RESPECT THE ARCHPRIEST OF THE PANTHEON!
SKILL
Lorgar contends with his brother Corax (one of the best combatants among the Primarchs), before his prime:
HIS BROTHER WAS a warrior, a warlord, and from the very first moment their weapons met, Corax was fighting to kill, while Lorgar fought to stay alive. The battle moved too fast for mortal eyes to perceive, with both primarchs pushing themselves beyond anything else they’d endured.
Corax evaded the crozius without even once parrying. He weaved aside, threw himself out of reach, or fired his flight pack with enough force to boost him up and over Lorgar’s heavy swings. By contrast, sweat stung Lorgar’s eyes as he desperately blocked each of his brother’s attacks. Illuminarum’s great hammerhead rang like a church bell as it battered aside the Raven Lord’s claws.
‘What are you doing?’ Corax cried into his brother’s face as their weapons locked. ‘What madness has taken you all?’
Lorgar disengaged, hurling Corax backward with enough strength to leave his brother unbalanced. The Raven Lord compensated instantly, his flight pack breathing fire and propelling him back at his brother. Bladed wings flashed out to the side, but Lorgar was ready for them. He ignored their scraping, cutting wounds as they knifed through his armour, and focused on hammering Corax’s claws aside. In the seconds’ safety he bought for himself, Lorgar at last landed a true blow. Corax was sent sprawling again as the crozius pounded into his breastplate. The power field around the maul’s head struck with enough force to send a shockwave blasting out from the warring brothers, throwing all nearby Astartes to the ground.
In less time than it took to breathe in, Corax was back on his feet, thrusters firing, spearing at Lorgar once more.
‘Answer me, traitor,’ the Raven Lord grunted. His dark eyes were narrowed at the sickening light that haloed Lorgar. ‘You… are a poor reflection of our father… with that psychic gold.’
Lorgar felt himself slipping back in the mud, his boots grinding across the earth as his brother’s strength leaned heavier against him. He couldn’t break the weapon lock this time. Both Corax’s claws clutched at Illuminarum’s haft, burning the handle and the Word Bearer’s hands.
‘I am bringing the truth to humanity,’ Lorgar breathed.
‘You are destroying the Imperium! You are betraying your own blood!’ The wildness in the Raven Lord’s black eyes was something Lorgar had never even imagined before. Corax had always seemed so taciturn, so devoid of passion. That this warrior lay beneath the albino facade was a horrendous revelation.
The claw tips, spitting with crackling power fields, were a finger’s length from Lorgar’s face now. ‘I will kill you, Lorgar.’
‘I know.’ He spoke through gritted teeth, feeling strength bleed from his bones. ‘But I have seen what will be. Our father, a bloodless corpse enthroned upon gold, and screaming into the void forever.’
‘Lies.’ The black eyes narrowed, and the Raven Lord’s pale muscles bunched, locking harder. ‘You are reducing a kingdom to chaos. Overthrowing the perfect order.’
Lorgar’s grey eyes danced with light despite the strain on his body. ‘The opposite of chaos is not order, brother. It is stasis. Lifeless, unchanging… stasis.’
With a last grunt, Lorgar’s strength gave. Quivering hands could no longer keep his brother’s weapons back.
‘Here it is,’ Corax promised in a hiss, his saliva flecking Lorgar’s eyes and cheeks. ‘Here is the death you so richly deserve.’
The claws reached his brother’s face. Slowly, the metal burning-hot, they sliced over Lorgar’s golden skin. Inch by inch, blackening the golden flesh, cutting into the meat of his cheeks. Even should he escape, he would bear these scars until the day he died. He knew this, and did not care.
The psychic fire wreathing them both flared in response to Lorgar’s pain. Corax closed his eyes to spare his sight, and instinct cost him his quick victory. Lorgar threw the Raven Lord back again. Illuminarum rose, ready to strike, before a burst of smoky fire launched the Raven Lord up from the soil to come down on Lorgar from above. The Word Bearer smashed the first claw aside, striking the fist with enough force to shatter the gauntlet completely, but even as scythe-long claw blades span off into the surrounding melee, the second claw struck home.
Metre-long talons sank through Lorgar’s stomach, the tips glinting to the side of his spine as they thrust from his back. Such a blow meant little to a primarch – only when Corax heaved upwards did Lorgar stagger. The claws bit and cut, sawing through the Word Bearer’s body.
Illuminarum slipped from the impaled primarch’s fists. Those same hands wrapped around Corax’s throat even as the Raven Lord was carving his brother in half.
