Editing Mortarion (section)

===Horus Heresy===
For the longest time, we didn't actually quite know ''why'' Mortarion joined the Traitors since there weren't many books with him as the protagonist. It was generally presumed as being for [[Perturabo|ideological reasons]] rather than being outright [[Fulgrim|corrupted]], [[Angron|broken]] or [[Konrad Curze|bat-shit insane]] since we knew he already considered the [[Emperor]] and the [[Imperial Truth]] to be hypocritical and had never forgiven the Emperor for being the one to kill his foster "father" instead of him.

Now to many, that second issue might sound petty to the point of outright ridiculousness. They would be entirely correct. He had, after all, accepted the Emperor's challenge, lost, and had then honored his bargain. For all intents and purposes the whole situation should have been over and done with, and for practically any other Primarch (except maybe the similarly Darwinian Ferrus), it would have been. But Mortarion was not simply bitter at having been denied his revenge by the Emperor; his problem ran faaar deeper than that. For you see, his whole Darwinian fitness schtick, which was the axis around which his world turned, had been suffering from a major problem ever since the Emperor had saved him. Mortarion had always been of the opinion that [[Marines Malevolent|if you could not do something for yourself, then you were weak, and as such did not deserve whatever it was that you'd failed to achieve.]] Such was simply the way of Barbarus. On a planet that crappy, anyone who was weak just fucking died.

What was even worse in Mortarion's mind than simply not being strong enough to achieve something on one's own, was the concept of achieving something with ''help''. Yet this was precisely what the Emperor had done for Mortarion. He had been too weak to kill his foster father and the Emperor, who was strong, had stepped in and done if for him. To top it all off, the Emperor had done it with contemptuous ease; the Overlord had been as nothing to him, and had been felled in a single blow. Both the resentment and the feelings of inadequacy caused by the Golden Giga-chad's casual display of might had been festering inside Mortarion throughout the whole of the Crusade, causing his desire for greater strength to grow into a Fulgrim-level obsession. He also felt that the whole goal of the Imperium was idiotic. To Mortarion, the Emperor's intention to build an Imperium of ''Man'' essentially meant building an empire of, and for, the ''weak''. Worse yet, it was those who were strong, the Primarchs and Astartes, who were building it for them. It seemed to Mortarion like this Imperium of Man would have the strong ''serving'' the weak, and that was a complete inversion of what he believed to be proper. As time had ground on and his internalization of his failure upon Barbarus continued to gnaw at him, his opinion of the weak became ever more contemptuous. He would go from simply dismissing the weak to outright despising them, and believing that they did not deserve to live as anything other than fodder for the strong. And again, to be fair to him, this was simply the way of Barbarus. You ''had'' to pull your own weight at the very least; there was simply no other option.

Like Horus, Mortarion also hated the influence that civilians had begun to wield post-Ullanor, seeing them as unworthy and, well, weak. Horus' rebellion promised an order based on '''Might Is Right''', and if the Warmaster died in the process of overthrowing the Emprah, then Mortarion might get a shot at the top job. So he was probably like "Yeah I won't worship Chaos, but I'll follow you anyway!" with Horus. Then again, a flashback with Malcador tells us that between the jailkeeper relationship with his adoptive dad, wanting to kill said foster parent, failing and watching his real dad kill said evil dad and finally finding out that his real dad was also a psyker (basically everything that he hated) that dabbled with the Warp behind everyone's back; Mortarion might have had mental scars of similar significance to Curze's and Angron's. He may simply have been better at hiding them. If his own statements are to be believed, then he, like Angron, was also not a fan of people he considered to be tyrants (like his necro-daddy) and as far as he was concerned, the Emperor fit that description to a T.

If he was telling Jaghatai the truth, in Horus he saw a leader who could give the strong freedom to dominate the galaxy, driving out the weak and impure. At the same time, Horus might not keep the throne once he got it; there would be "room to rise" when the war was over-- specifically, room for Mortarion to take Horus's place. However, that wasn't as easy as he thought, especially when he saw just how many despised psykers, witches, and sorcerers were running around all over the place. As a last-ditch attempt to change the balance, he tried to recruit [[Jaghatai Khan]] on [[Prospero]], using the Warrior Lodges to subvert the [[White Scars]]. Being an architect of the [[Librarian|Librarius]] and a generally cool guy, the Khan told Mortarion he was an idiot and went to town on the Death Lord. Mortarion gave Jaghatai the fight of his life, but eventually ran away to take his butthurt out on the rest of the Prosperine system, all the while brooding over the Khan's taunts. He'd thrown his lot in with the thing he hated the most and now that he'd run out of allies, it was going to claim him.

