Chaos Lord • Exalted Champion • Sorcerer Lord • Daemon Prince • Dark Commune ( Cult Demagogue • Mindwitch • Iconrach • Blessed Blades) It seems likely that Lorgar shared his belief with others, discussing and nursing their faith alongside his own. It might be easy given later events to say that figures such as Erebus and Kor Phaeron were his chief confidants, and perhaps they were. Others though seem equally likely to have played their part. Halik-gar, High Herald of the XVII th Legion and its commander before Lorgar's return, seems to have been converted by his gene-sire, and with him such devoted Iconoclasts as Maedro Vessar, and Ustun Cho. Through these and others, Lorgar began to change his Legion's soul. Lorgar's return to the XVII th Legion did not change the Legion's nature on the surface, the manner in which they waged war was the same, but, underneath the surface, the return of their gene-father changed the Imperial Heralds in far more profound ways. The old ways of devoted service were no longer enough, devotion to an ideal was not enough, victory was not enough. The reason one fought, the fire that drove one on step-by-step on the path of truth, that was everything. If victory was certain, and who could doubt it as stars and systems fell to the Emperor's Great Crusade in their hundreds, then the measure of true victory was not in death and blood, but in what a warrior carried within him. What one believed and the mark one left on Mankind were of the utmost importance. This sense of heightened fervour spread through the XVII th Legion like fire, as if Lorgar's mere presence had raised his sons up into a brighter light.

Using an oracle disciple of Cyrene Valantion as a guide, Lorgar, Layak, and a small force of Word Bearers entered the Webway in search of Fulgrim. They successfully navigated its treacherous corridors to enter the Eye of Terror, where they found themselves before the Palace of Slaanesh itself. Within they discovered Fulgrim and N'Kari engaged in debauchery. The Furious Abyss ' first kill was the Ultramarines starship Fist of Macragge as it was heading for repairs to the Vangelis spaceport. The Astropaths of the Fist of Macragge managed to send out a telepathic warning through the Warp, ultimately received as a very powerful psychic scream at the Vangelis spaceport. There are six other Prayers to the Dark Gods to choose from and an additional prayer dedicated to each of the four Chaos Gods if your Dark Apostle bears their mark. One example is Omen of Potency, which will turn your Dark Apostle into a frenzied killing machine! Vox Dominus — Carrion-class. An extremely huge ship, commanded by Dark Apostle Nahren. Lost in the warp for a few seconds while most of the 3rd host were aboard, and returned to real space with all the ship's crew dead and with the Garden of Nurgle taken root on the ship. [20] After the razing of Monarchia, the history of the XVII th Legion divides. One is the history of the Legion that the Imperium believed existed for decades after, the history of a Legion pulling itself from the pit of the past and embracing its true calling, a false history. The second is a shadow history, the true history that hid behind the mask of seeming loyalty. This true history can never be known, and what Imperial scholars do know of it are only distorted glimpses. On the surface, Lorgar's response to the Emperor's censure was to withdraw. For a time his Legion seems to have played little part in the Great Crusade. When they returned, it was clear that they were a changed force. Whereas before they lingered after conquests, now they drove forward with relentless momentum. Worlds burned, civilisations were made to kneel, and a trail of swift conquest and Imperial Compliance actions stretched behind them like a bloody cloak. It is said that the Emperor was pleased that His son had understood his error and would, in time, become what he was destined to be. To every other eye, the Word Bearers seemed possessed by a penitent fury and grim resolve to burn the past. All were deceived.

Legends of the Dark Millennium

If you want to catch up with your Word Bearers reading, in the absence of the fabled Book of Lorgar, grab the epic Word Bearers omnibus by Anthony Reynolds. Colchis was a world of old gods. It was said that religion was in the air, in the touch of the sun and the taste of the dust. To its people, worship of higher powers was as much a part of them as the beating of their hearts and the crying of their children. Bound in feudal traditions, Colchis had once been a world of high technology, but those days lay forgotten in Old Night. Life was easy for some and hard for others, and all the people knew the same truths that their fathers had known and their mothers had taught. That disease came and culled generations, but that these times would pass for nothing could remain unchanged. That war would come like rain and stain the land with blood, but there were always the promises of joy even when all seemed lost. All men died, and kings fell and new kings rose, but the gods remained. Calth's three sister planets were all destroyed, massive geo-nuclear strikes ripping them apart at the core. The system's once gentle sun was laced with deadly heavy metals and other unstable substances that increased the star's radiation output tenfold; within a century after the Heresy's end, the final elements of Calth's atmosphere were burned off and the world was left an airless void, its populace forced to live in gigantic underground caverns which were transformed into massive subterranean hive cities.

