[SPEAKER_01]: The lights flickered again, a soft stutter that had become a familiar sight to Audron Vorsh.
[SPEAKER_01]: After three years in this forgotten station, he had become used to the behavior of the place.
[SPEAKER_01]: The patterns of its failing systems had become a kind of companion.
[SPEAKER_01]: The only companion he had left.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the quiet of his makeshift study, Vorsch wrapped his thin fingers around a cup of recaff, and enjoyed the warmth that began to chase away the chill of the orbiting station.
[SPEAKER_01]: The liquid was bitter, synthesized from concentrates that were older than his tenure here, but the feel of the cup in his hands was comforting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Small mercies he had learned, were the only mercies a fugitive could expect.
[SPEAKER_01]: Through the window, Morithas Prime hung like a grey pearl against the black velvet of space.
[SPEAKER_01]: The cemetery world, billions of the emperors' faithful, labor-neathed stone-skinned, their graves stretching from pole to pole in endless rows that blurred together when seen from orbit.
[SPEAKER_01]: On quiet nights and all nights were quiet here, vosh sometimes imagined he could hear them.
[SPEAKER_01]: whispering their stories to anyone patient enough to listen.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps that was why he had chosen this place.
[SPEAKER_01]: A world of the remembered dead seemed fitting company for a man piecing together the story of those the Imperium had chosen to forget.
[SPEAKER_01]: His study had once been a monitoring station for the servitors who maintained the orbital relays, a cramped space never meant for long-term living.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now it was buried beneath a mass of treasure from his long search, data-slate stacked in towers, scrolls of genuine parchment, curling at their edges in the recycled air, and bound books salvaged from archives that no longer knew they were missing them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The smell of old paper had seaped into everything, mingling with the life support systems and old metal walls of the place.
[SPEAKER_01]: Once he had been a lexm mechanic of the administrative historical division, a keeper of records whose greatest excitement was the occasional discovery of a misfile document from some forgotten compliance action.
[SPEAKER_01]: Respectable work, safe work, the kind of quiet service that could carry a man through a lifetime without incident or distinction.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then he had found the first fragment.
[SPEAKER_01]: tucked inside a routine requisition report from the Great Crusade era, and his safe little life had ended.
[SPEAKER_01]: The station creaked around him, metal expanding and contracting, as it passed through Morithos' primed shadow.
[SPEAKER_01]: Somewhere in the lower levels, a server tour went about its mindless maintenance rounds, its shuffling footsteps barely audible through the deck plating.
[SPEAKER_01]: These were the only sounds that broke the silence now, the groaning of old metal, the hum of struggling power systems, the soft scrape of automated servants who had forgotten.
[SPEAKER_01]: there was no one left to serve.
[SPEAKER_01]: Vorsh set down his cup and reached for the recording device that sat alone on the cleared space in front of him.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was an old unit, the kind that remembrances had once used to capture the testimonies of those who fought in the Great Crusade.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had traded three months of food rations for it, back when he still had things worth trading.
[SPEAKER_01]: The casing was scratched and worn, but the memory cause were sound.
[SPEAKER_01]: What he recorded here would survive, even if he did not.
[SPEAKER_01]: his finger hovered over the activation room, and he was surprised to find that it was trembling.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not from fear exactly, he had made his peace with fear long ago, in those first desperate weeks when he realized what he had discovered and what it would cost him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The inquisition was searching for him.
[SPEAKER_01]: He knew this the way a hunted animal knows when predators are circling, a certainty that lived in his bones rather than his mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: They would find him eventually, they always did, but not yet, not today.
[SPEAKER_01]: And perhaps, if he was very lucky, if the emperor still watched over fools who sought forbidden truths,
[SPEAKER_01]: 3 years of chasing whispers of piecing together a puzzle that the Imperium had spent 10,000 years trying to destroy.
[SPEAKER_01]: three years of learning to read between the lines of censored documents of recognizing the shape of reductions and understanding what the silence is meant.
[SPEAKER_01]: Three years of slowly, painstakingly assembling a truth so dangerous that the very act of knowing it was a death sentence.
[SPEAKER_01]: He thought of the Emperor's sons, those 20 demigods who were meant to lead humanity to a golden age that never
[SPEAKER_01]: Twenty primax, the history is said, twenty legions founded to conquer the galaxy.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when you counted the names that appeared in the approved texts, when you tallyed the statues in the great-investuary of the Imperial Palace, when you added up the loyal and the traitor alike, you only ever reached a teen.
[SPEAKER_01]: two empty plinths stood in that sacred hall, which had stood empty for ten millennia.
[SPEAKER_01]: Two spaces were statues should have been, but were not.
[SPEAKER_01]: Two silences in the role-call of the Emperor's sons, gaps that no official history acknowledged, and no sanctioned scholar was permitted to question.
[SPEAKER_01]: Vorsh had spent three years learning what those silences contain.
[SPEAKER_01]: He pressed the activation room.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the device hums softly to life.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's recording light glowing a steady red in the dim room.
[SPEAKER_01]: For a long moment, he simply sat there, listening to the quiet word of its mechanisms.
[SPEAKER_01]: Then, in a voice roughened by years of solitude and recycled air, the former lex mechanic of the administrative began to speak of forbidden
[SPEAKER_01]: He spoke of 20 sons and 18 names.
[SPEAKER_01]: He spoke of brothers who had been erased so completely that even asking about them was a crime.
[SPEAKER_01]: He spoke of the forgotten and the purged, two tragedies that had preceded the horrors heresy by decades.
[SPEAKER_01]: warnings written in empty plence that no one had been permitted to heed, and as his words spilled out into the darkness of that lonely station, orbiting a world where billions of the dead lay silent.
[SPEAKER_01]: The story of the lost primax began to take shape once more.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not as the imperium would have it told, but as it truly was.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a story that lies beneath all the other stories of our Imperion, a tale so old now that even its echoes have grown faint with the passing of 10,000 years, and it begins with a father and his sons.
[SPEAKER_01]: in the distant days before the Great Crusade had carried humanity's banners to the father's stars.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor of mankind labored in secret beneath the ancient mountains of terror, in Chambers carved from living rock.
[SPEAKER_01]: and sealed against the touch of time.
[SPEAKER_01]: There, in the soft glow of lumens, that never flickered, and the quiet hum of machinery, that would baffle even the brightest of minds.
[SPEAKER_01]: He undertook the greatest work of his long existence, the creation of 20 sons, who would carry his vision to a galaxy waiting to be reclaimed.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were not born as you, or I might understand birth, these primax, but neither were they simply made, for there was love in their crafting, and purpose, and hope of a kind that even the master of mankind, really permitted himself to express.
[SPEAKER_01]: Each one grew within an incubation pod marked with a numeral in the old high-gothic script, and each one carried within his forming flesh a fragment of the Emperor's own essence, not merely his genetic code, though that too was woven through them, but something deeper and harder to name.
[SPEAKER_01]: A spark, perhaps, a reflection, 20 mirrors of divinity, each catching the light at a different angle,
[SPEAKER_01]: Some were shaped for war in its most terrible and necessary forms.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their bodies destined to become temples of destruction, that would break the enemies of mankind upon the anvil of their fury.
[SPEAKER_01]: Others carried gifts more subtle, minds that could hold the administration of entire star systems.
[SPEAKER_01]: or souls touched with the psychosight, or hearts so vast that they might one day inspire billions to believe in something greater than themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor, it is said, designed each son for a purpose that only he fully understood.
[SPEAKER_01]: Weaving their destinies together like threads in a tapestry, whose final pattern remained his secret alone.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were to be generous, these primaxes, each commanding a legion of warriors, created from their own genetic template, the space marines, soldiers whose deeds would echo through the millennia, twenty-fathers for twenty legions, and at the head of them all, the emperor himself, guiding humanity toward a future free from the terrors that had haunted the age of strife.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was the dream that took shape in those laboratories beneath the mountains.
[SPEAKER_01]: And for a brief time, it seemed that nothing in all the galaxy could prevent it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there are powers in the universe that do not wish mankind well, and they had watched the Emperor's labors, with eyes that burn in the spaces between stars.
[SPEAKER_01]: What happened next has been told and retold so many times across the long millennia, that the truth of it has become something like a myth, one smooth by the passage of countless retellings, until only the shape of it remains.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some say the chaos gods themselves reach through the veil of reality, with hands made of malice, and tore the primax from their cradles, before they could draw their first breath.
[SPEAKER_01]: Others speak of a great wound, opening in the fabric of the universe.
