The Tragedy of the Traitors
Part 1
Dear reader, it’s my unfortunate duty to inform you that
you’ve been deceived. The servants of the Imperium would like you to live in a
world in which the Traitor Primarchs and their Legions are a gang of
moustache-twirling evil doers, who dove headlong into their heresy with
reckless abandon and villainous glee.
This is a lie. This is the first of a series of three
articles where I’m going to attempt to convince you that the nine Legions now
declared Excommunicatus Traitorus are
in fact the tragic victims of the Horus Heresy: some of circumstance, others of
their Father’s mistakes, but certainly victims all.
Foreword
Before I begin with the first three Legions, I’d like to
offer a brief comment on the contrast the Loyalists provide here. Of the nine
Primarchs who would stay loyal to the Emperor, eight were adopted into lives of
camaraderie, love or power. Whilst none of their lives was without warfare or
difficulty, they were surrounded by those who cared for them. Only Ferrus Manus
spent his formative years alone. Is it any wonder he was so ill-adjusted that
he would charge headlong into the Traitors at the Dropsite Massacre out of
blind fury? This is my first point: the upbringings of the loyalist Primarchs were
by and large experiences that shaped their psyches in constructive ways,
teaching empathy and honour.
Not so for those Primarchs I’ll be examining today:
Konrad Curze - The Night Haunter
Konrad didn’t fall on an idyllic world like Macragge, nor
was he shown the love of a family like Vulkan had received. Quite the opposite,
he found himself on Nostramo, a world pitched in eternal darkness, and quite
alone. Where other Primarchs grew up learning that when humanity stood
together, it could accomplish great things, Konrad looked upon the people of
his world, and saw instead a society that had brought out the very worst in
human nature. The strong survived, and the populace lived in fear. Not fear of
rampaging xenos or mutants, but simply fear of each other. On a world like
this, can we really blame Curze for the sort of man he would become? He never
had a role model like the Khan’s father or the Order on Caliban. Indeed, he
essentially had no relationships with anyone until the Emperor arrived to
welcome him into the Imperium.
I suggest that Konrad is simply a product of the
circumstances he found himself in, and became the Night Haunter not because of
some character flaw, but because it was inevitable that such a depraved world
would produce a depraved Primarch. Coupled with the harrowing visions of his
psychic “gift” these experiences moulded Konrad into a paranoid killer, and in
the end it is these experiences that make Konrad the unfortunate victim of
Nostramo and its inhabitants. Indeed, Nostramo was the also the prime source of intake for the Night Lords legion, and as such only provided the same dilemma that Konrad faced in his youth: in an environment where people only responded to fear, how else was he to lead? His sense of clothing, both for himself and the Astartes under his command, for what they had to become to eke out an existence on Nostramo, serves only to reinforce the tragedy of Curze's life.
Mortarion - The Death Lord
Mortarion’s childhood wasn’t the lonely affair of Curze, but
would nonetheless scar him. He landed on Barbarus where he was adopted by one
of the powerful necromantic warlords of that world. However his ‘father’ was
not a statesman or honourable warrior. He was a despot who harvested the
peasants of the lower valleys, reanimated them and forged their flesh into
freakish abominations for his own internecine wars between the other lords of
Barbarus. Whilst Mortarion was offered education and relative comfort, what
sort of teaching would we expect this child to receive? His adoptive father’s
actions show us exactly what value he places on others: they are tools, mere
raw ingredients to further his own aims.
What reason do we have to think
Mortarion wouldn’t be reshaped, at least psychologically, into a tool for these
conflicts? Does a tool need empathy? What about honour? It stands to reason
that Mortarion’s later callous disregard for mortal humans at his command, as
well as those Terran-born Death Guard legionaries who cared for them, was bred
not in the days leading up to the Heresy, but in his adolescence.
Unlike
Konrad, Mortarion may have had the chance to excise this old self from his
life. In his final days on Barbarus, Mortarion was leading the strongest of the
peasants in a revolution against these warlords, and stood against his adoptive
father, beginning to lose consciousness from the noxious fumes that surrounded
him. Whether Mortarion could have slain him and exorcised this part of his
life, we’ll never know, because the Emperor intervened and killed him. It is in
this way that the dark side of the Death Lord would never truly die, and would
fuel his betrayal of the Emperor and his Crusade. Like Konrad, I suggest it’s
hardly Mortarion’s fault that he grew up on such a hellish world, and was
educated and moulded by a moral monster. I mourn for the man Mortarion could
have been if he was born with Macragge’s silver spoon in his mouth.
Alpharius Omegon - The Hydra
Very little is known of
Alpharius’ early years. Like everything else concerning him and his legion,
it’s likely this ambiguity and confusion has been engineered deliberately to
make fighting them even harder. That said, I feel like “Nobody knows…” would be
a cop-out for an article like this, so we’re going to have to settle for the
apocryphal tales and rumours that surround these times. One such story insists
that Alpharius never actually left Terra when the Primarchs were scattered, and
spent his youth in the tutelage of the Emperor himself in secret. I’m prepared
to discount this story, essentially because it doesn’t stand to reason that the
Big E would keep a Primarch under wraps. In a climate where the Great Crusade
was just beginning, and 19 Primarchs had been lost, potentially forever,
Alpharius would have been a shining light to lead the Crusade. No, I think the
more likely tale is the version of events where as a youth he was abducted by
the hideous xenos race of the Slaugh. They kept him as a kind of pet, torturing
him and twisting his mind with acts of cruelty.
Like his brothers discussed here,
it’s impossible that this sort of experience would leave a man, even transhuman
one, completely unscarred. His sense of honour, or connection with other
people, may well have been compromised to such an extent that the choice to
engage in the Heresy in the way he did, was inevitable. Theirs is also a
palpable sense that his decision to cavort with the shadowy xenos Cabal may be
a strange version of Stockholm syndrome; is it any wonder he found it so easy
to betray his own kind, when he spent so long as one of the others?
Next time, I’d like to explore
the three Primarchs who are best described as the sad victims of the Emperor’s
utter inhumanity…
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