Leetu

Leetu, designated LE2, is a prototype legionary of the Emperor and Erda who survived the Siege of Terra and the confrontation in Lupercal’s Court. He is recorded as having been grown before the Primarchs had received names, and he belongs to the earlier, experimental phase of the Emperor’s work on superhuman warriors rather than to any Legion. He wears beak-helm plate stamped with his designation, and he adopted that designation as his name. He calls the Emperor and Erda his parents, but the only authority he has been recorded as obeying is Erda’s. His allegiance is therefore personal rather than institutional: it is owed to her, not to a Legion, a Primarch or the Imperium’s chain of command.

The account of his origin is bound up with Erda’s flight from Terra. When she scattered the infants and left, Leetu is recorded as having stood in the doorway and remained there for a span of years, comparable in length to a major war, until he was given a new charge. Erda later loaned him to John Grammaticus as a bodyguard, and in that role he accompanied Oll Persson’s company during the Siege of Terra. Accounts describe him as reserved and watchful. He is noted for drawing pictures when he believed himself unobserved, a habit that sits oddly beside his function as a protector.

His most consequential appearance falls at the climax of the Siege, in Lupercal’s Court aboard Horus’s flagship, where he is recorded as cutting Sanguinius down from the hooks. After Horus threw him aside, he perceived the Four in the dark, and he survived that encounter as well. In the wider chronology, his presence links the Perpetual circle around Grammaticus and Erda with the last hours of the Heresy, where the fates of the Emperor, Horus and Sanguinius were decided. Contemporaries in the same window include Rogal Dorn, who directed the defence of the Imperial Palace, and Oll Persson, whose company carried Leetu through the fighting on Terra.

Leetu is listed as missing. He returned to Terra carrying a tarot of the Throne, an object that is recorded as contributing to Dorn’s decision to seat the Emperor’s body upon the Golden Throne rather than give it to a funeral pyre. Afterwards he sat alone, shuffling cards and awaiting a debriefing that the Imperium was not organised to provide. What became of him beyond that point is not established, and later tradition does not settle where he went or whether Erda reclaimed him.