Horus Lupercal

Horus Lupercal was a primarch of the Imperium of Man, created by the Emperor on Terra in the late thirtieth millennium and scattered across the galaxy as an infant. His gestation-capsule fell on Cthonia, a gang world long since mined hollow, and accounts of his upbringing there diverge sharply. One tradition holds that he was raised by the gang overlord Khageddon under the name Nergüi, the “no-name”, and that he earned his kill-name by slaying Khageddon when Mechanicum adepts broke into the gang’s hold, afterwards styling himself Horus. By his own account, he was simply brought to Terra among a band of elderly gang comrades and there knelt before the Emperor. Other versions place his boyhood on Terra itself, or leave the place of his finding unrecorded. He is traditionally held to have been the first of the primarchs to be rediscovered, and for some thirty years the only one found, a distinction that shaped both his bond with the Emperor and his later pre-eminence among his brothers.

In the opening decades of the Great Crusade he fought beside the Emperor directly. At the Siege of Reillis the two stood back to back, and the Emperor saved his life; on the Ork scrapworld of Gorro, Horus hacked the arm from an Ork that had the Emperor by the throat. He was given command of the Luna Wolves, a Legion recruited largely from Cthonian gangers, and of the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet, and was repeatedly left in overall command of the Crusade’s Legions while the Emperor sought out other primarchs. He gained a reputation for securing compliance without bloodshed where this was possible, for honouring the customs of newly contacted peoples, and for deploying allied Legions according to their particular strengths. Alongside Rogal Dorn and Mortarion he fought the Ork warboss Gharkul Blackfang at Gyros-Thravian, and with Sanguinius he fought the Nephilim at Melchior, where he learned of the Blood Angels’ hidden flaw and swore to keep it secret.

The Ullanor Crusade, around the turn of the thirty-first millennium, brought him to the height of his renown. He led the assault on the fortress of the Ork overlord Urlakk Urg and killed him in single combat, and at the Triumph at Ullanor that followed, the Emperor named him Warmaster, commander of all Imperial military forces, before withdrawing to Terra. Sanguinius, Fulgrim, Lorgar, Mortarion and Dorn welcomed the appointment; Angron, Perturabo and Curze resented it; Leman Russ and the Lion accepted it only grudgingly. As Warmaster, Horus retook the Akum-Sothos Cluster at the Battle of Gate Forty-Two, where Corax’s Raven Guard bore the heaviest fighting; seized Sixty-Three Nineteen from a usurper by teleporting into his throne room and killing him with a single shot; fought the Megarachnids on the world called Murder; and made contact with the sophisticated human culture known as the Interex at Xenobia, where a raid by the Word Bearer Erebus on their Hall of Devices provoked open battle. In the aftermath he renamed his Legion the Sons of Horus, and increasingly chafed at the Emperor’s continued absence and at the authority vested in the newly formed Council of Terra.

The turning point came on Davin’s moon, where Horus returned to put down the renegade governor Eugen Temba. He killed Temba but was gravely wounded by the Anathame, a blade Erebus had stolen at Xenobia. Carried to the Serpent Lodge temple on Davin, he was shown visions, among them Erebus appearing in the likeness of the dead captain Hastur Sejanus, and there he accepted an alliance with the powers of Chaos; an attempt by Magnus the Red to reach him failed. In the time that followed he drew his brothers Angron, Fulgrim, Mortarion, Lorgar, Curze, Alpharius and Perturabo into his conspiracy, together with the Fabricator-General Kelbor-Hal.

The Heresy that bears his name opened with betrayal at Isstvan III, where he had loyalist elements of four Legions destroyed by virus bombardment, and at Isstvan V, where, fighting from fortifications prepared by Fulgrim, he turned four further Legions against three that had remained loyal; Fulgrim there presented him with the severed head of Ferrus Manus. Claiming a self-styled Dark Empire in the northern reaches of the Imperium, he survived an assassination attempt by Shadrak Meduson at Dwell, then invaded Molech and passed through the warp gate beneath it, returning greatly changed and empowered. At Trisolian, Leman Russ boarded his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, and wounded him with the Spear of Russ, a wound that reopened at Beta-Garmon and left him comatose until his equerry Maloghurst gave his own life to revive him. At a second gathering on Ullanor he cast out Lorgar, who had plotted to supplant him, before leading the gathered traitor Legions against Terra itself.

Horus emerged over Luna through a warp rift to open the Solar War, and as the Siege of Terra wore on he withdrew increasingly into Lupercal’s Court aboard the Vengeful Spirit. Learning that Roboute Guilliman’s fleets were only hours distant, he lowered his flagship’s shields to draw the Emperor into direct battle. He killed Sanguinius, and in the duel that followed overpowered the Emperor; but the Emperor struck back, and, with Horus for a moment freed from Chaos’s grip and begging for death, destroyed him with an athame given to the Emperor by Ollanius Persson, in 014.M31. Accounts of these final hours differ in their particulars. Afterwards Abaddon bore the Vengeful Spirit and Horus’s body into the Eye of Terror; the body was later stolen and cloned by Fabius Bile, and Abaddon himself killed the clone. Horus fought with the mace Worldbreaker, the Talon of Horus given him by Kelbor-Hal, and Terminator plate known as the Serpent’s Scales, having earlier borne a sword forged for him by Ferrus Manus; he is remembered as Lupercal, as the Warmaster, and as the Arch-Traitor.