Editing Horus Heresy (section)

===Mortarion: The Pale King===
Set during Mortarion's early days in the Imperium, just after the events of ''The Verdict of the Scythe'' and flashing back to the Conquest of Galaspar, his first campaign as primarch of the Death Guard. As he's settling into command of his legion, Mortarion learns of a noncompliant human empire known as the Order in the Galaspar Cluster. Billions of people are enslaved, kept permanently drugged up, and forced to work themselves to death for the enrichment of the High Comptrollers, a pack of oligarchical assholes who refer to their slaves as "labor units" and have them executed and turned into nutrient sludge because their baking wasn't up to par (no, really). The Order's similarities to the Overlords of Barbarus piss Mortarion off to the point where he rejects the other Imperial commanders' suggestion that they blockade and besiege the cluster and decides to do a Leeroy Jenkins-style decapitation strike instead. He takes his fleet and barges clean through the Cluster's exterior defenses before ramming a cruiser into the side of the largest hive on Galaspar Prime and going out to kick ass the Death Guard way: fistfuls of rad grenades, rivers of phosphex, and power scythes, all topped off with plenty of orbital bombardments. No one who belongs to the Order is allowed to survive; Morty and the legion kill most of the Comptrollers even when they try to surrender and leave a few to be torn to pieces by their former slaves. Mortarion expects to be praised for his work, but the Emperor seems upset and sends Horus and Sanguinius to call him to account. Both primarchs are stunned by the level of destruction Mortarion has wrought, and when he tries to justify himself to his brothers, Horus points out that all he's done is replace one kind of tyranny with another. Mort has a brief moment of clarity and wonders if there is a better path forward for him and his legion. Ultimately, however, he concludes that the examples of Galaspar and Absyrtus justify his way of war and decides to become an embodiment of unstoppable, unrelenting Death, [[Nurgle|and we all know how well that worked out for him.]] Also features [[Typhus|Calas Typhon]] and [[Knights-Errant#Nathaniel Garro|Nathaniel Garro]] in their early days as line legionaries. Typhon falls into a disgusting sewer at one point and runs into a psyker who seems to know what he'll become, while Garro is the sole survivor of a kill team sent to take out the Order's chief asshole, which is probably what set him on the path to becoming battle-captain of the Seventh Grand Company.