Onyx the Indestructible

Onyx
Title/Honours	Onyx the Indestructible, Onyx the Titan-Slayer
Discovered (world)	Neolithus
Discovered (period)	c.908.M30
Legion	Eighteenth
Heraldry/Sigil
Unique Weapon	Two custom artificer power-fists
Distinguishing Traits	Fearless, gregarious, determined
Flaws	Stubborn, careless, egocentric
Fate	Turned to stone during the Siege of Terra

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.

Onyx reminded of a old Terran saying our Father once told me, 'The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm'. While he was deserving of his sobriquet of the "Indestructible", in the end he was broken by the Heresy and his stubborn refusal to accept that not every battle is a winnable one. It was a great blow for our cause as he was ever the rock upon which our enemies would break themselves.

(Excerpt from Gaspard Lumey's private correspondence.)

Onyx The Indestructible was the Primarch of the Eighteenth Legion, the Stone Men. The largest and the strongest of the Primarchs, he was genetically close to the Thunder Warriors, although this fact was carefully concealed by the Emperor and only became known to Onyx himself shortly before the Heresy. His genetic heredity made him crude and uncouth, although his heart was in the right place. His image of himself as a great champion of humanity contrasted sharply with the wanton destruction his troops habitually caused during their campaigns. Many Primarchs thought him to be a natural candidate for a Traior, but Onyx remained loyal up to his last breath. Throughout his life, he was plagued by an acquired mutation that slowly turned his flesh into stone, until he was fully petrified during the Siege of Terra.

History

Youth

The Unification Wars taught a great many lessons to the Emperor of Mankind. He saw the brutal efficiency of his genetically enhanced Thunder Warriors, who took impregnable fortresses like cardboard castles and routed innumerable technobarbarian hosts without breaking into a sweat. But he also saw their dangerous instability, both mental and physiological, their insatiable craving for violence and destruction and their propensity to genetic diseases. As good as these warriors were, they weren't suited for conquering the Galaxy. It was then that the Emperor decided to create a superior breed of superhumans by stabilising the genome of the Thunder Warriors, trading off some of their destructive potential for stability and longevity. Thus began the Primarch Project.

With the assistance of his best genewright Ataulf Sachs, the Emperor set about tweaking the Thunder Warrior genes, striving to create a subspecies of humans that would combine the might of his supersoldiers with calmness and clarity of mind. It took him several failed experiments to approach this bold goal, and yet the first real Primarch he created could not be considered a complete success. There was still a lot left in him from the Thunder Warriors, he was more of a missing link between the two species than a proper Astartes. A rigorous genetic purist, Sachs insisted on destroying the boy as a failed experiment, but the Emperor ruled differently. He saw that even a deeply flawed Primarch like that could have his uses in the Great Crusade, and so the boy was saved.

Saved, but not for very long! The forces of Chaos eventually learned of the Primarch Project and hatched a plan to stop it at all costs, or at least twist it so much that it would serve their own purposes. While the Emperor was away, the Dark Gods snatched the capsules housing the infant Primarchs from his geneforge and scattered them throughout the Galaxy. Some of the Primarchs landed on peaceful and civilised worlds, some on inhospitable planets ruled by savagery. Neolithus was certainly one of the latter.

Planet Neolithus

The austere appearance of Neolithus is deceptive. From the orbit, this world appears to be nothing more than just another lifeless sphere of sedimentary rock sprinkled with grey regolith. It almost seems inconceivable that this planet was the home to a bustling Human civilisation before the onset of the Age of Strife. Neolithus was hit harder than most worlds by the ravages of this tumultuous era. A tear in the fabric of reality opened right next to it, from which the planet was bombarded by meteorites, cosmic dust and other stellar detritus sucked into the Warp through portals elsewhere in the Galaxy. Superheated from their passage through the Immaterium, it soon covered the entirety of the world's surface and quickly cemented into thick layers of sedimentary rock. Where lush forests rustling with wildlife once stood, there was only grey stone to behold; azure lakes and busy cities were replaced with lonesome rocky deserts.

