Editing Nobledark Imperium Primarchs (section)

== Fulgrim ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%"> '''''The Futurist:'''''

The Primarch Fulgrim, foremost of the Legion of Terra's Children, was conceived in a Merikan population expansion program. His parents were both loyal Merikan officers, and upon their deaths their genetic material had been saved — and eventually combined — for one of countless batch-grown children. In truth, this program and others like it were conceived and implemented as the early Wars of Unification rocked the Eurasian continent, if only to bolster the numbers of the Merikan guard should another high-technological joust of nations commence. Fulgrim was decanted twenty years before the fall of Ursh, in the facilities of the Moton industrial concern. By either random chance or the inevitability of mass production, Fulgrim could be said to have been born with a charming and distinct beauty, characteristics which he maintained through all his life — though accompanied by a vast and neurotic ego. In those days his name was Furis Doe, and shared a surname with all the other children created as he was. In his youth, he found success among the ranks or mechanists and the overseers of Moton, and became the commander of his own sub-workshop at a young age. Between his competence and the opportunity to demonstrate the success of their program, Furis' superiors were eager to fast track him.

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Furis matured steeped in the legends told by old mechanists — some even from the Arctic Enclaves — of the star spanning Mechanicus and the gleaming stelar empire they maintained — but also surrounded by the propaganda of the Merikan war machine, its edicts of the holy human form, and its pretensions to brutal meritocracy. In the years surrounding the Imperium's first truly overt offensives and then its brutal dismantling of the Despot of Ursh and all under his banner, Merika hardened for war against the Unification.

Between the saturation of muddled anti-Ursh and anti-Imperial propaganda and his own dreams of the stars, Furis began to recede into his mind just as the mounting war effort put the apparent prodigy in command of his own experimental workshop and staff. Placed under his command were Merikan mechanists and the tech-priests cast out of the polar enclave after it sided with the Imperium. Fulgrim — a nickname earned by his increasingly dry, cynical demeanor — mostly served as a director for the workshop, but was himself a decent scientist and tinkerer. 

Furis began experiments with superhuman modification in response to the fabled Imperial Thunder Warriors, among other things. While these projects had successes, even creating subsystems superior to Imperial equivalents in some respects, they were few and expensive where other avenues showed far greater promise. Fulgrim did, however, upgrade himself in numerous faculties, spending not insignificant resources on improving his physical and mental capacities. He was said to be deeply interested in the lore he could draw from the defector tech-priests, though he never went so far as to make any of his personal modifications as overt. Fulgrim would eventually express an opinion that it was partially the Mechanicus' preference for skitarii and servitors that made progress on superhuman physiological enhancement so difficult. He traveled around Merika and Kalbi during this period, particularly exploring the borderlands and the deep mazes of vaults drilled through the western mountains where techno-barbarians still flourished. Fulgrim and his workshop were notably productive though this time, either creating or dredging up dozens of horrific technological marvels, but Furis Doe was only loosely tethered to his superiors' control and was rarely in contact with Merikan command. In some histories it is guessed that the Warlord contacted him around this time, but in reality the fabled approach would happen later.

Furis and his mechanists, notably cherry-picked from Doe production runs, returned from the wastes with a vast technological bounty and only a handful fewer men and tech priests than they set off with. Several important events occurred around this time; Ursh had all but fallen and the Pan-Pacific empire was on the defensive, Kalbi was in revolt under Military Governor Dorn, and Merikan high command contemplated alliance with Hy Braseal — though the prospect was unlikely. Fulgrim famously wowed the capital as he fired some of his more militarily applicable discoveries over the marching grounds, and excited the officers in the audience with promises of strategic archeotech and superhuman advancements to rival the powers in Europe. In truth, the director was unmoored from the war effort as much as the rest of terrestrial reality; between the unnerving horrors of the wastes, the gross violations of decency and humanity he witnessed undertaken by the great Merikan industrial core, and the Dark Age technologies he had tried to meddle with, Fulgrim had driven cracks through his pretty world. Fulgrim had long nursed a love for hedonism, and as he enjoyed his fame in the capital his old neuroses as Moton's prodigy layered into his drug-clouded state. In something of a haze, Fulgrim began to lay down his own base of influence. Seeking military office, he naturally needed to advance himself militarily. Thus, attaching his tinkerers and forces to the command of one honorable Major Lucius Doe, Fulgrium was bound for the Expeditionary Forces to engage the Imperium. The air assets under his command, long maintained by the Merikan high command as defense against Urshii invasion, were to be fitted for offensive war and launched from forward air bases built up on New Atlantis. Major and Dr. Doe were respectively ordered to force the Brasealian and Afrique garrisons from the island and to ensure the readiness of the Merikan air forces and drop troops that would be stationed there.

