WARHAMMER 40K

"It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor of Mankind has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the vast Imperium of Man for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day so that he may never truly die.Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the Warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat to humanity from aliens, heretics, mutants -- and far, far worse. To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be relearned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods." Warhammer 40k Wiki is a collaborative project to create the most definitive and accurate reference for everything related to the Warhammer 40,000 universe." The Emperor of Mankind, often referred to by His faithful as the "God-Emperor," the "Master of Mankind," or simply "the Emperor," and who sometimes referred to Himself as "Revelation," known to the forces of Chaos as the False Emperor or the Corpse Emperor, is the immortal Perpetual and psyker who serves as the reigning monarch of the Imperium of Man, and is described by the Imperial Ecclesiarchy and the Imperial Cult as the father, guardian and god of Humanity.

The Chaos Gods and the Daemons of the Warp refer to Him as "the Anathema" for He is the greatest embodiment of universal order in the galaxy today and the most potent foe of Chaos in existence. He was, and remains, the most powerful Human psyker to have ever been born.

He has sat immobile, His body slowly crumbling, within the Golden Throne of Terra for over 10,000 standard years. Although once a living man, His shattered, decaying body can no longer support life, and it is kept intact only by the cybernetic mechanisms of the Golden Throne and a potent mind itself sustained by the daily sacrifice of thousands of lives.

The Emperor chose to sacrifice His immortal life at the end of the Horus Heresy in the service and protection of Mankind. To Humanity's countless trillions across the galaxy-spanning Imperium, He is nothing less than God. Through His Imperium, Humanity is united and remains one of the most powerful intelligent species in the Milky Way Galaxy as well as its most dominant in terms of both population and territory held.

United under one government, Mankind is able to survive the myriad deadly threats it faces from aliens, the forces of Chaos and the Traitors, Heretics and mutants that lie within the Imperium's boundaries.

The Imperium's rule, carried on in the Emperor's name since the end of the Horus Heresy by the High Lords of Terra and a multitude of Imperial organisations, has been long, oppressive and necessarily harsh.

It has also resulted in technological and cultural stagnation, and a regression into tyranny, superstition and religious obfuscation and intolerance that would have horrified the Emperor.

Though He is no longer responsive to external stimuli, the Emperor still lies at the very heart of the Imperium's continued existence. Although He cannot be directly involved in the day-to-day running of Humanity's galactic government, His existence on the Golden Throne is vital to sustaining the Imperium, since His powerful mind's presence in the Immaterium maintains and directs the Astronomican, the psychic beacon that makes possible faster-than-light Warp travel and is vital to Imperial shipping, transportation, commerce and communication. However, the maintenance of this beacon requires the aid of other psykers, whose lifeforces are slowly drained away by the Emperor to power the beacon. One thousand psykers a day give their lives to maintain the Emperor's psychic strength.

He is said to still guide His race through the psychically-reactive divination tool known as the Emperor's Tarot, which select psykers can consult to gain a glimpse of the future and the Emperor's will. He is also said to constantly battle the Chaos Gods in the Warp and prevent their further intrusion upon the material universe.

His mind must remain vigilant at all times throughout the entire Imperium to safeguard the Human race and to offer His protection to the faithful. Above all else, it is Mankind's collective belief in the Emperor's divinity that serves as its greatest protection from Chaos and the other hideous dangers that plague the galaxy. As the Imperial Creed has taught for over 10,000 standard years, the Emperor protects. The Emperor is the collective reincarnation of all the shamans of Neolithic Humanity's various peoples, the first Human psykers. The foul Warp entities that would become the four Great Powers of Chaos had not yet fully formed when the Emperor was born on Old Earth during prehistoric times before even the Age of Terra, somewhere in ancient central Anatolia (modern Turkey) in the 8th Millennium B.C.

But even before the birth of the Emperor, as Humanity grew and progressed, the Immaterium began to become increasingly disturbed by the dark undercurrents of Humanity's collective psyche, and the shamans began to lose their former ability to reincarnate into new bodies. Instead, upon dying, their souls were consumed by the entities and Daemons of the Warp.

Eventually the shamans of Humanity, unable to reincarnate, would become extinct, and without the shamans and their psychic abilities to guide the race, Humanity would inevitably fall prey to the corruptions of Chaos, just as eventually happened to the Aeldari. In these ancient days, all the shamans of Earth gathered in a grand conclave to decide what must be done to stave off the day when they had all been consumed by the Warp.

In the end, the shamans decided to pool their collective psychic energies by reincarnating as a single soul in a single Human body to create an individual they called "the New Man." The thousands of shamans, as one, took poison, and as one, they died, their souls flowing into the Immaterium in a rush of psychic power that overwhelmed those Daemons who sought to feast upon it with a cleansing, purifying fire, a flame imperishable that became one soul out of many.

A standard year later the child who would become the Emperor was born in a Neolithic settlement of Anatolian herders and farmers of a normal mother and father, with normal brothers and sisters. His psychic power was so great that its energies altered His genome and physiology in the womb and rendered Him immortal so He would no longer need to reincarnate and could not be assaulted by the daemonic creatures of the Immaterium upon His death. As He grew older, His potent psychic powers began to manifest.

For thirty-eight thousand Terran years, He wandered over the Earth and throughout Human history. He travelled among the different peoples of Mankind. While He had first been only an observer of Mankind's triumphs and follies, He soon began to help where He could, using His ancient wisdom to spread efficient government, crop management, animal husbandry, technology and peace. He used His influence carefully, at first adopting only the guise of a normal man, and without revealing His true nature.

As the millennia passed, the man who would become the Emperor watched the Human species develop. He travelled the entire globe, watching and helping, sometimes adopting the persona of a great leader or advisor. In times of trouble He became a crusader, a religious leader or even a messiah, at other times He remained a back-stage contributor to events, an advisor to kings, a court magician, a pioneering scientist. Many of the guises He adopted were humble, others became monumental figures of world history or religion. At times of crisis He would be there, steering Humanity along a narrow path to survival that only He could see.

As Humanity prospered and advanced over the millennia, the Warp became increasingly disturbed. The man who would become the Emperor was aware of how the extreme sides of the Human character were feeding the nascent Chaos Powers. Despite His best efforts to promote peace and harmony across Old Earth, the instinctive values of martial honour, ambition, defiance, and self-satisfaction could never be eradicated from the Human character.

Some of the New Man's plans proved less than successful; seeds of wisdom often failed to flourish or grew into uncontrollable monstrosities leading to eras of persecution and war. The Chaos Gods sensed the presence of the New Man, the "Anathema" as they would name Him, and His efforts to curb their own power and growth. Even before they became fully conscious in the Immaterium the Ruinous Powers recognised the man who would become the Emperor as their greatest enemy.

Khorne was the first of the four major Chaos Gods to wake fully, and an era of wars and conflict soon raged across the globe to herald his birth. Tzeentch was the next, and nations and politics soon grew to maturity with all of their implicit intrigues and double-dealings.

Nurgle was the third to awake and plagues swept across Old Earth's continents claiming many souls for the Lord of Decay. By the end of the European Middle Ages on Terra, all three of these Chaos Gods had awoken to full consciousness. The fourth, Slaanesh, still slumbered, to be awakened by the follies of a different species, the Aeldari.

But as the New Man's psychic powers further developed, He became ever more aware of the terrible dangers that awaited Mankind in the broader universe and He resolved to do all in His power to defend and guide Humanity towards a future as the predominant species in the galaxy.