Such a catastrophe could easily wipe out the entire population of Neolithus, but humans are a notoriously tough lot. When it became clear that the meteorite barrage was going to destroy everything on the surface of the planet, several survivalist groups sought refuge in the numerous cave systems that riddled the world's crust. Although the flight into the planet's deepest bowels allowed them to escape certain doom that awaited on the surface, they were now firmly sealed in their caves by hundreds of metres of newly formed rock. Cut off from the technological advancements of their cities, these survivors degenerated back to Stone Age within the span of several generations. But, in spite of all odds, their strange civilisation eventually learned to thrive in their hermetically sealed chthonic domain. They domesticated the strange indigenous creatures that inhabited the uncharted depths of their planet. Dire moles helped them to dig new tunnels and halls, while python-sized crustworms provided them with meat. While lack of oxygen would normally be a problem for any cave-dwelling society, the people of Neolithus were saved from suffocation by chemotrophic fungi that consumed carbon dioxide and produced oxygen.

After several decades of living in the caves, the people of Neolithus discovered that aside from destruction, the Warp brought invaluable gifts to their planet. The meteor storm that was unleashed upon Neolithus showered it in the rarest minerals with curious properties snatched by the Warp from the farthest corners of the Galaxy. Stones lighter than air and stones harder than diamond, stones that radiated dazzling light and stones that neutralised any poison. All of this mineral wealth was dumped onto Neolithus during the meteor showers, and many of these meteors dug deep into the planet's soil, getting stuck between the natural ores. The Neolithan cavemen first stumbled upon them while burrowing new tunnels in search for food and quickly discovered their strange properties. By exploiting and combining the properties of different Neolithan minerals, they managed to create equivalents of fairly complex machines while still technologically in the Stone Age. They even harnessed the power of steam with their primitive engines made from stone.

The mineral that had the greatest impact on the budding Neolithan society was the Soothstone. Originally little more than simple quartz, it was infused with visions of the future and the past while drifting in the Warp, which anyone who peered into its depths could catch a glimpse of. Although staring into the soothstones for too long could drive those of weaker will insane, the temptation to glimpse the future was too strong to abstain from it. Soon, a new caste called the Geomancers arose, which specialised in looking into polished Soothstone balls and interpreting their visions to lead the Neolithan tribes to prosperity. They mainly used their gift to locate new mineral veins, but sometimes they saw much more in their crystal balls than just ore deposits. These confusing visions were chiselled into the stone tablets of prophesies, which were then stored in a place where nobody could reach them. The visions from the crystals also allowed those amongst the Geomancers gifted with psychic powers to master and control them, serving as self-instruction manuals of sort. There were accidents that led to the extinction of entire tribes and collapsing of caves, but those were few and far between.

Apart from the risk of insanity, there was another big downside to becoming a Geomancer - the residual Warp energies still contained within the Soothstones slowly affected anyone working with them, turning their flesh into stone. Few Geomancers survived past seventy years of age, as they usually turned into stone statues before this point. Only those Neolithans truly obsessed with knowledge dared to accept the mantle of a Geomancer.

Young years

It was over this strange planet that the Warp expelled the capsule holding one of the boy Primarchs. Had they capsule not accelerated to enormous speed before the impact with the planet, it would have landed on its lifeless rocky surface, where only a death from starvation would await him. Perhaps it was a miscalculation on the part of the Dark Gods, or maybe it was a part of their inscrutable plan. Regardless, the capsule managed to punch through the stone shell of Neolithus and ended up in a natural cave. So strong was its impact with the planet that it caused a minor earthquake, drawing the attention of the local cavemen tribe. The mole-riding scouts soon discovered the capsule and brought it to their Geomancers. Tricked by its smooth, glittering surface, blackened by overheating when passing through the planet's atmosphere, they initially mistook it for the largest onyx they had ever seen. But the truth turned out to be even stranger than that: when the tribe's masons attempted to set the giant gem into the ceiling of the tribe's central cave as a decoration, they accidentally triggered the capsule's hatch, which opened to reveal the boy inside. Greatly amused by this curious birth from a stone, the Geomancers named the child Onyx.

