Editing Nobledark Imperium Primarchs (section)

===His Early Life===

Some men are born into greatness, and carry it upon their brow with the natural ease of command. Others have greatness forced unwillingly upon them, and they suffer its burden for duty and honor. The Primarch Angron fell firmly into the second category. 

Little is known about Angron’s early life. What is known is gleaned from his private writings, scattered public records, and a few of Kharn’s recollections; and it is little wonder that the Primarch did not speak of his youth, for it was a bitter and brutal upbringing so sadly common in the chaotic days before the Unification.

Angron was born to a humble family in a small town in Timbuk, the northern state of the Afrique League, along the border of the Nord Afrik Conclaves. The town sat on a trade route used by nomad clans and acted as a minor trade hub and rest stop for their caravans as they traveled the roads between the techno-barbarian conclaves of Nord Afrik and the settlements of the Afrique League. Angron’s family made their living as bakers; their fortified strongbread was particularly well-regarded in the area as a food of the road for weary travelers. Their lifestyle was modest but probably not unpleasant, and it was more than likely that Angron would have followed in his family’s footsteps and become a baker as well, living a quiet life, were it not for the Europian-Afrikaan War.

After the humiliating defeat inflicted by Angron’s fellow Primarch-to-be Roboute Guilliman, the Padishah of the Nord Afrik Conclaves needed victory and loot to pacify his rebellious vassal shahs and sheikhs, who were threatening a shahs-moot to elect a new leader or even open revolt should the Padishah refuse. Thus, the Padishah turned his gaze and armies towards the weakest of his neighbors, the Afrique League. The southern Afrique state of Nama Gola was cut off from Timbuk by the toxic coastal wastelands and the vassals of Ursh further inland, nor could they challenge the Afrikaan forces at sea, and so their northern brethren faced the rage of the Afrikaan utterly alone.

The Padishah’s regular forces had been decimated by the war with Europa, and in a desperate show of might he turned to the cruelest monsters and technologies hidden within the Conclaves. Upon the Afrique League he unleashed grotesqueries varied and vile — lumbering arco-flagellants, limbs replaced by electro-whips and hydraulic mauls; screaming berserker slaves, hippocampuses mangled by crude cybernetics to increase aggression; cackling Volkite cultists, who unleashed the terrible heat of their weapons to praise their Burning God and the Devouring Flame; shriveled moisture cannibals from the deep deserts, who ripped men apart to drink of the precious water in their bodies and harvest the fluids for dark rituals; and a hundred other varieties of horrors and monstrosities forgotten to history, each worse than the last.

The Afrikaan host swept over the border unimpeded as the scattered militias of Timbuk were blown aside before the Padishah’s storm of ravening terrors, the regular Afrique soldiers having long withdrawn to fortify the coastal cities. Angron’s town was one of the first to fall, and the Afrikaan marauders slaked their bloodlust on the terrified citizens through all manners of torture and slaughter. The details around what happened to Angron during this time are scarce; Angron himself understandably did not speak much of this event, and the only written comments involve a short line in one of his final writings. The only clues are from the journals of a minor officer of the Padishah’s elite Janissor Corps who was assigned to oversee the sacking of Angron’s village, where he writes of an incident regarding a young boy who leapt from the rafters of a burning bakery and stabbed one of his men to death, and who then almost escaped on foot before being shot down by a stun dart to be taken as a slave.

From ruins of his village, Angron was taken to a loot caravan along with the few other survivors, mostly young children like himself who would fetch a generous price at the slave markets. They were taken through the scorching heat and swirling sands of the Afrikaan deserts until at last they reached their destination: Karthago, called Carthisisia in the Afrikaan tongue, oldest of the Nord Afrik city-states, seat of His Ascendancy the Padishah. Perched upon the western bank of the great God’s Eye Lake, it was a dusty city of brass and stone, its red stone walls a crumbling reminder of a long and cultured past, its glittering pyramids and temples casting long shadows over the slave bazaars reeking of blood.

In the auction houses, the fierce young boy drew great interest from the old gladiator houses, for a star pit fighter would bring great riches and prestige to anyone who owned him, and when the auctioneer’s hammer finally fell after a round of exorbitant bidding, it was the infamous slaver Nuceria, Queen of Flesh, who won the right to Angron’s collar. After the auction he received Nuceria’s slave mark, the inverted red triangle upon his forehead that marked him as her property, a tattoo he would have for the rest of his life.

