Gaspard Lumey

Gaspard Lumey
File:Gaspardlumey.jpg
Title/Honours	First Iterator of the Adeptus Astartes, Citizen of Ciban, Citizen of the Markian Pact
Discovered (world)	Ciban IV
Discovered (period)	c.850.M30
Legion	Fifth
Heraldry/Sigil
Distinguishing Traits	objective, rational
Flaws	sceptical, distrustful
Horus Heresy role	Loyal. His imminent arrival forces Hektor's hand at the Battle of Terra.
Disposition	Stasis sleep beneath the Collegium Majoris on Ciban IV

This page details people, events, and organisations from the /tg/ Heresy, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. See the /tg/ Heresy Timeline and Galaxy pages for more information on the Alternate Universe.

Gaspard Lumey was the Primarch of the Fifth Legion, famously known as the Void Angels. He led his Legion to many great victories during the Great Crusade and Great Scouring. Lumey played an important role in bringing about the reforms of the Institutorum Astartes.

Appearance and Personality

Like all the Primarchs, Gaspard Lumey had the stature of a giant. Spending much of his life outdoors and physically active gave him broad shoulders and olive skin. He had bushy eyebrows, a prominent nose, and expressive, thoughtful eyes. Lumey usually wore his curly black hair long, loosely tied back from his face.

He was a difficult man, but one with a great presence. While other Primarchs far exceeded Lumey's ability to inspire trust, loyalty and respect, he was the master of sowing suspicion and discontent. When speaking he often emphasised his points by gesture. He rolled his eyes and sneered so often that these expressions were almost habit.

Partial biography

While the lives of the Emperor's warlike sons are mostly lost in myth and legend, Lumey's lifelong habit of writing has preserved his thoughts for posterity. The great corpus of his works prohibits its mastery in a normal human lifespan, but the Iterators of the Adeptus Astartes strive to read every word of their inspirational founder.

Youth

Ciban IV, often known as Ciban Felix or just Ciban, is a Civilised World in the Segmentum Pacificus. At the time that the infant Primarch Gaspard Lumey appeared on its surface, Ciban had attained a level of culture and technology approximating that of Second Millenium Earth. The planet was dominated by large, sophisticated states ruled by hereditary aristocrats.

The Primarch of the Void Angels landed in Fennechia, a colonial region of the petty empire of Gallia. His capsule crash-landed close to a farming community named Nouvelle-Havre and was taken in by the Lumeys, a childless middle-aged couple. It was quickly apparent to the close-knit villagers that the child Gaspard was something more than human, but the elders of Nouvelle-Havre counselled tolerance and encouraged the youth to see his strength as a gift to be shared with all.

As Gaspard Lumey absorbed the morals of his adoptive community, he learned the martial skills of a frontiersman. Hunting trips honed his natural talent for the stealth, outdoor survival, and marksmanship. Lumey also became deadly with an axe, whether thrown or in close quarters. Contented with this simple life in Nouvelle-Havre, the young Primarch was surprised when his foster parents insisted that he take his great talents out into the world to seek equally great challenges.

Plain Truth

Dutiful to parental advice, Gaspard Lumey travelled to the townships and cities of the colonies. If his first jobs are lost to history, his first and defining career was as a journalist in the dissenting press of the day. He issued a steady stream of broadsides and pamphlets condemning first the excesses of the colonial government, then the degeneracy of the aristocracy. The effectiveness of Lumey's works is still evident in the full title of his most popular pamphlet, Plain Truth: An Honest and therefore Illegal account of Fennechia's Misgovernance.

Growing unrest resulted in the formation of quasi-legal Committees of the Common Good, a kind of shadow government that gained the trust of the public as colonial governors became increasingly unpopular. Lumey, as a wanted man, did not participate in the Committees at first, but when open war broke out with the motherland he quickly volunteered his services to the rebel army.