At first, the Geomancers intended to bring the wonder boy up as one of them, but the futility of this endeavour became clear as he grew up. The young Onyx demonstrated complete disdain for knowledge and learning and even broke several priceless stone tablets of ancient wisdom. On the other hand, he displayed inhuman strength, able to crush rocks with his bare fists and headbutting holes in the cave walls. Seeing his natural gift for demolition, the Geomancers decided to train him as a miner instead. The Primarch grew up much quicker than a normal human boy would, and in his teens he was already digging new mines for his tribe. Onyx soon became a stock character of tall tales all across Neolithus, only most of these tall tales actually downplayed the real achievements of the Primarch, for they were too outrageous even for the inebriated miners to believe. With his trusty dire mole mount Mangont, the largest of his kind and the only one who could bear the Primarch's great weight, he could mine as much minerals in one night as an entire brigade would in a week. Even in these early years he already showed his violent tendencies by frequently getting into brawls and accidentally killing several of his co-workers, which he deeply regretted and tried to rectify by supporting their families. But these dark details of his biography were carefully concealed by the Geomancers to preserve Onyx's image as a worker hero.

A vision in the crystal

His meteoric career as a miner ended abruptly during one of his routine work shifts. He was excavating minerals from a newly discovered ore deposit when he suddenly stumbled upon a slab of stone he had never seen before. Driven by curiosity, Onyx carefully dug it out and cleaned it from the dirt. It turned out to be a large semi-transparent crystal that seemed to be filled with dancing plumes of iridescent mist. That was an unnaturally large slab of soothstone, in fact, the largest one on Neolithus. Onyx was mesmerised by the beauty of the dancing mists, he pressed his forehead against the crystal and stared into its otherworldly depths. Immediately his mind was filled with vivid visions, curious and wonderful, confusing and foreboding. He saw castles that walked like men and cities carved within titanic stalagmites, he saw men with green skin and men in bone armour. But there was one particular vision that struck him the most. It was a colossal cave, so wide that he couldn't see the walls. Its inconceivably tall ceiling was shrouded in impenetrable shadow and encrusted with billions and billions of shining diamonds. It would have taken the Primarch a lifetime to count them all. Nevertheless, he tried, and that's where the vision began to fade. As the swirling mists concealed the diamond cave, Onyx felt strange weakness in his legs and fell to his back.

Although from the Primarch's perspective he had been looking into the crystal for no more than an hour, an entire month had passed in real life. This was not the first time he had disappeared for a long time without telling anyone a word, so the Geomancers weren't particularly worried - after all, they couldn't think of anything in their tunnels that could harm Onyx. Such a long uninterrupted exposure to the Warp-tainted mineral took its toll on the Primarch. While his enhanced physique saved him from complete petrification, a fate that would await a common man should he stare into a soothstone for too long, parts of his skin turned to stone nonetheless. Apart from the odd bits of rock protruding from his skin here and there, his fists were now almost entirely encased in a layer of rock aside from several cracks that allowed him to move his fingers, and his back was entirely petrified, with short stone spikes now protruding from his spine. The careless Primarch wasn't too worried about this sudden metamorphosis; if anything, he found it pretty nice looking. Besides, his mind was still set on the diamond cave. He was determined to find and excavate it wherever it was, not for himself, but for his people. Unsure where to start his search, he went to his tribe's Geomancers for advice.

Much to the Primarch's frustration, instead of the expected assistance he found only scorn in the cave of the oracles. The Geomancers berated him for looking into a soothstone, a privilege reserved for their caste. Onyx was quick to dismiss their accusations and kept inquiring about the cave of infinite diamonds. But instead he was told that his visions had no meaning because he wasn't a proper Geomancer. Understanding that he wouldn't get a word out of the reclusive oracles, the Primarch angrily left their cave by bashing a hole through its wall. He was still fully convinced that everything he had seen in the crystal was real and that the Geomancers simply wanted to hide the truth from him. He quickly jumped to the conclusion that they kept the existence of the diamond cave in secret from the common miners because they wanted to keep its wealth all to themselves. The Primarch was fuming with rage as he was making his way to the miner quarters, breaking everything that stood in his way.

