THE TALE OF ASTELAN

PART FIVE

The former Chapter commander gathered his thoughts before he started, pushing himself back up onto the table. He spoke slowly, purposefully, his voice betraying none of his physical and mental frailty.

'You can disregard everything I have told you, if you wish. It is a remarkable tale, I cannot deny that, and one you might find hard to accept. If you cannot recognise my arguments on the strength of what you have already heard, then your masters have trained you well, and your loyalty does you credit. But your loyalty is misplaced. It is devoted to those who are undeserving of it. Your only loyalty is to the Emperor and to mankind, never forget that. Consider that fact when you listen to what I tell you now. Of the many truths I have to reveal to you, this is the most important. The Dark Angels considered themselves damned by the shame of the events of the Horus Heresy. They are wrong. Their damnation began when Caliban was rediscovered, and Lion El'Jonson took command of the Legion.'

Astelan paused and watched Boreas's face. It was as expressionless as ever, his stare dark and intense.

'Continue,' the Chaplain said.

'For ten thousand years, the Dark Angels have sought to atone for what happened on Caliban. This I learned from Methelas and Anovel, and you have confirmed it through your own actions and words. You have shrouded yourselves in secrecy, suppressed all knowledge of those events, and eliminated all evidence that the Fallen exist. Even within your own ranks, you have created tiers of secrecy so that even the battle-brothers of the Chapter are unaware of their true origins. Like a coven of malcon­tents, you whisper to each other in the shadows. You conspire to carry out your quest away from the eyes of others. A veil of shadow covers everything you do. It is not because of the Horus Heresy, it is not because Luther and I, and others like us, fought with our own brethren. It is not because the shame of our sins must never been known to others. All of these are excuses, fab­rications, justifications to hide the truth. And the truth is so simple, it is shocking. There was a darkness within Lion El'Jonson. A darkness you all carry within you. It surrounds you, yet you are blind to its presence. Intrigue, secrets, lies and mystery: this is the legacy of your pri­march.'

'And what makes you think this?' Boreas asked.

'It is a long explanation, but listen to it in its entirety,' Astelan told him. 'It begins before the dawn of the Age of Imperium. Ancient Earth suffers from discord and anar­chy as the Age of Strife engulfs mankind. A visionary sees the way to lead humanity out of the darkness, devises a way to guide man back to the stars. We know him only as the Emperor, and He is far from an ordinary man. Cre­ating an army of superior warriors He subjugates the barbarian tribes that dominate Ancient Earth and creates a new society, that of Terra, the foundation of the Imperium He plans to build. Though His warriors are strong, fast, intelligent and loyal, He strives even further to perfect His vision, and creates the beings known as the primarchs. This I learned as a Chapter commander of the Dark Angels.

The primarchs were the perfect creations, far superior to any mortal man, wholly unnatural in their birth but imbued with altered genes that would make them matchless in the galaxy. Quite what the Emperor intended will never be known, for the primarchs were taken from Him, in much the same way as you say those of us who sided with Luther were taken from Caliban. The Emperor, perhaps, thought them lost, or maybe he knew that they were out there in the galaxy, awaiting rediscovery. The primarchs could not be recreated, or the Emperor was unwilling to try, and He founded the Space Marine Legions instead. Using what gene-seed He had remaining of the primarchs, He created us, the Dark Angels, and the other Legions, and so the First Founding was complete.

The Great Crusade began and we swept out into the stars on a great war of conquest. As planets fell to us, or were brought back into the fold of the growing Imperium, we raised new warriors and created new Space Marines from that same gene-seed, and thus the Legions were kept at full strength.

Over time, the primarchs were rediscovered. They had not been slain, but instead had been flung to the corners of the galaxy, awakening as infants on human-setded worlds. Here they eventually grew up in human society, and were rediscovered by the Emperor and the Legions which had been created from them. Each was given com­mand of the Legion that bore their gene-seed, and the Great Crusade continued.

Much of this is known to you, I am sure. However, there amongst the legends, you can still see the evidence of what I am about to tell you. Some of the primarchs were flawed. It might have been that their gene-seed was not as perfect as the Emperor thought, or perhaps the dark powers had gained influence over them while they were separated from the Emperor. But there is another, much simpler explanation.