[SPEAKER_01]: A storm in the warp of such fury, that even the emperor's protections could not hold against it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Still others whisper that the scattering served purposes beyond our understanding, that perhaps even tragedy may be woven into the designs of those who see further than we can imagine.
[SPEAKER_01]: What we know with certainty is only this, in a single cataclysmic moment, the 20 incubation pods vanished into the void, and the primax were gone.
[SPEAKER_01]: Scattered across the galaxy like seeds thrown to the cosmic winds, each infant tumbled through the impossible distances between stars, until he came to rest on some distant world, alone, and far from the father who had made them.
[SPEAKER_01]: and their each one grew, shaped by the world that had caught him in its gravity, moulded by circumstances that the emperor had never intended and could not have foreseen.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lehman Rass learned the ways of the Wolfkin on frozen fenras, where winter never truly ends, and strength is the only currency that matters.
[SPEAKER_01]: Gilliman was raised among the noble houses of Macrack, scored in statecraft and philosophy by a foster father, who recognized the greatness sleeping within the strange child, who had fallen from the sky.
[SPEAKER_01]: Volcan emerged from the volcanic crucible of nocturn, with a Smith's patience and a heart vast enough to hold compassion for all humanity's children.
[SPEAKER_01]: Corvus Correx survived the brutal prison mines of Lycaus, and emerged as a liberator, a pale skin specter of vengeance, whose name the oppressors would learn to fear.
[SPEAKER_01]: One by one, across decades of patient searching, the emperor found his scattered sons, and brought them home to the legions that bore their blood.
[SPEAKER_01]: And for a time it seemed that the design had survived the scattering intact.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps even strengthened by the trials that had tempered each primarck.
[SPEAKER_01]: 20 legions marched across the galaxy in those years.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their banners bright against the darkness between stars, and 20 primarcks led them toward a future that burned with promise.
[SPEAKER_01]: The great crusade rolled forward like a tide of hope and steel, gathering world after
[SPEAKER_01]: into an imperium that grew greater with each passing year, and it must have seemed to those who lived through it that nothing could stand against the combined might of the emperor and his sons.
[SPEAKER_01]: Humanities long nightmare was ending at last.
[SPEAKER_01]: The scattered children of terror were coming home.
[SPEAKER_01]: The legions bore numbers from one to twenty, each corresponding to a primarck and the warriors
[SPEAKER_01]: The Dark Angels marched as the first, the Lunar Wolves as the 16th, the Ultramarines as the 13th, and so the Great Royal Corps continued.
[SPEAKER_01]: 20 legions arrayed like the fingers of two mighty hands, reaching out to grasp the galaxy itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet even in the oldest records that survived from those days, fragments salvaged from archives that were ancient, before the heresy tour everything apart.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is something strange about the numbering.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sequence runs along its expected cause, but it stutters in two places, hesitates around two numerals, as if the scribes who wrote those early accounts found their hands unwilling to form certain words, two and eleven.
[SPEAKER_01]: Two numbers that appear only as silences, where names should be.
[SPEAKER_01]: Gaps in the record that no amount of searching has ever been able to fill.
[SPEAKER_01]: There were primax who bore those new rules once, and there were legions who marched beneath those banners.
[SPEAKER_01]: This much is certain.
[SPEAKER_01]: Attested to by fragments that somehow escaped the terrible purging that would try to exterminate them from history.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warriors of the Second and 11th legions fought in the Great Crusade alongside their brothers.
[SPEAKER_01]: Blood on forgotten worlds for the Emperor's dream, conquered and built and served as faithfully as any of the 18, whose names we still remember.
[SPEAKER_01]: They existed as surely as Gilliman, or Sangwinius, or any of the others, whose deeds still echo through the millennia.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then, for reasons that have been deliberately and thoroughly obscured, they simply cease to exist at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: The term for what happened to them carries a weight that even now, 10,000 years later, makes scholars hesitate before speaking it aloud.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dam Nachyoma Moriai, the old hygothic cause, condemnation of memory, an edict of obliteration.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is the most terrible punishment the imperium can render, reserve not for simple criminals or even traitors, but for those whose very existence has been judged too dangerous to remember.
[SPEAKER_01]: not death alone, though death too must have come, but something worse than death, erasure.
[SPEAKER_01]: The systematic and remorseless destruction of every record, every monument, every mention of the condemned, until they become not figures in history, but holds in it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Absences where presence once had been,
[SPEAKER_01]: The second and 11th legions received this sentence in full measure, and it was carried out with a thoroughness that chose the depth of whatever fear or shame drove it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Statues that had stood in places of honour were torn down and ground to powder.
[SPEAKER_01]: The dust used to line garden paths in the Imperial Palace, so that it might be walked upon by those who had consented to the forgetting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Records were burned or altered, with such care, that even the gaps they left were made to seem like natural spaces, rather than evidence of exusion.
[SPEAKER_01]: the primax own brothers, those sons of the Emperor, who had known the lost ones, who had perhaps fought beside them and called them kin, were forbidden by the Emperor himself to speak their names aloud ever again.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was by any measure one might care to apply, the most successful edict of obliteration, ever enacted in all the long and bloody history of the Imperium of Man.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ten thousand years have passed since those names were last spoken freely, and in all that time not a single verified name, not a single confirmed deed, not a single clear image of either lost
[SPEAKER_01]: Primark has surfaced in any archive that scholars have been permitted to search.
[SPEAKER_01]: The forgetting was absolute.
[SPEAKER_01]: The silence complete.
[SPEAKER_01]: Only the questions remain now, hanging in the darkness like stars that refuse to set.
[SPEAKER_01]: And perhaps that is the coolest part of all.
[SPEAKER_01]: What did they do to warrant an erasure, more thorough than that of Horace himself?
[SPEAKER_01]: The traitor, whose rebellion wounded the Emperor, and condemned half the Imperium to the worship of mad gods?
[SPEAKER_01]: What shame could be so profound?
[SPEAKER_01]: What failure so catastrophic, that even their loyal brothers chose the mercy of forgetting over the burden of memory?
[SPEAKER_01]: The answers, if indeed, they still exist anywhere in all the archives of mankind, lie buried beneath deliberate silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the fragments that survived, those few scattered pieces that somehow escaped the flames and the alterations, whisper of something terrible that happened before the heresy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that the masters of the Imperium decided in their infinite and awful wisdom was better left unknown even to those who might have learned from it.
[SPEAKER_01]: of the two brothers whose names have been taken from us.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is perhaps the elder in service, if not in discovery, whose absence leaves the stranger shape in imperial history.
[SPEAKER_01]: For we know just enough of him to sense what we have lost.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yet not nearly enough to understand why the losing was deemed necessary.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was among the first to be found, this quiet sun.
[SPEAKER_01]: The third primarck to be reunited with the Emperor after the scattering had thrown 20 to the far corners of the galaxy.
[SPEAKER_01]: the records that survived from those years of the Great Crusade, fragments really scraps that somehow escaped the burning.
[SPEAKER_01]: Place his discovery at approximately 821 of the 30th millennium.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the chronologies can be trusted, it means that the master of the second legion walked beside his father and brothers for well over a century before whatever fate claimed him.
[SPEAKER_01]: A hundred years and more of service to the Imperium, and yet we cannot say with certainty what colour his legions armour bore, or what symbol graced their standards, or even what name he answered to, when his brothers called him to council.
[SPEAKER_01]: and yet one voice speaks to us across the millennia, offering a glimpse of the primarque who would become the forgotten.
[SPEAKER_01]: Folgrim of the Emperor's children, the proud and tragic son, left behind accounts of the great crusades early years that somehow survived the various censorships and purges.
[SPEAKER_01]: In one such fragment, the Phoenician speaks of his brothers as they were before the heresy twisted everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: and their indescribians of warriors and statesmen and generals whose names still ring through history.
[SPEAKER_01]: He makes mention of one who stood apart from the rest.
[SPEAKER_01]: A contemplative and quiet man foregrip called him.
[SPEAKER_01]: A soul possessed of little humour whose silence in councils was not the silence of one who has nothing to say, but rather the stillness of deep water that moves according to currents invisible from the surface.
[SPEAKER_01]: the master of the second he names him.
[SPEAKER_01]: A title that tells us almost nothing, and yet somehow tells us everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: For it suggests a primarque, who was known more for his position than his personality, more for his role than his reputation.
[SPEAKER_01]: While brothers like Leeman Russ or Jagatai Khan carve their names into legend through bold deeds and bolder words, the second primarque seems to have been content to let his work speak for him.
[SPEAKER_01]: to lead his legion with acquired competence, the drew little attention, and perhaps preferred it that way.
