Rogal Dorn

Rogal Dorn is the primarch of the Imperial Fists, the VII Legion of Space Marines, also called the Praetorian of Terra and the Soldier. Cast from Terra as an infant, he was raised among the ice-hives of Inwit by the House of Dorn; the clan patriarch became as a grandfather to him and taught him tactics and survival. In time he ruled not only his caste but Inwit and the surrounding Inwit Cluster. He spent years restoring the enormous station Phalanx in orbit above the world. When the Emperor of Mankind’s Great Crusade reached Inwit, Dorn greeted him at the helm of the Phalanx, the seventh primarch to be found, and received command of the VII Legion while keeping the Phalanx as its fortress-monastery.

In the Great Crusade Dorn was noted for fortification and for loyalty that sought no favour. He liberated Necromunda from Orks, clashed with Konrad Curze over atrocity and with Ferrus Manus over method, and after the Triumph at Ullanor was recalled to Terra with his Legion to fortify the Imperial Palace as the Emperor withdrew from the field. When the frigate Eisenstein brought word of Horus’s rebellion, Dorn sent a Retribution Fleet toward Isstvan and returned to Terra himself with his veterans. As Lord Commander of the Imperium in the Emperor’s absence he organised the Sol System’s defence; at Pluto he landed on the moon Hydra and killed Alpharius in personal combat. During the Solar War he commanded from the Bhab Bastion and briefly from the Phalanx, where he fought the daemon Samus before returning to Terra’s surface.

In the Siege of Terra he directed the Palace defence, took the field at the Lion’s Gate Spaceport against Khârn and Perturabo, and at Saturnine fought Fulgrim while his trap ruined Abaddon’s subterranean assault. When the Bhab Bastion fell he withdrew to the Sanctum Imperialis and joined the teleport assault on the Vengeful Spirit, where for what seemed to him ages he was trapped in an endless desert before recovering his memory and helping Constantin Valdor and others return the mortally wounded Emperor to the Golden Throne. In the Great Scouring that followed he led a penitential crusade in black armour, accepted Guilliman’s Codex Astartes after the pain-glove vision, and assaulted Perturabo’s Eternal Fortress on Sebastus IV in the battle called the Iron Cage. Accounts of his later fate disagree on the date and on what of him was recovered; they agree that he boarded the Chaos battleship Sword of Sacrilege during a Black Crusade and vanished there, and that a skeletal hand held to be his is kept in stasis as the Chapter’s holiest relic.