Lucius had cut his teeth in the Panama trenches, fighting Hy Braseal in the long border wars that burned along the isthmus. He was little more than a month Furis's senior, and likewise was held up as another triumph of the Doe program. His tactical virtuosity was said to match Fulgrim's technical art, and the prodigies had been introduced to each other during the revels of some mutual superior. Major Doe is said to have rescued the mechanist from the agents of high ranking officers, who were intent on compelling Furis to grant them immortality, and would years later go on to make that same request — a request which Fulgrim strove to achieve. The two Does, Major Lucius and Special Lieutenant Fulgrim, took up their commands on New Atlantis; the former beginning his campaigns against the Braseali forces in the heavily fortified south of the landmass and the scattered Afrique enclaves occupying its eastern half, and the latter rebuilding and updating the ancient Merikan air fortress and factories on the island. Backed by Fulgrim's advanced weapons as well as the ever increasing air power Fulgrim was building in the northwest of the continent — and occasionally supplemented by Fulgrim's enhanced soldiers — Lucius made short, mean work of the Afrique settlements and drove Hy Braseal back to a single, heavily entrenched garrison on the continent's southernmost point. The Major was known for leading from the front, sword in hand. Fulgrim — once his workshop was well-established, and when the conversion of the Ursh defense interceptor wings to dive bombers and escorts was under way — was characteristically preoccupied with personal projects; he and his corps of mechanists were busy preparing cybernetic enhancements and combat-ready super soldiers, in a rush to complete their longstanding mission of providing Merika with shock troops equivalent to the Thunder Warrior — themselves already replaced by Astartes.  

Fulgrim was so bold as to fly sorties of cyborg drop troops into Imperial territory, testing his Merikanized Skittari against the Imperium and its Astartes under the cover of the brushfire wars that had sprung up around the holdouts of Ursh's conquests. In these raids — nominally advance scouting missions — he found that a single Astartes was worth about two of his own prized combat cyborgs. Despite many close calls, he succeeded in taking numerous Astartes and Thunder Warriors intact — though rarely alive — and began the process of reverse engineering their implants, if not outright stealing them. Very few outside of Fulgrim's mechanists — an increasingly honed band of enhanced Doe children and long exiled Arctic tech-priests — were privy to these hoarded acquisitions, but Lucius was one of the few who Furis included in his conspiracy. Both Lucius and Fulgrim were reforged with Astartes enhancements and the mechanists' own inventions, as best they could manage, alongside many of their cabal. The result was lesser in stature and might than true Astartes, but the Doe children were a match for second generation Astartes, refined towards Furis' aims for the unit. It was at this point that Fulgrim and his group caught the attention and interest of the Warlord's forces, and the Hydra in particular. With the artificial continent secured and the Merikan air forces ready to launch their newly fitted bombers and gunships, Merikan High Command moved into the fortress and Fulgrim's band returned to the continent. The lab that remained to produce Merikan cyber-legionnaires bore no trace of the Astartes experiments, but leaked rumors of new wonders saw Fulgrim returned to the capitol and his projects well-funded as war with the Imperium mounted, while Lucius was sent to reinforce the army sent to end the rebellion of Governor Dorn. Merikan bombers lit up the Imperium from Franj to Afrique and cyborg drop troops fell from the skies to the aid of recalcitrant lords and Urshii holdouts, destroying and sabotaging everything they could.

Fulgrim himself was attempting to engineer a coup; having seen the Imperium in his advance raids and equated it with the empire of old he had dreamed of, Fulgrim wished to cut down the old leadership of his nation while it seemed within his power, and steer Merika into his bright vision. He had surpassed even Lucius as a swordsman during his adventures in the New Atlantis campaign, and now Fulgrim planned to use his charm, fame, and the lure of technological enhancement to access necessary targets and ingratiate himself in the matters of succession before the planned decapitation. Though his early plan went well, Fulgrim overestimated his own and his agents' ability to manipulate a government in the mounting chaos of war with the Imperium, and it was not long before the self-styled superhuman was at the mercy of the Merikan secret police. He was saved by two plainly dressed men that introduced themselves as Ames and Ozzy, both of whom bore the sigil of a hydra. Under the aegis of these two Hydra contacts, the Doe cadre continued Fulgrim's strategy of building support in the mass produced populations of the manufactories further back from the coast, but Fulgrim himself was made to concede direct control over the operations in the capital.  Fulgrim's laboratories in the capital became the futurist's edifice to a Phoenician Merika, to the wonderment of the officer class, and Lucius built up the manufactories of Moton into an advanced fortress city on the near edge of the Kalbi territories.  Fulgrim had little contact with either project; these power bases were tended by the Doe Cadre's inner circle under the direction of the Hydra and Major Lucius respectively, and while Furis visited his old home when it was under the Major's command his work took him yet further from the center of the Doe conspiracy.