[SPEAKER_01]: and yet this contemplative nature did not make him meek.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nor did his quietude render him unwilling to speak hard truths when the moment demanded them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Fulgrim had recorded, with what sounds almost like grudging respect, beneath the wounded pride, that when the Emperor's children numbered only 200 warriors, and their primax ambitions already outstripped his legions capacity to fulfil them.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was the master of the second who broke his characteristic silence to accuse full grim of hubris.
[SPEAKER_01]: The quiet brother looked upon the proud one, and saw clearly the dangers that pride might bring, and he cared enough, or perhaps was honest enough, to say so allowed when others held their tongues.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is something almost prophetic in that accusation now, knowing as we do what full grim would eventually become, though we must be careful not to read too much into fragments that were never meant to be read as historical accounts.
[SPEAKER_01]: Still, it tells us something important about the forgotten one, that he possessed the clarity of vision to see flaws in his brothers that they could not see in themselves, and the
[SPEAKER_01]: One wonders whether he saw other things as well, whether those contemplative eyes perceive shadows, gathering on horizons that his more boisterous brothers never thought to watch.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's interesting to think about what he might have warned them about, had he been given the chance.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is another fragment, more curious still, that has surfaced in the centuries since the heresy.
[SPEAKER_01]: A reference so brief and so hedged with uncertainty, that scholars debate whether it refers to the second primar at all, or perhaps to his lost brother of the eleventh.
[SPEAKER_01]: It speaks of an expedition to the imga monolith, a strange structure that stands upon the eastern fringe of the galaxy, in regions that even now remain poorly chartered and less
[SPEAKER_01]: The imga monolith is a thing of the Necrons, those deathless Zenos whose civilization was ancient before humanity's ancestors had learned to walk upright.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the fragment suggests that one of the lost primax led his legion to that black and silent structure in the early centuries of the Great Crusade, what they looked for there, and what they found.
[SPEAKER_01]: and whether the finding had anything to do with the fate that would later claim them.
[SPEAKER_01]: These are questions that the fragment does not answer, and perhaps cannot answer, for whoever wrote it seems to have known little more than we do now.
[SPEAKER_01]: But if it was indeed the master of the second, who ventured to that haunted place, then perhaps we might understand why a primar of contemplative nature would be drawn to such a mystery.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Ymga monolith stands as one of the galaxies great enigmas, a monument to sciences and purposes that even the most learned members of the Adeptus Mechanicus cannot fathom.
[SPEAKER_01]: And a soul given to deep thought, and quiet study, might well have felt its pull across the stars.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps he went seeking knowledge.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps he went seeking understanding.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps he went seeking answers to questions that his brothers had never thought to ask.
[SPEAKER_01]: and perhaps, though this is speculation, of the most dangerous kind.
[SPEAKER_01]: He found something there that changed him, or changed how others perceived him, in ways that would eventually contribute to his removal from all memory.
[SPEAKER_01]: When scholars speak of the two lost primaxe in the rare texts that
[SPEAKER_01]: It is a distinction that paints something of a picture about the two men.
[SPEAKER_01]: Though its precise meaning has been debated across the millennia by those brave or foolish enough to study such forbidden subjects.
[SPEAKER_01]: to be purged suggests violence and active destruction, a threat eliminated through force of arms, but to be forgotten suggests something different, acquire to ending, a deliberate setting, a side, a shame buried, rather than a danger destroyed.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the master of the second was indeed the forgotten half of that terrible pairing, then perhaps his fate was not the spectacular catastrophe that we might imagine when we think of primax falling.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps there was no great battle, no dramatic confrontation, no moment of crisis that forced the Emperor's hand.
[SPEAKER_01]: But, perhaps instead, there was only a slow accumulation of concerns, a growing unease among his brothers and his father, until one day the decision was made that he could no longer be permitted to continue, and that the kindest thing, for everyone, would be to proceed as though he had never existed at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: The contemplative man erased contemplatively, the quiet brother given a quiet ending.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a terrible symmetry to it, even deed that is what happened, a poetry of the cruelest kind.
[SPEAKER_01]: The evidence we have, such as it is fragmentary and unreliable, and hedged about with 10,000 years of deliberate obscuration,
[SPEAKER_01]: Suggests that the Second Legion's destruction came before that of the 11th, possibly during or in the aftermath of the Rang Dan Xenocides.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those catastrophic campaigns again xenos so terrible that the Imperium nearly broke beneath their onslaught.
[SPEAKER_01]: Both lost legions are confirmed to have fought in those desperate wars, and it may be that whatever befell the master of the second had its roots in the horrors he witnessed there, or in choices he made, when all choices seemed equally dark.
[SPEAKER_01]: But these are only shadows of possibilities, shapes glimps through fog that will never fully lift.
[SPEAKER_01]: The truth of what happened to the second primarck died with those who enacted his forgetting, and Malkador the sigilite.
[SPEAKER_01]: who surely knew more than any other mortal soul, took that knowledge with him when he finally fell.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have now been left with only absence, a contemplative man who saw clearly and spoke truly, and let his legion through a century of war, reduced now to a handful of fragments and a title that tells us he was master of something we are no longer permitted to name.
[SPEAKER_01]: The forgotten one buried so deeply in silence that even his brothers, those who survived the heresy and its aftermath, could no longer recall his face, or his voice, or the colour of his eyes when they tried to remember him in their private grief.
[SPEAKER_01]: 200 years he might have lived, or 300 or more, we cannot know.
[SPEAKER_01]: For the records of his ending are as thoroughly destroyed as the records of his beginning.
[SPEAKER_01]: We know only that he was among the first to be found, and that his finding brought the emperor no lasting joy.
[SPEAKER_01]: We know that he was quiet, and thoughtful, and possessed of a clarity that let him see
[SPEAKER_01]: and we know that when the time came to erase him from history, whoever made that decision chose the word forgotten, rather than purged, as though what he represented was a sorrow to be buried, a wound too painful to look upon.
[SPEAKER_01]: A loss that could only be borne by pretending it had never occurred.
[SPEAKER_01]: The forgotten, the quiet brother, the master of the second.
[SPEAKER_01]: He deserved a better remembrance than silence, one would think, but silence is all we have left to give him now.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the Master of the Second was the quiet tragedy of the Lost Primarks, then his brother of the 11th was something else entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: A story cut short so swiftly and so violently that one might almost call it merciful.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was the last of the lost to be found, this nameless son.
[SPEAKER_01]: The 19th primarck to be reunited with a father who had spent decades searching the galaxy for the children that the warp had stolen from him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The records place his discovery at approximately 900 to 27 in the 30th millennium.
[SPEAKER_01]: For while his brother of the second had walked beside the emperor, for more than a century before whatever fate claimed him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The primarch of the 11th Legion would have barely 35 or 40 years of service before his name was struck from every record.
[SPEAKER_01]: His deeds erased from every conical.
[SPEAKER_01]: His very existence condemned to an oblivion more complete than death.
[SPEAKER_01]: 35 years, in the span of a primarx life, in the vast sweep of the Great Crusade, that was reshaping the galaxy itself, such a time is barely a heartbeat, long enough to learn the ways of war, perhaps.
[SPEAKER_01]: Long enough to lead a legion in a handful of campaigns, and begin to make a name that might echo through history, but not long enough to leave the kind of mark that
[SPEAKER_01]: One wonders if this brevity was part of why the forgetting was so successful.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the eleventh primarx simply had not been present long enough to carve himself deeply into the memories of those who would be commanded to forget him.
[SPEAKER_01]: or perhaps the opposite is true, perhaps whatever he did, whatever he became, happens so quickly and so catastrophically that there was no time for the slow accumulation of legacy that might have made his erasure more difficult.
[SPEAKER_01]: Found late, destroyed early, and the space between those two events filled with something so terrible, that even now, 10,000 years later, no one will
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a vision that haunts the chronicles of the heresy.
[SPEAKER_01]: A glimpse behind the veil that separates what is from what might have been.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it speaks to us of the 11th primarq, in ways that perhaps it's original witness never intended.
[SPEAKER_01]: When Horace Lupakal, greatest of the Emperor's sons and the one who would ultimately become the arched traitor, lay wounded on the moon of Daven.
[SPEAKER_01]: struck down by a blade of chaos that carried poisons, our medicine could not cure.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was taken by his desperate warriors to the temple of the serpent-large, where the priests of that world practiced old and dark arts.
[SPEAKER_01]: There, in the grip of fevered dreams sent by powers of chaos, the future warmaster experienced a vision that carried him backward through time itself, to the very moment when the primarks were scattered from their father's laboratory beneath the mountains of terror.
