Editing Nobledark Imperium Imperial Forces (section)

==== The Mortifactors ====
The Mortificators are a brother chapter to the Ultramarines, both being founded by veterans of the War of The Beast from Legion XIII in the days of The Rebuilding. The head of the force sent out that formed the core of the original Mortificators was commanded by the esteemed but eccentric — some would say slightly bonkers — Sasebo Tezuka. Tezuka was originally a child of the strange land of Strayllya on Old Earth, and had begun his military career in the earliest days of the Great Crusade. He was an accomplished man who commanded the respect of his men despite his oddness. One of these oddities was a seeming over-reliance on signs and portents that he used to make his decisions even though he himself was no psyker, and although he did employ them he didn’t use them for divination. Though he relied on what was essentially random chance, Tezuka seldom went irretrievably astray and more often than not followed a correct path. In more recent times people have wondered if the King of Clowns had anything to do with the roll of those bones, but no answer that any could understand has been forthcoming.
 
With the breakup of the XIII Legion, Captain — now Chapter Master — Tezuka was free to follow the omens as his cards and bones would show him and by a roundabout means, thirty years of wandering brought him to the world of Posul. If Posul was meant to be some sort of Promised Land it was not one given from any god that cared for its followers; Posul was dreary and dark, and by some fluke of topography and atmospheric composition it was eternally shrouded in a permanent and extremely heavy overcast lit only by two small, dim suns. It was a world of extremely dark nights and extremely dim days — and it was not unclaimed.
 
A hardy breed of man survived on that world, pale and slight of build with big dark eyes. They were primitive in those days, having in the time since man’s apex devolved to something that resembled Mesolithic era humanity. It was assumed at the time that their fall from grace, so complete as it was, was solely a result of an environment that was best and most politely described as very bleak. The plant life was typically sparse, with dark purple leaves to maximize the available energy from the dim suns, and the whole world had the general feeling of a deep-sea vent ecosystem on dry land.
 
Although that bleakness was almost certainly a contributing factor, it was not the whole story. The Posuli could fairly be described as the Death Cult of the Death Cults. They followed the faiths of the Deorum Mortuus Est, or at least adhered to the teachings of those who had slain their gods. Master Tezuka and his followers, dictated by omens to settle on this world, learned the stories of the eldest of the eldest priests and, backed up by their own findings in the Verboten Lands held by all tribes in inviolate sacrosanctity for time beyond mind, came to a startling conclusion: the natives — though not now — had once been worshipers of Chaos.
 
Their gods had been very real and walked among them awful and powerful, ordering great temples be built to them and demanding holocaust and sacrifice to feed them. Over the long years they had brought the Posuli low, to the point of being naught but cattle to the slaughter of unworthy butcher gods, until one day men led by the “dream-walkers” rose up, and were not struck down but instead did strike back with a righteous fire. Estimates by the off-worlders put the date of the uprising at approximately two centuries prior to the Posuli's discovery by the wider Imperium. The locals had no calendars and so none could know for sure, but it seemed that the gods of Posul were overthrown on or around the day of The Raid of the Mansion.
 
But the Posuli were by then a thoroughly broken people. Presumably their ancestors had been of the Great and Bountiful Human Dominion, stranded here in the early days of the Age of Strife, and presumably they did retain some measure of civility for some time, but if that is true none of that civility survived. The locals had nothing that they remembered of greatness, nothing to aspire to and no notion of lasting joy. They carried on much as they had, with cannibalistic rituals and constant wars of tribal slaughter. Tribal warriors would war and the victors would kill all of the men-folk and children and take the women as their own, and they would try to hold what land they could claim of the fallen’s holdings until displaced or the tribe split through internal unrest and warred upon once-kin.
 
