Editing Nobledark Imperium Primarchs (section)

== Corax ==

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

Towards the end of the Wars of Unification, the Despot of Ursh and remnants of the Pan-Pacific Empire united out of desperation — although for all their desperation the united empires were no less formidable and no less monstrous.

The lands of Sino were blessed with huge tracts of the richest and most bountiful fields on all of Old Earth, and with the produce that resulted a seemingly unending number of fighting men — and near-men and once-men — could be maintained. Those fields, though bountiful, were tilled with the blood and sweat and breaking backs of a slave caste that knew nothing of war and cared nothing for conquest — their eyes were cast firmly upon the ground, as those that dared to look up were so often the worse for it.

It seemed the Warlord knew that any attempt to invade that place by conventional means would be bloody in the extreme; to his own men, to their men, and most tragically to the people he was trying to liberate.

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Ursh had been pushed back and back, until it was now a diamond-hard core of resilience. Conventional war was to be avoided and Curze's methods of ''un''conventional war were best not considered.

Thus, all that could be done was stand at the border and wait. Although the Warlord could not get in, the Despot and his men were contained; victory by weight of probability and time was assured — but time passed waiting for a change to occur would turn the campaign glacial, and all the while suffering and death would continue amongst the downtrodden masses. Death by time or death by the blade, neither option was palatable.

It was into this unhappy standoff that Corax, the one who would one day be known as the Stormcrow, arose.

Uninformed and downtrodden as they were, the slaves of Sino were far from stupid — if only because stupidity was far from a survival trait in their harsh world. They had heard of the Warlord, they had heard of his new Imperium, and they had heard of the freedom it offered. It was a freedom they craved desperately. Yet few would dare try to run the border, for fear of what the Urshii would do to their loved ones left behind and what the foul men of the Khanate did to those they found escaping.

Among them arose a factory worker who had spent too long toiling for cruel masters and starving whilst his oppressors feasted. His family were dead by one means or another — be it contagion, deadly sport, or occult, unnatural ritual — and he was left with critically little left to lose.

His job afforded him a basic but working knowledge of alchemy and chemical reaction, and he often handled various kinds of equipment — merely considered tools rather than the weapons they could be. Corax was a very angry man, but also a very cunning man whose anger was tempered by age-earned wisdom and set for the long simmer rather than full boil. This proved a good thing, as he was surrounded by a lot of other very angry people who also needed to be taught that patience and anger could work very well together.

By simple but time proven methods of communication, the words of rebellion spread. It was not without cost or casualties, but the suffering of the fallen was just more fuel for the long burning fury of righteous hatred. The uncertainty surrounding the revolt is not to be understated; the rebellion could well have died in its infancy — but for the forces, resources, and attention being diverted to the borders where the Warlord circled, waiting for some weakness to show.

When the hammer finally came down, it was like half the nation caught fire all at once. Caught unawares, vast numbers of the fearsome warriors trying to out-stare the Warlord at the border were frantically pulled back to keep the heartlands under control. Perhaps this was a miscalculation on the part of the generals responsible for the decision — certainly the Despot thought so, if the flayed and violated (but still somehow living) bodies of those generals adorning the palace walls were anything to go by.

With that sudden depletion of amassed soldiery on the borders, the tables had turned sufficiently to make conventional invasion a realistic possibility. At the head of the vanguard was Angron, whose account of the first battles would have made for historically important reading — had he been persuaded to write anything down about it.

Caught between the forces of Corax and his merciless insurgency — who knew all about cruelty and were more than willing to give as good as they had gotten — and the forces of the Warlord — that were as unstoppable and inevitable as the rising of the sun — the forces of Ursh were driven from the lands of Sino to their last strongholds, where they licked their wounds and waited for the end — an end that came swiftly and succinctly.

The people of Corax, freed for the first time in living memory, looked towards the ordered and disciplined (except for Angron, who had to be sedated) forces with wary eyes. They were not slaves now and would never bend a knee to a man again.

Corax, to his credit, did know that there was a world of difference between taking an nation and holding it. His people were brave and tenacious, and could be vicious when provoked. But he knew deep down that they could not run a nation, and everything would soon descend into anarchy at best — and re-enslavement or death at worst.

When the Warlord strode across the quietened field of victory towards the Stormcrow, he could see in the eyes of the man opposite him that this was no meeting of conqueror and conquered; it was one man greeting another as an equal, brothers in battle and free men all.