Fennechian patriots initially suffered severe defeats at the hands of their oppressors. Gaspard Lumey achieved some renown as a guerilla leader, but he quickly realised that the colonists lacked the strength to triumph in a purely national struggle. Undeterred, Lumey smuggled himself into Gallia and circulated pamphlets denouncing not just the oppression of Fennechia but the whole regime of privilege. His message struck a chord. Even before Lumey arrived, Gallians were reading copies of Plain Truth and similar pamphlets written by figures such as Margarette Poisarden and Didier Bonchance. Political criminals, including Bonchance, flooded the Donjon, the great prison at Gallia's capital of Saint Vercy, but a jail cannot hold a whole people. When the imperial government attempted to raise a new tax for the war effort, ordinary Gallians began to revolt in their homeland, declaring that they were just as oppressed as the Fennechians.

Events in Saint Vercy developed at lightning pace. The Donjon was stormed by dockworkers and its inhabitants liberated. Regiments deployed to stifled the revolt arrested their officers and joined the rebels. Gallia's monarchy and national government fled the capital. The Committee of the Common Good, headed by Poisarden became the de facto government. A tremendous debate broke out in the Committee. Bonchance advocated a policy of temperance and forgiveness towards the old regime. Initially, his fraction held the majority, until Gaspard Lumey entered the hall. His prestige as a fighter in the colonies and rebel journalist won him the right to speak, but the Primarch's towering stature and personal charisma commanded the Committee's attention. Lumey hammered away at his rivals in the debate, explaining in sharp terms what the consequences of their mercy would be - a bloodbath organised by the aristocracy. In order to head off disaster, Lumey proposed a policy of "Righteous Terror", beginning with the imprisonment of supporters of the old regime and going so far as summary execution of aristocrats. While Lumey carried the majority, the fierce debate provoked splits. Didier Bonchance and his closest followers stormed out. These dissidents would escape Saint Vercy to sign on with the Royalist faction of a brewing civil war.

Mixed news from the rest of Gallia flowed into the capital. Committees were leading uprisings in the other big cities, but there was also news of armies being raised in the provinces - and worse, armies of intervention being prepared by Gallia's rivals. The Saint Vercy Committee of the Common Good acted decisively. A Republic was declared and the other Committees across Gallia, Fennechia, and, rather optimistically, the whole of Ciban were invited to freely join as equal participants. Margrette Poisarden was elected Speaker of the Republic's Assembly and she delegated military affairs to Gaspard Lumey.

For Lumey, the explosion from civil war to general war was neither unanticipated nor unwelcome. The Primarch understood that the aristocratic states mobilising against the infant Republic were just as unpopular at home as the Gallian monarchy had been. Therefore, his strategy was decided by a political question: how to break the ordinary people from their leaders? Lumey's approach was two-fold. Firstly, he offered an open hand to conscripts in enemy armies, declaring that the Republic bore them no ill-will for their misfortune and pledging assistance to those who deserted. Secondly, Lumey promised the guillotine to officers of aristocratic heritage, outlining that they were guilty of a crime against two nations for leading armies against the Republic.

Gaspard Lumey threw himself into the organisation of a new army of the Republic. If officers were in short supply, volunteers for the new army were not. Lumey's main struggle was in convincing militias from different regions of Gallia to support one another and welding these disparate parts into a unified whole. One of his most important aides was the remarkable Jean-Davide d'Orléans, a former Marquis and officer in the Royal Army of Gallia who had resigned his commission and surrendered himself to the Republic, pledging that the skills he had acquired for the defence of the nation rightfully belonged to the nation's people. D'Orléans and the handful of other officers who abandoned the monarchy endured considerable suspicion and harsh measures. On Lumey's orders, their families were held hostage. Some protested and refused to serve under such conditions, but d'Orléans persevered, famously remarking, "did not the old order hold the families of peasant conscripts hostage for the sake of its wars of ambition? Surely this new order, which is fighting daily to emancipate the common man, has the right to put a leash on its hunting hound."

Although Gallia's revolutionary wars were bloody and long, the Republic's constant and sincere appeals to the ordinary people eroded the foundations of the armies arrayed against them. Where Republican armies advanced, they found new supporters, willing to give them supplies, intelligence, and sometimes fresh volunteers for their armies. Where the forces of reaction pushed back, they encountered a surly populace, resentful at their presence and sometimes taking up arms as partisans. The completion of the wars saw the Republic stand alone on Ciban IV as a popular world government.

