Negators

Negators
A pointed Icovellavna
Battle Cry	"Remember me!"
Number	XIV
Successor Chapters	Unknown
Primarch	Aodhán Kael
Homeworld	Nusku
Specialty	Anti-armour operations, rapid redeployment, monster slaying
Allegiance	Traitors
Colours	Mist grey major, woad blue trim

This page is a work in progress, part of the Imperium Asunder project, a fan remake of the warhammer 40 000 history.

This life is but mist, and we walk in the mists only a short while.

- a common Negators saying.

Primarch

Discovery

Aodhán Kael, Primarch of the Negators, was raised on the fiery world of Nusku. An arid, windswept planet, Nusku's surface was primarily made up of sweeping plains, along which scores of ragged canyons ran in twisting lines. The radioactive storms that plagued the surface had transformed a portion of the population into an abhuman species of disfigured giants who had enslaved the remaining humans, driving them into the shadowed ravines that scarred the landscape, forcing them to dig tirelessly for precious stones and scraps of old technology. It was among these downtrodden clans that Aodhán grew to adulthood. His stunning beauty and natural charm quickly raised him into a position of leadership, and, as though driven by a hatred bred into his very bones, he led a fierce rebellion against Nusku's ruling caste. By the time Aodhán was discovered by Imperial forces, Nusku's plains were littered with the bones of dead giants. The Emperor found his son seated upon a throne of bulbous, oversized skulls, adorned in the finery of a warrior-king and basking in the adoration of his people.

The Early Crusade

As a Primarch, Aodhán was boisterous, friendly, and wild, leading his armies from the fore and promising future glory to worlds that complied with the Emperor's will. He was initially glad to march across the heavens as the Emperor's champion, the notion that he was a child of the galaxy's rightful ruler fanning is enormous ego, and his statuesque appearance made him a popular figure with the Imperial populace. He had a friendly rapport with many of his brothers, particularly those more inclined to combat, though the more scholarly among them often thought him a boorish thug of a man, more suited to a life of directionless adventure than leadership. Aodhán, quite ironically, was among the tallest of the Primarchs, standing a full head over some of his brothers. First into battle and last to retreat, he cut a heroic figure, his legendary beauty matched only by his uncanny - some might say freakish - strength. Though never quite possessing the grace of Kashaln or the martial discipline of Staffel, Aodhán commanded prodigious physical might, even by the standards of other Primarchs.

Widowmaker

Boisterous and reckless, he often forged ahead in the Crusade. It was in this way that he came upon the weapon he wields today. Upon inducting a feudal world in the galactic east into compliance, Aodhán led his Legion to deal with the 'monstrosities' that plagued the planet - creatures hailing from a nearby planetoid, seemingly the remains of a once thriving world, now charred down to its very core. The beings he and his men encountered there were like nothing they had ever known. They seemed barely real, shifting and changing with every step, spewing garish torrents of prismatic fire and slipping across the airless surface of the rock like shadows. It was only through immense fortitude and a stroke of luck that the creatures were banished from that place. As the horde thinned and the Negators pushed them to the bowl of a massive crater, the greatest among them revealed itself - a creature of blinding, scintillating feathers and roiling eyes, space flexing and stretching at its command. Though worn down by weeks of sustained battle, Aodhán faced the beast in single combat. It lashed at him with burst of fire and lightning, its touch twisting his armour into gnarled shapes. When it seemed that the Primarch would fall, his weapon cast from his hand, he reached out and found the hilt of an unfamiliar blade.

Driven deep into the ancient rock, the sword was slender in design, shimmering as though with a cold fire, and so tall that even in the hands of a Primarch it seemed overly large. Drawing it forth, Aodhán felt a rage like none other overcome him, and he struck his foe down with a single blow, its breast cleaved open by some irresistible force.

From then on, the Primarch claimed the blade as his own, dubbing it Widowmaker. It has remained at his side ever since.

The King in Red

In self-imposed exile from the Imperium's remnants, Aodhán's strength has only grown. Though he managed to reject Daemon Princehood, the Warp left its barbs in him, and he has slowly become something not-quite-mortal. His skin has become like burnished bronze, his eyes blazing and his rage manifesting around him as a blistering heat. He no longer wears his armour, having little need, and leaves footsteps of flame in his wake.

