Editing Details of The Fatemaker Controversy

Not much is known today of the so-called Fatemaker Commandery. Where most historians agree is that the Vulkan Imperium originally contacted this insular Astartes Chapter in what used to be the border of the old Malachias Sector in the late 54th Millennium. Their realm, which they referred to as the ‘Kapellan Safe Zone’, consisted of fifty well-organized and well-preserved worlds out of reach of most Galactic powers of that time.

The last fragmented records of the Pre-Strife era named the Fatemakers to be the sole guardians of that sector, and so it was originally presumed that these Space Marines were their direct descendants, who, in those long thousands of years, had changed their armor color and Chapter traditions. This was contradicted by the fact that the Kapellan Astartes, as they called themselves, apparently knew who the Fatemakers were, and they vehemently insisted that that particular Chapter had been destroyed, claiming that the Fatemakers ‘walked in a circle and are no more.’ The leader of the Vulkanite expedition and his Fire Beast advisors were not satisfied with this answer, especially after some compromising data had been found about the pursuits of the Kapellan Space Marines. Hostilities between the Vulkanite fleet and the Kapellan Safe Zone were cut short, however, when the Chapter Master of the Kapellans offered a deal to the fleet: he requested an audience with Vulkan himself, and in return, he would accept the Primarch’s judgement upon his realm without any further conditions.

The Chapter Master’s audience with the Primarch lasted for five hours, after which Vulkan gave the order to prepare his flagship, and personally took a journey to the Kapellan Safe Zone. There are no records what he witnessed there; however, on his return, he declared the Zone to be a semi-autonomous part of the Vulkan Empire, and that the Kapellans were indeed not identical to the Fatemaker Chapter.

Perhaps this was the problem which caused all these contradictions with the Kapellans: after all, if they were always referred to as “the Kapellans, who were definitely not the Fatemakers,” it was only to be expected that the Commandery itself was eventually associated with the name, whether they liked it or not. And they did not like it at all: it seemed that the Commandery was almost superstitiously reluctant to share anything in common with that ancient Chapter. The name stuck, however, and so by the beginning of the Last Primarch War, the Kapellans’ real Chapter name was barely mentioned at all.

Although the Kapellans apparently had unpleasant secrets, their use in battle was undeniable. They preferred two distinct strategies: a part of their forces was divided into small, specialized groups capable of applying surgical strikes against specific targets. While this set of tactics was reminiscent of typical Pre-Strife Space Marines, they had another tactical preference which was almost Crusade-era in nature. The Kapellans were fully comfortable with applying huge Astartes formations on the battlefields, which were accompanied by standard infantry, armour and aircraft, but was also supplemented by hordes of battle Ogryns calling themselves ‘Sons of Metragon.’ These abhumans were treated as equal citizens of the Safe Zone, and their ferocity and raw strength was further augmented by heavy cybernetization and crude but effective hand-to-hand weaponry. The Ogryns and the Kapellans’ other allies, including the [CLASSIFIED ON THE PERSONAL ORDER OF LORD VULKAN] also accompanied the Commendary to the muster before the Last Primarch War, although the Kapellans contributed an equally large force to the Magellan Reich to aid them against the war on the Chaos entity known as Doombred.

And so the Commandery fought its way into Galactic history, and in the light of the later events, the mystery surrounding the ancient Fatemakers seems trivial and irrelevant. My personal opinion is that we can accept the word of Lord Vulkan in this case: he personally ordered the Fatemaker Chapter symbol to be placed on the Wall of Remembrance on Armageddon. This wall contains all the symbols of the Space Marine Chapters which have perished since the creation of the first Astartes, and the inversed ‘Q’ among the other 846 symbols clearly indicates the Primarch’s belief in the Fatemakers’ final demise.

[Archivist Nikolai Guliano; excerpt from Astartes Chapters of the Human Imperiums, Unpublished Edition]