On Virtue

Rogue Traders probing ahead of the Great Crusade first came to Ciban IV in 848.M30. The world's sophisticated culture and unitary government was something of a surprise, and tales of Gaspard Lumey immediately caught the ear of the canny merchants. News travelled swiftly back to Terra, and the Emperor determined to investigate, strongly suspecting that the great revolutionary hero and representative in the Cibanese Assembly was one of his missing sons. After landing on Ciban IV, the Emperor approached Lumey openly, explaining their relationship by way of introduction. This did not convince the Primarch, who began to question his father on his views of morality, testing the answers against what he had come to believe on Ciban. Their debate, which lasted three days, was collected in a series of texts entitled On Virtue.

During the debate, Lumey initially took the role of protagonist, outlining the moral sensibilities that he developed on Ciban. The Primarch particularly stressed the rule of law and the importance of government serving the needs of the people, and explained himself by examples from his homeworld's history. In reply, the Emperor began with an assertion of the destiny of mankind to rule the galaxy, then sought to prove how the Imperial Truth and its doctrines of atheism, reason, and science would serve that end. While On Virtue is a particularly fine explanation of these points, its centre is Lumey's attack on the Emperor's position. The Primarch particularly questioned how an autocracy forged through conquest could be the embodiment of a rational culture. In answer, the Emperor artfully drew from Ciban's recent history, noting that the means used by the rebellion and those used by the old order had differed but little. What set the two apart was that one pointed towards the future, the other to the past. Past this pivot in the argument, Lumey and the Emperor spend a great deal of time further clarifying points of ethics and civics, but the Primarch's questions are clearly those of a student, not a rival.

Leadership in the Great Crusade

At the end of the debate on virtue, the Emperor of Mankind offered Gaspard Lumey command of a Legion of Space Marines to carry forward a vision of human unity and rationality. The Primarch's response was modest. While accepting the wisdom and judgement of the Emperor, Lumey expressed his doubts that his life on Ciban IV had adequately prepared him for a task of such awesome proportions. He further avowed that, while he would exert all of his powers and will upon the task, it was not a post he had sought out.

Of course, his initial task was not so awe-inspiring. When Lumey took command of the Fifth Legion, it was almost forgotten and counted only a few hundred in its ranks. Perhaps surprisingly, the Primarch was pleased enough by the efforts of the Fifth's former commanding officer, Antoine Antonelle, and retained him as the Legion's second-in-command. The two immediately set to work laying the framework for a massive intake of new aspirants, taking advantage of Ciban IV's large, healthy, well-educated population. However, Gaspard Lumey was also anxious to see the worlds beyond his adopted home. He travelled to the worlds of the Markian Pact, famously winning their loyalty for the Emperor without a shot being fired, and stayed for a time on Holy Terra. Lumey found humanity's cradle a difficult place, full of the relics of its ancient culture but with a population still numbed by millennia of war. He made a point of avoiding the planet, hardly ever visiting the Solar System except when strictly necessary.

Instead, Gaspard Lumey threw himself into the Great Crusade. He first set his sights on the worlds of the Al-Sherar sector. Lumey first led the Fifth Legion's few Astartes alongside new Demi-Brigades of mortal soldiers raised from Ciban IV and the Markian Pact in the Pacification of the Chwiorydd Hardd, eliminating an outpost of Xenos slavers. Though this act would lead to a sector-wide war against the Amatteir species, the Fifth would emerge victorious, with an enlarged and battle-tested - if young - force of Space Marines. This set the stage for the Fifth Legion to explode into the Great Crusade, hungry to make up for lost time. Roman Albrecht, Primarch of the Steel Marshals, captured the moment with his tribute to "Gaspard Lumey's men, moving like winged victory through the stars." The name would stick to them until the end of the Great Crusade - but others did not receive Fifth Legion's victories in such good humour.

The Dispatches

My Dear Brother,

Thank you for the gift. It has been a source of considerable joy to the Legion, both as a reading and in performances organized by our Iterators. Naturally, I have no disagreement regarding the work's significance and shared your sense of loss on learning that there are thirty works of this remarkable Terran still unknown to us. However, I believe your analysis of the work is quite wrong. The most important theme is not Brutus' internal conflict between honour and personal loyalty, but the decline of Roman culture. Shakespeare indicates that Brutus represented the ideals of the Republic in its heroic period. Yet by the time of the play, we see this virtuous figure isolated and not enjoying the confidence of the people. That is the essence of the work's historical tragedy.