As more and more Humans were born with the mutant psyker genes that granted them the ability to wield the potent power of the Immaterium in the last centuries of the Dark Age of Technology, and Humanity suffered from the deadly effects of uncontrolled psykers that heralded the onset of the Age of Strife, the Emperor realised that He would have to take a more direct and open role in Human affairs than ever before.

Following the birth of Slaanesh after the Fall of the Aeldari in the 30th Millennium, and the end of the Warp Storms that had prevented interstellar communications and travel from the Sol System, the Emperor determined that the time had come to directly steer the history of Humanity once more, or see the Human race ultimately go extinct due to the troubles of Old Night... The emperor has 20 sons aka the primarchs. The primarchs were the 20 genetically-engineered transhuman "sons" of the Emperor of Mankind created in the late 30th Millennium. They were intended to be the immortal and superhuman generals and proconsuls who would command the Emperor's Great Crusade to reunite the scattered Human race beneath His leadership. Their genomes later served as the genetic templates from which the Emperor crafted His 20 Space Marine Legions.

The primarchs were bred to be perfect generals, warriors and statesmen; larger, stronger, faster, and smarter than any normal Human could ever hope to be. They possessed a potent charisma and martial prowess that made them like the mythical gods of old, untouchable by disease, old age or supposedly the petty failings of lesser men.

Each embodied an aspect of war; one was the greatest strategist ever known, another the personification of the terror of war, a third the master of psychic powers, a fourth the greatest practitioner of the arts of fortification, and so on. The primarchs were the Emperor's answer to reclaiming all the lost worlds of Mankind, and welcoming them into His new Imperium.

The Emperor intended to raise His sons to be the best military commanders and political leaders in Human history. They would bring the Imperial Truth to the rest of the Human-settled galaxy in their father's name, serving as His generals and proconsuls.

But the Chaos Gods intervened to foil their great adversary's plans and the primarchs were sprited away through the Warp to other Human-settled planets of the galaxy. Deprived of the Emperor's care and guidance, each developed a personality uniquely shaped -- and sometimes damaged -- by the difficult circumstances of their homeworlds.

Yet for all their gifts, the primarchs were still only men, and in the end their all-too-Human flaws would become the primary obstacle to the realisation of the Emperor's great dream for Mankind.primarchs before the start of the Unification Wars in the 30th Millennium was known as the Primarch Project. It is unknown exactly when the project began but Perturabo would later estimate his own birth to be the year 792.M30, which gives an approximate date for the project's end, though he was referring to his arrival on Olympia.

The means by which the Emperor crafted 20 individual superhuman genomes using His own arcane Perpetual genetic code as the base without resorting to the use of cloning is unknown to present Imperial science. There was a 2-stage process involved: first, the Emperor extracted a subset of His own DNA to act as the foundation for a pure, undifferentiated primarch gene-stock template. The pure primarch gene-stock was then further differentiated into the 20 separate genetic templates that would serve as the individual primarchs' genomes.

The data concerning the original engineering of the individual primarch strands was later analyzed by a Raven Guard Apothecary and a magos genetor of the Mechanicum during the Horus Heresy. They discovered that certain of the individual primarchs' samples had gene sequences deliberately deleted from the base, "pure" primarch genome, while other samples showed the addition of clearly non-Human DNA. Intriguingly, the genome of the primarch listed as "Subject VI" had added canine-like DNA. Although it is not clear whether the sample numbers corresponded to the actual primarchs of the Space Marine Legions of the same number, this could explain the wolf-like affinity of Leman Russ and the unexpected feral mutation of many Space Wolves Astartes into the Wulfen.

It is believed by modern Imperial scholars that there was more than just physical manipulation of the genetics involved in the creation of the primarchs, and that the Emperor called upon many techniques of psychic sorcery derived from the Warp to shape the extraordinary abilities and unnatural charisma of His transhuman gene-sons.

It is also now known that sometime during the Age of Technology, the man who would become the Emperor had travelled with several of His fellow Perpetuals, including Alivia Sureka, to the world of Molech, a Knight World only a few light years distant from Terra, in a one-way spacecraft. Sureka watched as the Emperor entered a secret Warp Gate present on Molech, where He bargained with the powers of the Immaterium to gain new abilities and knowledge, including most likely the techniques needed to create the primarchs. Sureka was later tasked by the Emperor with remaining on Molech to guard the Warp Gate and keep others from using it until His armies returned millennia later to conquer it for the nascent Imperium of Man during the early days of the Great Crusade.

The Emperor's use of this knowledge meant that the primarchs were intended to be spiritually as well as physically engineered and may explain why they possessed so much personal magnetism and charisma beyond what even their enhanced genetics would predict. But such arcane techniques also meant that the primarchs were unusually vulnerable to the effects of Chaos since their souls would shine so brightly in the Immaterium and draw the attention of daemonic entities like moths to a candle flame.

This is why the Emperor carefully inscribed arcane glyphs of protection on the primarchs' gestation capsules and crafted the most powerful Gellar Field ever made around the gene-vault deep beneath the Imperial Palace in the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains where they were created.

Unfortunately, this protection proved insufficient, for the Chaos Gods learned of the Emperor's plans and the existence of the Primarch Project. They decided they had no wish to see His attempt to weaken their power succeed by extending His new order of reason and scientific progress across the Human-settled worlds of the galaxy. They are 20 primarchs: roboute guilliman, Sanguinius, Alpharius omegon, Horus, Jaghatai Khan, Vulkan, lion El Johnson, rogal Dorn, Lorgar, angron, magnus, fulgrim, ferrus Manus, konard Curze, corvux Corax, lemon Russ, Perturabo, Mortarion.

There is the 4 chaos gods who live in the warp. The Chaos Gods, also called the Dark Gods or the Ruinous Powers, are powerful, self-aware entities comprised solely of psychic energy who inhabit and control the psychic dimension that underlies all physical reality known as the Immaterium or the "Warp."

The Chaos Gods are in truth not really divine beings, though their great power often means there is little difference for those mortals who revere them. These Warp entities are created and sustained by the emotions and collective desires of every sentient being of the material universe. When an emotion or belief in realspace grows strong or widespread enough across the galaxy, it becomes embodied as one of the sentient denizens of the Warp.

The most powerful and most malevolent of these have become the Gods of Chaos. Although they are god-like beings, the Dark Gods are by their nature monomaniacal and completely single-minded since they are formed entirely of a single emotion or concept.

The Chaos Gods are dependent upon the emotions of mortal creatures, especially the hordes of Humanity, for their power and continued existence. As a result, the Chaos Gods strive to convert all mortals to their worship and service so that they may ultimately dominate the universe. However, if they were to win such a dark victory, it would likely destroy all of reality when the dimensional separation between realspace and the Immaterium broke down in its wake.

The Chaos Gods and the forces of Chaos that serve them are the greatest enemies of the Imperium of Man, the Aeldari and most other sentient forms of life in the Milky Way Galaxy, even if they are not fully aware yet of the threat Chaos poses, like the T'au Empire.

The Chaos Gods are able to devote a fraction of their psychic power in the Warp to create Daemons, psychic entities whose appearance and character reflect their patron god's own nature.

These Daemons may be reabsorbed into the god at their whim. The least of the minor Chaos Gods may be so limited in their power that expending that power to create a Daemon means their entire power is expended; in effect, the god becomes a Daemon.

In the Warp, the psychic reflection of similar thoughts and emotions gather together like rivulets of water running down a cliff face. They form streams and eddies of anguish and desire, pools of hatred and torrents of pride.

