Remus Ventanus

Remus Ventanus was captain of the Ultramarines Fourth Company during the defence of Calth against the Word Bearers. Gage gave him the sword Phaethon on assuming command of a company that had been intended as an administrative lesson. Calth’s defenders came to regard him as an officer they could not afford to lose.

The Word Bearers turned that assignment into a war for the planet’s data-grid and arcologies, and for the survivors of the fighting. Ventanus refused the surrender offered by Cxir and killed Samus with that apostle’s own athame, a ceremonial blade. He then sustained the coordination of the underground fighting for long enough that Calth survived as a world. Years later he planted a captured standard in the rock of Colchis and led the Fourth in a final march for Calth.

His tomb on Calth remained of consequence in the forty-first millennium (M41). There a spirit in black plate, identified with Ventanus, placed the Shard of Erebus in the hand of Uriel Ventris and named M’Kar for what he had formerly been. The episode presents Ventanus’s sense of duty as continuing beyond his death.