(Except from the "Julius Caesar letter", as collected in Gaspard Lumey's Dispatches)

During the Fifth Legion's long exile in the Galactic Fringe, Gaspard Lumey wrote a series of letters to his friend and fellow Primarch, Uriel Starikov. Their correspondence was far-reaching, though only Lumey's letters, known as "The Dispatches" are preserved. The best-known Dispatch, the so-called "Julius Caesar letter", begins with Lumey expressing his gratitude for a copy of Shakespeare's drama. The Primarch then gave his own thoughts on what constitutes the central part of the work, recounts campaign details including tactical experiments against the Orks and passes on a summary of ethnographical and archaeological findings with particular reference to architecture on newly-conquered Dellator. Lumey passed from his reflections with a self-deprecating joke about a senior officer's newborn child "escaping my name by being born female", then sought to make apology for ending his exile without orders, due to the breakdown in Imperial communication. The letter is dated three years after the infamous Drop Site Massacre.

Lives of the Primarchs

The era of good feelings after the victory of the Great Scourging was buoyed on by Gaspard Lumey's work in his new role as the First Iterator of the Adeptus Astartes. He wrote biographies of his loyalist brothers known as the Lives of the Primarchs. Arelex Orannis, whose Legion Lumey had once dismissed as "the scribes of war" assisted as editor of this series, up until his own untimely death. The Lives all followed a basic formula. While honest enough in his account, Lumey showed the Primarchs as fundamentally human and shaped by their environment. By doing so, Lumey hoped to make the trauma of the Heresy a comprehensible event and prevent the collapse of the Imperial Truth. However, in the anarchic conditions of the new Imperium, there were few worlds that received Lumey's message. Fewer still accepted it.

During the time in which he fought to defend the Imperium and its culture, the most important of Lumey's friendships was with Brennus, Primarch of the Thunder Kings. The two would exchange many letters in these decades, and as their siblings died or vanished, the two Primarchs grew to cherish one another's company. After Brennus disappeared during the First Black Crusade, Lumey went into seclusion. His last public act was writing a biography of fallen Brennus.

Rules

Gaspard Lumey Lord of the Void Angels

WS6 BS6 S6 T6 W5 I5 A5 Ld10 Sv2+

Unit Composition •1 (Unique)

Unit Type •Infantry (Character)

Wargear • Gendarme Plate • Terreur • Le Rasoir Imperium

Special rules •Primarch •Sire of the Void Angels •Very Bulky •Voidwalker

Gendarme Plate: Lumey wears an artificered suit of armour based on the MkIII, modified with teleportation and protective systems to make it most effective at the voidborne warfare the Legion specialized in. It provides a 2+ armour save and a 4+ Invulnerable save. In addition Lumey and any attached unit from his army may choose to Deep Strike, and will not scatter while doing so.

Terreur: A heavy slug-throwing weapon based on frontier weaponry used across the rising Imperium, Terreur combines great reach with stopping power.

Range: 36” S7 AP3 Special Rules: Assault 2, Sniper

Le Rasoir Imperium: In the tongue of Ciban, this weapons name is ‘The Imperial Razor’, a weapon of execution as much as of battle. Taking the form of a heavy bladed Power Axe, in the hands of Lumey it is a fearsome weapon.

Range: Melee S+1 AP2 Special Rules: Melee, Master Crafted, Murderous Strike

Voidwalker: Lumey is a master of both battles from ship to ship and the orbital assault, appearing out of nowhere to spread death and destruction to the foes of the Emperor. Hammer of Wrath attacks in an army lead by Gaspard Lumey may be re-rolled, and Drop Pods and teleporting Terminator Squads gain the shrouded special rule on the turn they arrive.

Sire of the Void Angels: To the Void Angels, their Primarch is nothing less than the exemplar of all they stand for, all the ideals they hold dear and would die for. All Void Angels in an army containing Gaspard Lumey have +1 to combat resolution. This includes Lumey Himself.