Since the dawn of time, these tides and waves of psychic energy have flowed unceasingly through the mirror realm of the Warp, and such is their power that they forged creatures made of the very stuff of dreams and nightmares. Eventually, these instinctual, formless entities gained a rudimentary consciousness of their own. The Chaos Gods were born -- vast psychic presences composed of the fantasies and horrors of mortals. These are the Ruinous Powers, and each one is a reflection of the mortal passions that formed them.

First amongst them is Khorne, the Lord of Battle, possessed of towering and immortal fury. Tzeentch, the bizarre and ever-changing Architect of Fate, weaves powerful sorceries to bind the future to his will, whilst great Nurgle, the Lord of Decay, labours endlessly to spread infection and pestilence. The last of their number is Slaanesh, the Dark Prince of Chaos, indulgent of every pleasure and excess, no matter how immoral or perverse.

As the intelligent species of the Milky Way Galaxy prospered and grew, so too did their hopes and ambitions, their anger and wars, their love and hatred. This burgeoning flood of raw emotion fed the Chaos Gods and nurtured their power.

Before long, the gods reached back to their makers with a curious and hungry sentience, planting seeds of corruption in the souls of those whose dreams they passed through. So were the first mortals bound to the will of the Ruinous Powers, and seeing the fruits of their labours, the gods began their eternal work to influence the physical realm and its myriad sentient races.

Lured by promises of extraordinary power and immortality, some mortals serve the Chaos Gods willingly, fomenting misery, war and death amongst their people in order to sustain and elevate their dark masters. Yet the Chaos Gods are fickle, prone to reneging or altering a deal on a whim, and few of these worshippers are ever granted the rewards they seek.

A Chaos God can only grow in power through the actions and thoughts of mortals. Those who worship a Chaos God, and behave in a way that feeds it, are rewarded with strange "gifts," extraordinary powers and potentially, immortality as a Daemon Prince. As the Chaos Gods battle in the Warp, so their mortal followers wage war in the material universe.

The victors of the battles earn more power for their unworldy master, though the twisted plans of the Chaos Gods are such that often victory is not necessary; merely the acts of sacrifice and battle themselves.

When devotees of Chaos die, their souls do not fade in the Warp and disappear like the spirits of others to some unknown and unknowable fate. Instead, their immortal energy is swallowed into the greatness of their gods, their souls sustained forever, bound to the eternal power of Chaos.

As a Chaos God gathers such energy, it expands in power, and its influence and territory within the Warp's Realm of Chaos grows. As extensions of the gods, the appearances of these domains are formed upon the same emotions that created their masters: Khorne's realm is founded on anger and bloodletting; Tzeentch's lands are scintillating constructs of pure magic; Nurgle's territory is a haven of death and regeneration, and Slaanesh's dominion is a paradise of damning temptations.

Though realm and god are as one, the Chaos Gods each have a form that embodies their personalities and dwells at the very heart of their territories. Wreathed in unearthly power, the Chaos Gods watch over their realms, seeking any disturbances in the pattern of the Warp that signal intrusion or opportunity. In the early history of the galaxy, the powers of the Warp had yet to form into distinct, intelligent entities. At this time, the emotions of sentient mortals flowed and ebbed as water does in a stream.

As the intelligent mortal species of the galaxy grew and prospered, so did the strength of their emotions. Eventually, the entities within the Warp grew to such a point where they could act independently of the general flow of emotions and thus became the Gods of Chaos.

They reached into the dreams of mortals and demanded praise and servitude in order to increase their own power, as the more one emotion is exhibited (in both thought and action) by a large group of sentient beings in the physical universe, the stronger that Chaos God becomes.

The Warp is the mirror of reality, a churning sea of raw psychic energy fed by the emotions of every creature of the galaxy who hopes, hates and dreams. It is a place of metaphor and madness, that can never be perceived or understood except through symbols and subjective interpretation. The strange powers of psykers of all kinds flow from the power of the Warp, the psyker's mind acting as a channel for the unreality of the Warp to affect reality.

It is also the Warp that allows Mankind, and many other races, to travel the vast distances of space. Starships pass through the Warp, their courses guided by Navigators bred to perceive and read the tides of psychic energy. All this was known in the time of the Emperor's Great Crusade, but it was only half the truth.

The gods whose existence was once denied by the early Imperium of Man's ruling ideology called the Imperial Truth are real. Vast formations of psychic energy, storms of dark emotion, persistent notes in the symphony of existence, all descriptions fall short of the true nature of the Powers of the Warp.

Powerful beyond mortal comprehension, parasitic and malign they are the Ruinous Powers, the pantheon of lies, the Primordial Annihilator. They have countless names in countless tongues, but to those who have glimpsed even a fraction of their existence, they are best known as the Chaos Gods.

These utterly alien entities hunger for the mortal realm, even though it is as fundamentally poisonous to their nature as air is to a creature of the deep ocean.

They can extend their power into reality, can expend power to influence mortals, corrupt physical existence, even send portions of themselves to walk amongst mortals as the entities called "Daemons," but only for a time.

To truly affect reality, they must use mortal creatures of flesh and blood. To such servants they can gift powers beyond imagining, offering the coin of the impossible in exchange for eternal slavery.

To many Humans such an exchange may seem the only way to escape from the pain of life, or to achieve their heart's desire, and in the superstitions and beliefs of the past, the Chaos Gods wait for the vain, the suffering, the wrathful and the desperate.

The Imperial Truth once strangled the beliefs and practises in which the Chaos Gods lurked. It hid the truth because the Emperor believed that such deliberate ignorance was the only way to protect Mankind from the predations of the Dark Gods.

End of Days With the opening of the Great Rift at the end of the 41st Millennium, the Daemonic incursions that had plagued the galaxy since time immemorial escalated in both scale and frequency.

A new era of terror and bloodshed was ushered in by that galaxy-spanning tear in the fabric of reality, and the armies of the Chaos Gods, mortal and Daemonic alike, began to conquer and consume the worlds of Humanity and the alien races with unprecedented impunity.

Had the Chaos Gods worked in unison in the wake of that terrible event, it is doubtless that realspace would have been utterly consumed by the sprawling madness of the Warp.

Yet true to their nature, the dark brothers saw the anarchy as an opportunity to fulfil their own agendas: to kill, to change, to pollute, to bathe in excess. So divided, they are unable to fully overcome the fierce resistance of the galaxy's inhabitants.

The Imperium of Man, the largest single empire in the galaxy, has been galvanised by the return of the legendary Primarch Roboute Guilliman, and with him fights a new breed of warrior in Humanity's defence, the Primaris Space Marines.

The older intelligent species of the galaxy, such as the Aeldari and the Necrons, continue to exhibit a stubborn refusal to bow before the Chaos Gods and accept their extinction, while upstart new species like the T'au gain a greater understanding by the day of the Realm of Chaos and the ancient and malevolent beings within it.

The barbaric Orks are only incited by the surging conflicts around them, and greet the prospect of battle against the Daemonic legions with the same reckless enthusiasm they always have.

The intergalactic devourers known as the Tyranids regard the immaterial Daemons with a special distaste, seeing them only as undigestible threats to the biomass they wish to consume.

So the ultimate battle for the galaxy continues, the Chaos Gods and their Daemonic legions threatening to annihilate everything, including each other, in their eternal quest for dominance. The Chaos Gods are the supernatural rulers of the Immaterium (the Warp) and have a great impact upon the events occurring in the physical universe. Numbered amongst the most powerful of the Chaos Gods are Khorne, the god of warfare, rage and murder, Nurgle, the god of disease, despair and decay, Tzeentch, the god of change and sorcery and Slaanesh, the god of pleasure and excess.