The primarchs and their Legions became as one. Their gene-seed was used directly to raise new Chapters for the Legions, and they became the commanders. Their per­sonality and that of their homeworld was indelibly etched on to the Legions, so that their battle-brothers became but lesser reflections of their primarchs. They, of course, shared a common homeworld, their people had raised the primarchs as their own. Still, this does not explain fully the effect the primarchs would have on the Legions they commanded.

The reason, I believe, that the primarchs and their Legions became as one with each other is because the pri­marchs learned how to be human from their homeworlds. When Leman Russ awoke on Fenris, he found himself on a savage ice world ruled by barbarian warriors. He grew up to be fiercely loyal, impetuous and unorthodox, just like those who had raised him. When Roboute Guilliman became an adult on Macragge, he had been tutored in life by statesmen, strategists and leaders of society, and was famed for his organization, from the greatest sweeping plan to the smallest detail. Think about it. The primarchs had to learn how to be human.

Perhaps it was unavoidable, or perhaps it had always been the Emperor's intent to raise and educate them as his own sons. Whatever the cause, the primarchs, for all their skill, strength, speed and intelligence, were a blank slate. They learned well and they learned quickly, but at the heart of the matter is the fact that they had to learn how to be humans.

You and I are Space Marines, and we are something far above and beyond a normal human. Our bodies bear only a physical resemblance to those of normal humans, for inside us the gene-seed and implanted organs have turned us into something far from normal men. We were not chosen on our physical suitability alone. We, like the primarchs, are intelligent, dextrous and quick of mind, and a decade of training and a lifetime of battle have honed those skills. It is said that we know no fear, and it is true, for the kind of fear a man suffers from is alien to us. We are incapable of the passion that humans speak so highly of in poems and sagas. We are no longer humans, the way we are created ensures that. It is a sacrifice, for mankind's own humanity makes it vulnerable, makes it susceptible to betrayal, to doubt, to despair and destruc­tive ambition. We are beyond such weaknesses, and yet we will never again truly be part of humanity, we will never again be one of the creatures we have been created to protect.

But even with that great catalogue of changes that marks us as far superior, and sometimes far weaker, than normal humans, we are still closer to mankind than the primarchs ever were. They were wholly artificial, never having had a true mother and father. We Space Marines, you and I, were once human. No matter what the train­ing, no matter what they do to our bodies, no matter how much a lifetime of battle hardens us to it, at the core of us lies that humanity. It will never surface wholly - it is suppressed, buried far beneath our conscious recogni­tion of it - but in our hearts and in our souls we were once and still are human, something the primarchs never had.'

'So what does that mean for Lion El'Jonson?' Boreas asked. 'He was raised by Luther, amongst the loyal, courageous knights of Caliban.'

'The very aptitude the primarchs had for learning, for adapting to those around them and their environment was their downfall. Lacking basic, unalterable humanity, they were just replicas. Physically perfect, intellectually without peer, but spiritually vacant. From the moment they awoke, they started learning, started shaping them­selves into what they would become. Those around them helped this process, taught them the values they would hold dear to them for their rest of their lives. The pri­marchs learned their moral values from the cultures they were raised in; they learnt how to fight, how to lead and how to feel from others.'

'I still fail to see the relevance,' Boreas said with a shake of his head.

'In some, that learning was perhaps a semblance of what the Emperor intended. Roboute Guilliman was the greatest of the primarchs, and never once wavered in his dedication and service. But he was inferior to Horus in every way. He was not as able-minded, nor as charis­matic, and not as physically adept. Why was it that Horus turned to the powers of Chaos, perfect as he supposedly was, when Guilliman, his inferior, is still renowned ten thousand years later as the shining example of a pri­march?

It is because Guilliman had learned incorruptibility. For whatever reason, from whatever source, Guilliman had shaped his mind to make it impregnable to the lure of power and personal ambition. He said Space Marines were unsullied by self-aggrandisement, and he spoke truly for he took all Space Marines to be as worthy as himself. Horus, somewhere in his upbringing, had learned a fatal weakness, a chink in the armour of his soul that allowed him to consider himself greater than the Emperor. He turned against his master, as did those who also had such flaws, and eventually Horus was killed and the others driven into the Eye of Terror where they stay to this day, nursing their flaws, reinforcing their prej­udices.'