The miner uprising

The miner elders listened carefully to his story, but they weren't sure whether it was to be believed. On the one hand, they knew Onyx well and realised that he was completely incapable of lying. On the other hand, his story was so outrageous and cast the Geomancers in such a negative light that the elders were sure there must have been some misunderstanding. The good intentions of the oracles were beyond any reasonable doubt, for the cavemen of Neolithus owed much of their prosperity to their selfless service. But the common miners were not nearly as wise or thoughtful as their elders. Their avarice ignited by Onyx's tales of the cave of endless diamonds, they grabbed their tools and formed a large mob that the Primarch led to the cave of the Geomancers. This time, he aggressively demanded to be shown the way to the diamond cave, threatening to use force if his demands weren't met. Much to his surprise, the Geomancers were completely unperturbed by his threats and attacked the miners first to teach them a lesson. Many of them displayed their rarely seen sorcerous abilities, such as turning their opponents to stone or bringing massive stone golems to life to crush them. But the miners had a clear numerical advantage, not to mention the advantage of having Onyx on their side, so the Geomancers were defeated after a long and gruelling battle.

Cornered, badly wounded and faced with the wrath of the rebellious miner legend, the remaining Geomancers caved in and told him the whole story. It turned out that the diamond cave had been a recurring vision ever since the founding of their caste - every single Geomancer had seen it once or twice in a crystal ball. Initially they were also eager to find it, but as the archives of their prophesies grew through the generations, this vision gradually took on a much darker tone. From hundreds of short fragmentary visions they eventually managed to put the whole picture together: the only way to reach this cave was to collapse all of the other caves on Neolithus. After this revelation, the diamond cave had become a forbidden topic amongst the Geomancers, and they advised Onyx to try and forget about it as well. Unfortunately, the Primarch was far too stubborn and overconfident to believe this story; instead, he simply discounted it as a pathetic last ditch effort to keep the location of the diamond cave in secret from the common people.

Still as determined as ever, Onyx ordered the captured oracles to lead him to the cave of prophesies and show him the tablets describing how to reach the diamond cave. They shrugged and agreed, thinking that after seeing the tablets for himself the rebellious miner would finally believe them. It was a long way downwards to the Geomancer archives, through abandoned mine shafts, treacherous natural caves, fungal groves choking with toxic spores and down the turbulent underground rivers. After a nearly week-long journey that costed them many lives, Onyx and his men finally arrived at the cave of prophesies near the point where the planet's crust gradually descended into its molten mantle. This cavern had a lake of boiling magma for a floor, and the archives themselves were deposited in a dolmen on a small island suspended from the cave walls on gigantic chains. As the Primarch descended one of these chains, a gigantic humanoid figure made from magma jumped at him from the lake below, the sentinel of the ancient prophesies created by the sorcery of the Geomancers. A normal man would have no chance against this monstrosity, but Onyx's stone-encased fists made his hands impervious to the lava, allowing the Primarch to pummel his adversary into oblivion.

The sundering

Once the sentinel turned into a pool of magma at his feet, Onyx entered the dolmen and began searching for the prophesies regarding the cave of diamonds. Although the tablets he found supported the story told to him by the Geomancers, the Primarch chose to ignore the parts that he didn't like, writing them off as more Geomancer trickery. He was far too stubborn to admit his mistake, even to himself. With the tablets in tow, he returned to his people and told them what needed to be done to unlock the diamond cave. His emissaries spread the word to all the other tribes of Neolithus, promising wealth beyond measure to those who would join. Either seduced by this promises or simply thrilled to join a legendary figure such as Onyx, many tribes betrayed their Geomancers and joined forces with the Primarch and his rebels. Some others weren't quite so easy to convince, they stood by the oracles and began preparing for an inevitable conflict. Although their prophetic abilities gave the Geomancers a tactical edge, they were eventually defeated by the much numerically superior rebels. Onyx decided to forgive the tribes that refused to join him, reasoning that there was more than enough diamonds in his cave for everyone.