[SPEAKER_01]: Horace walked through that sacred space in his dreaming, passed the incubation tanks that had once held his brothers, passed the empty vessels from which the warp had torn them one by one, and he stopped before the tank marked with the number 11.
[SPEAKER_01]: and he laid his hand upon the glass, and he felt something that would stay with him long after the fever broke, and the darkness that had touched him began its slow work of corruption.
[SPEAKER_01]: He felt the record says, the untapped glorious that might have lain ahead for what grew within.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he knew, with the certainty that visions sometimes bring, that those
[SPEAKER_01]: There is something sad in that image, if one allows oneself to dwell upon it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Horace standing before the tank of a brother, he would never truly know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Morning a future that had been foreclosed before it could begin.
[SPEAKER_01]: The vision suggests that even before the scattering, even before the infant primax were thrown to the far corners of the galaxy, to be shaped by worlds they had never been meant to inhabit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something about the eleventh's fate was already sealed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whether this was for knowledge granted by the chaos powers who sent the vision, or some deeper truth, about the nature of destiny itself, the record does not say.
[SPEAKER_01]: It gives us only Horace's grief for what might have been.
[SPEAKER_01]: and his certainty that whatever slumbered in that tank would never be permitted to flower.
[SPEAKER_01]: Untapped glories, a life unlived, a story that would end before it truly began.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet the 11th primarck did live for a time.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was found on some distant world, whose name has been erased, along with his own.
[SPEAKER_01]: Raised by people whose culture and customs have been obliterated from all memory.
[SPEAKER_01]: He took command of a legend that had been waiting for him across the decades of searching.
[SPEAKER_01]: Warriors who bore his genetic legacy and who must have greeted his arrival with the same joy that every legend felt when their father finally came home to them.
[SPEAKER_01]: He fought in the Great Crusade, led campaigns, made decisions that shaped the fates of worlds, all the things that Primarchs did, all the duties that came with being a son of the Emperor, and then, in the space of what seems to have been a terribly short time, something went wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have one more fragment, one more glimpse through the veil that shrouds these lost brothers.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it comes to us from a confrontation that took place in the final years before the heresy tore everything apart.
[SPEAKER_01]: Horus, by then the warmaster, the greatest of the Emperor's generals, the one in whom his father had placed the most trust, learned that Malkador, the sigilite, had ordered the destruction of one of the lost primarks statues in the Imperial Palace.
[SPEAKER_01]: The precise circumstances are unclear, as is which statue was being torn down, but the story has been preserved in accounts that somehow escaped the burning of so many other records.
[SPEAKER_01]: Horus confronted the sigilite, and with him came out farias, and Jagatai Khan, brothers who shared his outrage at what they saw as a desecration of their family's history.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warmest as words ring across the millennia, with a fury that even now carries genuine grief.
[SPEAKER_01]: The history of the Imperium is not something that can be amended, we will not allow it.
[SPEAKER_01]: But Markodor was unmoved, he spoke of the fallen primarch as disgraced, called the statue attribute unworthy of the palace, and when Horace pressed him, when the greatest of the Emperor's sons demanded that the sigilite speak the name that was being erased, something terrible happened.
[SPEAKER_01]: Horace began to speak the name himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: My brother's name was
[SPEAKER_01]: and market or struck him, not with fist or blade, but with the full weight of a psychic gift, second only to the Emperor's own.
[SPEAKER_01]: A blow that hammered into Horace's mind, like a Thunderbolt from a clear sky.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Warmaster, the greatest warrior humanity had ever produced.
[SPEAKER_01]: the general before whom entire civilizations had not in surrender, was driven to his knees by a mortal man, whose body was ancient and frail, but whose mind was forged of something harder than Adam Antium.
[SPEAKER_01]: What came from Horace's lips after that strike was not a name, but a ruin of one, syllables broken and scattered by the assault upon his mind.
[SPEAKER_01]: He found that he could not
[SPEAKER_01]: Scholars have debated those fragments from millennia, was Horace attempting to speak a name, something beginning with those syllables, perhaps a name that shared sounds with Markador's own title.
[SPEAKER_01]: Or was he simply trying to address the sigilite to plead or to curse and found even that simple act beyond his power in the grip of such terrible psychic force?
[SPEAKER_01]: The truth is that we cannot know, for Malkador himself never spoke of it afterward, and Horace would soon fall to darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Far deeper than any mystery of lost brothers, all we have are those broken sounds echoing across 10,000 years of silence.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is one final piece of evidence, slender as spiders silk, but fascinating for what it suggests.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the great tables that list the space marine legions, published in the forge world records of the Horus Heresy, the names of the lost primax are covered by bars of solid black.
[SPEAKER_01]: Redactions that obscure what was once written there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And people who have studied these bars with careful eyes have noted something curious about their lengths.
[SPEAKER_01]: The bar that covers the 11th Primax name is approximately the same length as the bar that would be needed to cover, Magnus the Red.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is not proof of anything, this measurement of shadows.
[SPEAKER_01]: But it suggests that whoever the eleventh was, he bore a name of similar construction to the Crimson King's own.
[SPEAKER_01]: Either a name in two parts, or a name followed by some title or epithet that distinguished him from his brothers.
[SPEAKER_01]: a name that might have rung through history alongside all the others, had history being permitted to remember it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Instead there is only the black bar, and the silence it represents, and the broken syllables that Horace choked out before Maucodor's wrath silenced him entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: The purged, the erased, the brother whose name was so dangerous, that speaking it could bring even the warm-aster to his knees.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever he was, whatever he did, whatever he might have become, had fate allowed him the centuries that his brothers were granted.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of it is gone now, swept away by an edict of obliteration, so thorough that even the shape of what was lost can only be guessed at through fragments and shadows and the terrible weight of absence.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are wars that shape the destiny of civilizations, and there are wars that nearly end them.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then there is the Rang Dan Zenocytes, a conflict so devastating, so absolutely catastrophic in its scope and cost, that even now, ten millennia later.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those who study the histories of the Great Crusade speak of it in low tones, as though the act of remembering might somehow call back the horrors that humanity barely survived.
[SPEAKER_01]: It began in the 86O's of the 30th millennium, when the expanding fleets of the Great Crusade breached the eastern fringe of the galaxy, and encountered something that had been waiting there in the darkness between stars, patient, ancient and hungry, in ways that would show themselves to be devastating.
[SPEAKER_01]: The rounder, they were called.
[SPEAKER_01]: though whether this was their own name for themselves, or simply the label that terrified Imperial forces assigned to the nightmares that came screaming out of the void, it is not clear.
[SPEAKER_01]: What the records do say, in language that grows more fragmented and fearful, the closer one reads, is that these Zeno's possessed capabilities that the Imperium had never before encountered and was utterly unprepared to face.
[SPEAKER_01]: neural enslavement.
[SPEAKER_01]: The words sit cold upon the page, but they cannot capture the horror of what they describe.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Rangda did not just kill their enemies, they took them, body and mind, turning loyal soldiers of the Emperor into weapons against their own brothers.
[SPEAKER_01]: through means that even the mechanicum's most learned magic could not comprehend or counter.
[SPEAKER_01]: Imagine facing a foe that does not need to defeat your armies when it can simply claim them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Turning every warrior you send against it into another soldier in its endless ranks.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was the enemy that awaited humanity on the eastern fringe.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when the war began in earnest, it seemed for a time that the great crusade itself might break upon that terrible shore.
[SPEAKER_01]: The losses exceeded anything the imperium had suffered before, and would not be matched again until the horrors heresy tore everything apart from within.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whole expeditionary fleets went to their deaths, without a single survivor returning to tell what had before in them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thousands of ships, millions of soldiers, simply gone, swallowed by the darkness as though they had never existed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Worlds that had been brought into compliance at tremendous cost were laid waste.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their populations either slaughtered or worse, taken by the Rander to serve their own needs.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dozens of Titan legions were obliterated entirely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their mighty mechanical bodies reduced to wreckage scattered across planets whose names have been stricken from every child.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the space marine legions, those warriors who had seemed invincible in their march across the stars, young, in the fires of the Rangdan campaigns, what had meant to face an enemy that could match them in both ferocity and horror.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Dark Angels, the first legion, pride of the Emperor's armies, and bearers of traditions that stretched back to the very dawn of the Great Crusade,
[SPEAKER_01]: were reduced to perhaps a tenth of their former strength.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ten percent, nine in every ten of those proud warriors who had marched into the eastern fringe never marched out again.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their genes seemed lost, their names added to roles of the dead that grew so long that the scribes who maintained them, wept as they wrote.
