Argel Tal

Argel Tal was a captain of the Word Bearers Legion and the first of the Gal Vorbak, Space Marines bound in life to a daemon of the warp. He commanded the Serrated Sun and stood among Primarch Lorgar’s most trusted officers, a Colchisian by birth whose devotion to the Legion’s search for divine truth carried him from his home world into the heresy that bore Lorgar’s name.

Argel Tal rose through the Word Bearers’ chaplaincy and was present at Monarchia when Imperial Fists and Ultramarines guns, acting on the Emperor’s sanction, levelled the Legion’s capital and shattered its faith in the Imperial Truth. He accompanied Lorgar afterwards on the pilgrimage that followed, guided in part by Cyrene Valantion, a blank human who became his ward and confidante, and it was during the rites that grew from that search that he was bound to a daemon later named Raum, becoming the first of the Gal Vorbak — warriors who carried a bound daemon within their own flesh and armour rather than merely commanding one.

As a captain of the Serrated Sun, Argel Tal fought at Isstvan V during the massacre of the loyalist Legions and went on to serve through the Shadow Crusade, the Word Bearers’ invasion of Ultramar, including the surprise assault on Calth. Accounts place him consistently at Lorgar’s side rather than as an independent commander, his Gal Vorbak serving as a shock element wherever the Word Bearers’ fleets made landfall.

Argel Tal’s service sat uneasily alongside that of Erebus, the First Chaplain whose manipulations had done much to set the Heresy in motion; the two shared a cause but not a method, and later tradition holds that Argel Tal distrusted Erebus even as he fought beside him. He is also recorded as a friend of Khârn, later the World Eaters’ Champion, a bond that crossed Legion lines and endured despite the widening war.

Argel Tal died during the fighting of the Shadow Crusade around Calth, his fate bound to that of Raum, the daemon he had carried since Cadia. The Gal Vorbak he had founded survived him as an elite formation within the Word Bearers, and Colchis remains the world with which his name and origin are most closely associated.