Valorn Adras

Valorn Adras
Title/Honours	The Scarred Hound of Taiga, The Last Lord of Taiga, The First Regent, The Unseen End
Discovered (world)	Taiga
Discovered (period)	862.M30
Legion	Pale Hounds
Great Crusade Command	Primarch, 697th Expeditionary fleet
Heraldry/Sigil
Unique Weapon	Forlorn Hope, Disizza Knife
Distinguishing Traits	Sniper, Pragmatic, Professional, Perfectionist
Flaws	Arrogant and Neurotic
Role	Separatist
Fate	Trapped in warp transit

This page is part of the Warmasters Triumvirate, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. See the Warmasters Triumvirate page for more information on the Alternate Universe.

Valorn Adras, also known as the Scarred Hound of Taiga is the Primarch of the Pale Hounds Space Marine Legion. A mysterious and little understood figure, due to he and his Legion's distaste for battling alongside their fellows, Valorn was an unparalleled sniper and master of stealth. Whilst he displayed a professional and rather aloof persona in public, those who knew him best knew him to have a sardonic sense of humour, though they also knew him to be prideful and easily obsessed. During the Brotherwar, Valorn joined Jon-Frederíc due to his dissatisfaction with the purely mortal nature of the High Lords and was - along with his Hounds - instrumental in breaking the stalemate at the Battle of New Hope. After the death of Zelbezis Dyestes, Valorn vanished along with his capital ship and a number of his finest marines. Nothing has been seen or heard of him since.

History

Primarch Origin

Valorn’s pod landed on the small, heavily forested and decidedly feudal planet of Taiga. It was found by Sharrath Arkan, the eldest son of the Arkan family, one of the aristocratic families that ruled Taiga at the time. Sharrath recovered both the pod and the child inside and brought both back to the family home with the aid of his servants. Sharrath’s father and the patriarch of the family, Silas, decided to adopt this “Child of the stars” as his own and named him Adras Arkan.

The Formative years of Adras’ life were highly constrictive. The young Primarch was rarely let out of the Arkan family home let alone the Arkan estate. The reason given to him was that the lands outside of the estate were fraught with danger, though what form that danger took and why it was dangerous they did not deign to tell him until he had reached physical maturity. Until then he was trained in the tactical arts of warfare by his father, taught how to fight by his brother Sharrath and taught the history of his home planet by an elderly scholar named Elsk with whom Adras was quite close. Of all the stories Elsk told Adras the one the young primarch was most enamoured by was the story of Valorn, a great statesman and warrior who united the people of Taiga into one nation and established the noble houses. Elsk would later be released from his service for telling Adras the story, the reasons for which Adras would also not understand till he was fully grown. When he was grown, he learnt of the Rebels. Rising from the planet’s peasantry they rejected the leadership of the noble families and were said to commit countless terrible acts upon those who opposed them. The family said they had feared for his safety, but now that he was grown they practically begged for his aid against the rebels. Adras wholeheartedly agreed, desiring to be of use to his home.

With his physical strength and skill already displayed in his duelling lessons, Adras was placed on the frontline of the war and performed admirably. With his aid, many battles that would otherwise have been lost were forged into victories. But something about the whole situation bothered the young primarch. He had been told of the evil of the rebels and noble acts of the aristocracy, but he saw nothing of either. What he did see was his fellows’ callous acts towards those they were supposed to be protecting. He saw towns become giant charnel houses, and prisoners tortured to the brink of death before being crucified by the roadsides.

Adras could understand the tactical point of atrocities. After all, they worked on the moral of the enemy and pushed them towards breaking point. Theoretically at least. But, two things worried him. One was that the nobles seemed to be deluding themselves into believing that both sides were enacting atrocities to maintain a sense of moral superiority. The thing that worried him more was that it didn’t seem to be working. Rather than shake the rebels resolve every abominable act merely drove them to fight harder. Both these realisations shook his faith in the nobility, whom the story of Valorn had noted to be descended from peasants, but they did not destroy it. That came later.

