Editing Arelex Orannis (section)

===Youth===

Arelex's pod took a very strange route, emerging from the Warp inside an ancient Space Hulk, rather than on a collision course with a planet like most of his brothers' pods. The scattered tribesmen, descendants of the original crews from those doomed voidcraft, were amazed when the hulk left the Warp, but this time something stayed behind from its travels. Opening the pod, they found a young infant boy, and despite the ever-present fear of starvation, the tribe added him to their numbers and accepted one more mouth to feed and shelter from the darkness. 

Arelex grew quickly, learning the hulk's ever changing ways from his elders and from first-hand experience. For one with his genetic gifts, the deadly serious business of day-to-day survival also became something of a game. Young Arelex delighted in putting his skills to use, climbing, crawling, sprinting and free-falling through every darkened corner of the colossal metal world, learning all he could of the ship's ways. He would often speak of "listening to the world's songs", and indeed, Arelex could foresee danger than none of his tribesmen even suspected, simply by catching minute fragments of sound that heralded disaster. On more than one occasion, Arelex convinced the tribe to pack up and move elsewhere, sometimes mere moments before an explosion or a swarm of mutant horrors would have descended upon them. In time, he became considered something of a seer, and the tribe's shamans initiated him into their deepest mysteries, his adopted father and tribal leader Ar-El chief among their membership. 

Though Arelex was hopeless at reading the mists of time and possibility like his adopted elders, he proved unexpectedly gifted when listening to their oral histories, songs of the long-dead vessels that made up the hulk, and the various fragmented tales of their systems and equipment, and how to maintain them. By these eternal songs, passed down from shaman to shaman, the fragmented Geller Field generators were kept barely functional, providing the tribe "safe" havens when the hulk inevitably returned to the Warp once more. The songs spoke of many other wondrous things, but the tribe simply had no time to spare investigating their truth. Survival came first. 

Arelex, on the other hand, was ill-content with this state of affairs. For most of his teenage years, he harassed the shamans to sing the songs over and over, memorizing their least detail. Every trinket, every relic, every heirloom the tribe still kept, all were mercilessly examined by the boy-Primarch. And miraculously... a few of them began to reveal unsuspected secrets. And he began to venture far afield. 

For days, weeks at a time, Arelex would disappear into the fathomless depths of the hulk, and armed with nothing more than a few sharp pieces of hull metal, he would retrieve trinkets and baubles, dataslates and pass-codes, and the corpses of mutants, Orks, and other unknown xenos he had killed. The tribe ate well those days. Over time, some of the braver youths began to follow their hero into the blackness, and Arelex's little band of boys tore their way from one end of the hulk to the other, practicing a fearless style of patient combat. When outmatched, they waited. Watching. Stalking. Eventually, the mutant would make a mistake. The Ork would quarrel with his comrades. The xeno would slumber. And then Arelex and his friends would act, striking without restraint or fear, plunging their knives deep into the foe's vulnerable flesh. By these methods, the tribe prospered and grew. 

And fragmented though they were, the tidbits of ancient times Arelex retrieved were beginning to form recognizable patterns in the Primarch's mind. One piece led to another, and the two together unlocked a third, and Arelex began to unlock doors held frozen for thousands of years, and awaken cogitators slumbering since their masters died centuries ago. It could not be called a "love" of learning, for the merciless needs of survival drove Arelex forward, not some intellectual pursuit, but learn he did, and value learning Arelex would. His genetically enhanced body let him kill, but his razor-sharp mind let him '''win'''. And with time, the teenage hellion grew into a gifted savage, an educated tribesman, a leader of his people. 

The tribe was all, and all were the tribe. No greater sin than harming a tribesman existed, and the only possible sentence was exile to a certain death in the blackness. The camaraderie of friends and family was a faint light against the horrors of life, and Arelex grew up steeped in that warm embrace of people who work for each other as much as themselves. Despite life's harshness, the Primarch would occasionally remark on his upbringing as a high point in his life, something that many of his brother Primarchs could not say. The people quarreled from time to time, but true divisiveness was swiftly crushed by survival's labor. His adopted family, father, mother, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins, all knew him by name, and he knew them. Without those bonds, the tribe would have perished long ago, and Arelex took pride in maintaining them. And once Arelex rose to lead the tribe, those bonds helped him overcome their fears, and begin to push back the darkness. 

In a campaign as terrible and challenging as any he would fight for the Imperium, young Arelex rallied his people and struck outward, using his carefully accumulated storehouse of lore to access new parts of the hulk, and bring some of its systems back online. New Geller Field generators were found and re-powered, giving the tribe more safe houses to shelter in. Xenos and mutants were killed by reactivated auto-sentries, and their meat fed the tribe, allowing their numbers to grow. Guns were retrieved from ancient lockers, so the tribe could protect itself in Arelex's absence.

Arelex's crowning achievement, surpassing even the final bloodstained purges that reclaimed the entire hulk for his tribe, was reactivating the Navigator chambers from a long-dormant military cruiser embedded in the hulk's core. The Warp Drive of the ancient voidship was responsible for its uncontrolled descents into the Warp, and Arelex reasoned that by restoring these systems as best he could, perhaps the hulk could be aimed, even piloted. The risks were beyond calculation, but the hulk itself was singing a tale of death and destruction. All things come to an end, and their metal world had precious few Warp Jumps left in it before the whole hulk broke apart and doomed them all. 

The Primarch would have to act soon, his hand forced by time's remorseless passage. The tribe's shamans carried thin remnants of intermingled blood from Navigators and psykers, forged in ancient days of interbreeding between stranded crew members. None of them had the long-lost Third Eye, only a faint ability to sense the Warp beyond the hull like a blind man groping in the dark. But it would have to be enough. Better groping hands than none at all. 

