Barbarus

Barbarus was a feral world wreathed in poisonous fog, ruled from its high mountain keeps by xenos Overlords, and the world where the warlord Necare raised the primarch Mortarion after finding him there as an infant. Mortarion is recorded as born in the late 30th millennium on Terra. Human communities survived only in the mist-choked valleys below, rendering tribute and, in some years, their own children to the Overlords who claimed dominion over the peaks. Among the world’s other notable natives was Calas Typhon, later First Captain of the Death Guard and a figure closely bound to Mortarion’s own rise.

Mortarion grew to adulthood as a valley outcast who turned against his former masters, leading the mist-dwellers in a long insurgency against the Overlords’ rule. The Emperor challenged Mortarion to take Necare’s last keep alone, and Mortarion’s climb through the poison failed; the Emperor killed Necare, and Mortarion then pledged himself to the Emperor, receiving command of the XIV Legion. Barbarus’s compliance and Mortarion’s recruitment as primarch of the XIV Legion, the Death Guard, followed directly from this campaign, and Calas Typhon accompanied him into the Legion’s command as Lord of Virulence.

Barbarus otherwise plays little part in the chronicles of the Great Crusade, remaining a distant world on which he was raised rather than a recurring campaign site. Its name resurfaces in the period following the Horus Heresy’s climax, when Lion El’Jonson led the Dark Angels in cyclonic torpedo strikes against the home worlds of Traitor primarchs, seeking to deny the scattered Death Guard and their allies any rallying point. Barbarus was struck and devastated in this campaign, its mountains and valleys alike laid waste.

The condition of Barbarus after the strike, and the fate of any survivors among the valley peoples or Overlord remnants, is not recorded. The world endures in the Death Guard’s history chiefly as the place where Mortarion first learned to hate tyranny and poison alike, and as the site of the Emperor’s one recorded direct intervention on his son’s behalf before the Heresy.