Jump 037: Warhammer 40k - Horus Heresy: The Primarchs

Jump 037: Warhammer 40k - Horus Heresy: The Primarchs

Allegiance: Loyalist
Origin: The Administrator
Drawbacks: [800] Early Start, Honest, Grudges, Galaxy's Worst Dad, Cannot See The Other Shore, Shattered

[Free]      Primarch Physiology
[Free]      Primarch Mentality
[Free]      Psychic Abilities
[100/1800]  One Of Many
[Free]      Divided Attention
[200/1800]  Incorruptible
[400/1800]  Combat Reflexes
[600/1800]  Preternatural Resilience
[900/1800]  Perfection
[1300/1800] Perpetual
[Free]      The Son Emulates The Father
[Free]      The Human Perspective
[1500/1800] Comprehensive Scientific Knowledge
[1600/1800] Eternal Edifice
[1800/1800] Redundant Mechanisms
[Free]      Reeking Of Corruption
[Free]      Above All Doubt
[1800/2300] Item Stipend (+500)
[Free]      Cyber-Bio Adaptations
[Free]      Arms: Master Crafted, Import (Plasma Rifle)
[Free]      Arms: Master Crafted, Import (Black Death)
[Free]      Armor: Artificer, Import (Praetor Armor)
[1850/2300] Armor: Lightweight
[2000/2300] Auric Armor
[2300/2300] Gene-Tech Vault

Legion Drawbacks: (+800) Dark Secret, Schism, Homeless

(300/1800)  Fleet Assets (x4)
(Free)      Fleet Imports (The Light of Terra, Fortress of DOOM)
(500/1800)  Abyss-class Battleship: The Lux Aeterna
(700/1800)  Phalanx: The Bastion
(600/1800)  Mark IV "Maximus"
(Free)      Combat Load
(Free)      Bolters
(800/1800)  Lost Archaeotech
(900/1800)  Exceptional Purity
(1100/1800) Safe Implantation
(1300/1800) Marines (x3) (100,000)
(Free)     Decentralized Operations
(1400/1800) Disciplined Fire
(1500/1800) Death Dealers
(1600/1800) Angels Of Salvatio
(1700/1800) Secret Service
(1800/1800) Iron Discipline

Let me tell you a story.

Once upon a time, the sky split open and a meteor streaked down from the heavens, crashing into a field. A humble farmer and his wife bore witness to this and investigated, finding nought but an infant among the wreckage that they chose to take in and raise as their own, being unable to have a child of their own.

This child grew at an amazingly rapid pace and his parents kept him secret as long as they could, fearful of what might happen if they hadn't. He was speaking within weeks, grew to the state of a toddler within months, and absorbed every bit of information that he could. The only reason his parents could afford to feed him was that they themselves had a supply of food because of their career. In the space of ten years, he'd grown to adulthood, but he'd proven himself unnaturally strong and able to help his parents out... and resistant to harm, as what would have been a horrible accident resulted in the thresher being destroyed, rather than any harm to himself beyond superficial wounds that healed before their eyes.

But he continued to grow beyond his tenth year into the fullness of his state as a primarch, and cast his sights further than the family's farm. The world, you see, was as many were in those days - war-torn, his nation fighting enemies within and without, and even those beyond. He was not the only one on that world that was capable of superhuman feats, but he was far and away the most capable of them. Some of them worked to make the world a better place while others were warlords or petty criminals. And so he worked under an assumed identity to keep his family safe from retribution, at first within the nearest metropolis to deal with the problems that spilled out of it... and then expanded his aims. He gathered other like-minded individuals to his cause, whether empowered or not, and many of them had been doing the same as he had in their own cities. Instead, working together, they were able to take on larger foes... working to unite the world and depose would-be tyrants.

When a horde of xenos invaded - a race long since forgotten and wiped from memory - the primarch and those around him fought them off. He was captured and taken to the xenos' home, a forge world they had conquered and converted into what should have been called a hell world, turned to the purpose of building armies of genetically and cybernetically modified soldiers that marched forth and conquered in their leader's name. Those who fought with him came to liberate him, and they did indeed take him back with them... except, as no one realized until years later, they had liberated a clone. His true self was still imprisoned when they departed, his very essence splintered and the greater bulk of it within the clone.

A clone that met his father, who had come to that world two years later, after the world had been more fully pacified and brought under a united banner. A clone that was put in charge of a legion of superhuman space marines, and tasked with bringing peace to the galaxy as a part of a great crusade. A clone who decided that the legions that he had been granted were simply not enough, and who instead of electing to recruiting additional marines through ordinary means, chose to create clones. Replicanti. A clone who, on realizing that one of the pieces of the primarch he lacked was his tactical acumen, chose to bolster the ranks of the replicanti with replicanti of himself. And who, themselves, did the same.