Aodhán was always an adventurer before a leader, and, without the harness of the Imperium holding him down, this can be quite clearly seen in the erratic workings of the modern Negators. He makes little attempt to keep his Legion loyal - they stay with him as, though turned craven and cruel, they feel themselves bonded as brothers - and routinely vanishes from the estate carved out in Commorragh, often without warning. Once every hundred or so years, he will feast for fifty days, as though building his strength, before embarking upon one such endeavor. He inevitably returns battered, beaten, and awash with the smell of rot, but wearing a winning smile, as though each time he comes a step closer to achieving some great feat.

Aodhán rarely leads his Legion to war, letting them persecute their own raids upon realspace. When not adventuring or embarking upon a rare campaign with the full muster of his Legion, he amuses himself with the delights of the Dark City. His spirits, however, are turbulent, and though he is at many times possessed of a rapacious love for life and its joys, he often takes to brooding, either out of boredom or something darker.

Deep within, Aodhán feels a spark of guilt for the current shape of the galaxy and his hand in it, and foresees a vision of a universe picked clean of life, where there are no great heroes or valiant deeds to do, and no bards to tell his tale or sing his songs, only the laughter of craven gods and the wailing of their tortured supplicants. He drowns these fears in pleasures of the flesh, fighting and feasting and savouring hundreds of concubines, but they remain always, a nagging shard of encroaching doom at the back of his mind.

Gene-seed

For much of the Great Crusade, the Negators' gene-seed remained relatively pure. Reflecting their Primarch's prodigious height, there is a trend towards a taller average height and leaner build among the Negators. Other than this, Aodhán's gene-seed was mostly unremarkable until his Legion's entry into the Heresy.

Warp-Spasm

With time, a specific flaw has appeared in the Negators' gene-seed. A select few of their number, when in the height of rage or excitement, can experience a burst of uncontrollable, intense mutation. The agony of the change sends them into a ferocious berserker state known as the warp-spasm. When the spasm subsides, most outward mutations gradually normalize, but each time a Legionnaire enters the rage they retain some sign of it - jagged fangs, a distended jaw, scythelike talons, etc. Over time, some Negators can become more akin to the monsters they hunt than their fellow brothers.

Culture

Glory or Coin

When the first Black Crusade was called, Aodhán's response to the Warmaster's summons became legendary:

"Make it worth my while."

Self-love is the order of the day with the Negators. The Legion has a rich, if volatile, culture, but little driving ideology. They do not fight for conquest, and, on the whole, have no lust for empire. They do not fight for an ideal. They do not fight for the Ruinous Powers. The Negators fight because it is glorious to do so, or because they have something gain from it. The spoils of war are of significant cultural importance to the Legion - trophies, captives, and all manner of ill-gotten gains are seen as additions to a Legionnaire's personal legend, nourishing their repute and increasing their standing in the eyes of their Brothers. It is not surprising, then, that many warbands and companies engage in mercenary activity. Many a Crusader State has menaced a minor power, only to find their forces met by a warband of eager Negators, ready and willing to spread carnage and death for the sake of renown. There is no universal currency, but the Negators are willing to take - by force, if necessary (and sometimes when not necessary) - all manner of payment in return for the chance to put their skills to use. Slaves, exotic weapons, ancient technologies and artifacts... a warband of Negators quickly accrues a vast storehouse of trophies from across the galaxy, whether plundered or gifted.

Psykers & Sorcery

Their ranks mostly pulled from civilizations in the heroic era of iron and early steel age civilizations, the Negators have a particularly unfavourable view of psykers and sorcery. Some Negators even go as far as inscribing fell runes into their armour, disrupting the attempts of psykers to concentrate and unweaving sorcery in their presence, at the cost of the runes gradually worsening the Legionnaire's sanity and making him more prone to succumbing to warp-spasm. This can sometimes result in twisted, ferocious mutants mingled with Warp-warded metal, often deployed ahead of Negator lines as specialized killers.