It was into this savagery that Chapter Master Sasebo Tezuka of Legion XIII descended. His first interaction with a local was when a boy — barely old enough to grow his first chin hairs — stabbed him in the gut with a stone tipped spear. Sasebo had approached the nearest tribe unarmoured and unarmed, wearing a simple coarse jute robe with only a brother-psyker at his side, to show peaceful intent and appear as unthreatening as an Astartes can. The spear tip cut into his skin and stopped at the black carapace. The lad received a backhander that knocked several of his teeth out; it was extremely easy to follow him back to his tribe.
 
Some worlds welcome the Imperium as returning brothers from the stars. Some worlds react poorly to Imperial attempts to uplift them. Few were as reluctant as the Posuli, who by then had no notion of anything greater than a tribe and no understanding of any social order more complex than "the strong rule and the weak are food". Generally, the Imperium tries to keep as much of the substance of a culture as possible in its uplifting. Master Sasebo couldn’t really see much worth keeping, and as the days passed the other teams that had investigated other tribes reported much of the same. It was a long and bloody road to remake the Posuli into any sort of real society, and Master Tezuka had fallen to the unknowable things of The Harrowing long before then.
 
In the end the people of Posul were brought, reluctant every step of the way, into the light of civilization. Although their world could never be tamed it was made better than awful, and it was possible to live there rather than just be sentenced. In the end the Posuli were taken to the stars again and became a part of the Imperium, if only a minor part. The people of Posul were found, despite being classed as abhuman Nightsiders, to be compatible with the Astartes Mk III MP gene-seed, and in the intervening years were made worthy of it. In time they raised regiments of their own to aid the Imperium that had taken then from the dirt. But it could not be said that they did not affect the chapter as it uplifted them, especially once the Mortifactors started to recruit from Posul.
 
The cannibalistic rituals were replaced with haemovorous rituals, and human sacrifices exchanged with deep drug-induced comatose vision seeking. The Mortifactors adopted both of these rituals. Thus, down the long march of years, while the chapter had amended the beliefs of the locals for their own betterment, the Mortifactors had also ended up adopting these beliefs and took up the scriptures of the Dead Gods. As such, the Mortificators were never seen as desirable allies. They were unpleasantly weird and typically possessed a grim disposition. But they were valued and so were their people. It was not to last.
 
In the year 997M39 the Leviathan fell upon Posul. There was no hope of saving the world. All those dusty temples where man had slain their gods, all those strange tribes and wandering soothsayers, all the victories of the Imperium to make men out of monsters, all of those works of art carved into pale stone and lit pink and deep red by the dim red suns, were all washed away in a tide of chitin that were in turn washed away in nuclear fire. Basilica Mortis, the great star fort of the Mortificators, had managed to remain hidden by strange Eldar trickery, and in its vaulted halls were held the last hopes of that world. As many of the keepers of the stories and children to tell those stories to were kept as safe as could be in the hidden Astartes stronghold. On the surface of Posul, the men, women, and Space Marines of that grim, dark world gave their lives to draw the Hive to them, to trick the Hive into believing that it was winning. Lord Magyar ordered the atomics released at the last possible moment, transforming the time when hope should have been turned to despair instead into righteous wrath and retribution, and for a moment he beheld his home in sunlight before the fire consumed him. 

And it was beautiful.
 
Posul is now a dead world, as perhaps is fitting. It is unlikely that the Adeptus Biologis will agree to terraform it in this age, as even in the old days it was never a particularly worthy candidate for such an endeavour. And as for the remnants of the Posuli and the Mortificators? They endure, barely. Hearing of their plight their distant kin in the Ultramarines petitioned the Imperium to grant them refuge, and they were granted a place on the basis that so few people would likely cause little disruption to any adoptive planet. The Mortificators requested long ruined Calth to settle upon and try and make a home. The people of Calth were initially unenthusiastic about the idea, to say the least, as their caverns and hollows were precious to them. When they learned that the Posuli wished to live in the wastelands of the surface, where none had dwelt since the devastation ten thousand years past, they were considerably more amenable. The Posuli, for their part, said that they could cover their eyes in the day and sleep and in the night, and sometimes they could pretend that they were home once more.
 
The Mortificators will rebuild. Death has not claimed them yet.