Adras’ faith in the nobility was buried in the town of Stongar just a year and a half after he had joined the war effort. Adras’ platoon had stopped in the town for the night on their way south. As they entered the town they took notice of an old man in rags speaking to a large crowd. As they approached they heard the contents of his speech. The venerable gentleman was cursing the noble houses and their war, lambasting them for the countless atrocities they had committed. Adras’ father was traveling with the platoon that day and ordered the man be brought before him. Two men marched off into the crowd and returned with the wizened body of Elsk, Adras’ tutor. Upon seeing the young Adras standing among the Arkan soldiers the old man seemed to deflate. He said not a word as Silas lectured him on the great sacrifices the nobles made for the people of Taiga. He ignored the soldiers as they beat him to the earth. He hardly seemed to notice as Silas cut his throat and dropped him to the street to die. The whole time his eyes stayed on Adras, looking not betrayed or angry or even shocked. Just disappointed. It shook Adras to watch one father figure kill the other, the camaraderie the two had shared lost to time and rage. It shook him even more to hear his father order the soldiers to crucify Elsk’s surviving family. As he did, he noted that he should have fired the old man sooner, for filling his son’s head with ideas about some preposterous brotherhood between peasant and noble. In Silas’ eyes the people were nothing but sheep to be driven, and the nobles were their divinely appointed drivers, born to lead them.

The old man had few left. His children had died for both nobles and rebels, his grandchildren had been slain by famine and pestilence and his siblings had been felled by time. All he had left was single grandson, barely ten years of age. Silas nailed the poor boy to a wooden cross and ordered two soldiers to stay guard over it allowing no one to take the boy down until he was dead. In that moment, Adras knew he could no longer remain loyal to the nobles. He knew that if this act was common the nobles had brought the rebellion upon themselves. He knew that even if they put down this rebellion there would be another. He had been taught that the nobles were perfectly suited to the ruling of the planet, but now he saw the reality. The nobles were far from perfect, and even if they were the only people who could govern Taiga that didn’t mean they deserved to. After all, the Valorn of ancient legend had been naught but a commoner himself in the beginning.

Adras left much behind that night. His father, his comrades, his sword, hell he left practically everything he’d ever known behind. All he took with him was his tutor’s grandson Guragol, his brother who could also no longer follow their father, enough supplies for a several day long journey, a destination and a new name, for he could be Adras Arkan no longer. Valorn Adras would undo the wrongs of Adras Arkan or die trying.

He journeyed south to the town his platoon had been ordered to assault. The locals had thrown their lot in with the rebels and were initially sceptical of the giant and his comrades. They became even more so when they were given their visitors names. The three were locked up in the town jail, though not before Valorn gave his warning to the town’s inhabitants. He warned them of platoons coming from the north and sure enough they showed up. The Taigan Loyalists wandered straight into a field of caltrops and bear traps before being introduced to a barrage of crossbow bolts.

It was a slaughter, yet Silas escaped. With Valorn’s intel (if not Valorn himself) proven trustworthy the rebels began to see a degree of worth in their noble captive. However, many of the rebellion’s still did not believe that Valorn truthfully wished to defect. Whilst no definite orders came from the council, the rebel leader in charge of the settlement holding the Primarch ordered him tortured, so that they could extract every scrap of useful intel from his highborn hide. Valorn endured this brutal treatment stoically, his super-human durability and pain tolerance rendering all but his captors most brutal methods ineffective. Even so, he still answered his captor’s questions, fearing to whom the torturers would turn their knives if he did not. Eventually however, something had to break.

Some weeks after Valorn’s capture he was placed within the familiar surroundings of the torture chamber and seen to by the familiar face of the fort’s chief torturer. This visit proceeded much as the previous ones had done, with his most gracious host taking a variety of sharpened implements to Valorn’s form, and Valorn repeating nuggets of useful information throughout the proceedings. Eventually however, the torturer seemed to grow bored. He noted that Valorn was a particularly morose individual and that he wondered what he’d look like with a smile on his face. With this he retrieved an unusually sleek and silver knife from one of the racks and took it to Valorn’s face. Unlike prior blades, this one parted Valorn’s skin like butter and carved a ragged curve from the corner of the primarch’s mouth, like a half smile. The torturer proudly revealed that the knife had been forged from a fragment of a strange metal sphere that had fallen into a noble estate some years ago. One which had contained an infant boy. Silas Arkan had sold the sphere to his fellow noble’s, but the rebels had been able to procure a small fragment of the thig and shape it into the elegant weapon currently cutting its way through Valorn’s mouth. He wondered aloud at the sharpness of the blade, to pierce such thick hide, even going so far as to wonder how well it would cut through the skin of his cellmates. In response Valorn broke free from his response and crushed the torturers hand in one inhumanly large fist. The young primarch quietly informed the torturer that he allowed this torture for the sake of the rebels, to let them feel in control. However, he promised that if these ministrations were passed on to Sharrath and Guragol, he would not hesitate to wreak his terrible vengeance upon who so ever was responsible. He then tore the knife from the whimpering torturer’s hands, marched himself back to his cell and locked himself in. Unsurprisingly, he and the others were released, with the torturer and fort commander soon filling the vacant cells. The rebel council had apparently decided that torturing a willing informant was a particularly significant blunder and once again Valorn was conscripted. However, Valorn would never truly heal from the wound that was inflicted upon him that day. The wound would scar, leaving Valorn with a curved smirk carved into his face for the rest of his days.

