Imperial Vox Cast

Lost to the Ages

By Luckee

Awareness comes in a wash of pain.  Hearts crashing to the beat of a furious roll.  Trapped inside the warrior struggles with the induced immobility.  Rage builds and the ferocity of ten millenia of imprisonment lashes against his prison.  The violence brings clairity and                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               the warrior senses his captors beyond the cage.  Vague figures dash about in a stampede of panic.  He manages a grin as he sets his arms to shearing the walls of his imprisonment.

Voices babble and rant.  The walls around him bow under his indomitable strength.  The warrior senses victory.  At long last he will be avenged on his captors.

He is enveloped by a wash of blackness.  Muscles betray their master and falter at the task in hand.  A single figure stands before him now.  A musical report of language passes between the figure and the host within the room.  Its calm demeanor and cadence brings ease to the warriors pain and slows the raging hearts.

Within the prison the warrior is taken slowly into rest again.  He struggles against the overwhelming tranquility.  His frustration abates before the will of the figure before him.  He is left with only a lament at how close he had been to freedom.

He is only narrowly aware as the figure approaches.  Around it a wall of shadows and vaguery disapate.  Its lithe and narrow frame draws close and a gentle but powerful hand touches the warriors brow.  The face draws closer, half ensconced in a polished plain white mask.  The other half is a comedy of worry and concern.  Features exaggerated over an androgenous humanoid vissage.  In a voice that promises safety the figure speaks.  “Calm, mighty Lion; the time for your return is near. But not yet.”

The figure turns on toe and strides away. The forms graceful gaite is swathed in the familiar checkers and stripes. Not for the first time, Johnson swears vengence on his xeno tormentor.

Where Are They Now?  The Primarchs, Part I
By Klarkash-Ton

The Primarchs.  The twenty (Or twenty-one.  Or eighteen.  Or nineteen.) super-beings created by the Emperor of Mankind to serve as his heirs and generals.  Each a demi-god in their own right, they were also the living embodiment of both their respective Space Marine Legions, and of various facets of the Emperor himself.  In the time since the Horus Heresy and the Age of Rebirth, they have passed into myth within the Imperium, deified in a manner similar to their father and creator, though secondary to him.  Yet human they were, for when they still strode the stars, it was their human failings that brought the galaxy to the brink of utter destruction, and the impact of those flaws have echoed down the ten thousand years since then.  In the 41st millenium, the Primarchs have long passed from the affairs of the temporal galaxy.  How did it happen that such might beings have faded away?  That’s something I hope to explore here.

Let’s first look at why the Primarchs are gone, not from an in-universe point of view, but from the point of view of analyzing the nature of the setting.  The 40k universe is a dark place, almost entirely bereft of hope; it is only through tremendous acts and unimaginable sacrifice that the Imperium — the protagonist of the setting — continues to cling to survival.  The Primarchs, like the Emperor, are powerful symbols of a time past wherein mankind’s lot in the galaxy was one of ascendancy.  As such, their presence would serve to undermine the integrity of the setting, and they had to be ‘removed from play,’ just as the Emperor was.  And so, stories were invented to explain their absence.  Let’s now take a look at exactly what those are.

Lion El’Jonson is as good a place to start as any, seeing as how he was the Primarch of the First Legion.  Following the Horus Heresy, the Lion returned to Caliban, only to be confronted by the the betrayal of Luther.  After the events of the Heresy, the Lion would brook no dissension within his own Legion’s ranks and unleashed a bombardment of apocalyptic proportions on his home world.  While the planet burned, Jonson personally led the assault on the renegades sheltering within the Rock, the Dark Angels’ fortress-monastery.  Jonson confronted Luther and the two did battle, Luther made powerful enough to stand against the Lion by virtue of the Powers of Chaos.  The titanic energies unleashed by the battle, coupled with the damage done by the orbital bombardment, shattered the planet of Caliban, with only the Rock withstanding the cataclysm by virtue of its defensive shields.  Luther felled Jonson with a psychic assault, but upon doing so, he realized what he had done and what he had become.  When a contingent of Dark Angels found Luther, he could only weep and profess that the Watchers in the Dark — an unknown but seemingly benevolent form of warp-being that had long existed on Caliban — had taken Jonson away.  Luther was sealed away in the deepest vaults of the fortress, but only a handful knew that Jonson had been placed in stasis even further within the Rock, where the Watchers in the Dark will supposedly awake him when he is once more needed.

Fulgrim’s fate can be interpreted in two possible ways.  In the more commonly held interpretation, Fulgrim ascended to become a Daemon Prince after he slew his brother-Primarch Ferrus Manus on Isstvan V.  Following this, Fulgrim followed Horus to the Siege of Terra, and fled to the Eye of Terror following the death of Horus, where he rules over a planet gifted to him by Slaanesh to this day.  However, Fulgrim’s ascendancy to a Daemon Prince is described as being brought about by his submitting to possession by a powerful Daemon, reducing Fulgrim to little more than a fragment of a mind, locked away in his own body.  Whether this should be considered his death or not is open to interpretation, as is what bearing this may have on the interpretation of the manner in which other Primarchs ascended to the rank Daemon Prince.