Boreas considered Astelan's words. 'I still have yet to hear anything to indicate why Lion El'Jonson could be to blame for the fall of the Dark Angels. If what you say is true, and the Lion was flawed, then it is the fault of Luther, the man you claim to be the Dark Angels' van­quished saviour. If Luther had raised Lion El'Jonson in the correct way, then it was Luther who turned from the Emperor, and thus it is still his sin. That would be true, but for one thing,' Astelan contin­ued. 'Our primarch, the great Lion, commander of the Dark Angels, was imperfect when Luther saved him from the guns of the Caliban hunting party. He had awoken in the deeps of the Caliban forests. They were wild, danger­ous places, swathed in near-darkness, where the sun penetrated the canopy only rarely. In the shadows lurked terrifying, mutated creatures that could kill a man with a single bite of their monstrous jaws or a swipe of their lethal claws. There they stalked and hunted each other, a vicious play of predator and prey.

This is the world that Lion El'Jonson grew up in and learned from. He learned that the dark shadows could hold hidden dangers, but also that they gave sanctuary. He became a creature of darkness, a thing that avoided the light, for it made him vulnerable and exposed him to danger. When Luther found him, El'Jonson was com­pletely feral, incapable of speech, little more than an animal. He found a hunter, and also the hunted.

It mattered not what Luther taught him, how well he raised him, what values he passed on to his adopted son. Although on the outside the Lion became a cultured, elo­quent, intellectual man, on the inside he was still that hunted, fearful creature. The flaw was already there, it simply became covered with layers of civilization and learning.

And so there was conflict in the heart of the great pri­march. Though I once cursed his name and wished him dead, I have grown beyond such feelings now. One can­not hate the primarchs for what they are, any more than one can truly hate the orks for being alien warmongers, or a gun for shooting you. They are simply what they have been created to be. We come to loathe their actions, to abhor what they represent, as I have come to loathe and abhor the primarchs for what they became and what they did. But it is the symptom we hate, not the disease; it is the effect we despise, not the cause.'

'A fanciful theory, but that is all,' Boreas said. 'Theories are not the truth, and that is what you promised I would hear.'

'Is it proof that you require? Will your doubts be swept away with evidence? If that is the case, then we shall leave the theories for now, and you shall hear the end, or really the beginning, of my tale.'

Astelan took a deep breath and stretched his aching, scarred limbs. He pushed himself off the slab and bent down to refill the goblet with water and took a long draught. Boreas watched him with his unbreaking stare, his eyes never wavering from Astelan's face, perhaps try­ing to divine the truth from his expression alone.

'When we first learned that our own primarch had been found, we were overjoyed,' Astelan continued, lean­ing with his back to the stone table. 'It was like a long lost forefather returning to us from the grave, and in many ways that is a literal truth rather than a useful analogy. Part of him was used to make us, and we owed much of what we were to him. It was another two years of fighting before I could take my Chapter to Caliban itself and meet our great commander, but the encounter was pleasant. More than pleasant, it was reassuring. We had once fought for the Emperor himself, and now we had a new commander. It had been a time of uncertainty, for though we trusted the Emperor implicitly, and if he gave command of the Dark Angels to Lion El'Jonson it must have been the right thing to do, we were unsure of the implications.

But when I met our primarch for the first time, when he gripped my shoulder and looked into my eyes, my fears were banished. Only the eyes of the Emperor him­self held more wisdom than that immortal gaze. Dark, penetrating, all-seeing, the Lion's eyes stared into your soul. If only then I had seen the madness that lay behind that intensity, history may well have been very different. But perhaps not. Perhaps even if I had somehow cut him down on the spot, it would have been too late. His legacy had already been bequeathed to the Dark Angels for ten thousand years.

'It is hard to explain what one feels when in the pres­ence of a primarch. Even I, a hardened Chapter commander of the finest Legion, felt awed and humbled. It is not unsurprising that the legends tell of how normal men were known to faint in their presence. The Lion exuded power and intelligence, every action was perfectly executed, every word perfectly considered. Far from being afraid, I was inspired. It had been many long years since the Emperor had truly led us, for the Imperium had grown vast in that time and his labours and cares had grown in proportion. So, standing in front of our pri­march, feeling his raw strength like a heat that prickled my skin, I swore a new oath of allegiance, to the Emperor, to humanity, to the Dark Angels and to Lion El'Jonson.