‘For the Emperor,’ Corax breathed, untroubled by his weaker brother’s grip. Lorgar crashed his forehead against Corax’s face, shattering his brother’s nose, but still he couldn’t free himself. The Raven Lord gave no ground, even as a second, third and fourth head butt decimated his delicate features.
‘But he lied to us,’ Lorgar spoke through lips that produced more blood than language. ‘Father lied.’
The claws jerked, snagged against Lorgar’s enhanced bones. Corax tore them free, inflicting more damage than the first impaling had done. Blood hissed and popped as it evaporated on the force-fielded blades.
‘Father lied,’ Lorgar said again. He was on his knees, hands clutched over the ruination of his stomach.
Corax’s black eyes gave nothing away. He stepped closer, his one functioning claw raised to execute his brother.
‘Do it,’ Lorgar snarled. The psychic wind, the misty fire – all were gone now. He was as he’d always been: Lorgar, the Seventeenth Son, the image of his father, the one soul in twenty who’d never wished to be a soldier. And here he would die, at the heart of a battlefield.
The foul irony of the moment settled on his shoulders, feeling grotesquely apt. He couldn’t move his legs. His body was a temple to nothing but pain. He could barely even see his executioner, for his psychic efforts had left him quivering with both weakness and a vision-blurring ache in his mind. A faint outline met his gaze, the blurred image of scythe-blades raised high.
‘Do it!’ Lorgar screamed at his brother.
The claw fell, and struck opposing metal.
-The First Heretic, Chapter 27
Lorgar is able to stalemate Roboute Guilliman while trying to prepare for a ritual. Guilliman being another highly skilled combatant known for his technical sophistication in swordsmanship among the Primarchs:
The demigod in gold and blue had the advantage of two weapons, but Lorgar’s crozius gave him a reach that his brother lacked. When they first met, there was no furious trading of frantic blows, nor were there any melodramatic speeches of vengeance avowed. The two primarchs came together once, power fist against war maul, and backed away from the resulting flare of repelling energy fields. Their warriors killed each other around them both, and neither primarch spared their sons a glance.
Lorgar flicked the clinging lightning from the head of his crozius, shaking his head in slow denial.
‘You’re ruining the song. You shouldn’t be here.’
Roboute Guilliman, Lord of the XIII Legion, stared with eyes ripened by hatred.
‘And yet, here I am.’
The brothers duelled in the stone street, their boots kicking up clouds of alkaline dust. Gone was any notion of humanity or mercy from either warrior – here, at last, were two men that despised one another, fighting to end each other’s lives.
In Guilliman’s eyes, Lorgar saw a wealth of purest, depthless hatred. A hatred not formed from one action and one event, but a chemical cauldron of emotion strong enough to twist even the calmest, most composed demigod in the Imperium. Anger flared in those eyes, of course. More than anger, it was rage. Frustration tainted it further; the desperation of not understanding why this was happening, and the ferocity of one who still believes he might find a way to stop it. Hurt – somehow, seeing the hurt in Guilliman’s eyes was worst of all – also poisoned the mix and made it rancid. This wasn’t the pure rage of Corax on the killing fields – the fury of a brother betrayed. This fury was saturated into something much harsher and much more complex. It was the pain of a builder, an architect, a loyal son who had done all that was ever asked of him, and had seen his life’s work die in foolish, spurious futility.
Lorgar knew that feeling, had known it since he knelt in the ashes of the Perfect City, the entire settlement destroyed by Guilliman’s fleet on the Emperor’s orders. For the first time in all the years of their wildly disparate lives, Lorgar Aurelian and Roboute Guilliman connected as equals.
To his amazement – the shock leaving him cold-blooded – Lorgar felt ashamed. In his brother’s face he finally saw real hate, and in that moment he learned a lesson that had evaded him all these decades. Guilliman had never hated him before. The Ultramarine had never undermined his efforts; never hidden his sneers while presenting false indifference; never held a secret joy over humbling Lorgar’s religious efforts in Monarchia and the great Crusade beyond.
Guilliman hadn’t hated him. Not until now. This was hate. This was hatred in totality, fuelled by a fortune of pathos. This was a hatred deserved, and it was a hatred that would see Lorgar dead, with the song unfinished and the False Emperor still enthroned at the head of an empire he didn’t – in his ignorance – deserve to lead.
The Bearer of the Word felt a sudden, burning need to explain everything, to justify himself, to tell how this was all necessary, all of it, to enlighten humanity. The rebellion. The war. The Heresy. The truth of reality was foul but it had to be told. Gods were real, and they needed man. The human race could rise in union and immortality as the favoured race of the Pantheon, or die as the eldar died centuries before for the sin of ignorance.
