Editing Golgothos (section)

==Personality==

Golgothos was the primarch who changed the most over the course of the Great Crusade. When he just left his homeworld of Sepulchra, he was a morose recluse whose menacing appearance and demeanour belied a quiet scholar far more at ease thinking than talking. Frequently lost in thought, he only raised his voice when the matters discussed concerned him directly, but every word of his had the weight of tombstone granite. Few dared start arguments with him, not for the fear of losing, but rather out of respect for his grim wisdom. In any discussion, his words were usually either the first, or the last. 

His first encounter with death left him deeply pessimistic and melancholic for the rest of his life. He stared the grim reaper in the eyes and recognised him as a foe who was far too strong for him. This, in its turn, led to his belief in the ultimate futility of all action. Although he filled this existential void in his heart with the ceaseless fighting of the Great Crusade, he remained sceptical about the outcome of this campaign until his last moments. In any endeavour, he always assumed the worst and saw even his successes as minor victories in the great war that humanity was bound to lose. That being said, he never allowed his scepticism to discourage his soldiers, preferring to keep it to himself. 

Some say it was this unwillingness to share his true feelings that eventually drove him to madness. However, most people who knew him agree that his mind was ultimately shattered by his fixation on death. He both loathed it for its cruelty and destructiveness and admired it for its implacability and fairness; his feelings on the subject were perhaps far too complex to be adequately described by anyone but Golgothos himself. Suffice it to say, he spent much of his free time pondering death and its implications. Perhaps he was trying, without much hope, to learn its dark secrets that would help him to defeat it or at least see its point. Unfortunately, he was merely peering into a bottomless abyss that existed for no rational reason and held no secrets to be learned, and this great nothingness gradually drove him insane.

There were, of course, other factors that precipitated his fall. His interment into an experimental dreadnought caused minor damage to his nervous system that was exacerbated by years of constant battles and stressful situations. This caused Golgothos to grow increasingly unstable and unable to control his emotions. While he retained his calm out of battle, on the battlefield he transformed into a violent fiend revelling in destruction. Certain remembrancers noted that he embodied the quiet aspect of death on board of his flagship and its violent side when in combat. But, as the Great Crusade went further on, the violent side started taking over, and it wasn't long before the primarch became notorious for bouts of fury outside of battle as well. It was at this point that even his brothers who had held him in high regard before started getting reservations about him and questioning his character. Only the Emperor and Johannes Vrach knew the true cause behind the dreadnought primarch's deteriorating psyche, but Vrach was too ashamed of his failure to tell of it even to his closest friend, Gaspard Lumey.

The negative influence from Inferox also didn't help the primarch's condition. The two brothers grew close based on their concealed religious feelings and frequently spent time together debating on the shape faith has taken in the militantly atheist Imperium. It was, perhaps, during these friendly discussions that some of the zeal Inferox was notorious for rubbed off on Golgothos. The dreadnought primarch practically worshipped the Burnt King for his blind, optimistic faith, so much purer than that of his own, tarnished by creeping scepticism and existential melancholy. His rational mind and philosophical disposition forever barred him from the pure faith of his brother, and Golgothos secretly despised himself for his useless sophistication. Eventually he began subconsciously imitating Inferox and his simple ways in an attempt to approximate his purity of heart, but by doing so he merely lowered his mind's rational defences that kept insanity at bay. 

Driven to the brink of madness by his unhealthy fascination with death and pushed into its embrace by his faulty dreadnought suit and the poisonous influence of Inferox, Golgothos was a vastly different person by the end of the Great Crusade. From a quiet, melancholic fatalist he turned into a raving zealot who fully embraced his menacing image and revelled in it. Reckless on the battlefield and unhinged in times of peace, he was seen by many primarchs as a failure and a hindrance to the Great Crusade. It was only his fanatical loyalty that kept his brothers from making open moves against him, but nobody realised that Golgothos was only truly loyal to his own twisted vision for mankind. Nobody knows if he would have retained his allegiance to the Emperor if the tragic saga of his life wasn't brought to an abrupt finale by a treacherous strike from the Life Bringers.