Under the cover of another exploratory mission to the bunkers and cracks of the western mountain line, Fulgrim and his mechanists traveled the length of the rocky spine and the loosely governed western territories beyond. It was true they again delved the chains of fortresses, redoubts, and sunken chambers under those lands for new relics of the golden age, but only the least of these fruits ever reached Merikan High Command. The rest became assets of the conspiracy, and some even found their way across the wastes of Beringia to the Imperium.  More than this, Fulgrim secured the support of the enclaves whose knowledge had driven his successes years prior, and in the druidic labs of the Geno-Hippes (an ancient title) Fulgrim and his proto-Alpha Legion contacts established forward positions from which to build Astartes forces. The work done in these installations unified Fulgrim and the Geno-Hippes' cybernetically and biologically upgraded "Doe" Mk II Astartes with the Duscht-Jemanic genesmiths' Mk III pattern.

Through Fulgrim's promises and intrigues, much of the western territory would come to favor his succession, and for his technological efforts on their behalf they held him in better regard than High Command. The collaboration with the Geno-Hippes allowed state-of-the-art super soldier forces to be built in the mountain enclaves, stretching even into the heart of Governor Dorn's beleaguered territory. Less than a year since it nearly died with its indiscreet leader, Fulgrim's conspiracy was at its zenith. 

The destruction and capture of the Merikan air bases on New Atlantis saw the top admirals and generals return to the capital, in turn seeing preparations for a counterattack to keep the theater of war on the artificial continent and the fortification of the Atlantic coast. Lucius had made dramatic use of the Doe combat cyborgs Fulgrim had premiered in Europe, aiding the hapless commander tasked with the re-conquest of Dorn's dominion — entrenched as they were in west and northern Kalbi. Showy hunts by air cavalry and drop troops had done more to lionize the cyber-soldiers, as they strode about in gleaming gold and purple, than they could ever have hoped to have done to weaken Dorn’s defense. The guns of the Imperium were turned squarely to Merika in the weeks that followed;  the massive naval forces of Skand, the air forces of Europia, and the full war host of the Quadruple Alliance all gathered at New Atlantis. The ancient Merikan voidships that hung in orbit over the continent were moved in a careful dance across the Americas, for the dual purpose of denying space superiority to the heirloom fleet the Imperium brought to bear and remaining ever vigilant above the Panama fortresses for movement from Hy Braseal. Fulgrim returned to the capital as plans were being drawn up to leap back to New Atlantis and charge from Europia to Uralia — with Doe cyborgs leading the way. Other plans were being conceived to quickly stamp out Governor Dorn's decades long rebellion and annihilate it to the last — using the forces of the field marshal already engaged in the north backed by masses of advanced weapons deployed from Moton. Neither plan would ever see action.
	
As Fulgrim made to announce promises of support from western military governors with all due fanfare, he was accompanied by a brigade of what seemed to all a new generation of cyborg soldiers — as fair as their inventor and clad in bright ceremonial armor. Mere days after he had arrived at the capital, Merika and the Imperium began fighting in and above the Atlantic, west of the artificial continent; air forces clashed above the naval blockades and the coasts, and orbital assets made firing lines hundreds of kilometers long. Orders were issued to Moton to begin operation in Kalbi, and soon Doe-designed and Doe-piloted gunships and drop troops were buzzing northwest towards the Merikan position. Impenetrable havoc erupted in the Merikan capital and the first company of one hundred Terra's Sons — led by Fulgrim the Futurist — fortified the Doe laboratories and began conducting brutal raids on enemy factions within the Merikan command structure and officer class, who were also entrenched in the capital. The citadel of the high command had been raided by teleporter insertion of un-blazoned power-armored commandos in the first hours of the fighting, and subsequent clashes over the building saw it bombed to rubble by Merikan air assets. Fulgrim officially seized dictatorial emergency powers, and with a company drawn from his long-honed circle of mechanists he corrected his rivals in the capital, making a great show of the advanced forces those same officers and ministry heads had counted on in their grand strategies. The Futurist took Merika's reins, and with the nation’s purple and white still flying high, cowed the fractious military houses in the wake of what he called an opportunistic Hy Brasealian attack, enabled by the faithlessness of his enemies and the Imperium's assault.