With the remnants of opposition finally crushed, the Primarch's plan could finally be put into motion. The Neolithan tribes opened their vaults, surrendering all of the explosive minerals they had to Onyx. Several large primitive bombs were constructed from these explosives, each one of which was powerful enough to level an Imperial hive. But the Primarch's plan was far more ambitious than that. His men brought the bombs to the cave of the prophesies where the crust touched the mantle and dumped them into the magma. An explosion of such immense force in a point of tectonic instability caused a planet-wide chain reaction. Neolithus trembled in tectonic convulsions unheard of since the formation of the world. Hindered by the planet's stone shell, continents struggled to move, writhing like a snake in its old skin and trying to cast it off. Hundreds of volcanoes erupted across Neolithis, destroying its rock casing chip by chip. Finally, after a devastating earthquake that seemed to shake the entire world, the planet's rocky prison finally exploded into myriads of pieces small and large, which concentrated on the orbit to form rings around Neolithus. But while this cataclysm finally freed the planet's surface, it also collapsed all of the caves that riddled its crust. Together with much of the planet's modest population, Onyx took refuge in the uppermost cave on the planet, and most of them managed to escape the calamity by quickly escaping to the surface; most, but hardly all.

Now there was no coming back. Centuries of Neolithan caveman culture, thousands of mines and cities built by caring hands for the generations to come, works of art and marvels of stone technology, all of it was now buried deep within the soil, never to be recovered. In pursuit of his dream, Onyx carelessly destroyed the world as it was, not leaving a stone upon a stone. But, on the other hand, his vision finally came true - he led the people of Neolithus to the diamond cave of his dreams! It was obviously none else than the planetary surface lit by the star-filled sky. The precious gemstones he saw were just distant suns, and the cavern ceiling that they supposedly decorated didn't exist at all, being a construction of a mind struggling to comprehend something it had never seen. To make matters worse, everyday life was now as far out of reach for the Neolithans as the celestial diamonds. Their homes were destroyed, their livestock went extinct in a span of several hours, their equipment was buried hundreds of metres below. Although the planetary surface was now free, it was a lifeless, empty rocky desert not unlike the shell that used to envelop it before the sundering. His good intentions combined with his stubbornness, overconfidence and carelessness led Onyx to doom the entire population of his planet.

The few days that followed were hell. The people were starving and angry at Onyx for leading them astray, but nobody dared to throw a challenge to the Primarch. As for him, while he was searching for a solution to his problem, he didn't worry too much. Onyx was sure that everything would work out in the end: a carefree optimist, he couldn't even begin to realise that not all stories end well. Miraculously, this one did. When some of the Neolithans started fainting from hunger, one of the diamonds in the ceiling began to grow. It grew and grew, until it became clear that it was not a gemstone, but an enormous flying structure made from exotic stones. The strange flying rock landed near the Neolithan camp and opened up to reveal a cave inside of it. From this cave, men in strange garments came, one of them as tall as Onyx himself. The Primarch was suspicious of these new arrivals: were they the diamond cave tribe? Would they attempt to expel him and his people from their domain? The reality turned out to be even stranger than his expectations when the chief of the diamond tribe introduced himself as Onyx's father.

Though the Primarch was grateful to this stranger for giving food to his men, he still had his doubts about the veracity of his words. When the stranger claimed to be the Emperor of Mankind and invited his son to lead his armies in the Great Crusade, Onyx wasn't impressed at all. He offered the Emperor a challenge, saying that he would only follow a chief who was stronger than himself. Saying that, the Primarch walked to a nearby crag, grabbed it, pulled it from the ground, raised above his head and threw down. With a smile, the Emperor picked the enormous stone up and threw it to the orbit, where it became a part of the ring surrounding Neolithus. All the doubts were gone now: Onyx knew that only his father could be so strong. He absolutely didn't need to know that the Emperor tricked him by helping himself with his psychic powers.