There is a fifth major Chaos God named Malice who embodies Chaos' tendency to turn in upon itself and who acts against the interests of the other Chaos Gods whenever he can, though he is certainly no ally of the Imperium either.

Occasionally, the Chaos Gods can set aside their innate rivalry and unite in the pursuit of a larger goal, such as the overthrow of the Imperium of Man and its Emperor, who represent the strongest current force for order in the Milky Way Galaxy. During this time, the forces of the Ruinous Powers can be considered to serve a concept known as Chaos Undivided. The Ruinous Powers generally draw their strength from the sentient minds of the galaxy's inhabitants, whose collective unconsciousness shapes the psychically-reactive substance of the Immaterium and actually gives birth and sustenance to the Chaos Gods and any other spiritual entities who are empowered by a sufficient level of belief, like the Aeldari's lost gods or the Emperor of Mankind Himself.

The Ruinous Powers possess the ability to interact with the material universe in a limited way as the entities of the Warp can at times enter the material universe through the minds of those individuals gifted (or cursed) with psychic powers.

The Ruinous Powers can also shape lesser supernatural entities from the psychic substance of the Warp who are extensions of their own wills and are generally referred to in the Imperium of Man and among the Aeldari as Daemons.

The T'au are excluded from worrying about possession by Warp entities like Daemons because of their limited psychic abilities and thus their limited presence in the Warp.

The Necrons, as intelligent yet soulless creatures composed of living metal, no longer project any psychic presence in the Warp, while their former C'tan masters are beings purely of the material realm who are unusually vulnerable to psychic attacks because of their lack of a presence in the Immaterium.

There exists a hierarchy of sorts within the ranks of the Ruinous Powers, though it ebbs and flows according to the vagaries of the Great Game for supremacy fought constantly between the Dark Gods and their servants.

Currently, in the 41st Millennium, Khorne is held as the mightiest of all, for the practice of murder and blood sacrifice stretches to the dark beginnings of the universe.

Though Khorne sees the use of psychic sorcery as the refuge of cowards, his closest rival, Tzeentch, thrives on the raw stuff of Chaos and uses it to influence a million times a million plots, his devious mind always a step ahead of his opponents.

Where Tzeentch would see hopes thrive and fortunes change, Nurgle, the Father of Plagues, revels in despair and hopelessness. In times of galactic pandemic, Nurgle's power can eclipse even that of his brothers in darkness. Last in the pantheon is Slaanesh, who knows well how to play on the obsessions.

Primarchs: "They shall be my sons, and in them will live the hopes of a unified Humanity. Theirs will be the strength to prevail, not only when victory lies within easy reach, but even when it seems unattainable, when doom settles like a shroud all about. In those times of darkness, my noble sons will shine the brightest of all." — Attributed to the Emperor of Mankind

The primarchs were the 20 genetically-engineered transhuman "sons" of the Emperor of Mankind created in the late 30th Millennium. They were intended to be the immortal and superhuman generals and proconsuls who would command the Emperor's Great Crusade to reunite the scattered Human race beneath His leadership. Their genomes later served as the genetic templates from which the Emperor crafted His 20 Space Marine Legions.

The primarchs were bred to be perfect generals, warriors and statesmen; larger, stronger, faster, and smarter than any normal Human could ever hope to be. They possessed a potent charisma and martial prowess that made them like the mythical gods of old, untouchable by disease, old age or supposedly the petty failings of lesser men.

Each embodied an aspect of war; one was the greatest strategist ever known, another the personification of the terror of war, a third the master of psychic powers, a fourth the greatest practitioner of the arts of fortification, and so on. The primarchs were the Emperor's answer to reclaiming all the lost worlds of Mankind, and welcoming them into His new Imperium.

The Emperor intended to raise His sons to be the best military commanders and political leaders in Human history. They would bring the Imperial Truth to the rest of the Human-settled galaxy in their father's name, serving as His generals and proconsuls.

But the Chaos Gods intervened to foil their great adversary's plans and the primarchs were sprited away through the Warp to other Human-settled planets of the galaxy. Deprived of the Emperor's care and guidance, each developed a personality uniquely shaped -- and sometimes damaged -- by the difficult circumstances of their homeworlds.

Yet for all their gifts, the primarchs were still only men, and in the end their all-too-Human flaws would become the primary obstacle to the realisation of the Emperor's great dream for Mankind.

Primarch Project The massive scientific effort to create the primarchs before the start of the Unification Wars in the 30th Millennium was known as the Primarch Project. It is unknown exactly when the project began but Perturabo would later estimate his own birth to be the year 792.M30, which gives an approximate date for the project's end, though he was referring to his arrival on Olympia.

The means by which the Emperor crafted 20 individual superhuman genomes using His own arcane Perpetual genetic code as the base without resorting to the use of cloning is unknown to present Imperial science. There was a 2-stage process involved: first, the Emperor extracted a subset of His own DNA to act as the foundation for a pure, undifferentiated primarch gene-stock template. The pure primarch gene-stock was then further differentiated into the 20 separate genetic templates that would serve as the individual primarchs' genomes.

The data concerning the original engineering of the individual primarch strands was later analyzed by a Raven Guard Apothecary and a magos genetor of the Mechanicum during the Horus Heresy. They discovered that certain of the individual primarchs' samples had gene sequences deliberately deleted from the base, "pure" primarch genome, while other samples showed the addition of clearly non-Human DNA. Intriguingly, the genome of the primarch listed as "Subject VI" had added canine-like DNA. Although it is not clear whether the sample numbers corresponded to the actual primarchs of the Space Marine Legions of the same number, this could explain the wolf-like affinity of Leman Russ and the unexpected feral mutation of many Space Wolves Astartes into the Wulfen.

It is believed by modern Imperial scholars that there was more than just physical manipulation of the genetics involved in the creation of the primarchs, and that the Emperor called upon many techniques of psychic sorcery derived from the Warp to shape the extraordinary abilities and unnatural charisma of His transhuman gene-sons.

It is also now known that sometime during the Age of Technology, the man who would become the Emperor had travelled with several of His fellow Perpetuals, including Alivia Sureka, to the world of Molech, a Knight World only a few light years distant from Terra, in a one-way spacecraft. Sureka watched as the Emperor entered a secret Warp Gate present on Molech, where He bargained with the powers of the Immaterium to gain new abilities and knowledge, including most likely the techniques needed to create the primarchs. Sureka was later tasked by the Emperor with remaining on Molech to guard the Warp Gate and keep others from using it until His armies returned millennia later to conquer it for the nascent Imperium of Man during the early days of the Great Crusade.

The Emperor's use of this knowledge meant that the primarchs were intended to be spiritually as well as physically engineered and may explain why they possessed so much personal magnetism and charisma beyond what even their enhanced genetics would predict. But such arcane techniques also meant that the primarchs were unusually vulnerable to the effects of Chaos since their souls would shine so brightly in the Immaterium and draw the attention of daemonic entities like moths to a candle flame.

This is why the Emperor carefully inscribed arcane glyphs of protection on the primarchs' gestation capsules and crafted the most powerful Gellar Field ever made around the gene-vault deep beneath the Imperial Palace in the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains where they were created.

Unfortunately, this protection proved insufficient, for the Chaos Gods learned of the Emperor's plans and the existence of the Primarch Project. They decided they had no wish to see His attempt to weaken their power succeed by extending His new order of reason and scientific progress across the Human-settled worlds of the galaxy.