Prior to the decapitation of the Merikan military, the Kalbi expeditionary force had embarked on a hard offensive against Dorn, counting on support from Moton's special forces as they drove for the pacific. Lucius lead the combined forces of the second company of Terra's Sons and cybernetic Moton drop brigades, smashing the confounded expeditionary force against Dorn's built up battle lines. The Merikan ship above Kalbi was quick to react with the the bombardment of the Moton citadel, and what few volleys it managed were devastating before it was crippled by boarding forces of Merikanized skitarii and mechanists. In the capital, there was stalemate between Fulgrim and the remains of the Merikan High Command, with most of the lower officers sided with the futurist or "removed" from the equation. But the campaigns in the north were fast concluded, and Lucius advanced southeast — some of Dorn's own forces following close behind. The Merikan Orbital Brigades and Navy were old institutions staunchly opposed to Fulgrim, and supported Merikan ground forces throughout the gulf coast and around the Panama fortifications. As Merikan reserves were mobilized by the panicking High Command, the Astartes company in the Rockies struck east across the continent — right at the head of the western governors' military forces — and made rapid progress securing the Merikan heartland despite the orbital bombardment from opposing factions. The machine-stubber, rocketeer, and armored fighting carriage battalions that had been the Merikan Junta's unbeatable scourges were hardly sufficient against their own colonial forces reinforced by Astartes and Skitarii. After a week of the stalemate in the capital, the Merikan Navy and Space Brigade retreated and shortened the blockade so they could both bombard the capital and keep Imperial forces from doing the same.

Fulgrim and Terra's Sons first company continued to fight for the capital, all under heavy shelling and the highest rate of lance strikes the capital's guarding geostationary starship could muster. They were supported by most of the remaining officer corps against the remaining High Command holdouts, the latter of whom were reinforced by Merikan marines and loyalist military regiments. Fireteams of Astartes in Imperial livery moved openly in the south and west, and Imperial soldiers landed in Newfoundland and the gulf; to be met by the advanced guard of the forces that started from the Rockies or Moton. Lucius and Dorn's forces combined with the Terra's Sons third company, the latter of whom had led the midlands campaign, marched on the eastern seaboard, pacifying or simply commandeering the remaining ground forces — nearly all of whom remained unclear on the state of affairs for the duration.

The Merikan Space Brigade was forced to retreat from the battle for the capital by subsequent attacks and abandoned the Merikan Navy to regroup with Merika’s remaining voidships over the Panama defenses, which had become the last stronghold of the remnants of the old Merikan High Command. In short order, the Merikan blockade was broken by the Imperials and the Merikan Navy suffered mutiny and folded. The Imperial Navy and Air Forces subsequently accompanied the battered Merikan Navy into the harbor of the capital. The cratered slopes of the captial's anti-fallout pyramid bunker-citadels were lined with Merikan officers and civilians, as Imperial engineers and officials of every land and discipline piled off amidst the columns of proud soldiers in the livery of Franj, Gredbritton, Achemedinia, and Europia. The Imperial delegation was marched to the Doe complex by the Futurist's own soldiers — equal in stature and clad in purple with emblems of raptors — who were themselves well-known to the capital from the past weeks. The Imperials had hardly arrived at what had become the de facto seat of government for a day before those same engineers and Furis' mechanists were seen together, drafting plans for reconstruction.  

The battered Merikans that remained in the capital saw many astounding figures among the Imperial delegation — the gold giant that had been the subject of much propaganda, the Skandian warrior at his side, his tattooed sorcerer, his towering iron-fisted automaton, his cadre of princes, the vassal warriors he’d taken from Ursh and the Pan-Pacific League, and so on, and on — as they had disembarked. The transcripts of the meetings within the Doe laboratories were sealed with the mark of a hydra, and vanished after some select members of the officer corps were pointedly denied a chance to read them. In the inevitable announcement from the grandstand on the capital’s debris-strewn parade ground, Esteemed Dictator Furis Doe and ‘Warlord’ Oscar made their speeches; the former waxed poetic about the wonders of history and the wings of the Aquila, and the latter made a curt and businesslike statement sketching out the terms of Merika’s stake in the Imperium — which had already been decided. This was all very much in keeping with Merikan custom; the general impression among the Merikan junta’s officers and populace was that Fulgrim had brokered an alliance and won them an entry on the footing of equals. In truth, Fulgrim had met the Warlord in Sibar for the Astartes III hybridization project, long before the operation began, and the conference was in many ways a formality — though Furis took it as an opportunity to lobby for his future projects.  

