inquiries toward the resurrectionists of the Raven Guard and the fleshmasters of the Black Legion. Most recently, you have learned of the regular phenomenon that plagues the Blood Angels' daemonic homeworld, where shades from the Ninth Legion's past lay siege to the Lord of Hosts' palace. The prospect of aiding the very Legion which killed Horus in the first place disgusts you, but if there is any chance that these shades are the real deal, you must take the risk.
Discarded Prototype
You were born in one of Fabius Bile's laboratories, one of many attempts to better the Astartes template, and were cast out when you failed to measure to your maker's expectations. You think of yourself as relatively lucky : you may be a reject, but you are still capable of fighting, and you lack any of the obvious deformities that plague so many of the Clonelord's creations. Some part of you still mourn your father's abandonment, but there is nothing you can do about it - there are thousands like you in the Black Legion. But you are wrong. Bile hasn't abandoned you : his agents still keep watch over you from the shadows and report your every move to him. Nor are you a failure – in truth, you are far more powerful than you currently realize. Your exile is but the next step of the Clonelord's experiment, to evaluate how you react to the Eye of Terror's unique environment. You may be shaped like an Astartes, but you are something else entirely. Your true nature is that of something from the beyond that the Primogenitor captured in a prison of cloned flesh and false identity, but not even Bile knows exactly what you are. All that he knows for sure is that you aren't a daemon in disguise : your realm of origin is much further from reality than the Warp ever could be. Without being aware of it, you have reshaped your body inside your armor, not according to the designs of any Warp-born entity. You have started to display some minor gifts : the ability to perceive all living things around you, self-repairing wargear, and the ability to unleash high-velocity spikes of a black material toward your enemies that fade from existence after a few minutes. Your current self, both physical and spiritual, is a chrysalis for something else, something Bile is very interested in studying – and, perhaps, just a bit worried about …
Enslaved Arch-Magos
Once you were mighty, a lord of the Mechanicum whose word was heeded by millions of tech-priests and thralls. When the civil war erupted, you chose the side that did not restrain its most brilliant minds with outdated morality and beliefs. Your creations reapt a great tally of Imperial lives as you unleashed them against the slaves of the False Omnissiah. But after the defeat at Terra, your fortunes plummeted. You lost most of your resources when you fled to the Eye, and once there, you were captured and enslaved by Fabius Bile, Arch-Renegade of the Third Legion and Primogenitor of the Black Legion. The Clonelord didn't kill you, claiming that your knowledge of genetics and technology was too precious to waste, and you thought that meant he wanted you to continue your research under him – but you were wrong. All that Bile needed was someone to oversee one of the vast facilities he has hidden within the Eye of Terror, where thousands of new, enhanced Astartes are being kept in stasis, waiting for the time Bile unleashes them upon an unsuspecting galaxy. You have been implanted with hundreds of control devices to ensure your loyalty, and have spent the last millennia monitoring energy levels and directing repairs – or even performing them yourself when none of the vat-born rejects you have as assistants can get the job done. You would have sworn to yourself to avenge this humiliation if you weren't afraid one of the implanted devices would pick up on the thought and destroy you in retaliation. Centuries of bondage have broken your will, reduced you to little more than a servitor yourself, but deep beneath the surface, there remains a spark of the unfettered creative fire that caused you to side with Guilliman during the Heresy – and that spark could yet be kindled anew …
New Man Infiltrator
You are the creation of Fabius Bile, the God of your people, crafted by his intellect to replace a Humanity that has become obsolete. You are faster, stronger, more resilient than baseline humans, and utterly devoid of anything resembling a conscience – which makes you uniquely suited for the cut-throat world of Imperial aristocracy, where your ancestors were implanted centuries ago as part of one of the Primogenitor's long-running schemes. It took your line two thousand years and five generations (longevity was but the least of the improvements the Primogenitor made to your ancestors), but you have finally claimed the throne of Sector Lord. Hundreds of worlds and billions of souls fall under your purview, and no one in the Imperium is the wiser as to your true nature. You have placed members of your family to key positions, where they can do the most damage while remaining out of sight. The Imperium's well-accepted practice of nepotism means that no one finds this strange, and at least your cousins are intelligent and apt to the positions you bestow upon them. Slowly, your people are eroding the strength of the Sector, spreading spiritual corruption and turning the lords of the Imperium against one another. Soon, the call will come from the Eye of Terror, and you will engineer the utter collapse of the old order. The Sector will burn, and you and your kind will rise from the ashes to rule over those of Humanity who prove worthy of enduring as your thralls, slaves and toys. But until then, there is still plenty of fun to be had – the decadence that takes place within your palaces is a thing of beautiful nightmares. Daemons whisper in your ear when you sleep, promising you glories untold, but you know them for the liars they are. When your people rise from the Imperium's ruins, the Neverborn will be put into their proper place – enslaved.