Following Horus’ death and the retreat of Traitor forces, Perturabo — rather than retreat to the Eye of Terror with the majority of his fellow Traitor Primarchs — Perturabo led his Iron Warriors to the planet of Sebastus IV, where he oversaw the construction of the Eternal Fortress, twenty square miles of some of the most fiendish fortifications ever devised.  Rogal Dorn vowed to dig Perturabo out, and attacked with his Imperial Fists.  There had always been a rivalry between the two, and the fighting was some of the bitterest ever seen.  Finally, though, the Fists reached the center of the fortifications only to find nothing there; they had been tricked by Perutrabo.  Perturabo, on the other hand, had seen enough Astartes slain in the name of the Ruinous Powers to earn himself the rank of Daemon Prince, and he was granted the Fortress World of Medrengard in the Eye of Terror, where he still dwells.

Following his battle on Terra during the Horus Heresy, Jorghatai Khan led his White Scars back out into the galaxy, launching a crusade against the Dark Eldar.  Tales say that in one battle during this crusade, Jaghatai was lost, sucked into a Warp Portal, where he was destined to fight for all eternity.  Realistically, given the uncharted and dangerous nature of the Warp-space in the region where the White Scars were fighting, the Khan’s ship was simply lost and destroyed in the Empyrean.  However, as the White Scars were doing battle with the Dark Eldar, it is possible that Jaghatai entered a Webway portal that was sealed behind him, and has been trapped there ever since.

Leman Russ, too, survived the events of the Heresy, and continued to preside over his Legion, a significant factor in the Space Wolves’ successful refusal of Codex Astartes during the Age of Rebirth that has held to this day.  After years had passed, though, Russ held a massive feast, at the height of which, Russ arose and announced that he was leaving his Space Wolves.  He took with him a small retinue and was last seen entering the Eye of Terror.  However, Russ also promised that he would return for “the Wolftime,” apparently the final battle at the end of things.  Though Russ’s current whereabouts are unknown, to this day the Space Wolves will launch crusades in search of him, though none has yet produced a clue as to his current location or status.

Rogal Dorn was one of the final Loyalist Primarchs to leave the Imperium.  Following the events on Sebastus IV described above, Dorn divided his Legion as prescribed in the Codex Astartes, continuing to lead the Imperial Fists.  In this time, Dorn began to see the unsettling changes in both the Imperium and in the way he, as a living Primarch, was treated; he began to wonder if his continued presence in the Galaxy was a good thing.  Finally, during a Black Crusade (the exact Black Crusade is never specified, though it is noted that this took place “soon after the disappearance of Corax”), Rogal Dorn led a small Imperial Fists force to reinforce the beleaguered Imperial Navy at the Cadian Gate.  Upon their arrival, the Imperial fists found their strike force vastly outnumbered by the Traitor ships.  Rather than engage in a traditional ship-to-ship battle that he couldn’t hope to win, Dorn led a series of boarding actions against the Chaos forces.  The Fists would teleport aboard a Chaos ship and do as much damage as they could, as quickly as they could before moving on to the next ship by whatever means were available.  Though this gamble allowed the Imperial Fists to hold the Chaos forces at bay, it cost Dorn his life in a final stand on the bridge of the Despoiler Class Battleship Sword of Sacrilege.  When a large body of Imperial Navy ships arrived to relieve the Imperial Fists, Dorn’s remains were secured, and remain in the possession of his Chapter.

Konrad Curze or Night Haunter was one of the few Traitor Primarchs not to flee into the Eye of Terror following the Horus Heresy.  Instead, Curze took his Night Lords and waged a campaign against the Imperium in the Eastern Fringes.  The Imperium, allegedly at the command of the Emperor himself, dispatched fully half of the assassins of the Callidus temple to dispatch the Night Haunter.  One of these, an assassin named M’Shen caught up with Curze in his palace on Tsagualsa.  She slew him there, though it is suggested that Curze allowed this to happen, believing that his assassination vindicated his belief that wrong must be punished.

Sanguinius was the second Primarch to fall during the Heresy.  After leading the defence of the Imperial Palace during the Siege of Terra, Sanguinius accompanied the Emperor when He teleported aboard Horus’ Battle Barge.  The boarding party was seperated in the act of arriving on the ship, and Sanguinius was the first to reach Horus.  Though Sanguinius still sought to redeem Horus, the two did battle, with Horus slaying his brother-Primarch receiving only a small scratch in his armor in return.  However, it is believed that it was this damage that ultimately allowed the Emperor to slay Horus, though as it is said that the Emperor slew Horus with a psychic assault, it is unclear whether this ought to be interpreted literally or figuratively.  Sanguinius’s body was recovered, and now rests in burial on Baal.

Ferrus Manus, as has already been mentioned, was the first Primarch to be killed in the Heresy.  Fulgrim had thought to turn his brother-Primarch before the events of Isstvan III, however Ferrus would not betray the Emperor, and attacked Fulgrim.  Fulgrim Bested his brother, but was unwilling to kill him, and merely left him unconscious.    The two met again on Isstvan V, where they fought once more.  Now, however, Fulgrim’s mind had been even more corrupted by the Daemon bound within his sword, and finally slew Ferrus, presenting his head to Horus.  It should be remembered, though, that it is this act that brought about a death of sorts for Fulgrim, as well.

Well, that’s all for now, folks.  In two months, we’ll look at the remaining nine Primarchs, as well as talk about the two Unknown Primarchs.  In the meantime, tell us who’s your favorite Primarch and why!

Come join the discussion in the forums.