Editing Nobledark Imperium Primarchs (section)

== Horus ==

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">''''' The King of Empty Space: '''''

[[Image:1484667029816.jpg|thumb|Primarch Horus Lupercal, King of Empty Space.]]

''"Somehow I thought he'd be... well... gold-ier"''<br>
— Horus Lupercal, speaking of his first impressions of the Warlord

The exact birth date of Horus is not easy to pin down, as the calendar used by the Void Born of Sol was one used by no one else, and didn’t use the Earth Year as the basic measure of time. The particular calendar used by Tribe Lupercal fell out of use, in any case, within a few generation of the death of Abaddon the Last and the disbanding of the Void Born as a unified nation.

What is known is that, by the final days of the Earth Unification Wars, Horus Lupercal was a man of renown and considerable accomplishment. His age was always difficult to judge, as up until his twilight years he remained spry, lively, and remarkable well preserved. When the Warlord first made contact with him he was described as being in his late prime to very early middle years in age. In appearance, he was much like all Void Born; freakishly tall and thin, pale, and in possession of large eyes and pianist hands. His face was much accustomed to smiling and his mouth contained three gold teeth; generally he evoked an image of a second-hand starship salesman in the people that met him.

The Void Born were not, in those ancient days, a unified people — though they were more cooperative amongst their own kind than baseline humanity ever was. They attributed this to the constant exposure to the bottomless depths of the inky blackness; space is vast and good friends are few. Yes, they would swindle, cheat, and engage in cutthroat business practices, but never to the point of death. Of all the myriad branches of humanity, in those days theirs was the only one willing to ply the starry sea. How Horus Lupercal, son of Maherpa, of the Lunar Lagrange Point rose from a humble bulk haulage transporter to representative of the Void Born as a unified people is the stuff of legends amongst the Merchant Navy and early Rogue Trader dynasties, and like most legends is almost certainly mostly bullshit.

Whatever the case, it was not long before the final defeat of Ursh that Horus found himself in a support harness on the surface of Old Earth, unsteadily approaching the Warlord’s tent a few miles behind the front lines. Exactly what they discussed that day is not in any recorded history, and the event itself was witnessed by only a precious few — Sigillite Malcador and Lord Guilliman among them. But beer was drunk and hands were shook, and Horus returned to his people and the blessed lightness of empty space.


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The nation of Ursh was brought to an end the next day, for all that their underground resistance would persist for nigh on twenty years after.

The Warlord — now Steward — appointed his twenty greatest the rank of Primarch. Among their exalted ranks was Horus, who soon after was crowned King of Empty Space by the unanimous vote of the great matriarchs and patriarchs of his people.

Some time after the King’s death, archived audio records revealed that the Olympus Mons Priesthood of Mars had also offered him vassalage — at not unreasonable terms — some days after the deal with the Warlord was made;


“So you're saying you'd rather be vassal to the Terrawatt apostate's flesh-smith than master of our every ship for perpetuity? You scorn the shipwrights of your forefathers! You scorn the smiths of time immemorial! What nerve you have, Lord-Admiral, what—”

“Nerve, is it? Certainly, it is nerve, magos. He promised me a partnership, as fruitful and even as the bargain you propose. He'd have me be his indispensable confederate until the end of my days, and as lord of my people. I made sure he stood as I knelt to the throne, and swore no oath he had not. I set the terms of my service, and I chose my mandate.”

“The gilt conqueror has amassed the treasures of man's eldest ruin, and he dotes mightily upon his subjects. More than that, he is unabashedly greedy.”

“Oh yes, his greed for self-possessed statesmen and commanders is vast, and his appetite for men wiser than he insatiable. I am the admiral of my ships, and of his ships, and all ships he might gain henceforth, and command his navy just as my own. He is steward of my people, and he is bound to them, each and every. Not just for as long as I hold them as one but instead in perpetuity, so long as his empire stands.”


And so was undone — with no small bitterness — an older arrangement between the Void Born and the Mechanicum, each feeling betrayed by the other. It was perhaps not such a heavy or saddening burden on the Primarch’s heart as it might have been, as he had never dealt with the Olympus Mons Brotherhood and so felt no real loyalty to them. In the days of his youth and in his father’s service, they had dealt with lesser — and less arrogant — brotherhoods. The Olympus Mons Brotherhood had subjugated them all, and thus felt they were entitled to take on their obligations and owed their respective loyalties. But Horus had shaken no hands with them.

It should be noted that, despite the public image of the unshakable trust and confidence the Steward had in his primarchs, Horus did worry him somewhat — and worried the other Primarchs rather more. Horus dreamed of an Imperium with almost no centralized authority and an almost non-existent hierarchy; each world independent and sovereign, united in mutual friendship but beholden to no one but themselves, and with no authority past their own bounds.