Many things happened in the weeks that followed. Mechanicum forces were dispatched to Neolithus to help the locals excavate their buried cities and return to their old way of life. Though they preferred to retain their culture, they gladly accepted the high technology of the Imperium, quickly becoming one of the richest worlds in the Galaxy by selling their mineral wealth to the Forge Worlds. Thanks to the Emperor's intervention, Onyx's great fiasco born of his hubris and self-confidence turned around completely, turning the man into the hero he had always considered himself to be. In spite of that, the Primarch wasn't particularly grateful to his father, preferring instead to think that he would have found a way out either way. This bothered the Emperor little, for he needed a good general and not necessarily a modest man. While the Primarch had considered mining his calling for much of his early life, he found his true passion in warfare. The parts he enjoyed the most in mining were linked with demolition, destruction and breaking things, and now he had a chance to do that on a much larger scale.

In the end, his vision of the diamond cave came true, and now he was ordered to mine all of these diamonds for his father. Onyx couldn't be more eager to begin the task.

The Great Crusade

After training and molding his legion, Onyx went to test their might for the first time by repelling a great ork WAAAGH at the Imperium's doorstep, on the planet of Fenris. He led his legion valiantly, and it is here that he earned himself the moniker "The Mountain of Fenris", as he held is ground even against the greatest of odds. His next challenge was the Wars of the Colossi, in which he led the Stone Men against the horrible Jormmund by defending and retaking worlds in the Segmentum Ultima. He personally felled about 50 titans, leading squads of elite terminators into the aliens' hearts, and detonating melta-charges. It is this that earned him the name "Titan-Slayer", and gained massive popularity within the ranks of the Imperiun.

Personality

A champion of humanity, selfless hero in shining armour always ready to protect the weak and the downtrodden. A relentless fighter for justice, equality and the good of all people. Always ready to rise up to any challenge, no matter how daunting, if the things he believed in were at stake. A paragon of the noblest qualities of humankind: bravery, honour, valour, courage, heroism and so and so. A bastion of safety, protecting his race from the horrors of the Galaxy. And, most importantly, very humble, never taking too much credit for his glorious deeds.

This is how Onyx saw himself.

The impression everyone else had of him was very different. Most of his brothers viewed Onyx as extremely immature, irresponsible, brutish, self-centred and careless. In any discussion, he couldn't shut up about himself and his amazing adventures, a great deal of which he either exaggerated or made up on the go. Interestingly enough, he genuinely believed everything he was saying, but he was the only one convinced by these tall tales. Needless to say, his brothers were usually irritated by Onyx's incessant boasting. He couldn't begin to understand the utmost importance of strategic meetings, in no small part because he was bored to tears by planning of any kind and preferred to make decisions on the go. He never took these meetings seriously and only used them as an opportunity to tell a couple of war stories and show off his trophies. Because of this, he was a rare guest at strategic meetings, only present if his attendance was required. The Primarchs with a biting tongue, such as the Voidwatcher or Gaspard Lumey, never shied away from criticising Onyx in the open.

Such pronouncedly cold treatment from his brothers would deeply offend most other Primarchs, but Onyx was an exception. His enormous self-confidence made him completely impervious to criticism, and he took any disparaging comments as a joke. This made many of his brothers hold his intelligence in a low regard, but this judgement was quite misplaced. In spite of his crude demeanour, the Primarch of the Stone Men was fairly smart, but his large ego and careless attitude often interfered with his rational judgement. Unable to believe that someone may sincerely dislike him, he believed all of his brothers to be his friends and fraternised with them in the most unceremonious manner. Onyx had little to no concept of private space and loved smacking people on the shoulder or giving them friendly pushes as signs of affection, which could be quite painful, considering his enormous strength. To some of his brothers such treatment was awkward; others found his lack of proper manners charming.

In spite of all of his numerous shortcomings, Onyx's heart was in the right place, and his desire to help Humanity was genuine. While his actual actions were usually marred by his irresponsibility and violent tendencies, his intentions were always noble. Perhaps the greatest problem of his life was that he never realised how his admirable aspirations result in trouble for everyone involved. Just like he could never learn to control his great physical strength properly, he never really learned restraint in warfare. Always inclined towards heroic, but strategically foolish decisions, he ruined the plans of many a campaign he was involved in, after which some of the Imperial commanders outright refused to work with the Stone Men. Some of the more thoughtful Primarchs saw Onyx's good heart underneath the crude Neolithan rock, and those became genuine friends to the boisterous giant. In particular, Shakya Vardhana and Golgothos were rather close to Onyx and tried, to the best of their ability, to teach him responsibility and restraint. Alas, their efforts were not enough to reshape the man of stone.

