Wilmut Sachs
This page details people, events, and organisations from the /tg/ Heresy, a fan re-working of the Warhammer 40,000 Universe. See the /tg/ Heresy Timeline and Galaxy pages for more information on the Alternate Universe.
"He was my brother, the most brilliant man I had ever met, save Johannes or the Emperor himself. I loved him, but he could not love. All that could be said of Vrach, he did what he did out of love. Sachs did what he did for no reason other than that he could, that was why he was so wonderful, and that was why he became the disgusting monster that could kill a sweet man like Edentis. It was my responsibility to look after my brothers, I failed them, and now I will hunt down the man who caused all this and end his life."
-Gaius Vira to Sebastion Rex, The Meeting at Duranesh
Even in the extensive gallery of heretics and traitors to Mankind, the figure of Wilmut Sachs stands out as especially ominous. The mere list of his vicious crimes against humanity can drive a lesser person insane with terror and disgust. One of the Galaxy's brightest minds, he served as the High Genetor with the Life Bringers, where his role involved creating cures to the numerous diseases that plagued the Galaxy. As his battle brothers clashed with the enemies of Mankind upon smouldering battlefields, he relentlessly fought its intangible foes in his laboratories. Although initially successful in his endeavours, his inability to find the ultimate panacea against all disease as demanded by his Primarch, Johannes Vrach, slowly chipped away at his sanity. Driven to utter desperation by his mounting failures, he begged the masters of the Immaterium for assistance - but, as expected, their help came at a hefty price. In exchange for the ultimate cure, Sachs forged a pact with Nurgle and corrupted his Legion in the name of his new master. After crushing defeat suffered by the Life Bringers in the Battle of Rai, he led the remnants of his Legion into the Eye of Terror, where he eventually rose up to become one of the pre-eminent warlords.
Current situation
In the Forty First millennium, Wilmut Sachs is still alive, though to call him well would be a big stretch. A walking incubator of pestilence, Sachs serves as the high regent of Eden, the Daemon World ruled over by his Primarch Johannes Vrach. Like the rest of the Daemon Primarchs, Vrach neglects his domain in the material world, which leaves Sachs as the de-facto leader of the Life Bringers. Not all of his former Battle Brothers agree with this hierarchy, prompting many of them to leave and found their own realms within the Eye of Terror. The Devil of Vischmauz cares little for such dissent, since his main passion still lies with research, not political power. And research needs funding, which often leads Sachs to hire out his services to those few warlords of the Eye who can afford it.
Wilmut Sachs was a round man even before his corruption, he naturally gave the appearance of being soft despite his enhanced physiology. He wears a moustache and a monocle, both of which he has come to be known for. His doughy face and watery eyes give off the impression of a pudgy infant, but this is in direct conflict with the nature of their owner. Inflated by the numerous toxiferous gases his organs produce, his body is large, malformed and rotund in shape, the unnatural bodily processes constantly going on inside of it produce a repulsive symphony of physiological sounds that heralds his presence. At one point, reckless genetic experimentation Sachs performed on himself caused a permanent atrophy of his legs, turning them into misshapen blobs of flesh hanging from his massive underside, compelled to twitch spasmodically by the vestiges of muscle memory. This defect made Sachs incapable of locomotion, forcing him to graft spindly spider-like limbs to his lower body to carry him aloft.
The most drastic feature of Sachs is his constant decomposition. Over the course of his tenure as the Master of Life Bringers, he accumulated more gifts from Nurgle than even a genetically enhanced Space Marine organism could handle. This causes his body to decay so quickly that even a naked eye can easily see the decomposition process in motion. It generally takes between several days and several months for his body to decompose entirely, leaving nothing but a yellowish mouldy skeleton and a disembodied brain. Although this is a source of great discomfort for Sachs, his brilliant mind eventually found a way around this curse. He constantly keeps several dozen lobotomised clones of himself in a stasis field and, as soon as his current body rots to the point of being impractical to use, he takes one of his spare bodies from stasis and transplants his diseased brain into it, discarding his previous shell. Although he's done it countless times over the course of the millennia, several incidents did happen. For instance, one of his clones managed to escape before Sachs performed lobotomy on him, tricked a number of prominent Life Bringer champions into believing he was the real Sachs and started a civil war on Eden. Eventually, he was defeated and escaped with his followers to found one of the largest Nurgle-worshipping warbands, the Harbingers of Pestilence.
The goal and aspirations of Wilmut Sachs have come full circle. Whereas before the Heresy he searched desperately for the ultimate cure for all diseases, now he is trying just as hard to create the ultimate plague that nothing in the Galaxy could heal. Although he has unleashed several epidemics upon the Imperium and each one dwarfed its predecessors, all of them were ultimately stopped. One was studied by the Magi Biologis of the Adeptus Mechanicus until they found a cure, another was cured by an ancient Xenos artefact found by the Inquisition, and his best plague to date, the Überrot, was stopped by an Imperial Saint. Still, Sachs keeps experimenting with dedication deserving of a better application, an he will not stop until he has reached his goal.