Editing Belisarius Cawl (section)

==The Man Himself==
While the Gathering Storm didn't develop his personality really more than the average maverick Adeptus Mechanicus Magos, the Black Library give us a know-it-all, showy geek, Cawl is grandiloquent, prone to shock-and-awe demonstrations where he casually commits tech-heresy and gets away with it and has a very roguish disregard for authority. Like many nerds during his early life he was not above alternating between acting petulantly and then pretending loyalty and begging for mercy once the threat of violence upon him was evident, and like many nerds when bullied would take the opportunity to get his sweet revenge. It also helps that he is - somewhat onesidedly - friends with the most powerful man in the modern Imperium who also owes virtually all his current success to Cawl.

Later on he loves to show he is not just in control but ready to reveal his last trick and [[just as planned]] move, up to the point of risking the wrath of his boss and a C'tan shard, which in turn demonstrates that he still got some adamantium balls, more evident if you consider the kind of punishment the Imperium in general and the Mechanicus in particular gives to tech-heresy, in other words, he is a troll, with the ego which would make an Slaaneshi Chaos Lord blush, no joke he literally said he could fix a planet devoured by Tyranids ''because he can'', how big is that in terms of ego?

This is not to say he doesn't have his bro-tier moments, he still sees himself as a benevolent teacher to his Primaris creations, while he keeps a clone of his early life bro co-worker Friedrich. Cawl sincerely believes he can actually fix the galaxy and defeat Chaos and the various other horrors both mundane and not quite so mundane once and for all, with science, an opinion which is shared with Guilliman, of course from a meta point of view this is nonsensical (how GW will keep selling minis?) but, given what he is capable of, and since two of his works are [[Great Rift|warp dampening at a galactic scale]] and [[Tyranids|accelerated terraforming of dead worlds]] for the first time in many editions the Imperium is going from "fighting a hopeless war" to "fighting a virtually hopeless war", breaking with the grimderp sadness the setting has fallen into during many years.

Yet for all his potentially dubious private pursuits, irksome eccentricities, unabashed disregard for etiquette and protocol, and so on, Cawl nonetheless fulfilled his mandate given to him by Guilliman. Without error? No. Without deviation? Absolutely not. But he succeeded and gave Guilliman (and by extension humanity) the resources to survive and stabilize. Said resources were even '''NEW''' [and shiny] because rather than being just more of the same, Cawl had actually set out to make ''modifications'' and ''improvements'', which are both dirty curse words to much of the Mechanicus. As of the conclusion of the Plague Wars, a certain level of stability has been achieved for now, and Cawl has set his sights on humanity being able to ''thrive'' once more. Unhindered by dogma or adherence to norms that cripple his peers, Cawl has the perspective, drive, resources, and knowledge to actually make that a reality. So long as Guilliman or someone keeps an eye on Cawl to pull him back from anything truly potentially ruinous, should his drive for knowledge get the best of him, he's probably not a risk. Perhaps most importantly though, some of the recent lore has revealed that Post-heresy Big-E himself put his trust in Cawl for events yet to come. The Emperor knew in some capacity even before the Unification Wars that their paths were bound together, and that he and Cawl would have even more work to do together in the future. For his part, Cawl seems to genuinely revere the Emperor as Omnissiah and wishes to better humanity. If the price of achieving that aim is tolerating some annoying personality traits, then that's hardly a cost-prohibitive transaction.