The remains of the Merikan Space Brigade took aboard much of the Panama garrison and its war materiel, but lingering as they were between the changed Merikan regime and Hy Braseal was not a long-term option. What remained of the Merikan Space Brigade never reconvened after that regrouping at Panama; the bulk of the small fleet dove for deep space and vanished from common histories, while about half their number mobilized to attack the Imperial ships above the eastern seaboard — of which two were disabled and one seized before it could be scuttled. The six voidships that remained over Panama held position for two months, and subsequently defected to Hy Braseal. Of those ships, one is recorded to have been used by Hy Braseal in the War of The Beast, further cementing their victory over their long term rival. They too could be considered the “winners” of the Unification Wars, and remained the last holdout of the old nations on Earth centuries into the Imperium.

Fulgrim made many inquiries into future endeavors to the Warlord — for potential avenues of research and for examination of technologies — which continued all through the last years of Unification, and he always seemed to give them precedence over the interim Merikan government run by him and Lucius. Lucius in particular — but Fulgrim as well — both showed a keen interest in the overtures the Imperium extended Hy Braseal, though they had the deference not to take part. It was worth noting, in Oscar's mind, that the Does had more or less copied the councils under which he'd arrayed the leaders of the lands of Europe and the remains of Ursh, to assemble and represent the various Merikan provinces north of the isthmus and south of Dorn's restored Kalbi, and had done it all without coaching on his part — though with focused and major alterations in some areas. Under the newly drafted agreement between Merika and the Imperium, there were provisions for continued cooperation with the Alpha Legion (nominally to ensure full and thorough reform and removal of entrenched corruption), for the continuation the Doe program — with the added practice of optimizing the babies after random sample combination (which Fulgrim had already started doing), and provisions for eminent domain over all samples of neutronium in the Merikan government's remit. For his part, Lucius was reorganizing the Merikan military and its many arms foundries, designing them to support his companies of Terra's Children, and glad-handing and encouraging as much of the old officer class to go on on grand world tours to enjoy the new Imperium. Fulgrim, meanwhile, was overseeing the expansion of the proud legion of nearly three hundred that had overtaken the Merikan war machine. And yet, Fulgrim's inquiries persisted, pointedly asking what his place would be in the Imperium.

The Futurist got his conclusive answer shortly after Oscar became Steward of the Empty Throne. He was named Primarch of Terra's Children, swore his oath before all assembled, and together they began the next stage of unification: that of Sol. With naught but some hasty organization of the new Council of Merikan Foremen, Fulgrim convened his legion in Moton. Fulgrim stood before his force of three hundred Astartes — each selected personally by him and bearing his modifications — and their backing of seven hundred Merikanized Skitarii. With his blades by his hip, his mechanists arrayed behind him, and Lucius by his side, Fulgrim drew up — in illustrious, impassioned words — his vision of the era before Old Night, one that the this new Imperium of unification would reclaim, with the Children of Terra at the fore to realize its mighty promise. He spoke of ships fleet and unstoppable, pillar cities vaster and more grand than any gilded Urshii ziggurat or Merikan pyramid-bunker, and of the great bridges indestructible; the Neutronium lines that tied worlds to the sea of heaven and thus to each-other. He envisioned his legion as the mighty “New Men” of this Imperium, more virtuous, more beautiful, more effective than any officer class or knightly order of the old provincial nations, the great poet warriors that would realize this Imperium’s truth. His speech was met with cheers of exuberance and tears of joy among his men, and in that moment every member of the Legion of Terra's Children knew they would follow their Primarch to the stars. 

Furis’ new position on the council of twenty — the Primarchs, Malcador, and Oscar Steward — ensured he was now privy to the grand strategy of the Solar Unification without needing to trade favors with Ames and Ozzy. Already the pale and eerie, yet charming trade lord of the inner system had seized the initiative and taken up the Unification’s banner as its master of ships, and the famed Knight of Franj — the Lion ascendant — was bound on a mission of pacification to the outer Sol system aboard his flotilla. With some prodding, a contingent of Terra’s Children's best military virtuosos followed close behind, led by Lucius in a gold, purple, and white fleet of a half dozen restored Merikan warships.

In that same period of manic consolidation and activity, Fulgrim fell in with Horus, the esteemed King of Empty Space, and Ferrus Manus, the iron-fisted Antarctican Skitarii mastermind, on their mission of diplomacy to Mars. While the Steward knew Lorgar, the Holy Man that he was, to be the better diplomat than the preening Phoenician, treating with the dogmatic and hegemonic Brotherhood of Olympus Mons was a task ill-suited to the earnest preacher, and thus it was Fulgrim that bore the Standard of the Aquila to the red priests for that first time. It proved a wise choice, and between the guns of Empty Space encircling, the mercenary charms of Horus and guileful Fulgrim, and the proud imperatives of the Antarctic Brotherhood’s iron fist, the ruddy neighbor of Old Earth was drawn into the fold. 