Scattering of the Primarchs The Ruinous Powers of Chaos somehow spirited the Emperor's unborn superhuman children away through the Warp in ca. 792.M30 from the gene-laboratories of what would become the Imperial Dungeons of the Imperial Palace. A massive localised Warp rift was created within the gene vaults of the palace, deep under the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains on Terra where the primarchs were gestating.

The gestation capsules containing the Emperor's unborn sons were scattered through the Warp to Human colony planets long since lost to Mankind during the Age of Strife.

It may have been at this time, when first touched by the hand of Chaos, that the first seeds of corruption were laid in the breasts of those primarchs who would eventually turn Traitor to the Emperor and His Imperium. Whether the Emperor was able to affect this outcome is unsure, but every primarch landed on ancient worlds of Humanity, planets long since lost to the light of the greater universe beyond the stars.

This was a massive setback to the Emperor's plans. He had counted on His superhuman generals to lead his army of conquest out from Terra. Without them, His plans, so many millennia in the making, rested on a knife's edge. He needed an edge, something to give Mankind an advantage as they struck out against a very hostile galaxy once more.

Despite this terrible setback, the Emperor was nothing if not adaptive, and He decided to move forward without the primarchs. He and the scientists of the Imperial Biotechnical Division had already used the samples of genetic material from each of His primarchs to craft the first Astartes gene-seed solar decades before, stem cell zygotes from which had been cultured genetically-engineered organs that, when implanted within a normal, adolescent Human male host, would allow that man to take on many of the physical and mental properties possessed by each primarch.

The Emperor had implanted these organs into the bravest, strongest, and best young Human warriors identified among His armies whom He intended to stand by His side as the vanguard of the Great Crusade. Thus were born the Legiones Astartes, the Space Marines, and they would reconquer the galaxy for Humanity at the command of the Master of Mankind even without the initial leadership of their primarchs.

Although an Astartes warrior was but a pale copy of his primarch gene-sire, the technique of implanting Human beings with extra organs allowed for a certain degree of "mass-production," and where the Emperor's 20 superhuman sons had been centuries in the making, thousands of Astartes could now be engineered and trained in the matter of a single Terran decade. These techniques provided the Emperor with the required numbers of transhuman warriors to successfully launch the Great Crusade in 798.M30.

It should be noted that Adeptus Custodes genetic modifications, which are apparently derived in part from the undifferentiated primarch gene-stock, is more complex than base Astartes gene-seed, as it contains 12 more elements. The source of Custodian genetics, being only one step removed from the actual DNA of the Emperor Himself, may explain the Custodes' extremely heightened sense of kinship with the Emperor.

However, the Custodian genetic code is still far simpler than each of the individual primarch genomes, even though all were derived from the same source: the undifferentiated, pure primarch gene-stock template.

Rediscovery of the Primarchs As the new interstellar Human empire expanded during the Great Crusade, the Emperor used His powerful gifts of psychic foresight and precognition to track down His wayward sons, scattered across the galaxy, and reunite them with their respective Space Marine Legions.

Each primarch was both a father and older brother to each Legion's Astartes, the source of that Legion's temperament and humours, a being in which each Legion saw its ultimate perfection and ways of war given personification.

The return of the primarchs to their Legions marked the height of the Great Crusade. First thousands, and then hundreds of thousands of Human-settled worlds fell to "Imperial Compliance," their conquest carried out by the newly reunited primarchs and their Space Marine Legions.

Like the gods of mythic Terran legend, the primarchs strode the battlefields of the galaxy, and their power proved irresistible.

Yet the primarchs, for all their expressed superiority and seeming immortality, were still men, and they possessed too many of the same Human flaws that have bedeviled Mankind since the birth of the species.

They proved jealous and arrogant, highly competitive and all-too-willing to hold grudges against one another and even their father the Emperor.

Whether these flaws were the result of their exposure to the corrupting power of Chaos as infants or were simply the natural Human flaws that could not be excised even from the progeny of the Emperor, is unknown.

Yet, ultimately, it was the primarchs' flaws that doomed the Imperium to the nightmare of the Horus Heresy and 10,000 standard years of stagnation, decay, repression and endless war.

After the Primarch Angron's rediscovery, the Emperor noted that he had been altered by the cerebral cybernetic modifications known as the Butcher's Nails that had been implanted in his mind by the gladiatorial slave lords of his homeworld of Nuceria.

The great Mechanicum Techno-archaeologist Arkhan Land aided the Emperor in investigating the nature of this terrible technology intended to increase aggression and rage which was slowly killing Angron.

In the course of the tech-priest's investigation, the Emperor explained to Land that, in truth, He had no emotional attachment to the primarchs because they were simply created to serve Mankind as tools and weapons.

When asked why the Emperor had allowed the primarchs to call Him "father" although He professed to feel no such filial attachment, the Emperor told the ancient story of the puppet named Pinnochio who had sought to become a real boy. He explained that it was only natural for any creation to refer to its creator as father.

Order of Rediscovery of the Primarchs The following is a definitive list of the order in which the primarchs were rediscovered by the Emperor of Mankind during the Great Crusade starting in 798.M30 as released by Black Library, the division of Games Workshop which is devoted to publishing all Warhammer 40,000 novels and audiobooks.

This is the list that all future Games Workshop projects is likely to be based on, taking into account the most recent canon material from the latest novels and sourcebooks used in the creation of this list.

Please bear in mind that there is a difference in time between when a primarch was found by the Emperor, and when the primarch took command of his Legion.

At the height of the Great Crusade, the Imperial Warmaster Horus fell to the temptations of Chaos, and convinced eight of his fellow brother primarchs to rebel against the Emperor and follow him in his attempt to supplant the Master of Mankind.

During the Horus Heresy, brother fought brother as the fallen primarchs led their Traitor Legions against their former comrades who remained loyal; Horus himself fought the Blood Angels' Primarch Sanguinius and the Emperor during the final battle of the great interstellar civil war.

At the height of the final confrontation during the Siege of Terra, above the surface of Terra on Horus' own flagship, the Gloriana-class Battleship Vengeful Spirit, the Emperor clashed with the Warmaster.

The Emperor was reluctant to use His full psychic power against His most beloved son, and it was not until Horus had mortally crippled the Emperor and killed Sanguinius that the Emperor finally unleashed the full extent of His unimaginable psychic powers.

He finally brought the Warmaster down and eradicated even his soul from the Warp so that the Ruinous Powers could not restore their puppet to some semblance of horrid life.

Most of the remaining Traitor Legions fled into the Eye of Terror following Horus' defeat, and their primarchs would sell their souls to Chaos, becoming Daemon Princes, each ruling a small Chaos empire within the corrupted realms of the Eye of Terror.

Loyalist Primarchs:

Today, all but one of the primarchs are either damned in servitude to the gods of Chaos, lost to current knowledge of their whereabouts or dead.

As mentioned before, Sanguinius died at the hands of his beloved brother Horus during the Siege of Terra, who in turn later died at the hands of his father, the Emperor.

Ferrus Manus, primarch of the Iron Hands, died on Isstvan V at the start of the Horus Heresy during the Drop Site Massacre. He was killed by his most beloved brother and best friend, the Primarch Fulgrim, who wielded the Blade of the Laer, a daemonically-possessed weapon that corrupted his mind to Chaos and later possessed him.

This Greater Daemon of Slaanesh resided within Fulgrim's form for a time until the primarch reasserted his dominance and regained control of his body.