There were few things Onyx enjoyed as much as destruction. As with most of his notable flaws, this was caused by his Thunder Warrior ancestry. He didn't destroy to punish, like Inferox, or to cripple the enemy, like Johannes Vrach. He just did it because he loved breaking things. On more than a single occasion, his artillery accidentally levelled the city together with its walls, which made the Primarch sad for about four minutes on average. While civilian deaths were amongst the few things he eventually learned to take seriously, large scale property damage followed him anywhere he went. He was several times caught ordering to destroy objects that weren't tactically important, and always managed to make up a perfectly reasonable justification for it, a testament to his undervalued intelligence.

All in all, Onyx was an awkward giant who was always trying to help, but generally ended up causing a lot of harm in process. It was only after his death, when his crude and boisterous mannerisms faded away from memory, that he was finally hailed for being the great hero he was.

Appearance

A true colossus of a man, Onyx was by far the largest of his brothers. There was only one man taller than him in the Galaxy, and that was the Emperor himself. He towered over anybody like a mountain given life, and his powerful laugh sounded like an avalanche. The Primarch's skin was greyish in colour due to a minor defect in his geneseed, strengthening his resemblance to a walking mountain even further. His facial features were very coarse and rugged, like if chiselled from a cliff face by an inexperienced sculptor and then touched by erosion. No hair could ever grow on his head, although the Primarch always thought that a wild mane would suit his personality perfectly. He compensated for his baldness with his facial hair, which included large fluffy muttonchops, a curly moustache and a long braided beard. Onyx's grey eyes seemingly didn't belong on this stern face: they were bright, full of life and had a mischievous twinkle to them.

His movements were slow, but his legendary strength more than compensated for it. Onyx had more strength in his finger than a normal Space Marine would have in his entire upper body, and could reportedly crush a Power Armour helmet within his hand. Indeed, he did destroy several perfectly fine helmets from his Legion's armoury just for his entertainment, caring little for their value. When conflicted by his Techmarines, he said that only the weaklings needed to put on helmets in battle, and his boys were the toughest Marines in the Galaxy. Combined with his clumsiness and carefree attitude, his strength tended to cause a lot of accidental destruction wherever Onyx went, but the Primarch just casually shrugged it off, telling that his Legion's treasury would pay for everything. For this reason and many others, his treasury was usually half-empty, and he was the only Primarch to ever ask his brothers to lend him some money.

The weeks he spent staring into the giant soothstone slab in his youth had a profound effect on the Primarch - parts of his skin turned to stone, especially on his fists and his back, from which short stone spikes grew. These mutations were examined by Imperial physicians upon Onyx's reunion with his father and found harmless enough to leave them be. Besides, the examination revealed that parts of the Primarch's skeleton turned to stone as well. During the Great Crusade, the mutation slowly progressed, accelerating after especially stressful or emotional experiences. By the time of the Siege of Terra, most of Onyx's skin was petrified, which made movement difficult for the Primarch. He took to the battlefield all the same, compensating for his lack of mobility with sheer ferocity.

Wargear

Uniquely for an Astartes, Onyx's set of Terminator Armour was not made from the modern materials typical for the Imperium, but was instead chiselled out of great monolithic slabs of Neolithan rock. Even for him, a set of armour of such enormous weight was sometimes a bit bothersome to carry on his shoulders, so he reluctantly allowed his Techmarines to mechanise it with parts salvaged from old mining machines. These rugged industrial parts protruding from under the stone of his armour made the Primarch appear as brutal as humanly possible. While Neolithan rock offered unmatched protection, it was nearly impossible to repair, so Onyx's armour was always covered in chips and small cracks from the last couple of battles, giving it a stark resemblance to natural stone worn down by erosion. In accordance with the ancient Neolithan tradition of painting scenes of a successful hunt on the cave walls before the hunt to ensure good luck, he painted scenes of glorious victory on his armour before every battle. Onyx was admittedly not the best artist, but very few in his Legion were brave enough to point that out.