Between blocking the hammer-blows of his brother’s swinging fists, Lorgar started cursing the warp’s song for distracting him. It played through his skull and before his eyes, insistent and ceaseless. Everything felt significant. Nothing sounded right. Every bell-toll of his crozius crashing against Guilliman’s fists thrummed wrong, confusing the crescendo as it was supposed to be rising.
Both primarchs fought without heeding their warriors, their godlike movements an inconceivable blur to the Space Marines fighting around them. Here was a record of the very mythical action that the Terran remembrancer order had been founded to document, as two of the Emperor’s sons raised weapons in the embodiment of those most ancient legends: Akillus, Destroyer of the fortress-city Troi; or Gulyat, Giant of the Fillestyne Tribe. None had ever imagined the heroes of this new age would take the field against each other, nor could they have predicted the wellsprings of spite between them.
‘Calth.’ The word was a weapon. Guilliman breathed it, infesting it with the same hatred colouring his eyes. ‘Calth. Jursa. Kallas. Corum’s Landing. Ereth Five. Quilkhama. Tycor. Armatura. How many of my worlds, Lorgar? How many?’
Lorgar parried another swing, spinning his crozius in a heavy retort. Guilliman blocked it as easily as Lorgar had blocked the punch. Their blows rang out across the battle the way temple bells called the faithful to worship.
‘Calth,’ Guilliman said again. ‘No words now, “brother”? No reply for what your Legion has done across the Five Hundred Worlds?’
Lorgar held his tongue. Everything had changed after Isstvan. In the hours after the massacre, as he’d sat alone and let his face bleed from Corax’s murder-talons, he sensed the shifting of fate behind the veil. The futures rewiring themselves, new pathways of possibility opening up. In this last year, he finally felt himself taking the mantle of the man he’d always meant to be. He even, in his less humble moments, hungered to face Corax again. Things wouldn’t play out so perfectly in the Raven Lord’s favour next time – of that, Lorgar was sure.
‘The Mark of Calth.’ Guilliman made the title into an accusation. Reserved dignity even flavoured his wrath: he refused to fall into the emotional madness of a berserk killer, instead fighting with a fury that burned cold.
Guilliman slammed his hands together, catching the falling maul with a harsh whine of protesting energy fields. Holding it there, he looked past their joined weapons and into his brother’s eyes.
‘Look at me. Look at my face. Do you see the Mark of Calth?’
His patrician’s features were handsome in a stately, stern way, even when twisted by anger, but he could never be considered as made in the Emperor’s image to the degree that played over Lorgar’s tattooed visage. The only difference between Guilliman now and the Guilliman that had stood in the dust of Monarchia was a fine threading of dark veins along the primarch’s throat and cheeks – scarcely noticeable to any but those who knew him best.
‘Void exposure.’ The Ultramarine refused to release the weapon, despite lightning dancing down his heavy gauntlets. Lorgar gripped Illuminarum’s haft as the energy rippled down its length, biting at his gloved hands and setting fire to the parchments bound to his shoulder guards. ‘Void exposure when you killed one of my worlds, and the fleet above it.’
Lorgar didn’t spit back with harsh words. He shook his head, pitting his strength against his brother’s.
Guilliman’s statesman smile played across his features. ‘You’ve changed.’
Lorgar grunted at his brother’s accusation.
‘So everyone tells me.’
This time, it was Lorgar who disengaged. He pulled Illuminarum free, and suffered a fist to the sternum for taking the risk. The blow sucked all the breath from his body, cracked his breastplate, and left him with a bloody smile at the poetic justice. He’d cracked his brother’s breastplate in the Perfect City and now the favour was returned. Fate really was laughing at him.
‘First blood to me,’ Guilliman said.
The pity in that voice was acid in Lorgar’s ears. He tried to speak, tried to breathe, and could do neither. The song had never sounded more wrong.
Guilliman’s hands scrabbled and skidded across his armour, seeking a stranglehold to end the fight quickly. Lorgar repulsed him with a projected burst of telekinesis, weak and wavering with the song still so de-tuned, but enough to send his brother staggering. The maul followed, its power field trailing lightning as Lorgar hammered it into the side of Guilliman’s head with the force of a cannonball. There was a crack that wouldn’t have shamed a peal of thunder.
‘There’s your Mark of Calth,’ Lorgar replied, backing away to catch his breath. Air sawed in and out of his lungs. He could already taste blood – Guilliman’s blow had broken something inside him. Several ribs at the very least, and likely something more vital. He dragged in a breath, and exhaled it as blood down the front of his armour.