Though they find sorcery distasteful, the Negators see its uses, and find a place in their halls for slaves with clairvoyant abilities. These Morrígna, as they are called, are generally women, as the specific complaint Negators have of sorcery is that it is unmanly. Aodhán himself keeps a pair of personal Morrígna in the form of Sgathaich and Aoifea, a pair of Eldar Farseers who once managed to deceive and humiliate the Primarch. Negators that manifest psyker powers generally ward their own armour and, if discovered, will have to constantly prove themselves, all the while weathering insults on subjects ranging from battle prowess to sexual potency.

A common Negators' joke: "How do you tell a Sky Serpent and a Warp Raider apart? The Sky Serpent is the one on top!"

Dreadnoughts

The Negators abhor dreadnoughts, but use them nonetheless. Rather than interring their dead within them, they trap captured enemies within their shells, employing the haemonculi of Commorragh to twist their bodies and minds into a state of unholy, utterly insane fusion with the metal of the construct. These dreadnoughts take the role of 'giants' in their traditional games, serving as punching bags of a sort for Astartes of the Legion to whet their appetites for combat against. In battle, they are deployed amidst enemy forces in drop pods, set loose to rampage through the unfortunate ranks of their victims, driven to a frenzy by decades of sustained agony and brutal battle.

Organization

Structure

The Legion

The precise structure of the Negators Legion is tenuous and fluid at the best of times. In years past, prior to the Heresy, the Legion was divided into warbands of a thousand Marines, each of which in turn was composed of ten companies, each headed by a captain. The specifics of force organization were often disregarded by the Primarch, and each Warlord was free to compose his forces as he saw fit, so long as their vision remained somewhat within the realm of reason. In theory, the same structure still exists, but time and disinterest on Aodhán's part have seen the Legion's ranks gradually spin out of control. The Negators do not limit themselves in recruiting, Aodhán having handed the secrets of his gene-seed over to a number of Commorragh's haemonculi cults, not particularly caring about the potential consequences of such a bargain. With their assistance, the Legion has no trouble replenishing its ranks (though, there has been a marked increase in Legionnaires falling to warp-spasm, a fact the Primarch is either unaware of or cares little of). The number of Legionnaires or companies within a warband can vary wildly, as can the number of warbands, and it may very well be that even Aodhán himself does not know how many Negators currently exist. The same can be said of force composition - the Primarch is perfectly willing to let his sons do as they will. If their lack of planning or overspecialization spells their doom, then hopefully they at least die with honour and flair, and carve a name for themselves in history.

The Davidian Circle

The inner council of the Negators and the occupants of Aodhán's court, these ancient Legionnaires are among the most accomplished and famed warriors to have traversed the stars. Officially, only Warlords recognized by the Primarch for their accomplishments and can claim to be Knights of the Circle and preside over a warband, but the number of Negators considered to be Davidians is constantly in flux, subject to hearsay and embellishment, the practice of boasting honed to fine art by the Marines of the Negators. Those unrecognized by Aodhán, however, are bereft of the Circle's greatest boon. Aodhán knights those he acknowledges personally, cutting his Warp-touched flesh and letting the supplicant drink of his fiery blood. The ensuing transformation burns away a touch of the Davidian's mortality, turning their hearts to furnaces of bright flame and filling their veins with unnatural heat. Their skin dims to a burnished bronze, their hands becoming mottled with the rust-red of old bloodstains, and their strength and vitality skyrocket. Few warriors have been granted such an honour, and fewer still can be said to have truly plumbed the furthest depths of the power invested in them.

The Court of Shadows

Not an official organization by any means, the Court of Shadows nonetheless occupies a singular position of reverence and fear, both within the Legion and in the faiths of its slaves and serfs. Even prior to the Heresy, Aodhán was an insatiable womanizer. It should come to the surprise of absolutely no-one that, without the watchful eye of the Emperor at his back and after roughly ten thousand years of raiding, pillaging, and whoring, the Primarch has fathered hundreds of thousands of children. Though generally human at birth, these creatures rarely remain that way. Aodhán has not been remotely mortal for many centuries, and his Warp-touched flesh does not mingle easily with the mundane matter of purely physical beings. The Primarch's sons and daughters are quickly overcome with rampant mutations, shriveling away from the material world as they become more shadow than flesh. Not beings of the Warp, nor beings of the material, they exist somewhere in-between, creatures of twisting shadow and desiccating flame. Monsters in every sense of the word, they are beings of rapacious, insatiable hunger, constantly seeking the warmth of realspace and the flesh of those that dwell there, yet only able to flicker to and fro between existence and non-existence, and only in places where the skeins of reality are thin.