And so the tribe braced themselves within the glowing borders of the Geller Fields, while Arelex and the shamans took their places deep within the hulk. For the first time, Arelex felt true fear, as he commended his entire tribe to the Warp, and the hulk's protection. The Primarch gambled all he had ever known on his own skills, and the strength of Mankind's works. 

The hulk disappeared from mortal sight, leaving only blackness behind. Arelex thought of planets, and suns. Strange things known only from ancient stories, worlds with practically infinite space, where life was easy and the air was clean. Titanic balls of fire which nurtured life, rather than the fitful and often explosive emergency lights that dimly lit their world. Lands where water flowed freely, where food grew of its own accord without needing the blood of mutants to drink. Wonders beyond measure, surely. As the Warp howled close around them, Arelex put his faith in the stories, and chose to believe that such things could exist. 

Forward. Ever forward. To turn back is to die, to become fearful is to fall into oblivion. Dashing from console to console, Arelex kept the hulk's fragile components alive, while his father and the other shamans turned their every thought to finding a path through the Warp, to the homeworld of humanity spoken of in so many ancient songs. To the Cradle of Man. To Earth. To Terra. 

But the Warp would not let them pass so easily.

It was fortunate indeed that the hulk was located fairly close to Terra, for Arelex's journey would have been short by the standards of Imperial voidcraft. But with a jury-rigged composite of a thousand dead vessels? Without a Navigator? Without any real understanding of the Warp, or the void? Terra might as well have been in another galaxy. Their Warp jump began as smoothly as could have been hoped, and for a time the winds of Chaos were calm. The shamans' navigation was crude in the extreme, and their fumbling hands began to roil the Sea of Souls in their passage. The entire hulk began to shudder and groan, and Arelex's ears picked up the unmistakable sounds of imminent failure building in its components. 

The rough seas became a sudden hurricane without warning, and their most skilled psychic, shaman Ke-Kos, burst into lurid flames of a million hues, dying horribly as the fury of the Warp forced itself through his brain. Something horrible began to pull itself through his smoldering body as it fell to the deck, but with his life force severed, the creature never fully manifested, vanishing from whence it came without the shaman's power to sustain itself. Even though it existed for the blink of an eye, Arelex would never forget the jagged shard of fear that shot through him in that moment. Hull-wraiths he knew. Hull-wraiths he had killed before, breaking their ghostly, icy forms with his bare hands. This was something far, far greater and more terrible than those. And as the hulk shrieked metallic sounds of pain, Arelex began to lose his confidence. The tribe had no choice, the hulk was dying. He knew this. But had he chosen the wisest path? Could they have pried a voidship loose and flown it to safety? 

There was no time. Ke-Kos was dead, and to stop now meant certain death. Shaman Ar-El was the next best option. Arelex knew this. But he also knew it meant killing his own father. Committing the greatest of sins, kinslaying. With a face as grim and haggard as death itself, Arelex asked his father to die for the Primarch's sins, and find them a path through the storm Arelex had guided them into. 

And so he did. A kind of golden aura surrounded Arelex's adopted father, something unseen and unheard of in any of the ancient tales. His strength seemed to multiply a hundredfold, and the hulk abruptly changed course in the Warp's shifting currents. Though they were no longer headed for Terra, Ar-El sang to the tribe, sang of a golden beacon in the madness that promised safety. Arelex believed his father mad, dying, grasping for hope where surely there was none. And yet, what choice was there? The Primarch bent his every skill to sustaining the physical vessel, while Ar-El guided them inexorably towards the beacon. 

The hulk could take no more, and Arelex engaged the cogitators that would return them to reality. Shrieking in protest as they burst from the Warp, the hulk's systems flashed and died in showers of electrical sparks, never to awaken again. And shaman Ar-El died with them, his own form twisting and distorting horribly as the Warp claimed one final price in blood for disturbing it so arrogantly. His bones and muscle stretched and twisted, drawing themselves out like putty into the shape of a leering skull, then all caught ablaze in violet fire with a final howl of terror. 

Nothing more than ash remained of Arelex's father, and even that ash was swallowed up into the Warp. 

But, they had arrived around a planet, drifting just inside the orbit of its innermost moon, a beautiful white jewel orbiting above a colossal orb of blue, green, and brown. Its parent star burned a warm orangish-yellow, and Arelex wept as its light fell upon him, the first starlight any of them had ever known. And around the planet, a host of small stars burned brightly in the void, coming ever closer to the colossal interloper suddenly in their midst. The hulk had failed in its quest to reach Terra, but the Emperor had found another of his children. Immediately recognizing Arelex's presence, the Emperor's mighty flagship put on flank speed to reach his as soon as possible, pulling ahead of the fleet with haste. 

The golden giant teleported aboard the hulk in a brilliant flash, only to see a stonefaced young Primarch standing apart from his tribe, bitter tears running down his cheeks. Though the people comforted his adoptive mother, Arelex himself dared not touch her. The Primarch made arrangements to have his tribe settled on the planet below, and to have the Space Hulk that had sheltered them all these years repaired and remade into an orbital station, a sentry to guard them forevermore. Arelex would see to it that his family led a good life, but he would never return to them again. The code of the tribe was absolute. A kinslayer must go into exile. 

And so, Ar-El-Ex Or-Ann-Is, son of shaman Ar-El and of mother Or-Ann, would take the name Arelex Orannis, and become Primarch of Legio Secundus, the first Primarch to have been found beyond Terra, and brother to Hektor, who had remained upon Terra thanks to Malcador the Sage. Though stricken with grief, Arelex walled off the part of him that had been a tribesman aboard the hulk, and strode forward to an unknown destiny at the Emperor's side, with a new tribe to call his own. 

He would not fail them as he had his adoptive father.