Ortan Cassius

Ortan Cassius is the Master of Sanctity of the Ultramarines, the senior Chaplain of the Chapter and, at almost four hundred years of age, its oldest member outside the sarcophagus of a Dreadnought. Known as the True Believer, he succeeded Agai Paulus as Master of Sanctity and is the only Ultramarine permitted to address Marneus Calgar as “young Calgar”. Born around 600.M41, he was inducted into the Chaplaincy early in his career. No homeworld is recorded for him.

As a young Chaplain he inspired many battle-brothers with his hatred of the enemies of mankind, although some veterans judged him reckless and overly aggressive. At the manufactorium city of Skemarchus he led 3rd Company assets and Sternguard Veterans in an aggressive assault on an Ork army; when an Ork Gargant left him pinned beneath rubble, Vael Donatus brought the ground down beneath the war machine with a single bolt shell. Before the Tyrannic Wars Cassius also served for a time in the Deathwatch. In 680.M41, after Inquisitor Chaegryn and Kill Team Excis had vanished on the mining world Ghosar Quintus, he mustered a hand-picked kill team from ten Chapters, fought through the Cult of the Four-Armed Emperor in the Great Pit, and slew its Patriarch. The Purge of the Trysst Dynasty was the Imperium’s first major encounter with a Genestealer Cult.

In 745.M41 he fought beside Calgar against Hive Fleet Behemoth in the Battle of Macragge. In the final stages of the battle he accompanied the relief force that reached the polar fortresses too late to save the 1st Company; few of his unit survived, and a rampaging Carnifex left him so badly wounded that the Apothecaries rebuilt much of his body with bionics. His throat has never fully healed, and scarcely any of his remaining flesh is free of scars. After the invasion he withdrew the Banner of Macragge from the field until the Chapter had restored its numbers, and he persuaded Calgar to sanction a unit of Tyrannic War Veterans, a formation for which the Codex Astartes makes no provision.

Cassius has since fought the Tyranids on many fronts. On the agri-world Styxia Prime, in the Eastern Fringes, he shared command with the Cadian General Arka against a tendril of Hive Fleet Gorgon. On the industrial world Kolovan, fighting alongside the 3rd and 5th Companies against Hive Fleet Kraken, he slew the Swarmlord, which the Hive Mind afterwards reincarnated aboard a hive ship. On the war world Torhaven he led an Ultramarines strike force beside a Deathwatch kill team to purge a Genestealer Cult that endangered a hidden cache of the Chapter’s gene-seed. During the Bloodborn invasion of Ultramar in 999.M41 he served on Quintarn, where he and Captain Epathus persuaded Captain Caito Galenus not to censure Scout Sergeant Torias Telion, whose raid on the Maidens of Nestor broke the Dark Mechanicus forces of Votheer Tark. He later warned Telion that the war would leave lasting damage within the Chapter.

He carries Infernus, a master-crafted combi-flamer that he forged and sanctified himself, and a crozius arcanum cast in the shape of a Tyranid skull; in Deathwatch service he bore a Justus Incarne-pattern crozius and the Tome of Ectoclades. His heraldry shows an Ultima above a laurel and the Crux Terminatus on the black of the Reclusiam. Since the opening of the Great Rift and the Plague Wars, when much of the Chapter’s strength turned against the forces of Chaos, Cassius has kept his attention on the Tyranid threat, and the Tyrannic War Veterans remain his particular charge.