Fulgrim hardly returned to Merika after this, instead dwelling at the dockyards of the Lagrange with Horus, supervising the building of the dreadnoughts that would lead the coming interstellar crusade, and on Mars, aiding the designs of the Iron Fists he had long idolized from the stories of his Mechanists. One could hardly tell if his fondness for Horus was surpassed by his love for Horus’ ships, and though his obsession with the mighty Ferrus Manus was clear, it took many efforts and trials to prove the worth of his works, and thus himself, to the machine-man.

Fulgrim was often said by the remembrancers to be the more worldly mirror image of Blessed Sanguinius; created haphazardly — a happy accident that perfected himself — but grew imperious and mighty by his own ambition, if flying by roaring jet instead of graceful wing. And like Sanguinius, Fulgrim too was pale and fair, refined and elegant. Indeed this was very compelling image — the Terra’s Children’s fine armor was unmarred and unbloodied even through Fulgrim’s brutal raids and engagements, and Fulgrim struck where he pleased and retreated when it was advantageous — but the differences between the two came not from the body, but the mind; Fulgrim's blade was drawn in pride where Sanguinius drew his in duty. For all their contrasts, the aesthete and the prince were on good terms — so long as military matters were not broached between them. Likewise, he was compared to Guilliman — great strategos of Europia — as the Phoenician conducted great overarching campaigns in sector after sector, indomitable purple Astartes at the vanguard and unbreakable supply lines guarded by his shining cyborgs, advancing through the galactic west apace with the vaunted Ultramarines in the east. That said, Guilliman never leaned quite so heavily on the techniques of economic sabotage and proxy war that Fulgrim typically brought to bear, following on the heels of the shadowy Alpha Legionnaires he still held close from the days of the Merikan Coup. By all appearances, Fulgrim was as deft a diplomat as Lorgar, Vulcan, Horus, and Roboute — but for the fact that when he paraded his regal Astartes before the people of a world and charmed its leaders at Imperial-hosted galas, he was often hard at work cutting down their dissenting elements and special forces just beneath that pleasant veneer of peace.

Be it from their similar childhoods, shared archaic fantasy of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, or merely Fulgrim’s persistence, it was in this time that he finally endeared himself to Ferrus Manus. In Fulgrim, Ferrus saw a fitting disregard for the limitations of biology. In Ferrus, Fulgrim found an exemplar for the advancement of the holy human form and appreciation of its mighty heritage. Thus, and an unusual friendship had bloomed in the life of the Iron Fist. 

'''The Contest of Smiths'''

It was in the forges under Olympus Mons, after the Gorgon had established his might over the heads of the resident Archmagos, that they held their famed Contest of Smiths. Among the great cogs and reactors of the forges in the heart of the red mountain, the cold Iron Hand was making demonstration of his mastery of artifice before the many venerable smiths of the ancient foundry. While the Gorgon beat cascades of sparks from adamant at the forge, another unfamiliar host of robed and augmented figures drew around the mighty Skitarii. At its head was Fulgrim, and about him were the Archaeo-technological Diviners and Warsmiths of the Terrawatt Clan that he had been asked to herald to the Martian Brotherhood, and with them came the Genesmiths of the Duscht Jemanic, the Geno-Hippes of the mountain enclaves, mighty Weapon-Wrights and Siege Masters of Macedonia and Achemedinia, and Furis’ own mechanists — the last of whom had already found favor among the Martians that held with the more creative interpretations of the Strictures Cybernetica.

It was in the midst of this gathering of the great masters in the forges of the Brotherhood of Olympus Mons — who had brought Mars to heel in a few scant years, who dared to say they were the keepers of the Noctis Labyrinth, who were protectors of the vast treasury of knowledge and art that were the assets of the Imperial Court, who were possessors of so many esoteric and mighty secrets and specializations that they could not be rightly remembered hence their passing — that Fulgrim and Ferrus proposed to settle the budding rivalry between Old Earth and Holy Mars. In the spirit of their great and blessed adventures to come — their Crusade of Interstellar Unification — Fulgrim proposed a tourney that would last seven days, and in that time all present would strive to see the arsenal of Man filled with wonders to match the weapons of old. It was Ferrus that added the terms that each master of his own forge should work for himself upon his craft, and that any that shrunk from the task — who would let servitors or adepts dither in their work — would show their lack of art. It was then that Ferrus Manus shed his robes and bore down upon the forge, like a tempest with his vast silver arms, and bid the adepts about him bring schematics and materials. Furis Doe likewise seized a forge, his Mechanists setting about the recalibration of tools and selection of designs. And all around Siege Masters and Genesmiths and Armorers rushed to heat Adamant and prepare the manufacture of fine mechanical filigree.