All of this makes for a fairly interesting look into Mortarion's psyche in that his reasons for turning appeared to have been unusually self-serving for a Traitor Primarch. For example, Horus seemed to have actually convinced himself that he was the good guy in the Heresy, Fulgrim basically just got addicted to space opioids, Angron hated the Emperor for letting all his bros die (and had significant brain damage to boot), Curze was a raving lunatic with a split personality, Lorgar's god fixation simply found a new target, who knows with Alpharius/Omegon, Magnus did <s>nothing</s> everything wrong, and Perturabo, despite being an absolute child, thought that he had been used and abused by Daddy E. Mortarion on the other hand appears mostly to have just gotten fed up with the way the Imperium was being run and wanted more power for himself. Kinda based in all honesty...

The ''Scars'' novel kinda retcons the start of Mortarion's descent here -- the Khan thinks that Mortarion's "power" has grown (probably psychically) and that the guy's face looks discoloured around his rebreather. Despite this, he still insisted on claiming he was the only "pure" Primarch.

Just after getting into that scrap with the Khan, he travelled to a library world that once belonged to the [[Thousand Sons]] and set about [[Exterminatus|purging it]] to find a particular person possessed by a daemon. This would prove a turning point, as he kept the daemon in order to [[Inquisition|extract knowledge on how to defeat daemons]], but ended up getting goaded into using sorcerous powers to blast the creature into a mushy pulp and declaring that he would learn all he could about his [[Daemon|enemy]] in order to learn how to [[Fail|better eradicate it]] - which the daemon had foreseen as the beginning of Mortarion's descent into [[Fifteen views of Asscrack|Nurgle's Pocket]].

The retcon continues here, as Mortarion's claims to "purity" are mocked to his face and we're told that a Chaos God has already staked a claim on him. It's also pretty clear that Mortarion's close to going nuts even before this push, as his quarters are littered with Scientific Anti-Warp Devices (AKA shit tons of charms, incantations and numerical codes which do hurt Daemons... once he starts using the Warp). Oh yeah, and he makes speeches about how [[Exterminatus|destroying worlds is good for the soul]].

Following this he went on a psychic binge on [[Molech]], using the daemon prince who his old captain Ignatius Grulgor had become to wipe out entire cities. He also [[Awesome|took a blast from a Stormhammer cannon in the face, stayed on his feet, and destroyed the goddamn superheavy tank.]]

Apparently the tank shell was loaded with a rare substance known as "common sense" (and his regular author was back) so Mortarion retreated from the Warp again, smashed up his trinkets, locked Grulgor away, banned sorcery again (although that only applied to his own Legion and he was more lenient on his allies) and generally treated the whole thing as some kind of lost weekend/failed experiment. His paranoia only got worse when First Captain [[Typhon]] disappeared, and then Horus assigned him the task of destroying the White Scars. Mortarion was so suspicious that he accused Horus of trying to get him killed, not appreciating that he was the only one Horus could trust to Get Shit Done in this scenario until Horus explained that the other Primarchs had [[Fulgrim|fucked off]], [[Angron|were]] [[Konrad Curze|uncontrollable]], [[Perturabo|disillusioned]], [[Alpharius|not really fans in the first place]] or were [[Lorgar|too busy pursuing personal vendettas]].

To that end Mortarion worked alongside [[Eidolon]] of the Emperor's Children, and despite Eidolon being a glory-whore who was all for using Chaos to modify himself wherever he could while also employing sorcerers (while Mortarion is the polar opposite), the two got along really well (mostly because Mortarion made it clear Eidolon was working '''with''' him and not '''for''' him). Surprisingly, Mortarion arguably treated Eidolon better than Eidolon's own Primarch, given how Mortarion was supportive and didn't cut Eidolon's head off.

The mission would have gone swimmingly, if the Scars' head psyker hadn't opened up a [[Dark Glass|Webway gate]]. Still, Mortarion was able to break open the Khan's flagship and teleported aboard with three hundred Terminators... only to find the ship empty, with the Khan and co evacuated to another ship (admittedly Jaghatai hated doing it, feeling like he was a coward for running away). Next thing he knew, the shields came back and his force was zerg rushed by the last of the Sagyar Mazan death squads formed from disgraced (cuz they attempted to usurp the Khan) White Scars. So he watched as his nemesis escaped and the warriors he'd once hoped would force the Khan to join them redeemed themselves by delaying him. And worst of all? [[Troll|They did it while laughing.]]