Still, the Shadow Princes' terrible hunger is sometimes sated. The blood-witches of the Morrígna channel these beings through themselves in their sorcery, scathing their masters' enemies with invisible fangs and claws, and have enshrined them as minor deities in their ramshackle faith. In the rare instances where the Morrígna are seen accompanying the Negators' barbarian auxiliaries, they use profane blood-ritual to let the Shadow Princes infest the flesh of their flock, transforming them into rampaging Chaos Spawn. In particularly favourable conditions, a full circle of blood-witches might even bring one of Aodhán's children fully into the material realm, where it can eat its fill of those unfortunates in its path.

Auxiliaries & Allies

When intent on persecuting a sustained campaign, the Negators rarely arrive on the field of battle alone. The Legion draws upon a vast reserve of auxiliaries, culled from low-civilization worlds, slave raids, and gladiatorial recruitment within Commorragh. Serving as a secondary function as pools from which to draw potential Legionnaires or Morrígna, many Warbands' slave stocks have formed societies and cultures of their own, often lead in religious reverence of the Negators by a select number of Morrígna. Able-bodied men are deployed as Potentiate Auxiliaries across the galaxy, armed with a hodgepodge of looted or traded weapons, and used to hold ground, serve as diversionary forces, and battle with boring or weak foes - tasks with little honour or fame associated with them. Women selected for their psyker talents as Morrígna serve a selection of roles based on their specific, and are inducted into the tradition of grisly blood sorcery that has slowly accumulated among the Negators' pet witches. Most of all, the abilities of foresight and clairvoyance are valued, but sorcery geared toward the binding of daemons or brewing of arcane mixtures (for increased physical prowess, stronger vitality, greater sexual potency, etc) have a place among the crafts of the Morrígna.

Aside from subservient auxiliaries, the Negators are sometimes spied working alongside other forces. The Legion's particularly close relationship with a handful of wytch cults, along with its neighboring kabals, can occasionally mean that the Legion takes to the field alongside a raiding party of Commorrite Eldar. In a few cases, Negators have even been reported to be working under their command - Aodhán sometimes lends his Legionnaires out to favoured wytches, though generally not for long.

In addition to chasing valour and renown as mercenaries themselves, the Negators have on occasion been known to put their coffers to use by employing the services of numerous xenos mercenaries, from the predatory Kroot to the ruthless Rak'Gol.

Tactics

Specialized in bringing down large targets, Negators are schooled rigorously in the means and method to destroying all manner of beasts and war machines. They field large numbers of armour piercing weaponry, utilizing teams of crack shot autocannon specialists, and coat their armaments with all manner of poisons and corrosive gels. Primarily raiders, the Legion strikes hard and strikes fast, their tactics centered around the annihilation of priority targets. They are quick to redeploy once the greatest of foes have been leveled and their glory has been had, utilizing specialized heavy weapon teams known as Venators, equipped with modified, jump-jet assisted power armour. Preferring decisive blows to the grind of sustained combat, the Negators tend to forego battles of attrition, and are often equipped with an array of unstable, single-use weapons that reflect this mentality. Combat is an all-or-nothing pursuit to the Negators - they either destroy their foe with extreme prejudice (and, more often than than not, a great deal of flair), or they themselves are destroyed.