[SPEAKER_01]: Other legions suffered proportionally, their ranks thinned by attrition,
[SPEAKER_01]: So severe that recovery would take decades if recovery came at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is in this context of absolute catastrophe that we must consider the fate of the lost legions, for both the second and the 11th are confirmed to have fought in the Rang Dan's inner sides, and the timing of their erasure aligns with the aftermath of those campaigns.
[SPEAKER_01]: The confirmation comes to us through an accident, a bureaucratic error of the sword that sometimes allows truth to slip through the cracks of even the most thorough censorship.
[SPEAKER_01]: A record was mistakenly included in copies of the Imperial Infantryman's uplifting primer.
[SPEAKER_01]: That handbook given to every soldier of the Astro-Militarum.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this record spoke plainly of what official histories have labored so hard to obscure.
[SPEAKER_01]: The second in 11th legions, it stated, participated in the campaigns of the Rangdhan Zenocides, during the eight six o' waits, if the 30th millennium.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their involvement is confirmed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their presence on those blood-soaked battlefields established beyond reasonable doubt.
[SPEAKER_01]: What happened to them there, and whether what happened contributed to their eventual destruction,
[SPEAKER_01]: But there is another fragment, preserved in the forge world conicals of the Horace Heresy, that speaks to the fate of legions during the Rang Dan campaigns, in language that chills the blood.
[SPEAKER_01]: The passage recounts the terrible toll of the war, the fleets last, the world's destroyed, the Titan legions annihilated, and then it says this.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the end, entire space marine legions redacted section had been lost to the Imperium.
[SPEAKER_01]: The redaction sits in the middle of that sentence like a wound, a gap where meaning should be found.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lost to the Imperium but how?
[SPEAKER_01]: The word lost can mean many things, it can mean destroyed certainly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wipe out by an enemy too powerful to overcome, but it can also mean something else, something darker, something that the randers particular capabilities make terribly plausible.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Rander enslaved mines.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is established fact, recorded in every account of the war that has survived the millennia.
[SPEAKER_01]: They turned loyal servants of the emperor into puppets dancing on strings of alien will, and neither faith nor training nor the genetic enhancements of the adeptor societies provided reliable protection against their methods.
[SPEAKER_01]: If common soldiers could be claimed, if Titan crews could be turned, if entire populations could be subverted in the space of days or hours.
[SPEAKER_01]: What of the primarcs themselves?
[SPEAKER_01]: Could one of those primax, the quiet master of the second, or his ill-fated brother of the 11th, have been compromised by the rounder?
[SPEAKER_01]: Could a son of the emperor, a being of such power and will, that he was designed to be incorruptible, have fallen prey to neural enslavement so complete, that he turned against everything he had been created to protect?
[SPEAKER_01]: Could an entire legion have followed their father into that darkness, not through choice or corruption in the manner of the later traders, but through a violation of their very minds that left them no more capable of resistance than a servitor is capable of questioning its programming.
[SPEAKER_01]: The timing haunts those who study these forbidden histories.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Rangdown Zenocides reached their peak in the eight sixties of the 30th millennium.
[SPEAKER_01]: The lost legions were erased from all records, sometime around 962 to 969, within years, perhaps within months of the campaign's conclusion.
[SPEAKER_01]: Both legions are confirmed to have fought in those wars, both legions emerge from those wars, and then shortly afterward, ceased to exist.
[SPEAKER_01]: Correlation is not causation as the scholars remind us.
[SPEAKER_01]: The timing might be coincidence, the alignment of dates nothing more than the random clustering of unrelated events.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps what happened to the second and 11th legions had nothing to do with the Rander at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps their destruction stemmed from entirely different failures, entirely different shames, and their presence in the zenosides is merely an incidental detail.
[SPEAKER_01]: In a story whose true shape has been hidden from us.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the redaction in the middle of that sentence will not let us rest easy with such reassurances.
[SPEAKER_01]: Entire space marine legions had been lost to the Imperium.
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone, at some point, knew exactly how those legions were lost and that someone, or their successors, decided that the knowledge was too dangerous to preserve.
[SPEAKER_01]: not just painful, not merely shameful, but dangerous.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever happened to the lost legions in the aftermath of the Rang Dan's inner sides, it was something that the masters of the Imperium decided we must never be allowed to know.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so we are left with questions that have no answers, possibilities that cannot be confirmed or denied, and a silence that grows louder, the more closely we examine it.
[SPEAKER_01]: the Rangda are gone now, destroyed or driven back into whatever darkness spawned them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their threat to humanity ended millennia ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the shadow they cast across the history of the Great Crusade remains, and in that shadow, two legions disappeared forever.
[SPEAKER_01]: The crucible of the Xenocides tested every warrior who passed through it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most emerged scarred but intact, their loyalty proven in the fires of the most terrible war humanity had yet faced.
[SPEAKER_01]: But some it seems did not emerge at all, or emerged so changed that those who loved them best decided it would be kinder to pretend they had never existed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every family has its secrets, and every kingdom its necessary cruitives, and in the vast and terrible family of the Emperor's sons, there was one brother who bore a burden that none of the others envied.
[SPEAKER_01]: The role of executioner, the wolf set loose when all other options had been exhausted.
[SPEAKER_01]: The blade that fell when judgment had been rendered, and mercy was no longer possible.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lehman Rass of the Space Wars did not choose this duty, so far as any record tells us.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was placed upon him by a father who understood, perhaps better than any being who has ever lived, that even the grandest designs may require pruning, that even the most beloved sons may disappoint, and that when such disappointments grow dangerous enough to threaten everything that has been built, there must be someone willing to do what must be done.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Wolf King accepted this burden, the way he accepted all things, with a pragmatism that his more romantic brothers sometimes mistook for savagery, but which those who knew him better understood as a kind of terrible love.
[SPEAKER_01]: He loved the Imperium enough to be its executioner.
[SPEAKER_01]: He loved his father enough to carry out judgments that broke something inside him with each execution.
[SPEAKER_01]: And he loved his brothers, even though he was sent to destroy, enough to ensure that their endings, when they came, were swift and certain, rather than drawn out in the slow agony of siege and attrition.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was the role of the space wolves in the days before the heresy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not just warriors, though they were fearsome in battle, but instruments of sanction.
[SPEAKER_01]: The emperor's final recourse when a threat was too terrible, or too shameful for normal warfare to address.
[SPEAKER_01]: Other legions conquered worlds and crashed Zeno's empires, and brought the light of the Imperion to corners of the galaxy.
[SPEAKER_01]: The wolves did all of this as well, but they also waited for the summons that might come at any moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: The command to turn their fangs, not against aliens or heretics, but against their own kind.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a lonely burden, and russ bore it largely in silence, for what could he say to brothers who might one day find themselves on the wrong end of his judgment.
[SPEAKER_01]: What bonds of fellowship could survive the knowledge that the wolf at your side,
[SPEAKER_01]: might one day be ordered to tear out your throat.
[SPEAKER_01]: The evidence that the space wolves carried out the destruction of the lost legions is scattered across the fragmentary records of the Great Crusade.
[SPEAKER_01]: But when assembled, it forms a picture that admits little doubt.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the Great Timeline of the Crusades final years, preserved in the forge world chronicles that have become our most reliable source for this dark period.
[SPEAKER_01]: There are two entries that stand out from all the others, not for what they say, but for what they refuse to say.
[SPEAKER_01]: The year 1965 of the 30th millennium contains an entry marked simply all data redacted, with only a single notation surviving the censorship.
[SPEAKER_01]: Space Wolves involvement confirmed, four years later in 1969 of the 30th millennium, an identical entry appears, all data redacted, space Wolves involvement confirmed.
[SPEAKER_01]: two operations, four years apart, both so sensitive that even 10,000 years later, the imperium will not acknowledge what occurred.
[SPEAKER_01]: The timing aligns with what we know of the lost legions fate.
[SPEAKER_01]: Roguel Dawn, in his contemplation of the empty plinthes in the Imperial Palace, spoke of separate tragedies, two distinct catastrophes, not a single shared doom.
[SPEAKER_01]: If the second primarke fell first, as the evidence suggests, then the year 965 might mark the date when the wolves were unleashed against him and his legion.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if the 11th followed four years later, his own brief and troubled existence brought to its violent conclusion, then 969 might be the date that no one is permitted to remember.