His weapons of choice reflected his preference of close combat. In most circumstances, Onyx went into battle equipped with twin Artificer power fists. These weapons gave him the feeling closest to pummelling the enemy with his own hands, which he enjoyed immensely. Sometimes in a reckless feat of bravado he threw his weapons to the ground, continuing to fight the foes with his bare hands, punching their heads off and breaking their necks like twigs. The Primarch's legendary strength ensured that even this radical minimalist approach was fairly effective, though effectiveness was near the top of the long list of things Onyx didn't care for in the slightest. Besides, the Primarch often carried a traditional Neolithan stone pickaxe with him, though this one was more for decoration than anything. This is not to say that Onyx never used it to break a couple of skulls; but then again, he also used a chair leg, a lamppost and a cow leg to break a couple of skulls at different points in his life.

Sometimes the circumstances forced him to use ranged weaponry. In these cases, he dusted off his Igneous Cannon, a one of a kind weapon based on a modified STC found by his Legion. This gun shot lumps of lava as its projectiles and used obsidian dust for ammo. While the range of these projectiles left much to be desired, their effect on any kind of armour was nothing short of magnificent. Lava could melt through through most of the materials used for armour or at least contaminated them, overheating the systems.

A fan's attempt at rules

	PTS	WS	BS	S	T	W	I	A	Ld	Sv
Onyx:	465	6	3	8	8	7	5	5	10	2+/4++

Unit type: Independent Character, Infantry.

Wargear: Cragplate Armor, Gloves, Igneous Canon

Special Rules: ADAMANTIUMEST WILL!!!, Very Bulky, Eternal Warrior, Fear, Fearless, HAH! A FEEBLE EFFORT!, Independent Character, It Will Not Die, Master of the Legion, NO YOU FOOLS, THEY RUN FROM US!

Cragplate Armor: It's armor made of rocks, yo. 2+/3++. Reduces the strength of all ranged attacks by onyx remaining wounds

Gloves: The twin mastercrafted powerfists crafted by the Stone Man's artificers, Onyx never reffered to them as anything other than "My gloves," though he was enthusiastically grateful to their makers. IStrike with the following profile: S:x2 AP1, Armorbane, Concussive, Paired (+1A), Strikedown. Every to wound roll of 6 reduces targets attacks by 1d3 in challenge

Igneous Canon: A bizarre weapon, to say the least. Shoots chunks of lava. It may not burn as hot as plasma, but its more solid state of matter means that the heat sticks around longer, overheating flesh and circuit alike. It shoots with the following profile: S:10 AP4 Assault 1, 16 inch range, Blast, Deflagrate, Fleshbane, Haywire.

ADAMANTIUMEST WILL!!!: Upon hearing of the "Adamantium Will" of his brothers, Onyx proclaimed that he had the ADAMANTIUMEST WILL OF ALL!!!. Resisting psykers is about strength of character and simply denying the warp's right to affect you, and no one does denial like Onyx does. 2+ deny the witch, baby.

HAH! A FEEBLE EFFORT!: Onyx has zero fucks to give about the following: Concussive, Strikedown, Fleshbane.

No you fools, THEY run from US!: No Stone Man would run in the sight of their primarch. No Stone Man. Ever. They all get fearless.

ONYX SMASH!!! Onyx has two and only two purposes. First, he wrecks shit. 7 S8 AP1 Armorbane, Concussive, Strikedown hits on the charge are going to kill anything up to and including a Landraider. Due to his high strength and resilience, Onyx is one of the more formidable Primarchs, though his low initiative and attacks are definitely a weakness. His immunity to most status affects and psychic powers helps make up for that to some degree. He also makes all his sons fearless, which is just awesome. Not exactly a tactical genius, but he makes a good battering ram.