The Great Crusade was at its height then, and I spent only a few days on Caliban, marvelling at its beauty. Our primarch was a reflection of his homeworld, I realise now. The surface was breathtaking, but underneath lived darkness.

My Chapter returned to the fore of the expanding frontier of the Imperium, and we continued to battle against the foes of mankind, pressing further and further into the darkness. It was then that things started to change. Slowly, subtly, the influence of the Lion was being felt and the Legion altered in accord. When we had fought for the Emperor, we had virtually free rein. We had a mandate, a destiny to fulfil, and we understood implicitly what was expected of us. It is the same vision that I spoke of earlier, and I can see now why you find it so difficult to understand. You who were not there, who did not hear the Emperor's speeches, who did not swear allegiance in front of the Emperor himself, will never understand. That destiny is a part of me as much as my secondary heart.

Where once the Emperor had sent us forth in the knowledge that his will was our will, now our primarch introduced greater controls. At first it seemed eminently appropriate, after all he was indeed a strategic genius and with him to co-ordinate our efforts surely there was nothing that could stop us. But slowly, year after year, more power was taken from the Chapter commanders to act independently, to devise their own course of action. More and more, the Lion held the reins of the Legion tight.

It was then that an incident occurred which began to sdr my suspicions. It was nothing much, on the face of it. My Chapter had dropped from the warp into a particular star system and we were making our way towards its core to see if there were any inhabitable worlds. As we approached the inner planets our scouts sent back word of another fleet on a closing course. We moved to battle stations to prepare for immediate attack, and we began to manoeuvre to gain the best advantage. When I was happy that our fleet held the upper hand, I gave the order to attack. Very dearly that order could have cost us, if it had not been for the alertness of the captain of one of our ships in the vanguard. He refused the order to open fire and urgently reported back. The enemy fleet was no enemy at all! We were about to engage the ships of the Twenty-third Chapter, under Commander Mentheus.

The near-catastrophic attack was aborted, and no more was said about it, but I began to think. Why had Mentheus been there? Why would El'Jonson have sent two fleets to the same system? I thought perhaps that at first our primarch had made a mistake. But that was impossible, the exactitude of his planning and co­ordination was one of the Lion's greatest strengths. He never made mistakes of that nature. That left the possibility that Mentheus or myself were in error, but after conferring with each other, we were both in agreement that we were following our specific orders.

That left only the possibility that Lion El'Jonson had intended for us both to be there. I could think of no rea­son why two Chapters had been required, the system was uninhabitable. There had been nothing to indicate a threat worthy of two Chapters, both recently refreshed and at full strength.

There was no reason I could think of, and for a while I ignored the thoughts that had begun to nag at my subcon­scious, undl they took me onto a new track. The fact that we were both heading to the same system had not been com­municated to me. What was more worrying, perhaps, was that our primarch had not seen fit to even tell me that we were fighting in the same sector, though Mentheus had been well-informed. This made me realise that, with the pri­march's greater control over every Chapter, the communication between Chapter commanders was virtu­ally non-existent. At the dawn of the crusade, we would regularly confer to devise strategy, to co-ordinate our efforts for the maximum chance of victory and success. Now, we received our orders and simply followed them.

It was as if El'Jonson was attempting to isolate us. The fear and distrust that had been ingrained into his soul during his infancy was turning to paranoia, perhaps. The instinct for survival on the most basic level was now twisted with the teachings of Luther and the upbringing Lion El'Jonson had received. Where once he saw enemies and prey in the shadows, now he saw them again but in the galaxy around him. I think that our primarch began to fear us, and that through no fault of his own he began to see everything around him as a threat.

I resolved to counter some of this growing isolation and made more vigorous inquiries. My suspicions were still not aroused at this point, I merely saw a problem developing and sought to avoid it. As I gathered more information, the picture became more clear. Each of the old Chapters, those founded before the rediscovery of Caliban, had a shadow, a new Chapter, founded on Cal­iban with Lion El'Jonson's own gene-seed, within five sectors or less of it. You could argue that this was coinci­dence, or more likely for mutual support, and I would agree were it not for the fact that many of the new Chap­ter commanders seemed to be aware of the presence of the old Legion, but the commanders who had served alongside me throughout the Great Crusade rarely knew of the proximity of their companions. We were being watched.