The next twelve years of Angron’s life were a nightmare of the most brutal training imaginable, designed to break and beat him into a instrument of slaughter, a sadistic crucible to purify him into a weapon unhindered by morality or humanity. From sunup to sundown, on the grounds of Nuceria’s palatial manor, Angron was forced to train and fight until his entire body was a tight knot of agony, and every slight failure, misstep, or distraction was punished with beatings. In his first year he was given a puppy to raise as his companion, and on his birthday the next year he was ordered to strangle it with his bare hands. When he refused, he received the first of many electro-whippings. As Angron grew older, Nuceria used him as her headsman, forcing him to mete out the punishments to her other slaves, like cutting off the feet of escapees and executing those who disobeyed.

It was in this hell that Angron grew into a man. At eighteen he already stood well over six feet tall, his dusky frame thick with corded muscle, and he was excellent with the sword, superb with the mace, and unmatched with the axe. During one sparring match he killed three of the trainers that had tortured him since his childhood with a blunted training sword until the others managed to intervene, and when Nuceria heard she laughed and said the dead men had done their jobs well.

Yet for all their efforts, they had not broken him. Beneath all the years of horrors and scars upon Angron’s psyche, there was still the core of the simple young boy from Timbuk, the son of parents he no longer remembered, born in a village that no longer existed. It would have been easier to break — to become the monster they wanted, to place the blame for all the atrocities he had committed on Nuceria and the others who forced his hand. Instead Angron chose to face and accept all that he had done, and when he woke at night, gasping and sweating from the nightmares that haunted him, all he could do was swear to make things right, some way, some how.

When it was time for Angron’s first fight in the pits, to Nuceria’s fury it was to be against Tigris of Franj, a knight taken as a prisoner of war long ago and a long-time veteran of the pits. Nuceria had seen too many promising young talents cut down before their prime by facing wily old fighters before they were ready, and on this match she saw the mark of the other gladiator houses, conspiring with the gamemasters to kill her most promising fighter before he could bloom. For all her rage, Nuceria could not challenge their combined authority, and so as Angron stepped out in the sandy arena to face the Franjish knight, she resigned herself to losing a decade of investment.
Angron won in less than 5 minutes. With dispassionate, overwhelming strikes of his axe he dismantled his opponent’s defense piece by piece before battering him down with a furious rain of blows. When the crowd called for Tigris’ death, in defiance of pit custom Angron refused to perform the traditional execution of disemboweling his opponent and strangling him with his own intestines. Instead, he cleanly decapitated Tigris in a single blow, leaving the crowd in a momentary stunned silence before they rose to their in feet in an approving roar to cheer the masterful performance by the young fighter.

Elated, Nuceria took Angron to her slave pens and allowed him to choose any of the slave girls to be his personal courtesan, a prize usually reserved for gladiators that had won ten fights. To Nuceria’s surprise he walked past the cells of beautiful young women to the cells of children. They were frightened, furtive little things, and there Angron picked up a little boy with dark eyes full of defiance and loss, so very much like his own, and said this boy was to be no slave, but his son. And so Angron had found Kharn, the first of his children.

In the next few years Angron became a legend, his matches broadcasted and rebroadcasted throughout the Conclaves, defeating champion after champion in an unbroken chain of victories. The crowds called him the “Lord of the Red Sands” while Nuceria lavished gifts and privileges on him for his victories, and so Angron’s little family grew as he took several more children under his wing as his sons and daughters. Yet for all his successes and outward displays of obedience, Angron was still haunted by his sins, and the chance for his atonement finally came when he was approached by a group of fellow slaves who asked that he aid them in their escape attempt by killing the guards the protected the motor pool. In return, they would take him and his children with them to freedom in far off Franj. Angron agreed without reservation, and the preparations were made. 

Yet rarely were things ever so simple. The night before the planned escape, Angron returned to his quarters after training to find his children’s rooms empty. Nuceria was sitting in her study when Angron burst through the door, his axe dripping with gore from the guards he had slaughtered outside, and froze when he saw Macer — his youngest son — upon her lap, the baby giggling as the slaver cooed and bounced him in her lap in a mockery of motherhood. Angron demanded to know where his children were. Nuceria replied that they were safe, for the moment, but only if Angron the revealed the names of the conspirators of his escape. Remain silent, she added, and his children would die screaming, and suddenly there was a stiletto in her hand, delicately tracing a line across the baby’s neck. Falling to his knees and weeping tears of helpless rage, Angron made his choice, and Nuceria smiled. In the morning, there were dozens of new crucifixes in the courtyard, and the moans and cries of the dying escapees echoed through the manor. Angron could only look on at the new nightmare that would haunt his dreams, and swear a dozen new vows of bloody vengeance.