At the contest’s end, the forges and laboratories still and quiet, many gleaming wonders were brought forth to be seen by all. Kelbor Hal, esteemed host to those assembled, humbly presented a bright adamant power-javelin he named the Windlance, that flew unerring by means of grav-lifts in its shaft, and for which he received much acclaim. Vie Braur, Master of the Genesmiths, came forward with a pair of golden armbands that would regrow the arm on which it was worn in a matter of minutes if it was severed. This was followed by a cybernetic eye that saw across the spectrums and could glare a hail of lasfire as effectively as a heavy rifle, presented by Arton Luron of the Order Cybernetica. From the Geno-Hippes, a poison gland from which a modified creature could spit streams of strong corrosive marking agent. Put forth by the Skitarii armorers was a beautiful brassy jezail of ancient design and thunderous power. An ingenious system of actuated tread claws that would let superheavy tanks scale sheer cliffs was produced by the Macedonian envoy. The gift of the Terrawatt engineers was a gleaming reconstruction of an ancient tactical awareness computer, a golden pedestal that held an ethereally projected globe, then set to show much of the infrastructure and troop placement on Mars. Between all of these treasures and wonders — any one of them fit for royalty of the previous forsaken era — still none could rightly see its creator named champion, until together Fulgrim bore up a great black hammer, and Ferrus Manus unsheathed a burning golden blade.

The black hammer — Forgebreaker — glowered with un-light, cut as it was from a shred of neutronium Fulgrim salvaged from one of Earth's many equatorial scars, and he had struck upon a way to shape it only in the heat of the tourney. Though in the past Fulgrim had failed endlessly to work neutronium whatsoever, the modest lump of exotic matter was now a weapon to scatter the mass of mountains. The eye-searing sword thrust aloft by the Gorgon was simply named — Fireblade — and it burned with unreal white flames that enveloped its narrow golden edges at solar temperatures, forged as the unification of many of the ancient subsystem fragments and schematics Ferrus Manus' brothers of the Antarctic Enclaves had brought from Earth, and now possible to construct and piece together in the vast facilities of the Martian Brotherhood. The whole assembly of priests and artificers conceded the glory of these weapons above all others, but between them none could decide the better. Fulgrim was certain it was the Gorgon's that was the mightiest; he loved the sword from his first sight of it, and its swift and biting form taken from the ancient glory of man far surpassed the bleak, crude weapon he had been able to carve from the strange matter. Ferrus Manus was already transfixed by the very notion of working neutronium even on such a small scale — far better than his misassembled archeotech hunting knife, here was a step towards the rediscovery of one of mankind's greatest arts. No decision could be reached, for the mastery of artifice could be given neither to Old Earth nor Holy Mars, and the budding of that rivalry continued. But the tourney beneath the red mountain did fill the arsenal of the Unification of Sol and the long and glorious Great Crusade after, and much joy and mirth resounded in the forges of Mars on that seventh day, one that would be remembered as the unofficial, popular unification of Earth and Mars.

The tournament itself was said to end when the two Primarchs gave each other their own creations as prizes, and the countless Adepts, Apprentices, Magos, Forgemasters, and Artificers present saw fit to rejoice in their work and the coming years of war and production. As the Primarch inventors exchanged notes on their works of the past seven days, the huge convention of Imperial technological orders and leaders did much of the same, establishing much of the early relationship between the Mechanicus Orders and the myriad of other technological orders that The Throne would come to retain over the coming millennia. Fulgrim would never part with the Fireblade after this, taking it with him into the unification of the galaxy and bearing it back to Sol to strike at the back of the Beast — when all that bright, dreaming civilization shuddered and collapsed — and forth again in vengeance and beautiful rebirth. Ferrus Manus would never forsake the Forgebreaker, and even when the Gorgon finally fell on the fields of Armageddon, millennia after his weapon's maker, that same hammer had meted the ruin of many dozens of Meks and Bosses across the battlefield, and left its final enemy naught but broken atoms in the ground.

