Garviel Loken

Garviel Loken was captain of the Luna Wolves’ Tenth Company and a member of the Mournival before becoming a Knight-Errant of Malcador the Sigillite. Born on Cthonia, he rose through the Legion under Horus Aximand and Ezekyle Abaddon as fellow Mournival companions, and stood close to Warmaster Horus himself in the years before the Luna Wolves were renamed the Sons of Horus. His record is bound to Cthonia as birthplace and to Terra as the site of his final service, with the wider Horus Heresy providing the frame for both his fall from favour and his death.

When Horus turned against the Emperor, Loken’s refusal to abandon his oaths marked him as a target. He survived the massacre at Isstvan III, an attack the Warmaster ordered against his own loyalist companies to purge dissent within the assault force, escaping the killing ground alongside other loyalists such as Nathaniel Garro and Iacton Qruze. The remembrancers Euphrati Keeler and Ignace Karkasy, attached to the Luna Wolves before the betrayal, later carried testimony of his loyalty into the wider Imperial account of the war, treating him as a principal witness to the Legion’s corruption.

Recruited afterward as a Knight-Errant, Loken operated as an agent of Malcador the Sigillite through the remainder of the Heresy, working outside normal Legion command in operations bound to the Sigillite’s direct authority. In the war’s closing phase he boarded the Vengeful Spirit during the final movement against Horus, where he confronted Ezekyle Abaddon, once his closest Mournival brother, over the Warmaster’s corpse. It was there that Erebus, First Chaplain of the Word Bearers and the architect of the Isstvan betrayal, killed him, closing the account of a captain who had crossed from the Warmaster’s inner circle to his most persistent loyalist adversary.

Imperial remembrance treats Loken as a principal loyalist voice within the story of the XVI Legion’s fall, his survival of Isstvan III and his death aboard the Vengeful Spirit standing as bracketing points either side of his service to Malcador. Cthonia marks his origin and Terra his final theatre, with no further record of activity attached to him after Horus’s defeat.

Before his induction into the Luna Wolves, the XVI Legion of Space Marines, Loken belonged to the gangs of Cthonia. He fought in many Great Crusade campaigns before the Heresy, among them the bloodless compliance of Sarosel and, some eighty years before the Heresy, the Battle of Keylek against the reptilian keylekid. In the pacification of Sixty-Three Nineteen, a human world ruled by a self-proclaimed Emperor of Mankind, his Tenth Company was one of four chosen to spearhead the assault on the capital. He was then invited to take the place of the slain Hastur Sejanus in the Mournival, the informal council of four captains who advised Horus, and became the first member who was not a ‘son of Horus’, the name given to Luna Wolves who resembled their primarch. Fuller accounts record that Loken was already a company captain when Abaddon, Torgaddon and Aximand invited him into the council, so that they were his fellow captains rather than the officers under whom he rose. Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists, is recorded as having vouched for his strength of character and, during a visit to the Vengeful Spirit, as urging him to speak his mind in the Mournival. Loken then led the Tenth Company against the last rebel stronghold in the Whisperhead Mountains, where he saw his sergeant Xavyer Jubal possessed by the daemon Samus, an entity of the warp, in his first encounter with Chaos.

Loken was among the Warmaster’s entourage on the Interex world of Xenobia. When fighting broke out after a Kinebrach blade known as the Anathame was stolen from the city’s Hall of Devices, he wounded and spared an Interex officer identified as the subordinate commander Mithras Tull; after that campaign the Luna Wolves were renamed the Sons of Horus. His study of Terra’s ancient history at the urging of Kyril Sindermann, an iterator (an official orator of the Imperial Truth), and his sponsorship of the poet Ignace Karkasy, one of the remembrancers (civilian chroniclers of the Crusade), set him at odds with Erebus of the Word Bearers and with powerful figures in the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet. The same accounts record that Karkasy was murdered by Maggard, a member of the Legion’s lodge, in Horus’s purge of dissenters before the Isstvan campaign, and they record no testimony from Keeler on his behalf. Loken’s company formed part of the spearhead that landed on Davin’s moon, where Horus was gravely wounded. Loken and Tarik Torgaddon later returned to the wreck of the Glory of Terra, recovered the weapon and recognised it as the Anathame; concluding that Erebus was responsible, they reached the Temple of the Serpent Lodge on Davin only after Abaddon and Aximand had entrusted Horus to the lodge’s priests. After Horus’s recovery Loken witnessed him kill Emory Salignac, Fabricator Consul of the Auretian Technocracy, aboard the Vengeful Spirit, and disputed the official claim of an assassination attempt. In the war that followed on Aureus, which accounts describe as lasting nine or ten months, he and Torgaddon led their companies in the final assault on the Iron Citadel.