Rumours abound that Ferrus Manus may currently still be alive on Mars as his body was restored to a semblance of life through the cybernetic assistance of the Adeptus Mechanicus. However the Mechanicus and the Iron Hands Chapter both fervently deny this speculation.

Over the next thousand Terran years, the other remaining Loyalist primarchs died or disappeared one by one. Lion El'Jonson of the Dark Angels returned to his homeworld of Caliban to find it in ruins, and the Dark Angel Space Marines he had left to garrison it were "corrupted" by the bitter Fallen Angel Luther to rebellion. He led a strike force of his own Space Marines against the Traitors on the surface, fighting with a burning hate towards his lost sons.

The planet was heavily bombarded, drastically weakening it so that when the Chaos Gods realised they had failed to claim the Lion, they unleashed a Warp Storm of massive power and size.

All that was left of Caliban's surface was the Tower of Angels and The Rock, the Dark Angels' former stronghold, with the rest being either destroyed or sucked into the Warp.

When the Dark Angel Astartes got to the Tower of Angels, all they found was the unconscious body of Luther. The Lion was nowhere to be found.

But some say that he is still asleep inside The Rock (the floating remains of Caliban turned into a mobile fortress-monastery) with the Watchers in the Dark who are healing his injuries. Some Dark Angel Astartes say that he will return one day to lead them again. This would explain why Cypher, the Fallen Angel who has avoided capture time and again, has a special sword with him that he does not use in combat.

This blade may be the Lion's own sword, amongst other possibilities, and the truth of its origins would be one of the first questions the Dark Angels would love to ask the most elusive of their Fallen brothers.

Jaghatai Khan of the White Scars disappeared through a Drukhari Webway portal whilst he was pursuing those savage xenos after a raid on the White Scars' homeworld. Rumours abound that he was captured whilst lost in the twisting paths of the Drukhari's section of the Webway.

Leman Russ of the Space Wolves is one of the primarchs whose disappearance appears to be voluntary. The Space Wolves hold a legend that says Russ went on a quest to find a means to cure the Emperor with the fruit from the mystical Tree of Life, but the truth is likely to be far more complex.

Others have said that Russ travelled into the Eye of Terror, to lead his lost 13th Company against Magnus the Red and the Thousand Sons Traitor Legion. Still other legends hold that Russ was dying and that he shall return when the Imperium most needs him, the period called "the Wolftime" to lead the Wolves of Fenris once more.

Rogal Dorn of the Imperial Fists apparently died fighting on the bridge of the Chaos Despoiler-class Battleship Sword of Sacrilege alongside a company of his sons after he led a contingent of Imperial Fists in an attack on the massed armada of the 1st Black Crusade in the late 31st Millennium with a vastly outnumbered force.

He had launched the hopeless assault in the hopes of delaying the Chaos offensive upon the Imperium until reinforcements could arrive.

Dorn was one of the last primarchs to die after the end of the Horus Heresy. His skeletal remains, weapons and power armour were believed recovered from the wreck, even as most of the rest of the Chaos starship was destroyed during the conflict.

In the 41st Millennium, Dorn's skeletal fists have been separated from the rest of his remains and are housed in the holiest shrine of the Imperial Fists Chapter onboard their mobile fortress-monastery the Phalanx, preserved in stasis for all time and inscribed with the names of every Imperial Fists Chapter Master to have led the sons of Dorn since his death.

Only a Chapter Master has the right to inscribe his name and heraldry upon their sacred bones. At the same time, Dorn's skeletal corpse, without the hands, was also placed by the Imperial Fists within another chapel on the Phalanx, embedded within a block of clear amber that has been contoured to match the body's form.

Roboute Guilliman of the Ultramarines nearly met his end slowly after fighting his former brother Fulgrim of the Emperor's Children Traitor Legion during the Battle of Thessala in 121.M31. He was mortally wounded following a slash across his throat with a corrupted Chaos blade which later poisoned him, the legendary Kinebrach Anathame that nearly killed his brother Horus on the plague moon of Davin.

For ten thousand standard years, Guilliman's body lay at the heart of the Ultramarines' Temple of Correction on Macragge, maintained in a stasis field to preserve it. He was the only Loyalist primarch to still exist, in some physical sense, in the entire Imperium.

His sons and billions of pilgrims every Terran year were able to experience the awe-inspiring sight of one of the Emperor's own sons, the bleeding wounds he sustained still visible upon his neck and chest. Legend among the Ultramarines long held that his wound was slowly healing, in spite of the impossibility of such a thing while in stasis.

Guilliman was revived again after the fall of Cadia in the 13th Black Crusade during the Ultramar Campaign of 999.M41. Currently Guilliman serves once more as Imperial Regent and lord commander of the Imperium as he did in the years immediately after the Horus Heresy. The resurrected primarch led the Indomitus Crusade in an attempt to throw back the forces of Chaos and the xenos threats to the Imperium.

There is little known about how Vulkan of the Salamanders disappeared. He vanished into thin air around a thousand years after the Horus Heresy. Some claim that he died on Istvaan V, however he was later present at the Imperial Palace when Guilliman divided the Space Marine Legions into Chapters during the Second Founding.

The Salamanders Chapter believes that after one of their number finds all nine relics that Vulkan left scattered around the galaxy for them to find, Vulkan will return to lead the Salamanders to victory against the Traitor Legions of Chaos and gain vengeance for the terrible slaughter suffered by the Chapter at Istvaan V during the Drop Site Massacre.

In truth, Vulkan is a Perpetual like the Emperor, one of a strange group of Human mutants who possess the ability to be resurrected no matter how many times they are slain -- and Vulkan has faced the reaper many times over the last 10,000 Terran years.

Corvus Corax of the Raven Guard was tainted by guilt and shame following the end of the Horus Heresy. In order to rebuild the strength of his gene-sons from the devastation of the Drop Site Massacre on Isstvan V, Corax sought to accelerate the growth of his Legion's gene-seed organs by obtaining a sample of the pure primarch DNA from Terra that the Emperor had used to create His sons.

The Emperor allowed Corax to carry out this mission and the needed genetic material was obtained, but infiltrators within the Raven Guard from the Alpha Legion used a daemonic essence to taint the primarch DNA, causing many Raven Guard aspirants to become hulking mutants.

Filled with despair and shame at this outcome, Corax personally gave each degenerated battle-brother the Emperor's Peace. Riddled with guilt over what he had done to save his Legion, Corax locked himself away within his sanctum, the Raven's Tower, for a standard year.

On the anniversary date of his self-imposed exile, he left his tower, haggard and gaunt, and took a small shuttlecraft. It was last monitored as setting a course for the Eye of Terror, the realm of the Chaos Gods. He left only a single word as his legacy -- "nevermore." Corax was later mutated by the energies of the Warp into a creature composed entirely of shadow, who is now hunting the Word Bearers and the Daemon Primarch Lorgar within the Eye of Terror.

Of all the primarchs, excepting those missing, the resurrected Roboute Guilliman, the mutated Corvus Corax and the slowly awakening Lion El'Jonson, only the damned primarchs of Chaos live today, although their bodies, minds and souls have been completely consumed by the power of the Dark Gods.

FATE OF THE PRIMARCHS Traitors:

Horus - Warmaster Horus of the Sons of Horus was killed by the Emperor of Mankind aboard his own battle barge and flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, in orbit above Terra at the end of the Siege of Terra and his soul in the Warp was obliterated by the fully unleashed psychic power of the Emperor's mind. His corpse was later completely destroyed by the Chaos Lord Abaddon the Despoiler, who took Horus' place as the overall leader and Warmaster of the forces of Chaos and the master of the Black Legion, the former Sons of Horus.

