Lorgar Aurelian

Lorgar Aurelian, called the Urizen, is the primarch of the Word Bearers, the XVII Legion of Space Marines, and the first of the Emperor’s sons to turn openly to Chaos. Cast as an infant onto the desert world of Colchis, he was taken in by a tribe of outcasts known as the Declined under the chieftain Fan Morgal, then seized as a disciple by the exiled Covenant priest Kor Phaeron, who killed Fan Morgal and his people to conceal the boy’s origin. Lorgar rose through Colchis’s theocracy as Archpriest and Bearer of the Word, led the Schism Wars that broke the Covenant’s old order, and ruled the world before the Emperor of Mankind and Magnus the Red landed to reclaim him. He swore fealty at once, redirected Colchis’s faith toward the Emperor, and took command of the Imperial Heralds, soon renamed the Word Bearers. In the years that followed he compiled the Lectitio Divinitatus and built his Legion around missionary conquest rather than speed of compliance.

That devotion brought censure on Khur, where the Word Bearers had raised Monarchia, the Perfect City, as a shrine to the Emperor as god. The Emperor ordered the Ultramarines under Roboute Guilliman to raze the city; some accounts also place Rogal Dorn’s Imperial Fists among the forces that levelled it. Lorgar and his Legion were compelled to kneel in the ashes before the Emperor and Guilliman. In the aftermath Kor Phaeron and Erebus turned his grief toward the Chaos gods, and Lorgar undertook a pilgrimage that drew him to newly discovered Cadia. There Ingethel the Ascended showed him the Primordial Truth; he returned converted to Chaos Undivided and set about remaking the Word Bearers in secret. Erebus, acting under that design, went to Davin and helped set Horus on the path to rebellion.

At the Isstvan V Drop Site Massacre Lorgar stood among the Traitor second wave with the Night Lords, Alpha Legion and Iron Warriors, and fought Corvus Corax until Konrad Curze’s intervention. He did not take personal part in the Battle of Calth, which Kor Phaeron and Erebus directed against Guilliman’s Ultramarines. Instead, during the Shadow Crusade, Lorgar fought beside Angron on Armatura and then on Nuceria, where he completed the Khornate ritual that raised Angron to daemonhood while Guilliman strove to intervene. At the Traitor muster on Ullanor he attempted, with Zardu Layak and a bound Fulgrim, to usurp Horus; Horus beat him and cast him from his sight. Lorgar did not stand in the Siege of Terra. He observed its closing stages from the primitive world of Yssimae through rites of divination, restored contact with Erebus, and ordered Yssimae burned before withdrawing.

After the Heresy he ascended as a Daemon Prince of Chaos Undivided, taking titles such as Archpriest of the Primordial Truth and Minister of Chaos Absolute, and withdrew for millennia into the Templum Inficio on the daemon world of Sicarus in the Eye of Terror. Imperial record treats him as missing from the battlefield for most of the intervening age, though rumour at the opening of the Great Rift places him once more at the head of Word Bearers hosts.