'''The Conquest of Laeran'''

The world of Laeran was, in all Imperial records of the Great Crusade and since, unique. A wonder brought together in the horror of Old Night, with technology from the brighter age — before the dusk of the Old Empire’s Fall. The space-based, sculptural colonies of the Laer were first encountered by the 28th Expeditionary Fleet of the Terra’s Children along a long arc across the fringes of the galactic west. At their eager initiation of contact with the third legion, the serpentine Xenos seemed the most advanced, cultured, and diplomatically forward the Imperium had encountered since Eldrad’s representation of the Craftworlders. Shared in these early encounters with the diplomatic cadres of the Laer, and confirmed by Imperial analysis of the distribution of known colonies, the Laer had fled their home in the regions of the galactic northwest to escape the collapse of the Old Eldar Empire they had evolved in the midst of. Absconding from their home star in a mass exodus and seeding new colonies along the path of their flight, they had fled the opening of the Eye of Terror.

As the next stages of diplomatic contact and positioning were prepared, Imperial assets from the Terra’s Children likewise began the far less stately work of intelligence gathering and the preparation of contingencies. The Laer’s description of their means of exodus — Laeran itself — was striking, both in their soaring reverence for the world and its technological significance as a gas giant and lunar system driven by torch drives to the point of warp transit capability, constituting a starship of utterly immense scale. Of similar interest were the trans-biological technologies the serpents employed, with many of their modifications matching — or even surpassing — humanity’s best Astartes or Skitarii implants and treatments. Fulgrim grew drawn by this wonder, and his personal attention quickly fell upon the Laeran matter. With his curiosity came his inquisitive pack of mechanists and genewrights, Captain Lucius and his force reconnaissance fleets, the Legions’ Blades, the Phoenix Company, the support brigades of heavily updated Merikan Shock Cyborgs, and the Mechanicus Exploratory attaché offered by Ferrus. Their Administratum observers, Munitorum bullet-and-bean-counters, Alpha Legion contacts, and the not-insignificant following of painters, sculptors, artisans, documentarians, writers, and veritable circus of other artists that had found Fulgrim as a patron and received stipends as Imperial Remembrancers, followed close behind. As elements of the Third Legion and their diplomatic entourage contacted more and more Laer colonies, the air of open artistic and diplomatic exchange persisted. In actuality, however, diplomacy had stalled, and deep tensions were building between the parties — veiled though it was by a pretense of aesthetic debate and politely contrasting paradigms for cybernetic development and genetic engineering.

Though more formal diplomacy between powers and a meeting on Laeran remained the subject of talk, in truth the planet’s location was not forthcoming from the Laer even as Imperial Naval assets narrowed down their deductions for its path and place. Within the week the elusive torchworld’s presumptive location was pinned down and confirmed, while a discovery made by Lorgar was delivered to Fulgrim by the hand of the Custodes that had accompanied the Preacher’s expedition to the brink go the Eye of Terror.

From any other Primarch, the aristocratic ones long in the Warmaster’s highest favor particularly, Fulgrim’s pride and nervous sense of inferiority would have led him to doubt the clear conclusion Lorgar’s report implied. He would have dared to think nearly any of his twenty peers would press such conclusions upon him merely to disrupt the handful of years he had sunk into cautious diplomacy with the Laer. But not of Lorgar — he had no doubt in the conqueror of naught but hearts and minds. The Mechanicus attaché, Lucius, Ames and Ozzy, the Mechanists, the Genesmiths, the Administratum observers, the Eldar Corsair captain Fulgrim had convinced to join them, and all the rest all of the Imperium's party agreed upon the necessity for decisive action. It was made clear that the path of Laeran had not taken it from its place amongst the Crone worlds along a direct path out of their midst, but rather that their path started at the Cadian Gate, that their passing had been marked with terror and rapine, and that their elder colonies were rocked by civil war against a monodominant cult of perfection. Fulgrim was insistent that he personally reaffirm to the Laeran delegation and accompanying fleet that the Imperium had truly negotiated with them in earnest, and that he had the assurance of one Mr. Ozzy that they would be transported to Ganymede unharmed and in perfect safety. Upon the seizure of their vessel and the Laer diplomats’ removal, Fulgrim returned to his flagship — the Pride of Imperium — and began the Astropathic relay of instructions to activate the contingencies, likewise prepared in earnest.

Codex entry not finished.

Additional Details

- This universe's version of an "Iron Cage" incident that leads most Astartes legions to follow Guilliman's idea of breaking into Chapters. Fulgrim tries to micromanage everything but gets ground down by attrition. Final blow was trying to clear a sector of an Ork infestation led by a Tzeentch-aligned Big Wyrd, which was so nuts it was impossible to account for everything.

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