Magnus the Red - Magnus the Red of the Thousand Sons rose to become a Daemon Prince of Tzeentch and the master of the Planet of the Sorcerers within the Eye of Terror. He later moved that Daemon World through ritualistic sorcery to the location of Magnus' original homeworld of Prospero in realspace following the Siege of the Fenris System in ca. 999.M41.

Angron - Angron of the World Eaters ultimately was transformed into a Daemon Prince of Khorne. Mortarion - Mortarion of the Death Guard became a Daemon Prince of Nurgle.

Fulgrim - Fulgrim of the Emperor's Children became a Daemon Prince of Slaanesh.

Lorgar - Lorgar of the Word Bearers served Chaos directly and so was transformed into a Daemon Prince of Chaos Undivided, the master of the Daemon World of Sicarus within the Eye of Terror, an unholy world dedicated to spreading the worship of the Ruinous Powers across the galaxy.

Perturabo - Perturabo of the Iron Warriors was also transformed into a Daemon Prince of Chaos Undivided.

Konrad Curze - Konrad Curze, also known as "Night Haunter," was assassinated by the Callidus Temple Assassin M'Shen. He allowed her infiltration, apparently wanting to die to be freed of the stain on his soul imposed by his own life-long brutality.

Alpharius Omegon - Alpharius of the Alpha Legion was killed by Rogal Dorn, cleaved in two during the Battle of Pluto in the Horus Heresy. Omegon, who assumed the role and identity of his brother, is believed to have been killed by Roboute Guilliman, but the source which reported his death may have been manipulated by one of the Legion's schemes. It is not known if Alpharius or his identical twin Omegon was the Primarch killed by Guilliman. Due to the report's unreliability, the Alpha Legion may still be led by one of its Primarchs.

Loyalist:

Ferrus Manus - Ferrus Manus of the Iron Hands was killed at the Drop Site Massacre on Istvaan V at the start of the Horus Heresy by Fulgrim of the Emperor's Children who presented his head to Horus. Sanguinius - Sanguinius of the Blood Angels was slain by Horus on the bridge of his Battle Barge and flagship Vengeful Spirit in orbit above Terra at the end of the Siege of Terra after refusing to join him and serve the Ruinous Powers of Chaos. Lion El'Jonson - Lion El'Jonson of the Dark Angels returned to his homeworld of Caliban only to discover that his friend and second-in command Luther and the Dark Angel garrison left on their homeworld had turned against him and chosen to serve Chaos. He led a strike force of his own Loyalist Dark Angels against the Traitors, who were called the Fallen Angels. He disappeared amongst the inferno as the world was blasted apart by a Warp Storm caused by the Fallen Angels' adherence to Chaos and a powerful bombardment from his ships in orbit. He sleeps deep within the Rock, the biggest remaining piece of Caliban and the current mobile fortress-monastery of the Dark Angels. Only the Emperor and the Watchers in the Dark know of this great secret. Jaghatai Khan - Jaghatai Khan of the White Scars disappeared while pursuing Drukhari pirates into a Webway portal after they had managed to raid the world of Mundus Planus. There are rumours that he fights there still against the Drukhari, lost in the twisting paths of the Webway. After nine thousand years, it seems highly unlikely, but not impossible that Jaghatai Khan still lives. Leman Russ - Leman Russ of the Space Wolves disappeared into the Eye of Terror. The Space Wolves have a legend that says Russ went on a quest to find a means to cure the Emperor and restore him to full consciousness. His final words before his disappearance indicate that he would return during the Wolftime (the Last Battle between Order and Chaos). It is also said that Leman Russ led the 13th Company of the Space Wolves into the Eye of Terror and ordered them to hunt down the Traitor Legions which had fled into that vast Warp rift, particularly the Thousand Sons, the Space Wolves' most hated adversaries. Rogal Dorn - Rogal Dorn of the Imperial Fists died fighting on the bridge of the Chaos Despoiler-class Battleship Sword of Sacrilege alongside a company of his sons after he led a contingent of Imperial Fists in an attack on the massed armada of the 1st Black Crusade in the late 31st Millennium with a vastly outnumbered force. He had launched the hopeless assault in the hopes of delaying the Chaos offensive upon the Imperium until reinforcements could arrive. He died long after many of his Loyalist brother Primarchs had already passed on. His skeletal remains, weapons and power armour were recovered from the wreck, even as most of the Chaos starship was destroyed during the conflict. Today, Dorn's skeletal fists have been separated from the rest of his remains and are housed in the holiest shrine of the Imperial Fists Chapter onboard their mobile fortress-monastery the Phalanx, preserved in stasis for all time and inscribed with the names of every Imperial Fists Chapter Master to have led the sons of Dorn since his death. Only a Chapter Master has the right to inscribe his name and heraldry upon their sacred bones. At the same time, Dorn's skeletal corpse, without the hands, was also placed by the Imperial Fists within another chapel on the Phalanx, embedded within a block of clear amber that has been contoured to match the body's form. Roboute Guilliman - Roboute Guilliman of the Ultramarines was struck down with an envenomed Chaos blade by his brother Primarch Fulgrim. His body was perfectly preserved in a stasis field at the heart of the Temple of Correction on the world of Macragge. It was long rumoured that he was still alive and that his wound was slowly healing, something considered physically impossible in a stasis field. The truth of this rumour has proved to be moot, but was seen by many (including the Ultramarines Captain Uriel Ventris) as mere wishful thinking. However, during the Ultramar Campaign in 999.M41, Roboute Guilliman was resurrected through a combination of the technical skill of Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl and the psychic might of Ynnead, the Aeldari god of the dead, as directed through his priestess Yvraine, the leader of the Ynnari. After his awakening, Guilliman led the Terran Crusade to the Imperium's Throneworld to meet with his father the Emperor of Mankind for the first time in 10,000 standard years. In the wake of that meeting, Guilliman named himself the Lord Commander of the Imperium once more and launched the Indomitus Crusade to take the fight back to the encroaching enemies of Mankind. Vulkan - Vulkan of the Salamanders disappeared. The position of Chapter Master, filled by the Captain of the 1st Company of the Salamanders ever since, is considered to be a regency as the Salamanders believe that Vulkan will one day return and lead them on a great crusade against Chaos. Corvus Corax - Corvus Corax of the Raven Guard was racked by guilt and shame for what had happened to his Chapter when he had approved the use of heretical genetic manipulation in order to rapidly increase the numbers of the shattered Raven Guard after the Drop Site Massacre. In order to rebuild quickly the strength of his Legion from the Dropsite Massacre on Istvaan V, Corax had ordered the Raven Guard's Apothecaries to accelerate the growth of the Legion's gene-seed organs, producing more Space Marines than the process normally allowed, but these changes also degenerated or mutated the Legion's gene-seed, causing many Raven Guard Neophytes to become hulking, mutant monsters. Riddled with guilt over what he had done, Corax euthanised all of the mutated Astartes and then locked himself away within his sanctum, the Raven's Tower. Exactly one standard year later he left his tower, haggard and gaunt, and took a small shuttlecraft equipped with a Warp-Drive into the Immaterium with the words, "Nevermore." Corax's shuttle was last monitored setting a course through the Warp for the Eye of Terror. Corax went on to hunt the Traitor Primarchs, seeking revenge for the deaths of his sons during the Drop Site Massacre. At some point his long exposure to the corrupting energies of the Warp led to his transformation into a creature made of shadow itself. Using his new abilities, Corax wreaked havoc on a Word Bearers Daemon World in the Eye of Terror. Far beyond the abilities of average Word Bearers Heretic Astartes to defeat, the Daemon Primarch Lorgar himself appeared before Corax and the two engaged in a vicious duel. Corax managed to dominate the battle, forcing Lorgar to retreat and close the portal through the Warp from which he had come. As Lorgar vanished, Corax vowed that he would hunt down and slay the Daemon Primarch and destroy his Legion once and for all.