Corax knew he would need to use what temporary authority he had as leader of a victorious rebellion to direct his people into a cohesive whole, now that the immediate threat was removed. The Warlord, for his part, knew that the newly freed people of Sino were distrustful of outsiders and wouldn't take kindly to direct orders. A compromise was quickly reached; the most competent-seeming of Corax's people would be given positions of authority in the newly freed nation, but would also be provided with advisors and assistants from the newly formalized Administratum — on loan for as long as they were wanted.

It was not long after that the battered and weathered man Corax witnessed the final and lasting death of the Ursh, and ever afterwards was he disappointed that he didn't get to deal the killing blow.

As Old Earth was brought to a new golden age, the now Steward's eyes turned upward to the inky black. To the far reaches of Luna and Mars, to Jupiter and Saturn — and further, so very much further.

The Steward knew he would need men whose loyalty and competence could be assured. People to act in his stead. Of the multitude of gifted and proven individuals at his disposal, Corvus Corax was one of a mere twenty who would ascend to the vaunted rank of Primarch. When it came to covertly setting traps and ambushes he had no equal. Sadly, he was well beyond the age where super soldier treatments could be a viable possibility — to say nothing of the two prosthetic lungs Imperium loyal tech-adepts had gifted him to undo the effects of thirty years of toxic fume inhalation from his old job. He did receive some discrete cybernetic enhancements and longevity treatments, but nothing that wouldn't allow him to pass as human.

The skills he had learned and instilled in his new legion were of great use in the Unification of Sol. One of the earliest and most characteristic of his victories was when the dissidents breaking away after the Magi of Mars pledged allegiance to the Empty Throne swiftly found themselves making considerable compromises — as their air recyclers all spontaneously exploded. Ever a man of the people, Corax would always choose the path of least collateral damage over expediency or personal safety.

As the Unification of Sol turned into the Great Crusade, Primarch Corax found that there were all too many kindred souls enslaved on distant worlds to terrible masters — some human, some xeno, some hideous beyond categorization, yet all slavers and monsters to the last.

Although the Raven Guard did possess Astartes soldiers, favoring a more refined version of the earlier patterns rather than the later models, they were only typically used for the killing blow. The bulk of the Legion was composed of mere mortal men, who were far more adept at covertly tagging targets of interest and walking amongst the downtrodden masses unobserved. When the Space Marines were called in and the fireworks went off the action would be intense, devastating, and brief. Quick decapitations with little mess were what his legionaries prided themselves in, and it served them well. The people of the worlds they liberated loved them and rejoiced in their coming; the Men of Earth, the legendary homeworld of humanity, had come back to save them.

But Corax neither rested on his laurels nor revelled in the celebrations. If his victories had taught him one thing, it was that their campaigns, however deadly or destructive, were necessary — and they hadn't yet run out of worlds to free. There would be no rest until they reached the edge of the galaxy and all the worlds in between were free.

During the Great Crusade, the Raven Guard could be said to have operated in a manner mirroring that of the Night Lords. The Night Lords would terrorize, scatter, and slaughter, but leave the technology and architecture of a world intact in preparation for a killing blow — the Imperium had no shortage of people, and a replacement population could always be brought in. The Raven Guard, in distinct contrast, preferred to destroy facilities and infrastructure, but spare those who knew how to repair and maintain it, in preparation for the final strike — under the certainty that expertise could not be easily replaced. The Raven Guard argued that the entire endeavour of the Great Crusade was to save humanity, not slaughter it. The Night Lords agreed, but saw no point is losing sleep over the loss of individual humans sacrificed for the good of the whole.

Both rival Primarchs despised one another — both raised valid arguments, both were most effective when fighting in concert with a more direct Legion or similar fighting force, and neither were openly brought to heel by the Steward because both were undeniably effective. Twice, in the days of the Great Crusade, the Crow and the Haunter came to blows, although their Legions never went to war against each other. Barely.

When the Beast arose among the orks, and the Great Crusade ran into its equal and opposite, the nature of the Raven Guard changed. Just as the Night Haunters were occasionally called in — to their disgust — to protect refugee convoys, so too were the Raven Guard called in to euthanize populations contaminated irreparably. To say that Corax found these orders distasteful would be a gross understatement. Out of all the Primarchs, it was Corax who was first to outright disobey a direct order from the Steward. He would not bring nuclear fire down upon a civilian target. He and his men would not abandon their principles, not even in the face of annihilation.