Fuller accounts of Isstvan III describe his survival in different terms. Horus placed Loken and Torgaddon in the first wave so that they would die in the virus bombing; when it failed, Loken, Torgaddon and Saul Tarvitz of the Emperor’s Children commanded the loyalists who held the Precentor’s Palace in the Choral City, and Loken declared the loyal legionaries of the XVI Legion to be Luna Wolves once more. He saw Torgaddon killed by Aximand, was wounded by Abaddon, and was believed to have died in the final orbital bombardment, while Garro and Iacton Qruze had left the system aboard the frigate Eisenstein. Months later a team led by Nathaniel Garro on the orders of Malcador found a lone legionary in the ruins who had forgotten his name and called himself Cerberus, the title by which Loken is also known. After single combat Garro reminded him of who he was, and Loken agreed to return with them to Terra as the last of the Sigillite’s chosen recruits.

The Knights-Errant were agents recruited by Malcador from many Legions, including those that had turned traitor. Loken’s first mission took him with Qruze to Caliban to judge the loyalty of the Dark Angels under Luther. He allowed himself to be captured, read Luther’s mind with telepathic help from one of the Watchers in the Dark, and escaped with the aid of Cypher after Qruze had killed a Dark Angel sentry, an act Loken condemned. He then withdrew to Luna, where he restored the garden of a disused dome of the Somnus Citadel, and is recorded as having been visited there by the dead Torgaddon, who reminded him of his Mournival oath. He next led a Knights-Errant team, assembled with Leman Russ, to infiltrate the Vengeful Spirit at Molech. On the way the stealth-ship Tarnhelm called at a fortress on Titan to collect Qruze, where Loken also saw the remembrancer Mersadie Oliton. Aboard the flagship the team marked the decks for a later Space Wolves assault but were captured and brought before Horus in Lupercal’s Court. Loken refused the Warmaster’s offer to return to the Legion; in the fight that followed Horus killed Qruze, and the team was drawn out into space and recovered by the Tarnhelm.

On Terra, shortly before Horus arrived, Loken fought Chaos cultists alongside Garro, Macer Varren, Helig Gallor and Vardas Ison. When the daemon known as the Lord of the Flies possessed Varren, Loken briefly recalled him to himself, and Varren used Loken’s grenades to kill himself. Malcador then brought Loken and eight other Knights-Errant before the Emperor in a chamber beneath the Imperial Palace, where they were asked to found a new order to fight the powers of the warp and to take new names. Loken, intended to become Crius, declined and returned to the surface; the order became the Grey Knights. In the final phase of the Solar War he brought Oliton aboard the Phalanx to meet Dorn; Samus manifested through her, Loken fought the daemon in his Cerberus persona, and Oliton closed its portal by taking her own life.

During the Siege of Terra, Dorn and Malcador chose Loken to lead kill-teams beneath the Saturnine Gate against a subterranean assault by the Sons of Horus. With Garro, Gallor, Bel Sepatus, Endryd Haar and others he defeated the attack, killing Captain Tybalt Marr; the daemon Tormageddon, which Erebus had raised using Torgaddon’s remains; and Horus Aximand, whose sword Mourn-it-All he took. He told Sindermann afterwards that he was becoming a conduit for the Emperor’s power, and he later found Euphrati Keeler leading militias in Terra’s ruins and agreed to stay with her, though the breakdown of space and time in the siege’s last stage soon separated them. Passing from the Hall of Leng, the Emperor’s library, onto the Vengeful Spirit, he destroyed the physical form of Samus, helped turn the Emperor from becoming the Dark King, a god-like form, and reached Lupercal’s Court as the Emperor slew Horus. He remained with Horus’s body, and Erebus stabbed him in the back after he had urged Abaddon and the surviving Sons of Horus officers to surrender. His death, aboard the flagship above Terra rather than on the planet’s surface, is dated to 014.M31. Besides Mourn-it-All he had carried the chainsword of his Luna Wolves service and a force sword that had belonged to Tylos Rubio, given to him after Rubio left for Titan.