And all the while, all his ships were getting grimier and the mortals were getting sicker...

Eventually Mortarion got fed up with Typhon fucking around the galaxy on his own and tried to use Eidolon's sorcerers to locate him, but his first captain didn't turn up again until the very last stage of the Heresy. He rejoined the fleet and convinced Mortarion to lead the assault on Terra from his ship, ''Terminus Est''. After they entered the Warp, Typhon ordered all the [[Navigator]]s killed, claiming they were secretly loyalists, and convinced Mortarion that he and his other psykers could get them safely to Terra.

Though you might expect Mortation to flip his shit over his First Captain revealing himself as a psyker and offing dozens of others who were at least grudgingly tolerated by Morty, there is an explanation: according to ''The Buried Dagger'', Typhon planted some evidence that showed the Navigators were scheming to drive the fleet into a supermassive black hole on orders from Malcador, then executed them all before Mortarion could stop him. Morty was pissed, but recognized that he had no other choice but to trust Typhon. It also turns out that Typhon was literally the first normal human Mortarion ever interacted with on Barbarus and was one of the first recruits for his original Death Guard, so Mortarion trusted him probably as much as he trusted anyone anymore.

Of course this bit him on the ass, since his big ol' fleet got caught in a Warp Storm on its way to Terra, where they had to suffer diseases which would kill anyone else. The Death Guard's legendary endurance was turned against them, holding them just on the edge of death, suffering so hard that it makes a [[Dark Eldar]] torture feel like a tender massage (no, really).

What would be the best way to stop the disease? [[Derp|Start the worship of the God of the Diseases, of course!]]

To be fair, Typhon was already doing that -- in fact, he was the one who arranged for them to be caught in the warp storm in the first place. Mortarion realized this and killed him but being an acolyte of [[Nurgle]] already, and being on a ship flooded with Grandpappy's warp contagions, he just got right back up. Then Mortarion killed him again, only this time he used Grulgor to try to do it. He basically just tossed the monster into a room with Typhon and expected Grulgor to do as monsters typically do.

Evidently however, Mortarion had forgotten that they were on a ship in the middle of a warp storm and full of Nurgle's own power, so this ultimately had just about the exact opposite effect as Mortarion wanted. As Grulgor was already a walking Nurgle bioweapon, he and Typhon simply combined into a significantly worse Nurgle bioweapon known as [[Typhus]], all while laughing at Mortarion. Unable to endure the suffering any longer, Mortarion gave in and pledged himself and his Legion to Nurgle.

Nurgle was of course very pleased by this and he ended their suffering, buuuut with the slight caveat of turning them all into walking sacks of rotting meat that simply won't die; better known as our beloved [[Plague Marines]]. Mortarion himself... actually didn't change all that much. Aside from getting a rather scabby face and a fuckhueg pair of moth wings, he looks near-identical to his pre-Chaos self. Rather ironically, his armor actually looks significantly cleaner now than it did before he turned into the foremost Daemon Prince of pus and rot. When he transformed, for whatever reason the armor changed in color from an off-white covered in rust stains to a sort of dull radioactive green. Though it is highly doubtful that Mortarion cleans his new suit any more often than his old one (ie never), the green seems to take far more aesthetically to grime than his white armor did.

This act of "swearing loyalty" takes on a different context when you realize that Mortarion utterly despised the Ruinous Powers (even if he may have been getting some assistance from them towards the end of the Heresy, if the events of ''Scars'' are to be believed) and only submitted to Nurgle because he physically couldn't suffer any longer or watch his sons do the same. Certain fluff sources literally state that as Mortarion lay in agony he pictured himself once again defeated atop his surrogate father's lair, too weak to fight on in the face of certain death, only this time he knew the Emperor wasn't going to save him from his fate (when you consider the importance he placed on strength and the refusal to surrender, this becomes an even bigger nightmare).

And so, after a lifetime of striving to become the toughest, grimmest, most unstoppable motherfucker in the galaxy, he crumbled when the stakes were highest, and lost his soul to Chaos, becoming everything he hated most. Now ''that'' is [[Grimdark]].