[SPEAKER_01]: Two brothers, two executions, two entries in the historical record that have been scrubbed clean of everything, except the notation that tells us who carried out the deeds.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the most damning evidence comes not from timelines or redacted entries, but from the words of Lehman Russ himself.
[SPEAKER_01]: Words spoken in an unguarded moment, preserved by a remembranceer, who perhaps did not fully understand the weight of what he was recording.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the days before the burning of Prospero, when the Space Wolves were preparing to carry out the Emperor's judgment against Magnus the Red and his thousand sons, a mortal chronicle named Casper Horser, found himself in conversation with the Wolf King.
[SPEAKER_01]: The subject turned, as such conversations often did in those troubled times, to the unprecedented nature of what was about to occur.
[SPEAKER_01]: Space Marine sent to make war upon space Marines.
[SPEAKER_01]: Brothers ordered to destroy brothers.
[SPEAKER_01]: The unthinkable made suddenly and terribly real.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a first time for everything, Horser observed, speaking with the innocent confidence of a man who did not know how wrong he was.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rust laughed at this, but the sound that emerged from that mighty throat was not the booming Murth that usually accompanied the Wolf King's humour.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was something else, something that Horser described as a sad sound.
[SPEAKER_01]: Heavy with a grief that the primar rarely permitted others to witness.
[SPEAKER_01]: That, Russ replied, and there was a weight in that single word that spoke of memories, he would rather not carry.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, that's not unprecedented.
[SPEAKER_01]: not unprecedented.
[SPEAKER_01]: The space walls had sanctioned legions before.
[SPEAKER_01]: Russ had led his sons against his brothers before Praspero, before the heresy, before the galaxy learned what betrayal truly meant.
[SPEAKER_01]: He carried within him the knowledge of what it felt like to destroy those who shared his blood.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that knowledge had left scars that even a primarx constitution could not fully heal.
[SPEAKER_01]: If any doubt remained about what befell the lost legions at the hands of the Sixth, it is dispelled by testimony from an unexpected source.
[SPEAKER_01]: A dreadnought of the world eaters legion, named Lorc, who had served as legion master of the twelfth, before angrons discovery, and who carried within his ancient shell, memories that stretched back to the earliest days of the Great Crusade.
[SPEAKER_01]: Laws stated the truth that official histories had labored so hard to obscure.
[SPEAKER_01]: Twice before the Emperor has purged his own progeny and every living soul within the legions that followed them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The words land like hammerblows, twice before, not losses in battle, not tragic accidents, not the quiet fading of legions that could not sustain themselves, purges, deliberate and total, ordered by the emperor himself and carried out against his own sons and all who followed them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The lost primarcs did not simply disappear.
[SPEAKER_01]: They were destroyed, along with every warrior who bore their genetic legacy, and the destruction was sanctioned at the highest level of imperial authority.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if such purges required an executioner, who else could it have been but Lehman Rass and his wars.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a conversation recorded between Malkador the Cigilite and the Wolf King that took place during the dark days of the Heresy, when half the Imperium had turned traitor and it seemed that everything the Emperor had built might crumble to ash.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sigilite, the ancient keeper of secrets, spoke to us of the primax and their various failings.
[SPEAKER_01]: The pride of full grim, the obsession of perturbable, the bitterness of modernity, all the flaws that had made them vulnerable to the seductions of chaos.
[SPEAKER_01]: So many of the others have been disappointments, Malcolm Dorset, and there was a weirdness in his voice that even his formidable will could not entirely conceal.
[SPEAKER_01]: First those we do not name, then Horus and the rest.
[SPEAKER_01]: those we do not name.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even in private conversation with one of the few beings in the galaxy, he could trust absolutely.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maucodor would not speak the names of the lost primax.
[SPEAKER_01]: But he acknowledged their existence, acknowledged that they had been disappointments, the first disappointments, the original failures, the sons who had fallen short of their father's hopes before Horace ever dreamed of rebellion.
[SPEAKER_01]: and then the sigilite said something else.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that illuminates the terrible role that Russ had been forced to play.
[SPEAKER_01]: But not you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Not you.
[SPEAKER_01]: Of all the Emperor's sons, Lehman Rass had never disappointed.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had done everything asked of him, carried every burden placed upon his shoulders, executed every judgement no matter how much it cost him.
[SPEAKER_01]: The other primarks had their pride, their ambitions, their secret doubts and private rebellions against the roles they had been assigned.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rass had only his duty.
[SPEAKER_01]: and he had fulfilled it without fail.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even when fulfilling it meant destroying brothers, he might have loved.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is easy perhaps to cast the wolf king as a villain in this tale.
[SPEAKER_01]: The executioner is rarely beloved and those who carry out harsh judgments are often remembered more for the blood on their hands than for the grief in their hearts, but the evidence suggests that rust took no pleasure in what
[SPEAKER_01]: that each execution carved away something from his soul that would never grow back.
[SPEAKER_01]: That he bore the title of the Emperor's executioner, not as a mark of pride, but as a brand of sacrifice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone had to do it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone had to be willing to turn on his own brothers, when his brothers posed a threat too great to be tolerated.
[SPEAKER_01]: Someone had to carry the memory of what he had done, even when everyone else was commanded to forget.
[SPEAKER_01]: Lehman Russ was that someone, and when the time came, he did what was required of him, and then he lived with the weight of it for all the years that followed.
[SPEAKER_01]: The loyal executioner, the reliable son, the wolf who hunted his own pack when the pack turned rabbit.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever sins the lost primax committed, whatever failures led to their destruction, Russ was the instrument of their ending.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that knowledge, one suspects, haunted him far more than any enemy he ever faced in battle.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the long history of the Imperium, there have been many keepers of secrets, inquisitors and spy masters, archivists and confesses, all those whose duty it is to know what others must not.
[SPEAKER_01]: But none of them, in all the millennia that have passed since humanity, first reached for the stars, have ever borne a burden, quite like that which rested upon the shoulders of Maucadore the Cigilite.
[SPEAKER_01]: The servant of the Emperor, whose very name has become synonymous with the keeping of truths too dangerous to speak aloud.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was older than many would believe.
[SPEAKER_01]: This man who was not entirely a man anymore, his body withered by the passage of centuries that should have claimed him long before the Great Crusade began.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some whispered that he was a perpetual, one of those rare souls cursed or blessed with an immortality.
[SPEAKER_01]: Others said, he had simply refused to die, holding himself together through sheer force of will, until his appointed tasks were complete.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever the truth of his longevity, one thing was certain.
[SPEAKER_01]: Malkador wielded psychic power second only to the Emperor himself, among all the baseline humans who had ever lived.
[SPEAKER_01]: a gift of the mind so vast and so terrible that even the primax had learned to treat him with a respect that bordered on fear.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was the regent of terror, the voice of the Emperor, in all matters of governance and administration, the hand that guided the Imperium's course when its creator was occupied with more pressing concerns, but more than this, more than any title or office, Malkador was the keeper of the Imperium's deepest and most terrible secrets, and chief among those
[SPEAKER_01]: It was Malkador who had overseen their removal from history.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was Malkador who had ordered the destruction of their monuments, the burning of their records, the systematic elimination of every trace that might remind the Imperium that they had ever existed.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was Malkador who enforced the silence that followed, with a ruthlessness that spared no one, not even the greatest of the Emperor's remaining sons.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have spoken already of the confrontation with Horus, who did not come alone to confront the sigilite.
[SPEAKER_01]: With him came our farias of the Alpha Legion, and Jagatai Khan of the White Skars, the Warhawk whose fierce independence had always set him somewhat apart from the others.
[SPEAKER_01]: three sons of the Emperor, three demigods whose combined might could have conquered worlds, standing before a withered old man whose bodies seemed ready to crumble at the slightest touch.
[SPEAKER_01]: And yet it was the old man who held all the power in that room.
[SPEAKER_01]: alpharious spoke of sacrifice, of the price that all the primax knew might one day be demanded of them.
[SPEAKER_01]: He argued that even a fallen brother deserved to be remembered, that to erase a life entirely was a cruelty beyond mere execution.
[SPEAKER_01]: The can said nothing, but his presence alone spoke volumes, the war hawk, who valued freedom above almost all else, standing in solidarity
[SPEAKER_01]: After striking Horus with that psychic blow, Malcolm or Spoke, and his voice carried a weight that made the very air seem to tremble.
[SPEAKER_01]: Enough, you will be silent, or I will unmake you here and now.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not an idle threat.
[SPEAKER_01]: In that moment, everyone in that chamber understood with perfect clarity that Malkador the sigilite could have destroyed Horace Lupa cow.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warmaster, the greatest of the primax, the emperor's most beloved son, through sheer force of will alone.