In Horus’ vision humanity would be, in some distant age, diversified into cultivated and pure abhumanism; a type of tool for every job and a type of human for every world, all united in a shared common humanity. Humanity was in its infancy compared to the Eldar, true, but unlike the Eldar we would not forget our roots. To him, the Imperium was not a final product, but rather a mere stepping-stone towards some strange utopia of a “Star Union”.

These visions did not sit well with the Steward at all. Nevertheless, though Horus was willing to privately challenge the Steward's vision for humanity, he never crossed the line and tried to aggressively implement anything to that effect. As the Emperor could wait and play the long game, so too could Horus. He saw his vision as inevitable; maybe it would start to take shape in some near century or some unimaginably distant age, but he could wait.

The great ships of the Migrant Fleets now stood with the Steward, whose eyes were fixed upon the warring states of the Far-Orbit colonies on the moons of Neptune and Uranus, the Jovian and Saturnine nations, the settlements of the asteroids belt and the Kuiper belt, and the ultimately to the distant stars. Suddenly, those stars seemed not so distant.

It would be Horus’ people who would take them there. His formidable ships would be at the forefront of the frontier, at the bleeding edge where the Imperium met wilderness space. At the place where profit, fame and fortune could be made and where legends were forged. In every way possible, his people were going to make a killing off of this deal.

The Void Born, though master sailors of the starry seas, made for poor soldiers. Upon their ships were placed bondsmen of the Imperial Army and the fearsome and awe-inspiring Astartes pattern Space Marines. In essence, Horus now had his own Legion on top of being a necessary participant in the operations of all the other Legions, as he was the one with the ships. There was not a war he didn’t have a hand in, not a victory his people not accredited with having done their part.

But of these victories, he would claim, none were a grand as those that came to the Imperium willingly — as he had, not so long ago. Deals were ripe for the making, trade could flow, riches could be shared and increased, and all the petty little worlds had to do was reach out a hand. Of all the Primarchs only Lorgar managed to get more worlds to join the Imperium bloodlessly.

Time wore on and the borders were pushed back. The Void Born soon found themselves with more — more ships made, more wars victorious, more trade flowing, more deals made, more riches pouring into their coffers, more fame and fortune, more stories and glories — than even Horus could have dreamed of, all those years ago in that far away tent on some forgotten battlefield. It was a golden age after the ten thousand years of the Long Night. It was in this golden age that Abaddon, nephew of Horus, was born.

Horus had no children (that he knew about) and so took the young Void Born as his heir and protégé, and tried to instill in the child the skills that had led him down the road to kingship and riches. But to Horus’ mixed shame and pride, Abaddon turned into more of an admiral than a salesman. That was not to say that he didn’t learn much from Horus — quite the opposite — as Abaddon was no poor diplomat and could play the part of the blunt-but-lovable old soldier to his advantage, and manipulate an Administratum requisitions committees as well as any royal court. It was just as well, as there weren’t enough Void Born to fill the Navy by that time — and hadn’t been for decades, if truth be known. The Imperium was growing faster and faster still, producing ships faster than his people could fill them, making it a necessity for baseline humans to fill the berths of the Imperium's voidships. Horus was Void Born to the marrow and had grown up in another time. A time that was all but gone now. Abaddon would be the sort to inherit Empty Space. 

As the forces of the Void Wolves — as his forces had collectively become known by that point — were at the edge of Imperial Space, it was they that were first alerted to the arrival of The Beast.

The Beast’s forces, raised across a thousand star systems and launched simultaneously with disturbingly un-orky precision, swatted aside hundreds of ships in a matter of hours across a front twenty thousand lightyears long. After that, his people would need no incitement to vengeance — no rhetoric of Warlords or Stewards or hypothetical Emperors. Blood had been spilled in Empty Space, and for the Void Born — as has been since the days of the first space pirates — only one thing could wash away a debt of blood: more blood.

It says something of the presumptiveness of Chaos that they tried to deal with the Pale Primarch, at that point still believing that they had remained hidden. They believed Horus and his people to be degenerate mutants; too slow witted to realize that the Orks were not the orchestrators of this war.

They promised him dominion of the stars, the birth of his Stellar Union. They knew that he knew that the Steward would never allow it to be in his lifetime, but with their help all could be as it ought to be. He would be exalted from now to the day the last star went out. All he had to do was simply wait the war out. 

Horus would have none of it;

"Your offer sounds interesting. But you forget one thing: I am a captain of the migrant fleet and a businessman. In this place, I am the one who makes the deals. Now ''get off my ship''."