The chance would come sooner than Angron ever imagined. War came once again to the Nord Afrik Conclaves, but this time in the form of an overwhelming invasion from a mysterious Warlord from the Terrawatt Clan. At first, the Afrikaan nobility was filled with bluster, boasting that they would crush this upstart and take him as a slave to be paraded in the streets, yet in only a few short months the main armies of the Conclaves were crushed. The shahs of the Conclaves had imploded into panicked infighting and blame, and whispers spread throughout the fearful streets of Karthago of invincible steel-clad giants who marched in the vanguard of the invading army who crushed all resistance under the shells of their mighty guns.

Soon the enemy army was at the gates of Karthago, and the siege was brief, the spirit of the defending soldiers already broken and the conscripted slaves unwilling to waste their lives for their hated masters. As the walls fell and the fighting neared the estate, Angron knew he would have no better chance to fulfill his vows. In the chaos he pushed his way through panicking servants and slaves to the motor pool, where he found Nuceria with a few guards preparing an armored car for her escape. The guards he swiftly killed before they even had a chance to draw their weapons. For Nuceria, Angron gave her the death she deserved: the gladiator’s death, cutting open her belly and strangling her with her own entrails as she screamed and begged for mercy she had never shown, a final act of irony he hoped would appease his fallen comrades.
With the deed done, Angron took his axe and retreated to his quarters with his children, barricading the door as the sounds of fighting grew ever closer. Soon, he could hear echoing footsteps inside the manor, and he gripped his axe tightly as they drew closer down the hallway. 

The door exploded open in a cloud of splinters and dust, and a hulking armored figure ducked through the doorway with a massive gun in its grip. From behind, Angron leapt forward and kicked the back of the intruder’s leg, causing the giant to stumble forward slightly, and with a roar he swung his axe two-handed at its vulnerable head. The axe struck true and hard, and bounced off harmlessly with a clang. The giant turned, and in response drove its armored fist into Angron’s chest. Never in all his training, sparring, or duels had Angron been hit so hard, and he was flung backwards against the wall, vision flickering, gasping and coughing blood through broken ribs and crushed lungs. 

The giant stood over him and leveled the gaping muzzle of its gun at Angron’s head, dim light glinting balefully from the red lenses of its helmet, when there was a sudden movement. It was Kharn, screaming and beating at the giant’s leg with his thin arms. The giant looked down at the boy flailing helplessly at its leg and turned towards the sounds of whimpers from the other side of the room where the rest of Angron’s children huddled weeping behind the bed. He looked back down at Angron, and wordlessly the giant plucked Kharn off its leg, tossed him aside, and walked out of the room.

The next few days were a haze of pain as Angron lay in his bed, tended by a few of the old healers who had remained. The city had fallen, they told him, and to their surprise there had been no looting or raping or murder. Instead, the corrupt of the city had been dragged into the streets and purged, all the old slavers and fat nobles and decadent priests — though the Padishah had long fled. So when word spread that the Warlord that had taken their city would be coming to visit his new territory, Angron dragged himself out of his bed despite the agony in his chest, and limped his way down to the city gates to take stock of this Warlord who had conquered them so easily.

When the Warlord walked through the city gates, there was a murmur of hushed awe. He was young, his face unlined and dark hair falling to his shoulders, and he towered well above the steel giants beside him, his gold-armored frame standing well over eight feet tall. In unison, the crowds lining the road began to kneel, an instinct drilled into each of them by their years of service to their masters. But as their knees began to bend, each person felt an invisible force seize them, holding them before their knees could touch the ground. A presence touched their thoughts, vast and overwhelming, yet somehow warm and protective, and it spoke in ringing tones that echoed soundlessly within their minds:

''Do not kneel, for I am no king or conqueror.''

''Do not kneel, for you are slaves and servants to the unworthy no longer.''

''Do not kneel, for though you know it not you are noble and good.''

''Instead, I bid you: STAND.''

And every onlooker felt the force around their bodies reverse, pulling them gently but firmly upwards, until even the most stoopbacked old men found themselves standing as tall and proud as they did in the flower of their youth. They looked up with wide eyes upon the golden stranger before them, and a cry rushed through the crowd as they called out in tongues from a dozen lands. 

“Liberator!” “Breaker of chains!” “Savior!” And that is when Angron knew he would fight and die for the Warlord.

See Also: [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#Nails|Nails]]