Ancient Rylanor

Ancient Rylanor was a Contemptor-pattern Dreadnought of the Emperor’s Children Legion, recorded among the loyalist forces at Isstvan III. The honorific “Ancient” denotes a warrior of long service and standing who has been interred within a Dreadnought sarcophagus after grievous injury. By the outbreak of the Horus Heresy, Rylanor was counted among the oldest active members of his Legion, with a record reaching back into the early decades of the Great Crusade. His significance in the wider story lies in the fact that he served the Emperor’s cause from within a Legion whose primarch, Fulgrim, was drawn into Horus’s rebellion, so that his loyalty set him against many of his own battle-brothers.

There the Warmaster’s forces exposed the loyalist elements within several Legions, among them the Emperor’s Children, and then subjected the world to virus bombardment in the event now called the Isstvan III Atrocity. Rylanor is recorded among the loyalist Emperor’s Children on the surface, where he is associated with the company of Saul Tarvitz, a captain of the same Legion who resisted the treachery of his own commanders. Accounts differ on the details of the fighting on the planet, and this dossier does not attempt to fix his movements more precisely than the surviving record allows.