It would be disingenuous to say that Horus had not considered sitting out the War of the Beast; he was a merchant prince at heart, and knew first-hand the advantages of considering alternatives and making cost-benefit analyses. However, he realized that not coming to the aid of the Imperium, regardless of his own political opinions, would kill any hope of a long-term "Star Union" — a fact only reinforced by the attempted temptation of the Chaos Gods. Even if humanity survived the War of the Beast, brother would blame brother for a perceived lack of help and poison any attempt at a long term "Star Union". And, perhaps most importantly, Horus had sworn an oath to the Steward centuries past. To Horus Lupercal, a man without his word was no man at all.

The people of the Void Born were not as numerous as the baseline humans and for a time it looked as though, by throwing their lot in with the Imperium, Horus had doomed them to extinction. But Horus and the wise admirals under his command could be all too sure of one thing: Chaos would have come for them in time, Imperium or no. The War needed to be over quickly. It needed to be over before his people left the stars forever.

The King of Empty Space went to the Steward and proposed a plan. A desperate and needed plan. By misdirection and feigned weakness, the forces of the Imperium would funnel the hordes of the Beast to Old Earth. Orkish psychology would demand that The Beast himself be at the head of the incursion and there — deep in the heart of Imperial territory — they would close the trap and decapitate the WAAAGH!!! of The Beast. Without their leader the orks would fall apart and fight each other, and without their meat shields the Chaos Eldar would flee.

Horus was not on the surface of Old Earth to witness the death of the Angel-Primarch. He knew that none of the other Primarchs knew of his plan to force the end of the war. He knew that they would blame him; he could tell them that the war needed to be ended, a war of attrition against Orks was a slow walk into the grave and as relentless as a gravity well. He could have told them that this had been the only hope of victory. HE knew it all to be true. Maybe they would agree, maybe they would not. Maybe it didn’t matter in the face of victory. But it was a bitter victory, given the cost and the ruin the Imperium had suffered. The Golden Age was over, and now it seemed that Long Night had never really left.

In the subsequent years — and accompanying reconstruction and rejuvenation — of the Imperium, the Merchant Navy was instrumental in the rebuilding efforts, to the point of being equal to the forces of the Imperial Army in importance. Broken and scared worlds looked to the heavens and the Pale Men of the stars with pleading and love. Horus was old, now, and a little broken inside. But maybe helping the battered and bruised people of the Imperium, seeing their gratitude and their heartfelt smiles, healed something in Horus' heart, in some small way. 

Many expected that Horus would launch a coup against the Steward around this time; the Imperium was on its knees, its allies were weary, and many of the generals and the old Mechanicum brotherhoods would have followed him without question. For all his faults — for all his trials and failures — Horus was still hellishly charismatic and could sell anyone anything, whether it be a used cargo hauler or a new dream.

The Imperium waited, and it seemed like all powers that be in the Imperium — the Primarchs and generals, the lords and their assassins, the movers and shakers and the influence-peddlers — all stood poised to spring in one direction or another at his word. That word never came. Maybe he had given up on his dream of a galactic union, or perhaps he saw it as something that could only be born from the Imperium. We will never know. But for three hundred years the Imperium waited for a rebellion that would never come. A man without his word is no man at all.

Void Born are fragile creatures by nature and their bodies can’t deal with alchemy in the blood well, making it is easy for them to overdose on drugs and medicines. The rejuvenant drugs that kept him in some manner of youth had to be of a lower dosage, and now even that was starting to fail altogether. His body was too frail for the longevity treatments designed for baseline humans. Primarch Horus Lupercal, King of Empty Space, would die soon.

An entirely plausible story — held as true by the Sons of Horus and official Imperial history — put forward this unusual reaction to rejuveants as an explanation of the Lord-Admiral's recorded vigor and mental acuity, even unto the last years of his life, as well as his ceremonious abdication to Prince Abaddon several years before his death. That the Lord-Admiral spent those years assembling an entourage of notable captains, as he flitted between the systems of the Imperium, has been relegated to obscure tomes of history. Around this time, Horus threw his considerable clout into numerous ambitious projects, and was often present in the orbits of Old Earth, Mars, and Jupiter, as well as the systems of Chthonia and Prospero. Of all his works in these last decades, he is recorded to have shown greatest interest in the creation of an Imperial capital upon the Chthonian ring, the work of the Martian explorator fleets, and the collaborations of Fulgrim and Ferrus Mannus. These projects are acknowledged to have laid the groundwork for much of the Imperial Navy's own capacity for independent logistics and development. The order that would become the Sons of Horus had its roots in this period, intended by Horus to see his vision of a humanity truly suited to interstellar civilization well into the future. Horus died nineteen years after his abdication and was entombed on his personal warship. Age took him quickly in the end, but he went into the Long Sleep knowing that he had served his people and the Imperium well, and that a good man would take up his burdens.

His tomb has never been opened, but upon that basalt slab still stands the Corona Nox. Waiting for a worthy brow to sit upon.

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