At first, the assistance he rendered unto the Rebels took the form of information on troop movements, the locations of weapon stores and the like, but as he began to run out of viable intel he went from informant to warrior. His first few battles made it abundantly clear to Valorn that he still was not trusted by his fellow rebels. He was offered no weapons save those he could scrounge on the battlefield, and even then, those were taken from him after the fight was over. As time passed and the rebels became gradually surer Valorn wouldn’t kill them in their sleep he was granted the right to not only keep the weapons he looted but take some weapons into battle himself. He chose a pair of knives and a crossbow so large it was almost a ballista. With Valorn the rebels found not only a powerful warrior but a skilled strategist. He found himself being granted more and more control over his operations as the war dragged on and the nobles were pushed back to a series of massively fortified castles in the north of the planet. By this point Valorn had been given control of his own rebel cell and as such had a position on the Rogue Council, the leaders of the rebellion. He and his cell were sent to operate deep behind enemy lines, sabotaging the noble’s efforts to counter the rebels. It was here that Valorn first practiced the combined arts of blitzkrieg and infiltration that would become the staple of his legion. Eventually Valorn’s cell was given the privilege of spearheading the campaign against the Noble fortresses.

If anything, the assaults on the castles were easier than the battles Valorn fought in the early days of the war. These were buildings that both Valorn and Sharrath had visited and explored when they were younger. They knew the history of these places and their architecture. Turned out that the nobles of Taiga had a bit of a thing for secret passageways and exits. Of course, a secret exit also functions as a secret entrance. As such most of the battles towards the end of the war went a similar way: the brothers go on ahead of their forces and sneak into castle via one secret escape route or other, the brothers do a variety of sneaky activities such as sabotaging weapons and killing guards, the brothers open main gates when the bulk of their forces arrive, the brothers watch like a pair of happy parents as rebel forces take the castle with little difficulty. Eventually only one bastion of noble might remained. The ancient fortress of the Arkan family.

It was not a difficult assault. Valorn had Sharrath stay with the troops as he slipped into the old fortress and killed Silas in his sleep. With the old man dead tradition dictated that his role as head of the house would be granted to his eldest surviving son, who happened to be Sharrath. Thus, Sharrath appeared before the gates of his family castle and was granted his birth right by his mother. He then revealed his previously unknown allegiance to his relatives and ordered the noble troops to stand down and surrender to the rebels. Whilst they were rather displeased to follow the orders of a traitor they had few other options, considering that the host was nearby and a twelve-foot-tall superhuman who had shown he could kill them easily in their sleep was even nearer, so obeyed his command.

With this the rebellion ended. All the nobles were either dead or imprisoned (house arrest in the case of the Arkans) and so the Rogue’s Council began to govern Taiga. Each of the 13 councillors were given a 13th of the land once ruled by the nobles to govern as their own. This included Valorn, who was granted the territories around his old family home and took to his new duty solemnly. Unsure as to whether he could father children he officially adopted Guragol, with whom he had grown close over the years of the rebellion and appointed him as his heir. Thus, began an age of peace, but it was not to last. For a visitor was fated to arrive on Taiga bearing very ill news indeed.

