Alpha Primus

Alpha Primus is recorded as the first Primaris Space Marine, created on Mars by Archmagos Belisarius Cawl in the Imperium’s service. The designation marks the earliest successful subject of the programme that produced the Primaris Space Marines: larger, augmented warriors of the Adeptus Astartes, bred from gene-seed derived from the Primarch Roboute Guilliman. He belongs to the Adeptus Astartes in form and purpose, but he was made within the forges of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

The programme is attributed to Cawl’s long, largely secret labour beneath the Martian surface. Cawl maintains that it proceeded under a directive from Guilliman himself, given long before the Primarch’s return. Alpha Primus stands at the start of that work, the first of the prototypes from which the later Primaris battle-brothers were refined. Accounts differ on the exact date and method of his making, and the surviving record says little about his individual conduct, allegiances or fate. The Primaris warriors were held in stasis until Guilliman’s return to the Imperium in the later forty-first millennium, when Cawl presented them to the Lord Commander as the basis of a new Space Marine host.

The standing of Alpha Primus is that of a progenitor rather than a commander: he is significant as the proof on which every later Primaris Space Marine rests, and his existence ties Mars to the wider Ultima Founding and to the campaigns of the Indomitus Crusade. His present status is unknown, and later tradition should not be assumed to fill the gap. On the Orrery map he is anchored to Mars, and on the timeline to the moment of Cawl’s creation, contemporary with Cawl’s work on the Martian forges and, much later, with Guilliman’s return to Terra.