[SPEAKER_01]: The power that the old man wielded was not just sufficient to wound or incapacitate.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was sufficient to annihilate, to erase a being who had been designed to be unkillable, to do to horrors what had already been done to the brothers whose memory he had tried to defend.
[SPEAKER_01]: Only the desperate intervention of the others broke the moment.
[SPEAKER_01]: Alpharius pleaded for the sigilite to stop, his voice carrying an edge of genuine fear that the Lord of the Alpha Legion rarely permitted others to hear.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Canne-Belode Maucodor's title like a battle cry, demanding that he releases hold before it was too late.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Maucodor, after a long moment in which the outcome hung upon the edge of a knife,
[SPEAKER_01]: Horus collapsed to the floor, gasping for breath.
[SPEAKER_01]: His body reduced to something almost pitiful, by the experience of helplessness that few primarcs had ever known.
[SPEAKER_01]: You have no earthly concept of what has been sacrificed, Malkador said.
[SPEAKER_01]: and there was something in his voice that might have been grief, or might have been anger, or might have been both woven together into an emotion that had no name, just so that you may ascend.
[SPEAKER_01]: But perhaps the most terrible revelation regarding Malkador's role in the forgetting comes not from confrontations or displays of power.
[SPEAKER_01]: But from a quiet moment, a conversation in a hidden chamber deep beneath the imperial palace.
[SPEAKER_01]: Where secrets were kept, that even the keepers of secrets did not speak of lightly.
[SPEAKER_01]: Rogledorn, critorion of terror, and master of the imperial fists, discovered this chamber by accident during the days of the heresy.
[SPEAKER_01]: When work crews breaching sealed sections of the palace, stumbled upon doors marked with odd numerals.
[SPEAKER_01]: The workers died, claimed by psychic traps, that had waited 10,000 years to spring, and
[SPEAKER_01]: There, in the darkness beneath the palace, he found Malkador waiting for him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And there, the sigilite revealed a truth that shattered everything dawned thought he knew about the lost primax, and the forgetting that had claimed them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The memory suppression had not been imposed by tyranny.
[SPEAKER_01]: It had been requested by dawn himself, and by Gilliman, two of the most loyal and level
[SPEAKER_01]: They had gone to Markador and asked him to erase their memories of their lost brothers, to take from them the knowledge of what had happened, because that knowledge would have threatened the core ideals of the Great Crusade itself.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was not a secret kept from the primax against their will.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was a burden that at least some of them had chosen to bear, preferring the mercy of forgetting to the agony of remembrance.
[SPEAKER_01]: But Malkador offered Dawn a choice that night in the hidden chamber.
[SPEAKER_01]: He could, if Dawn wished it, temporarily restore the memories that had been suppressed, let the Praetorians see once more what he had asked to forget.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that he might judge whether the forgetting had truly been the right decision.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dawn accepted, and what he saw when those memories flooded back into his mind broke something inside him that would never fully heal.
[SPEAKER_01]: The accounts describe his reaction as something approaching panic, Rogel Dawn, who had never flinched from any enemy, who had fortified terror itself against the forces of chaos.
[SPEAKER_01]: who embodied duty and stoicism and unshakable resolve, reduced to a state of horror, so profound that he could barely form words.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever he witnessed in those restored memories, whatever truth came rushing back into his consciousness after years of blessed ignorance.
[SPEAKER_01]: it was something he considered worse than the horrors heresy itself, worse than his father's mortal wounding, worse than the imperium's sundering, worse than all the betrayals and massacos that had defined the dark as chapter in human history.
[SPEAKER_01]: and when Malkador offered to restore the suppression, to take those terrible memories away once more, dawn agreed without hesitation.
[SPEAKER_01]: He chose to forget again, he chose the mercy of ignorance over the burden of truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: The chamber was sealed, the memories faded, and Roguel Dawn walked away from that place with the knowledge that he had once known something so terrible that even he, the Praetorian, the unbreakable, could not bear to carry it.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the weight that Malkador bore for all the years of his long service, not just the keeping of secrets, but the keeping of secrets so awful, that even demigods beg to have them take away.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was the architect of forgetting, the guardian of truths to dangerous to remember.
[SPEAKER_01]: the one who carried what others could not carry and remembered what others could not bear to recall.
[SPEAKER_01]: And when he finally fell, spending the last of his strength to hold the golden throne, while the Emperor was taken to be interred upon it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He took those secrets with him into whatever rest awaits such souls.
[SPEAKER_01]: the names of the lost primax, the truth of what befell them.
[SPEAKER_01]: The horror that made Roguel Dawn choose amnesia over memory.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of it died with Malkadoa the sigilite, and perhaps that is exactly as he intended.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some truths, after all, are too dangerous to survive their keeper.
[SPEAKER_01]: When we speak of the lost primarcs and the fate that claimed them, it is easy to forget that they did not stand alone, that behind each of those vanished demigods, march tens of thousands of warriors who bore their genetic legacy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Space marines who had fought and bled, and conquered, in the name of fathers who would one day be condemned to oblivion.
[SPEAKER_01]: What became of these sons when their fathers were destroyed?
[SPEAKER_01]: What fate awaited the warriors of legions, whose very existence was being scrubbed from every record in the Imperium.
[SPEAKER_01]: The answer, when it comes to us through the broken records that survived the great forgetting, is both more merciful and more terrible than simple destruction.
[SPEAKER_01]: Malkador the Cigilite, in the hidden chamber beneath the Imperial Palace, where he revealed so many terrible truths to Rogledorn, spoke of the lost legions of space marines, with something that might almost have been compassion, or at least the cold calculation of
[SPEAKER_01]: that even in judgment, there must be limits to the cruelty inflicted upon the innocent.
[SPEAKER_01]: They did not share their primax fates, the sigilite confirmed.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in those words lies the first truth we must understand.
[SPEAKER_01]: The space marines of the second and eleventh legions were not slaughtered alongside the fathers they had served.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever crimes their primarx committed, whatever failures led to their destruction.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warriors who followed them were deemed blameless, too blameless perhaps to be condemned to death for sins that were not their own.
[SPEAKER_01]: But survival came at a cost that some might consider worse than dying.
[SPEAKER_01]: The marines were mined wiped, Malkador explained, their memories erased by psychic techniques that left no trace of who they had been, or whom they had served.
[SPEAKER_01]: Everything that made them warriors of the second or 11th Legion.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their battle honours, their brotherhood, their pride in the heraldry they wore, and the primarch whose blood flowed in their veins.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of it was taken from them, scraped away like rust from iron until only the bare metal of their assortment is conditioning remains.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then they were attuned to new circumstances.
[SPEAKER_01]: The sigilite said, using a clinical phrase for an unknown process.
[SPEAKER_01]: New identities were implanted in minds that had been emptied of everything they once contained.
[SPEAKER_01]: New loyalties were inscribed upon souls that had been scraped clean of the old.
[SPEAKER_01]: Warriors who had fought beneath one banner for decades, a work believing they had always served another.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their memories of campaigns and brothers, and a father's voice replaced by fabrications, so thorough that even they could not distinguish the force from the true.
[SPEAKER_01]: Malkador called it an act of mercy, and perhaps in his own way he believed that.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warriors were too useful to be discarded," he said, two valuable, two thoroughly trained, two desperately needed in a galaxy that devoured soldiers faster than even the great crusade could produce them.
[SPEAKER_01]: To destroy them alongside their primax, would have been a waste that the Imperium could not afford, and so they were preserved after a fashion, even as everything they had
[SPEAKER_01]: but preserved where, if tens of thousands of space marines were stripped of their identities and given new ones, what legions received these go soldiers, these warriors whose true origins had been hidden even from themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a theory that has persisted across the millennia, whispered in corners where such whispers are permitted.
[SPEAKER_01]: It concerns the Ultramarines, the most numerous and most organized of the legions, and their remarkable growth during the very years when the second and 11th legions were being erased from history.
[SPEAKER_01]: By the time of the horrors heresy, the ultramarines numbered approximately 250,000 space marines, by far the largest legion, eclipsing, even the iron warriors and word bearers, who had themselves grown vast through decades of aggressive recruitment.
[SPEAKER_01]: This growth has been attributed to many factors, the administrative genius of Gilliman.
[SPEAKER_01]: the stable gene seed that made ultramarines recruitment and usually successful.
[SPEAKER_01]: The access to 500 worlds that provided an endless stream of suitable candidates.
[SPEAKER_01]: All of these explanations are true, so far as they go.