It was upon the fate of planet Azoth — once a thriving cultural hub, now corrupted and tainted — that the Raven Guard made their principled stand. The world was infected but they believed — they knew in their heart of hearts — that it could be saved. The forces sent to retake it were led by the Stormcrow himself, who needed to show the Steward that no such drastic steps need ever be taken.

Upon that world, something in the heart of Corax died at what he saw. At the barbarity and the debauchery, the unholy violations of justice and morality he could never have dreamed of — not even the most depraved Despot of the Urshi could have dreamed of. Here, the Stormcrow bore witness to the

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And so Azoth was sterilized with atomic fire, a monument and condemnation to all that should be reviled. Never again, the Stormcrow vowed, never again would he inflict such cruelty for the sake of human pity and the bleeding conscience of one old man. Indeed, the primarch did feel old. And, in some way unfixable by rejuvenant treatments, did look it — now more than ever. 

For all that it cost the self-respect and idealism of one Primarch, the Imperium did at least learn of the Chaos Eldar earlier than they otherwise might have. Despite his disobedience, Corax faced no censure from the Steward for showing pity and sorrow in his work — if he had shown joy then maybe things would have gone rather differently for him, but the Steward would not punish a man for being human.

For the most part the Raven Guard served in the War of the Beast with great valor and uncommon cunning, striking far harder than their numbers would suggest. Their greatest ally, they would claim in later years, was the orkish nature of their foes — orks are prone to infighting when their leaders were removed. Whole sub-WAAAAAGH!s would grind to a halt as Nobs and Warbosses were subject to fatal ambush and inhumanly precise assassinations. Purely against the orks, it is possible that the Raven Guard had no equal.

But it was not purely against the orks; the Children of Chaos were abroad, and the Raven Guard could not outmaneuver or decapitate them so readily. The forces of the Dark Gods reaped a heavy toll, as hunts were turned inside out and the weakness of using so many mere mortal men was exposed. Astartes, it was often claimed, knew no fear, but baseline humanity did and that played right into the hands of the Croneworlders.

It is unknown how many of these sworn to service under Corax fell. Many who venerate the Stormcrow Primarch would claim that none did — they are blinded by a worthy pride, but blinded all the same. In a legion that so loves the shadows the numbers are hard to tell, and when the traitors struck it was from a direction those in command did not anticipate — a direction thought ''safe'' — and so the wounds were felt all the deeper. Exact numbers may never be known beyond "too many".

Perhaps it was having to deal with these traitors, perhaps it was getting mired in a war of attrition against the orks, or getting outmaneuvered by the fallen Eldar, or maybe some combination of all three, but Corax — and all save a token force of his vanguard, like his old rival — was not on Old Earth when Sanguinius died and the great Beast was slaughtered. Some blamed him, but none so much as he himself did.

The wars of reconquest and the rebuilding of the Imperium was not a war that the Raven Guard were well suited for. Their primary means of warfare was one of carefully stalked targets and swift, simultaneous executions. The reconquest of the Imperium — with its muddied waters and sliding scales of loyalty — was something they found difficult to adapt to, and in the years that followed they lost nearly as many as they did to the Beast's depredations.

By the time the Imperium was stabilized and looking even anything like it had once done, the Raven Guard was a shattered remnant of its former glory and its primarch was almost broken. Corax had seen too much he held dear despoiled, too many dreams crushed. The Steward tried to comfort him, but his kind words fell upon deaf ears. In Corax's mind the Great Crusade, the greatest accomplishment of the human species, had failed — and perhaps he had played no small part in its failure.

To his credit, he never let his sorrows interfere with his work. The Raven Guard was rebuilt far more modestly in scale, and in the place of a Legion were a hundred Chapters, built in the centuries that followed. By the time the last of the commissioned chapters were declared ready for duty, Corax was an old and withered man. His early life had been hard and he had started on the rejuvenants relatively late in life — and it showed, now more than ever.

The truth of Corax's ultimate fate is unknown. He would, in his last known years, travel between the newly minted chapters to inspect and advise — and occasionally accompany on missions — but like always he made few aware of his movements, and would often drop in unannounced and leave abruptly. Which chapter he last visited is up for debate, as many records are contradictory at best and nonsensical at worst, but the only confirmed information is that one day he just vanished.

Some hold out hope, even unto the Dark Millennium, that the Raven King will return.

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