Lost Primarchs Almost nothing is known about the two unknown "Lost Primarchs." References to the second and eleventh primarchs are made in the short story, "The Lightning Tower," in which Rogal Dorn explains that the plinths on which their statues stand in the Imperial Palace should be vacant and says that "no one ever spoke of those two absent brothers. Their separate tragedies had seemed like aberrations. Had they, in fact, been warnings that no one had heeded?"

The Traitor primarchs' statues in this story are covered with a shroud, so the fate of the second and eleventh is undetermined. They may have been found and a tragedy befell them as the story implies they were spoken about posthumously.

During a conversation between Magnus the Red and Lorgar, it is mentioned that both Horus and Fulgrim upheld an oath taken never to speak again of the two lost brothers.

As for the fates of those primarchs' Space Marine Legions, the IInd Legion and the XIth Legion, speculation by the Word Bearers on "rumours" of a sudden swell in the Ultramarines' recruitment numbers following the decision to remove the two primarchs from the Imperial record may indicate that some of the Lost Legions' Astartes were integrated into the remaining Space Marine Legions.

Lost Future of the Primarchs While the Emperor had walked abroad, He had cloaked His manipulations in love. He had let His primarchs call Him father; He had let them call themselves His sons. He had rarely spoken those words Himself, Guilliman now realised, and when He had He had done so without sincerity. Buffeted by the full might of the Emperor's will unclothed in flesh, a cloak had been ripped from Guilliman's eyes. The Emperor had allowed them to love Him, and to believe He loved them in return. He had not. His primarchs were weapons, that was all. Personal contemplation of the Ultramarines Primarch Roboute Guilliman, lord commander of the Imperium, in the Era Indomitus

There has been intense speculation as to what the Emperor originally intended to do with the primarchs if His plans had come to fruition and the galaxy had truly become an uncontested and peaceful Human domain in the wake of the Great Crusade.

Unknown even to the primarchs themselves, a vast underground cavern deep beneath the Imperial Palace had been designated as residential quarters for the primarchs. There were 20 spacious apartments located there overlooking a large lake, with their design scaled for habitation by residents of the primarchs' massive proportions.

At least one of the primarchs, Corvus Corax, is known to have briefly stayed in his designated apartment during a visit to Terra at the beginning of the Horus Heresy.

The idea that all the primarchs could be corralled into these residential quarters during an extended time of peace and prosperity after the Great Crusade had been successfully concluded was probably wishful thinking on the part of the Emperor.

The primarchs had been created for war, leadership and conquest -- they were great men intended to undertake heroic projects and a quiet life would have held little appeal for any of them. However, the Emperor kept both the physical infrastructure and knowledge gleaned from the Primarch Project intact -- including samples of the original generic primarch gene-stock.

These samples were kept in a secret, guarded location, and though dormant, they could have easily become functional again. Although the Emperor did not reveal why He was keeping these very sensitive assets, it suggests that He may have had further use for the genetic stocks and techniques used during the Primarch Project, perhaps related to peace rather than war.

It is not known whether both the primarch quarters and the Primarch Project laboratories in the Imperial Palace still exist in the 41st Millennium. Additionally, the original pure primarch gene-stock sample was lost during the Horus Heresy after it was given to the Raven Guard and contaminated by Chaos taint, and was then stolen by the Alpha Legion.

---

There are many dangers in this world. Necrons, tyranids, chaos marines, chaos gods, traitors... But none will penetrate your faith in the emperor, go forth, child of mankind, and set the dark universe into shine.

He was in the dust of a corpse-king’s court. He was before a resplendent Emperor for all the ages.

‘Father,’ he said, and when he had said that word, it was the last time he had meant it. ‘Father, I have returned.’ Guilliman forced himself to look up into the pillar of light, the screaming of souls, the empty-eyed skull, the impassive god, the old man, yesterday’s saviour. ‘What must I do? Help me, father. Help me save them.’

In the present, in the past, he felt Mortarion’s wordless presence at his side, and felt his fallen brother’s horror.

He looked at the Emperor of Mankind, and could not see. Too much, too bright, too powerful. The unreality of the being before him stunned him to the core. A hundred different impressions, all false, all true, raced through his mind.

He could not remember what his father had looked like, before, and Roboute Guilliman forgot nothing.

And then, that thing, that terrible, awful thing upon the Throne, saw him.

‘My son,’ it said.

‘Thirteen,’ it said.

‘Lord of Ultramar.’

‘Saviour.’

‘Hope.’

‘Failure.’

‘Disappointment.’

‘Liar.’

‘Thief.’

‘Betrayer.’

‘Guilliman.’

He heard all these at once. He did not hear them at all. The Emperor spoke and did not speak. The very idea of words seemed ridiculous, the concept of them a grievous harm against the equilibrium of time and being.

‘Roboute Guilliman.’ The raging tempest spoke his name, and it was as the violence a dying sun rains upon its worlds. ‘Guilliman. Guilliman. Guilliman.’

The name echoed down the wind of eternity, never ceasing, never reaching its intended point. The sensation of many minds reached out to Guilliman, violating his senses as they tried to commune, but then one mind seemed to come from the many, a raw, unbounded power, and gave wordless commands to go out and save what they built together. To destroy what they made. To save his brothers, to kill them. Contradictory impulses, all impossible to disobey, all the same, all different.

Futures many and terrible raced through his mind, the results of all these things, should he do any, all or none of them.

‘Father!’ he cried.

Thoughts battered him.

‘A son.’

‘Not a son.’

‘A thing.’

‘A name.’

‘Not a name.’

‘A number. A tool. A product.’

A grand plan in ruins. An ambition unrealised. Information, too much information, coursed through Guilliman: stars and galaxies, entire universes, races older than time, things too terrifying to be real, eroding his being like a storm in full spate carves knife-edged gullies into badlands.

‘Please, father!’ he begged.

‘Father, not a father. Thing, thing, thing,’ the minds said.

‘Apotheosis.’

‘Victory.’

‘Defeat.’

‘Choose,’ it said.

‘Fate.’

‘Future.’

‘Past.’

‘Renewal. Despair. Decay.’

And then, there seemed to be focusing, as of a great will exerting itself, not for the final time, but nearly for the final time. A sense of strength failing. A sense of ending. Far away, he heard arcane machines whine and screech, close to collapse, and the clamour of screams of dying psykers that underpinned everything in that horrific room rising higher in pitch and intensity.

‘Guilliman.’ The voices overlaid, overlapped, became almost one, and Guilliman had a fleeting memory of a sad face that had seen too much, and a burden it could barely countenance. ‘Guilliman, hear me.

‘My last loyal son, my pride, my greatest triumph.’

How those words burned him, worse than the poisons of Mortarion, worse than the sting of failure. They were not a lie, not entirely. It was worse than that.

They were conditional.

‘My last tool. My last hope.’

A final drawing in of power, a thought expelled like a dying breath.

‘Guilliman…’.