Those under his command thought it all suspicious, especially when replicanti with increasingly horrendous mutations were found among their ranks, and dissent began to become apparent. The legion began conquering worlds, not to free them but to enslave them and forcibly conscript their population to bolster their numbers. With the replicanti, they had sufficient amounts of their geneseed to do this en masse, and the replicant primarchs knew sufficient methods to twist minds into their service. And when all of this became too much for the loyal space marines, the cloned primarchs began to purge their ranks ruthlessly, using it as a way to ensure the loyalty of those they'd brainwashed into working with the replicanti.

Despite all this, a number of them managed to escape, pursuing rumors that their primarch was not who he was thought to be at all. And indeed he wasn't - the cloned primarch still owed his loyalty to the dark lord of the hellworld, and his replicanti marines had been marching forward and conquering the sector in the dark lord's name rather than his sworn liege, the Emperor of Mankind. His oath of service to his "father" had never been sincere, after all, as he had never truly been his son. But in time, the marines still loyal to the Emperor's cause found their true primarch - he'd escaped years before and was fighting a guerilla war against the dark lord's holdings, slowly but steadily bleeding him, and having a most formidible ship at his disposal to boot. With their support, the primarch struck at the dark lord's hellworld, bringing an apocalypse upon it and savagely executing the dark lord and his leaders, before heading to Terra so his father could meet his true son and have everything explained.

"Well, that explains much," said the Emperor, who had already ordered the purge of the insurrectionists, before instructing the primarch in question and his sons to repaint their armor and join the mini-crusade to prove their loyalty, though even afterward they would be kept on the shortest of chains. They, of course, did so; the primarch took great pleasure in slaying his clones while the vast majority of replicanti were purged. In the end, those who hadn't defected to report to their primarch and the Emperor - largely those who had been brainwashed to blindly accept whatever they were told as truth, and who only fought back when they were forcibly shown the truth - were folded into the former War-Born, and most of the affected systems marked for recolonization. The loyal remnants of this legion, however, were sent to work in the Emperor's service in exile. All mention of them was wiped from the records, and this was naught but a constant trial for them to prove their worth; their leader was, at least in size, all but identical to legion. And though they lacked a homeworld, they had a hollow planetoid that could be used as a mobile base - the Bastion, as they called it - and a notable fleet of assets that they'd procured from their now-purged-and-or-rebranded-and-best-forgotten brethren.

Had things gone a different way, the Horus Heresy might have ended quite differently. Had they been sent to Istvaan with the rest of the loyal marines, perhaps they would have been able to spare much of the galaxy's suffering; instead, Ferrus Manus acted from within even as the other traitors acted from without, and served as a distressingly level-headed right hand to the Warmaster turned traitor. (Though Fulgrim tried to clone him repeatedly and all of the clones refused to turn to chaos, infuriating him and driving a wedge between himself and the true primarch himself that would get bloody before the end.)

However, once they finally reached Sol itself six weeks later... they found the Legion's fleet awaiting them. Engaging them in hit and run attacks, they bled for every inch of advancement that they made before they finally reached Terra and began their siege. Though they expected reinforcements from the Dark Mechanicus as they finally escaped Mars, they were to be disappointed; the massive Lux Aeterna appeared out of nowhere practically atop them and annihilated them wholesale, while its shields deflected every bit of firepower sent its way, before turning its guns on the invading fleet and fighting a protracted battle with them for quite some time before withdrawing.

The siege did not go as hoped. Point defense on the ground was FAR heavier than anticipated and seemingly restoring itself once destroyed. Aside from direct fire, nothing struck the surface... including landing parties. In time, the Emperor took the fight to the Warmaster himself in orbit. He was wounded grievously until the death of a lone guardsman prompted him to take a final action. His wounds were found to have been partially healed after returning to his palace, while the Sigillite himself barely survived his time on the Golden Throne in the Emperor's stead. The traitors' forces, reeling from the loss of their leader, turned to flee the system...

And found the Bastion, and the nigh-invulnerable Lux Aeterna itself, blocking their retreat along with the newly arrived fleets of the Ultramarines and Dark Angels. Terra was the anvil, and those fleets were the hammer. While there were those that escaped, not so many did as might have been expected; unfortunately, the notable escapees included pretty much all of the remaining primarchs beside Ferrus Manus, Lorgar, and Horus himself.

The ultimate fate of this shattered legion and its primarch is uncertain. It is rumored that they fought beside the Solar Auxilia in the Rangdan Xenocides, before the Heresy, and later were placed under the command of the Sigillite and used for purposes unknown up until the Siege of Terra. After that... well, the remaining loyalists began looking at them suspiciously, but they threw themselves into the task of purging the chaos marines, and simply disappeared into the warp one day.