Specialized Troops

Venator Teams

Exemplifying the Negators' preference for overwhelming killing power, Venator squads take the place occupied by Devastators in a more traditional Legion structure. Foregoing plasma and bolter technology, Venator teams utilize accurate, armour-piercing weaponry - autocannons (often equipped with specialized ammunition), lascannons, rocket launchers, etc. Renowned for their accuracy and encyclopedic knowledge of anti-armour tactica, many Venator teams are also equipped with modified, jump-jet assisted power armour, allowing them to rapidly move from one priority target to the next. Some Venators have taken this pursuit a step further, commissioning the haemonculi cults of Commorragh to fashion leathery wings or biological thrusters into their very biology.

Giantslayers

Veteran Negators, seeking to prove their worth against the greatest foes, sometimes embark upon a ritualized quest, delving into the darkest of daemon worlds in order to slay a Warp fiend of repute. They bind these defeated daemons to their weapons. Groups of Giantslayers, galvanized by daemonic energies and tempered by centuries of combat, cut a bloody swathe through the ranks of their foes, seeking out yet greater monsters to challenge and foes to break. Foregoing the use of ranged weaponry, they seek solely to test their mettle against the most terrible of daemons, warmachines and monsters, adding their foes' legends to their own.

Bane Knights

Typically disinterested in technical pursuits, it is no surprise to anyone that much of the Negators' equipment has fallen into a dire state of disrepair over the ages. Though the Legion maintains a vast horde of slaves to which the performance of mundane tasks is relegated, over time their lack of technical know-how and naturally adventurous spirit has resulted in inventive ways around this problem. One such method eventually lead to the Bane Knight tradition. Negators in search of new and higher thrills will sometimes delve into the murky depths of Commorragh, in hopes of binding one of the shadowy daemons that stalk those ancient passages. These nightmares, as they are called, are broken and trained as daemonic steeds. Carrying their riders across the battlefield with unnatural swiftness, they swathe the air around them in shadow, obfuscating their true position. Bane Knights generally wield Storm Shields and Flamespears, discarding these single-use weapons after a crushing charge to draw their primary arms.

Potentiate Auxiliaries

Have you ever found that combat against puny shits like Tau or Guardsmen gets totally boring after a while? Do you often find yourself hacking through swarms of disposable scum, bereft of glory or excitement? Do you find your thoughts drifting toward greater exploits? You too can solve this problem by chucking hordes disposable primitives at it. Plucked from savage worlds or Commorrite gladiatorial rings, these plucky mortals need minimal trailing and equipment, making up for with pure spunk and desperation. If any of them live long enough, they might even make good Legionnaires in future!

Equipment

One Shot, One Kill

Negators are partial to unstable, often one-use weapons that tear through armour like wet tissue and cause decisive damage in a single stroke. Their bolters are often customized with an cylindrical barrel known as a firedrake attached to the underside, carrying a one-shot melta charge. Unstable and wildly inaccurate at all but the closest ranges, these attachments are often fired at point blank against larger, armoured foes. In many instances, this causes severe damage to the bolter itself, sometimes even rendering it unusable. The Legion's characteristic Flamespears are a similar concept - polearm weapons designed to deliver a burst of melta waves upon impact - and often utilized by assault squads, alongside Eviscerator chainswords and other such weapons. Many Negators Terminators eschew handheld ranged weapons (though, shoulder-mounted autocannons remain popular), striding into battle with a pair of modified power fists. Constantly trailing tongues of crackling blue flame, these unstable modifications can be used to trigger a burst of melta emissions at will, often used to roast the innards (or crew, in the case of war machines) of a Negators' monstrous target.

Notable Individuals

Bother-Captain Coighann Muir

Otherwise known as Warboss Morr. Recruited from the savage world of Elgos V over eight hundred years ago, Coighann Muir was inducted into the Negators Legion at the height of its depravity. A man of unparalleled fury even before his transformation into an Astartes, Coighann was unruly even by the standards of his Legion, and rose in prominence purely by merit of his startling ferocity. Demented by a perpetual lust for conquest, Coighann and his company have not returned to the Dark City in almost six centuries, tearing their way across Segmentum Tempestus on a non-stop crusade for valorous combat. Presently, Coighann and his company preside over Waaagh! Morr, a tide of greenskins that constantly press into the realms of the Undying Vigil. Recent reports indicate that he has taken to painting himself green and adorning his armour with the hides of various ork warbosses.