It was a beautiful day, the day the Emperor arrived. Birds were singing, flowers were blooming, children were laughing and one young primarch was sitting in his study signing forms and doing other things integral to the running of his lands. As he sat and signed a servant entered and announced nervously that Valorn had a visitor. Valorn enquired as to the nature of the visitor. His servant responded that the visitor was from a far-off land and wished to speak to the primarch alone. Cautiously intrigued he told his servant to bring the visitor in, whilst he reached into his drawer for a knife, just in case. Whatever Valorn had been expecting of his visitor the figure went far beyond it. The figure wore a simple brown cloak that covered their form, was taller and broader than Valorn and spoke in a voice like summer thunder: dangerous and commanding, yet oddly warm. The visitor greeted Valorn with great solemnity and told him that his life was in danger. Valorn scoffed and stated that he had dealt with danger before, so his visitor had no need to worry. He then enquired as to exactly who his visitor was. The visitor removed his cloak and let it fall to the floor revealing dark hair, stern features and golden armour. ‘Your father.’ the Emperor of Mankind responded. Valorn, whose experience with fathers and father figures was hardly great merely raised an eyebrow at this revelation and bade the Emperor explain.

And so, the Emperor spoke, telling his son of the Imperium, his creation of the primarchs and above all else, Valorn’s purpose, to lead a legion of Astartes and aid his father in uniting and safeguarding humanity. Valorn noted that his life would most certainly be in danger if he followed his father to war. The Emperor responded by explaining that his son’s life was in danger anyway. Taiga was doomed, an asteroid strike on its sister world of Meros having altered its orbit, which had always brought it close enough to Taiga to cause some changes to the tides. Within a matter of years, the two worlds would collide, eradicating all life on both worlds. Valorn might have been inclined to disbelieve the Emperor, but, planetary collisions were probably the least fantastic of his father’s claims. Valorn enquired as to what was to be done. The Emperor initially requested that Valorn leave the world with him, but, when it became apparent that Valorn would not leave his people behind, he offered the use of his fleet to transport the people of Taiga to a safer world, but he could not provide that permanently as the fleet would have to move on in a few months, but he would send for Valorn’s gene sons to aid him after their departure.

Thus, began the great evacuation of Taiga. Valorn sent a missive to all the settlements of Taiga, telling the people to trust the strangers who came from the sky, for they were their only hope of survival. Of course, many were sceptical of Valorn’s claims, as the average human being is unwilling to trust strange beings flying down from the sky in giant metal boxes. As such Valorn was forced to travel throughout Taiga to convince his doubters that he spoke the truth. By the time he was done the Emperor had been forced to move on with his fleet after only two trips to and from the planet, but the Pale Hounds had arrived en masse to greet their new primarch. Their first meeting is said to have been far less emotional and far briefer than those of the other Primarchs. Less of a heartfelt reunion and more a brief hello before they dove into the evacuation efforts. As the months passed the young primarch began to fall to despair for a single reason. They couldn’t save everyone. Taiga was not a particularly populated world, with disease and warfare limiting its growth, but it still had a population in the millions. Though the Emperor's fleet had taken millions each trip and the Pale Hounds fleet was managing a similar haul they just weren’t taking enough, many would still be left on world when the impact came. As such, Valorn was forced to prioritise. The Elderly and the dying were ignored in favour of the young and the healthy. Families were torn apart with parents and grandparents being left to die while their children were whisked off to parts unknown, never to see one another again. And even then, they couldn’t save everyone. Not even close. When Meros finally struck Taiga, just under two thirds of its population were still planetside. Valorn watched as his homeworld heaved under the mighty impact, its crust cracking and tearing revealing the molten magma beneath, chunks of the world spiralling off into the void as Meros scraped past. When it was done the verdant ball of green he’d once known was no more, its surfaced shattered and the side Meros had struck cracked open like an egg's shell.

Valorn said little on that final journey from Taiga to the hive world of Advent. But when the refugees had left the fleet, to begin a new life on a new world, Valorn opened a vox channel to the fleet. He told them that they had done well, having saved millions of souls from a fiery death, but that he wasn’t here to provide congratulations. He wished to apologise. The sixteenth legion had come to Taiga expecting to find their Primarch. Instead they’d found a child wearing their primarch’s face, terrified at the thought of losing his adopted home. A child who could not lead his sons, nor aid them. But now? Now he would be their primarch, he would lead them to victory for humanity, but before that they had to ensure that they remembered. He ordered every ship to carve a single word into the highest point of their largest room. A word to remind them that sometimes a world could fall, not from hubris, malice or selfish greed, but by chance. A word to remind them that if a world could fall to cosmic chance they must ensure that the worlds of the Imperium would fall to naught else. That word was “Taiga”

It is said that he then sent a message to the Emperor. A brief, simple message, only ten words long. ‘Your son is ready. What would you have him do?’