Out-of-his-depth Tyrant
You should have known better than to make a deal with Fabius Bile. You really should have. It's not like you hadn't heard the stories : the Sons of Horus have made sure that, no matter the wishes of the Inquisition, tales of the Clonelord's vile crimes against Mankind are still spread across the Imperium's ruling elite, precisely to prevent fools like you from contacting him. But you thought you knew better, and you made a bargain with the Black Legion's founder, offering him his pick of your world's population in exchange for enough cloned troops to enforce your transition from mere nobility to full-fledged Governor. Bile came, delivered what he had promised, helped you overthrow the government and install yourself as uncontested monarch – then he took ten million children and left. Now, several years later, your cloned army has started to devolve. Entire squads are lost to rabid madness at a time, turning into hulking mutants and devouring dozens of your people before their biology breaks down. Their kindred still obey you – they have no choice, their loyalty was ingrained in their very genes – but even their ruthlessness and discipline grows unable to hold the rebellious populace in check. So far you have managed to hide your deeds from the rest of the galaxy by silencing the astropaths, but the Warp disturbances that isolated your world in the wake of Bile's departure are fading, and soon the Imperium will come calling. You have taken to drinking to be able to sleep, lest the nightmares of your coming punishment keep you awake – although they are pleasant compared to those where you end up going under Bile's knives yourself.
Renegade Warmaster
The Imperial warmachine put you in charge of the reconquest of an entire Sector that had fallen to heresy. But the forces of Chaos were well-entrenched, and the campaign devolved into a decades-long struggle, with million upon million of Guardsmen being sent into the grinder, and the absence of the Traitor Legions meant that no Space Marines could be spared to break the deadlock – at least, that's what the Legion Masters replied to your every plea for assistance. Because of your genuine talent for strategy on a grand scale, you were kept at your post despite the rising butcher's bill, even granted juvenat treatments so that you could live long enough to fulfill your initial objectives. But being forced to send more and more young men and women to their death slowly eroded your mind and chipped away at your soul. You and your forces used more and more morally dubious methods, exterminating wholesale the populations you were supposed to free rather than deal with insurgencies and hidden cults. Then it was using the sorcerous blades you had found in that den – they were the only things capable of reliably putting down the daemons your enemies were calling up from the depths of the Warp. Every step made perfect sense, not just to you, but to your surviving advisors, even the Inquisitor who had pledged to help the Crusade reach its end. By the time the final stronghold of the heretics in the Sector fell, you had become nigh identical to those you had spent so long fighting, and you were fully aware of it. Knowing that the Imperium would destroy you, you fled into the Eye of Terror with two-thirds of your troops (after destroying the remaining third, who would not follow you). The Black Legion welcomed you with open arms, especially considering the wide range of troops under your command – you have everything from Navy ships to Adeptus Mechanicus skitarii cohorts, and all of their lords are loyal to you, their bonds forged in the blood you spilled together. Bitterness eats you from within, and you have vowed that you will have your vengeance against the Imperium that made you into a monster.
Student of the Manflayer
You were an Apothecary of the White Scars, but now, you are one of Fabius Bile's Consortium, a group of Apothecaries and other flesh-crafters dedicated to the pursuit of learning and experimentation under the Clonelord's leadership. Your personal field of study is the various stable strains of mutants found in the Great Eye : you are trying to isolate which mutations are the result of natural selections in the Eye's merciless environment and which ones are the result of the interference of the trans-dimensional intelligences that fools call the Dark Gods. The latter must be purged, but the former can be integrated into the next iteration of the New Men, if they are beneficial enough. Except that life is a lie. You came into existence as one of Fabius Bile's clones, a perfect copy of the original Arch-Renegade on both the genetic and psychological level. The Pater Mutatis has countless enemies, and within the Eye of Terror most of them know that he has multiple bodies, though none understand the true scope of his transformation from Astartes into Consortium. He created you as a backup, a contingency in case his obvious bodies are destroyed. Should your "master" fall, you are programmed to ingratiate yourself to his killers by offering them access to the Clonelord's secrets - a proposal few warlords in the Eye could afford to refuse, then bide your time until you can safely destroy them. It took extensive surgery to hide your true nature from even the most keen-eyed observer, but that is nothing compared to what was done to your mind. Bile's memories are buried deep, updated whenever you come near your master through the psychic connection that exist between all clones of the Primogenitor.