As a result, Lorgar was determined to spread his own faith in the Emperor to every world that his Legion encountered in the course of the Great Crusade, a policy that would be in direct contradiction to the principles of the Imperial Truth. Yet Lorgar also was never respected by his brothers, largely because he was never comfortable with his own gifts and less prone to violence than they. I am partial to the Empire of mankind so even though I enjoyed the stories, I could not root for the traitors and was torn reading the book as literally millions of loyal citizens and dozens of venerable heroes are wiped out in the face of Chaos cruelty. The Word Bearers are a legion of the infamous Chaos Space Marines, genetically enhanced super-soldiers who betrayed their Emperor in favor of the gods of Chaos for reasons I'm not going to get into. The ranks of the traitors are many and varied, from the foaming-at-the-mouth World Eaters to the stoic and eerie Thousand Sons. The Word Bearers are a middle-of-the-road bunch of incredibly powerful killers, favoring a unified approach to the Chaos god foursome over following a single deity. While twisted and warped, theirs is a doctrine based on faith, and the potential is there to examine and explore what motivates and perpetuates the hearts and minds of those bound to such a doctrine. When the Emperor finally came to Colchis, the Primarch saw in the Master of Humanity the divine being spoken of in the ancient Colchisian prophecy. Taking his place in the Great Crusade, Lorgar led his Legion across the stars, fuelled by a fiery religious zeal. Wherever the Legion encountered the idols of any god that might rival the Emperor in the devotion of the people, they cast them down and ground them to dust, and in their place erected towering monuments to the glory of the Emperor, forcing the conquered to kneel before them and offer up praises to the new God of Mankind.

Chaos Space Marines • Havocs • Chosen • Chaos Terminators • Possessed ( Greater Possessed) • Khorne Berzerkers • Plague Marines • Noise Marines • Rubric Marines • Obliterators ( Mutilators) • Dark Disciple • Shrivetalon • Butcher • Cultists ( Accursed Mutant • Torments) • Chaos Spawn • Fallen

Exactly what happened can never be known, but it appears that Lorgar underwent first a spiritual crisis, and then Those of the Covenant who came forward to arrest Lorgar were killed by his followers. The Covenant split into two factions, and a holy war of immense proportions erupted, eventually forcing the entire population of the world to choose a side. This war lasted six standard years, ending when Lorgar and his Godsworn supporters stormed the temple of the Covenant known as the Cathedral of Illumination in the heart of the City of Grey Flowers, the world's capital of Vharadesh, at which the Primarch had trained, killing the monks within and eliminating the heart of the conservative religious resistance to his ideas concerning the One God. Lorgar, now the Archpriest of the reformed Covenant, promised the masses that their new God would arrive on Colchis no more than a year after their victory and that they would know him only as "The Emperor." Kor Phaeron expressly explained to his adopted son that he remained a believer in the other gods of the Old Faith, but that he also believed that the One God was the most powerful of their number. This continued belief in the Old Ways, also maintained by many other Colchisians after the Godsworn's victory, would lay the foundation for the Word Bearers' eventual turn to Chaos. When the Emperor and the Great Crusade's Expeditionary Fleet reached Colchis, and He descended with Magnus the Red at His side, there could be no doubt in Lorgar's mind that he knelt before his god. Beside him a planet knelt and believed the same. Lorgar saw this preordained meeting as the confirmation of his many visions and prophecies, and so, the Primarch and his people wholeheartedly embraced the ruler of the Imperium as their promised messiah and God-Emperor. The Wrathful and Fireblade made the transition as well, but the Furious Abyss deployed a psionic mine which disturbed the Warp, causing the Fireblade's Gellar Field to fail, and the ship was torn apart by the daemonic forces of the Empyrean. If there is a hierarchy of treachery, then the Word Bearers sit in its highest circle. Once the most devoted and rigorous of warriors, it was not enough that they fell, but they pulled their brother Space Marine Legions into the abyss with them. While the treachery of others came like a storm, or the final flowering of a long buried seed, the Word Bearers' betrayal was poison distilled over long years.He has since isolated himself within the Templum Inficio on the Daemon World of Sicarus where he has remained for thousands of Terran years, forbidding anyone to interrupt his meditation, thus allowing the Word Bearers to be taken over by a Dark Council of the Word Bearers' For the Warhammer enthusiast, I can't imagine that this omnibus would not be loved for the content of the stories alone. From its earliest days, the XVII th stood apart from its brother Legions in its Astartes' duty and outlook. While all the Legiones Astartes fought with utter devotion, the warriors of the XVII th Legion carried with them an air of zealotry. Recruited from the sons of exterminated foes of the Emperor, they were trained and raised to know the crimes of their forebears and the price of forgiveness. While others went to war with righteousness, the XVII th Legion fought with the cold fury that only the condemned and redeemed can know. Every post will be filled with Spoilers from the novel so if you haven't read this week's book then proceed with caution. Word Bearers: The Omnibus