[SPEAKER_01]: But there are those who believe they do not tell the whole story.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wordbearer captains of the Gal Vorbach, speaking among themselves in a moment preserved by records, discussed the Ultramarines' growth with a frankness that borders on the dangerous.
[SPEAKER_01]: The 13th definitely swelled to eclipse all the other legions, around the time the second and 11th were forgotten by imperial archives.
[SPEAKER_01]: The speaker did not state his fact that the Ultramarines had absorbed the survivors of the lost legions.
[SPEAKER_01]: Such a statement would have been too direct, too dangerous, too close to truths that even chaos touched warriors hesitated to speak aloud.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the implication hung in the air between them, unspoken, that unmistakable.
[SPEAKER_01]: The timing was too convenient to be mere coincidence.
[SPEAKER_01]: We cannot know with certainty whether this theory is true.
[SPEAKER_01]: The Ultramarines themselves, if they carry the blood of vanished brothers in their ranks, would have no way of knowing it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mind wiping was too thorough, the implanted memories too complete.
[SPEAKER_01]: The erasure of original identities too absolute to permit any trace of the truth to survive.
[SPEAKER_01]: whose every memory confirms that he has always been an ultra-marine, whose brothers accept him without question as one of their own.
[SPEAKER_01]: How could such a warrior ever discover that his true origins lie elsewhere?
[SPEAKER_01]: He could not.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is the point.
[SPEAKER_01]: That is the mercy.
[SPEAKER_01]: If mercy it can be called.
[SPEAKER_01]: That Malkador extended to the lost legion survivors.
[SPEAKER_01]: and yet the gene seed tells its own story, in ways that even the most thorough deletion cannot entirely suppress.
[SPEAKER_01]: Ten thousand years after the lost legions were destroyed, the Ark-Magos-Dominus-Belissarius Carl, that ancient and brilliant servant of the machine god, whose works had reshaped the very nature of the space marines, revealed that he possessed viable gene seed from both vanished legions.
[SPEAKER_01]: Preserved in the deepest vaults of Mars, maintained across the millennia by processes that only the mechanicum fully understood.
[SPEAKER_01]: The genetic legacy of the second and 11th primax had survived their destruction.
[SPEAKER_01]: When core sought permission to use these gene stocks for the creation of new primarism Marines, his proxy machine, the core inferior, an artificial intelligence that spoke with the Ark Magos's voice and authority, made an argument that cuts to the heart of what the lost legions truly were.
[SPEAKER_01]: The warriors were not at fault.
[SPEAKER_01]: The science is not at fault.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their primax were.
[SPEAKER_01]: the warriors were not at fault.
[SPEAKER_01]: In that simple statement lies a truth that the imperium has labored for 10,000 years to obscure.
[SPEAKER_01]: The space marines of the second and 11th legions were innocent.
[SPEAKER_01]: They served faithfully, fought bravely, gave everything they had to the great crusade that their fathers led them into.
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever crimes their primax committed, whatever failures brought down the judgment upon them.
[SPEAKER_01]: the warriors who bore their gene seed were blameless, and yet they were punished anyway, not with death perhaps, but with the erosion of who they were.
[SPEAKER_01]: Their identities were taken from them, their memories were stolen, their very sense of who they were was erased, and replaced with lies so complete that they could never know the truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: They became ghost soldiers, survivors of the lost legions, warriors whose true origins were hidden even from themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: They fought on, generation after generation, their genes seed harvested and implanted into new recruits, who inherited not only the genetic gifts of their primax, but also the great lie that concealed those primax identities.
[SPEAKER_01]: For ten millennia, the blood of the lost has flowed through chapters that do not know they carry it.
[SPEAKER_01]: Through warriors who cannot imagine that their heritage is anything other than what they have been told.
[SPEAKER_01]: Somewhere in the Imperium, even now, there may be space marines who carry the gene seed of the second primarque in their bodies.
[SPEAKER_01]: The quiet contemplative, the master of the second.
[SPEAKER_01]: the one who was forgotten.
[SPEAKER_01]: Somewhere warriors may bear the genetic legacy of the eleventh, the late comma, the unfulfilled promise, the the brother whose very name was dangerous enough to choke the warmaster.
[SPEAKER_01]: They will never know it.
[SPEAKER_01]: They cannot know it.
[SPEAKER_01]: The mercy that Malkador extended to their ancestors was the mercy of ignorance, and it has persisted across a hundred centuries of war and sacrifice.
[SPEAKER_01]: The primax were guilty, the warriors were not.
[SPEAKER_01]: and the warriors paid for their fathers' sins anyway, in the only currency that the Imperium would accept.
[SPEAKER_01]: The complete and utter destruction of everything they had once been.
[SPEAKER_01]: The recording device had grown warm beneath his fingers, its red lights still glowing steadily in the darkness of the station.
[SPEAKER_01]: Vorscht did not know how long he had been speaking, hours, perhaps longer, the cold recalf sat untouched beside him, and his throat ached with a rawness that came from words too long held silent, finally given voice.
[SPEAKER_01]: Through the window, Morithas' prime had completed nearly half its rotations since he began.
[SPEAKER_01]: The grace fear turned slowly beneath him, patient, as it had been from millennia, keeping its silent watch over the billions who slept beneath its surface.
[SPEAKER_01]: The dead did not judge.
[SPEAKER_01]: The dead simply waited and listened.
[SPEAKER_01]: Vorsh leaned back in his chair.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had done it.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had spoken aloud what the Imperium had decreed must never be spoken.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had given voice to the forgotten and the purged, to the empty plinths and the brothers who once stood upon them.
[SPEAKER_01]: to the tragedies that had preceded the greater tragedy and the warnings that no one had been permitted to heed.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was not a complete account, how could it be when the forgetting had been so thorough?
[SPEAKER_01]: There were gaps in his reconstruction, silences within the silence, places where even three years of obsessive searching had failed to uncover.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not know the
[SPEAKER_01]: He did not know, with certainty, the precise nature of their crimes or failures.
[SPEAKER_01]: He knew only the shape of the absence they had left behind, the wound in imperial history that had never been allowed to heal, because it had never been acknowledged at all.
[SPEAKER_01]: But perhaps that was enough, perhaps the shape of an absence could tell its own story.
[SPEAKER_01]: If someone was willing to trace its edges with patient fingers, and a heart open to grief.
[SPEAKER_01]: The station groaned softly around him, metal settling into metal, power systems cycling through their endless struggle against entropy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Somewhere below, a servitor continued its mindless rounds, maintaining systems for inhabitants who would never return.
[SPEAKER_01]: The air tasted of recycled stainless and old paper and the faint ozone of cogitators that had been running too long and too hard.
[SPEAKER_01]: Vorsh reached out and pressed the room that would end the recording.
[SPEAKER_01]: The red light flickered once and went dark.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in its absence the silence of the station seemed to deepen.
[SPEAKER_01]: He sat for a long moment in that silence, simply breathing.
[SPEAKER_01]: The inquisition would find him eventually.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had always known this, had made his peace with it, in those first desperate weeks of flight.
[SPEAKER_01]: But the recording would survive.
[SPEAKER_01]: He had made arrangements, redundancies, copies hidden in places that even he could no longer precisely recall.
[SPEAKER_01]: The truth would outlive him, scattered across the imperium, like seeds thrown to the wind, waiting for other seekers to find and nurture, and perhaps one day bring to flour.
[SPEAKER_01]: outside his window, the stars burned cold and eternal.
[SPEAKER_01]: The same stars that had watched the great crusade unfold, that had witnessed the scattering of the primax, and their reunion with a father who loved them.
[SPEAKER_01]: That had seen two of those beloved sons fall.
[SPEAKER_01]: The galaxy was very old, and it had kept many secrets across the long ages of its turning.
[SPEAKER_01]: Vorsch rose slowly from his chair, and walked to the viewport.
[SPEAKER_01]: Morithos Prime filled his vision, grey and silent, a world given over entirely to the honouring of the dead, billions of graves, billions of names carved in stone, preserved against the erosion of time because someone somewhere had decided that those lives mattered enough to remember.
[SPEAKER_01]: The lost primax had no graves, they had no stones, no monuments, no names carved anywhere in all the vast imperium.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had only absence, empty plinths and blank banners, and the silence that surrounded them like a shroud.
[SPEAKER_01]: But now, perhaps they had something more.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now they had a voice, however small, speaking their story into the darkness.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now they had a record, however incomplete, of what had been taken from us when they were taken from history.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now they had at least one soul in all the galaxy who had chosen to remember them, even knowing the cost of such remembrance.