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Boreas considered Astelan’s words ’I still have yet to hear anything to indicate why Lion El’Jonson could be to blaels If what you say is true, and the Lion was flawed, then it is the fault of Luther, the els’ van­quished saviour If Luther had raised Lion El’Jonson in the correct way, then it was Luther who turned from the Emperor, and thus it is still his sin That would be true, but for one thing,’ Astelan contin­ued ’Our priels, was iuns of the Caliban hunting party He had awoken in the deeps of the Caliban forests They ild, danger­ous places, swathed in near-darkness, where the sun penetrated the canopy only rarely In the shadows lurked terrifying, le bite of their monstrous jaws or a swipe of their lethal claws There they stalked and hunted each other, a vicious play of predator and prey
This is the world that Lion El’Jonson grew up in and learned froers, but also that they gave sanctuary He becaht, for it er When Luther found him, El’Jonson was com­pletely feral, incapable of speech, little more than an animal He found a hunter, and also the hunted
It ht him, hoell he raised hih on the outside the Lion became a cultured, elo­quent, intellectual man, on the inside he was still that hunted, fearful creature The flaas already there, it si
And so there was conflict in the heart of the great pri­h I once cursed his nas now One can­not hate the primarchs for what they are, any ers, or a gun for shooting you They are simply what they have been created to be We come to loathe their actions, to abhor what they represent, as I have come to loathe and abhor the primarchs for what they became and what they did But it is the symptom we hate, not the disease; it is the effect we despise, not the cause’
’A fanciful theory, but that is all,’ Boreas said ’Theories are not the truth, and that is what you promised I would hear’
’Is it proof that you require? Will your doubts be swept aith evidence? If that is the case, then we shall leave the theories for now, and you shall hear the end, or really the beginning, of my tale’
Astelan took a deep breath and stretched his aching, scarred limbs He pushed hioblet ater and took a long draught Boreas watched hi fro to divine the truth from his expression alone
’When we first learned that our own primarch had been found, ere overjoyed,’ Astelan continued, lean­ing with his back to the stone table ’It was like a long lost forefather returning to us frorave, and in y Part of him was used to make us, and ed hting before I could take reat commander, but the encounter was pleasant More than pleasant, it was reassuring We had once fought for the Emperor himself, and noe had a new coh we trusted the Eels to Lion El’Jonson itto do, ere unsure of the implications
But when I ripped my shoulder and looked into my eyes, my fears were banished Only the eyes of the Eaze Dark, penetrating, all-seeing, the Lion’s eyes stared into your soul If only then I had seen the madness that lay behind that intensity, history may well have been very different But perhaps not Perhaps even if I had somehow cut hiacy had already been bequeathed to the Dark Angels for ten thousand years
’It is hard to explain what one feels when in the pres­ence of a priion, felt awed and huends tell of how normal men were known to faint in their presence The Lion exuded power and intelligence, every action was perfectly executed, every word perfectly considered Far fro years since the Erown vast in that tirown in proportion So, standing in front of our pri­th like a heat that prickled iance, to the Eels and to Lion El’Jonson
The Great Crusade was at its height then, and I spent only a few days on Caliban,at its beauty Our primarch was a reflection of his ho, but underneath lived darkness
My Chapter returned to the fore of the expanding frontier of the Iainst the foes offurther and further into the darkness It was then that things started to change Slowly, subtly, the influence of the Lion was being felt and the Legion altered in accord When we had fought for the Emperor, we had virtually free rein We had a mandate, a destiny to fulfil, and we understood implicitly as expected of us It is the same vision that I spoke of earlier, and I can see nohy you find it so difficult to understand You ere not there, who did not hear the Eiance in front of the Emperor himself, will never understand That destiny is a part of me as much as my secondary heart
Where once the Ee that his as our will, now our prireater controls At first it seeic genius and with hi that could stop us But slowly, year after year, more poas taken from the Chapter commanders to act independently, to devise their own course of action More and ht
It was then that an incident occurred which began to sdrmuch, on the face of it My Chapter had dropped fro our way towards its core to see if there were any inhabitable worlds As we approached the inner planets our scouts sent back word of another fleet on a closing course We moved to battle stations to prepare for iain the best advantage When I was happy that our fleet held the upper hand, I gave the order to attack Very dearly that order could have cost us, if it had not been for the alertness of the captain of one of our ships in the vanguard He refused the order to open fire and urgently reported back The enee the ships of the Twenty-third Chapter, under Commander Mentheus
The near-catastrophic attack was aborted, and no an to think Why had Mentheus been there? Why would El’Jonson have sent two fleets to the saht perhaps that at first our primarch had made a mistake But that was i and co­ordination was one of the Lion’s greatest strengths He never made mistakes of that nature That left the possibility that Mentheus orwith each other, ere both in agree our specific orders
That left only the possibility that Lion El’Jonson had intended for us both to be there I could think of no rea­son o Chapters had been required, the syste to indicate a threat worthy of two Chapters, both recently refreshed and at full strength
There was no reason I could think of, and for a while I ignored the thoughts that had begun to nag at my subcon­scious, undl they tookto the same syste, perhaps, was that our pri in the sah Mentheus had been well-inforreater control over every Chapter, the communication between Chapter commanders was virtu­ally non-existent At the dawn of the crusade, ould regularly confer to devise strategy, to co-ordinate our efforts for the maximum chance of victory and success Noe received our orders and simply followed the to isolate us The fear and distrust that had been ingrained into his soul during his infancy was turning to paranoia, perhaps The instinct for survival on the s of Luther and the upbringing Lion El’Jonson had received Where once he saw eneain but in the galaxy around hih no fault of his own he began to see everything around hi isolation and orous inquiries My suspicions were still not aroused at this point, I athered more information, the picture became more clear Each of the old Chapters, those founded before the rediscovery of Caliban, had a shadow, a new Chapter, founded on Cal­iban with Lion El’Jonson’s own gene-seed, within five sectors or less of it You could argue that this was coinci­dence, or ree were it not for the fact that many of the new Chap­ter coion, but the cohout the Great Crusade rarely knew of the proxi watched