Both primarchs faced each other beneath the grey sky, one bleeding internally, the other with half of his face lost to blood sheeting from a fractured skull.
‘Enjoy that scar.’ Lorgar fought for his smile. ‘It will be with you until your dying day.’ He threw his arms wide, taking in the dying city. ‘Why chase me, Roboute? Why? Your fleet will fall against the Trisagion and you’ll die down here.’
‘There is a difference between confidence and arrogance, cur. Surely someone has told you that.’
The Word Bearer spat blood again. ‘But why come? Why come at all?’
‘Courage.’ Guilliman stalked forwards, ignoring his wound, and he didn’t need to struggle for a smile – it came as easily as breathing. ‘Courage and honour, Lorgar. Two virtues you have never known.’
-Betrayer, Chapter 21
Lorgar defeats An’ggrath the Unbound, before his prime. An’ggrath is the most powerful of all of Khorne’s Daemon Princes making him the most skilled of all. The fight also takes place within the Eye of Terror, meaning An’ggrath is at full strength:
The winged daemon roared again, its fanged maw wide, and the veins in its taut throat as thick as a man’s thigh. Even braced against the gale, Lorgar was forced back several metres in a skidding slide over the gravel. The primarch breathed a stream of Colchisian invective and, as the stinking wind died down, he replied with a shouted challenge of his own.
Before sanity could wrest control of his limbs, he was charging, boots pounding onto the red sand, his crozius raised in both hands.
THE FIRST BLOW struck with the force of a gunship falling from the sky, and with an impact at the same volume. The cleaving blade crashed against the golden maul, both weapons banging together and locking fast. Sparks sprayed from the elbow joints of Lorgar’s armour as the muscle-mimicking servos overloaded and shorted out. But he did it. He blocked the first bow. In spiteful retaliation for the beast’s presence, his crozius kissed the axe’s edge with leaping bolts of electrical force. With a cry that wouldn’t have shamed a feral world carnosaur, the primarch hurled the bloodthirster’s axe backward in a heaving shove, and brought his warhammer to fall on a downstroke, smashing into the creature’s knee.
At the moment of connection, faster than mortal reactions could process, the weapon’s power field protested at the kinetic treatment and burst outward in a blast of force. Something in the daemon’s leg cracked with the wet rip of a tree trunk falling.
First blood. Lorgar was already scrambling back, stumbling over the quaking sand, when the lash found his throat. The spiked coils bit as they wrapped tight, turning the trial of breathing into an absolute impossibility.
In the panicked rush of distorted senses, he saw the creature driven to one knee, its back-jointed bull-legs bent in submission. The primarch’s first blow had near crippled it. Had he been able to take in any air, he’d have roared in exaltation. Instead, he crashed to his knees, clawing at the serpentine weapon encircling his shoulders and throat. One arm was pinned to his body by the lash’s wrapping caress. The other clutched and pulled, dragging the whip off in a mess of snarling armour joints. For a flickering, red-stained moment, he remembered a painting in his father’s palace: a restored oil work of an oceanic sailor – in the era when Terra had possessed such large bodies of water – entangled by a krahkan sea monster.
Lorgar heard the bloodthirster’s wings rattling, felt the force of more wind as they beat again. Another acidic spurt of panic knifed through his thoughts: the daemon sought to take off, and drag him into the sky with it.
He rolled into the whip, trapping himself further, for the chance to tear his crozius from the fist wedged against his body. The lash around his throat squeezed in leathery embrace, freed of all resistance now. As he was dragged across the sand towards the daemon, Lorgar hurled his maul one-handed, with a strangled cry and the last of his strength.
It struck the bloodthirster’s face with the juicy crack of shattering bone, silencing the victory roar that had been brewing in the beast’s lungs. Fangs clattered down onto the primarch’s armour in a discoloured enamel hail. One sliced his cheek open with the daggerish fall of a stalactite. Had he been able to breathe, he’d have laughed, but pulling himself free of the slackened whip was enough.
Lorgar’s first three steps carried him to his crozius. Numb fingers slapped onto the hammer’s haft and he hauled it back into his grip. He turned in time to catch a face full of sprayed blood and spit, shaken from the daemon’s broken maw. It stung his skin, even as he wiped it away. The rest ate into his armour with hissing, smoking slowness.
‘Let this be finished,’ he bared his teeth, unaware how his expression reflected the daemon’s. For a wonder, it replied through its broken jaws and architecture of cracked teeth. Its voice was pulled right down from the thunderheads colliding above.
‘All the strength in the flesh. And the bitter caress. And the taste of blood on my tongue.’
He knew those words. He knew them well.
Perhaps the beast had intended them as a distraction. Perhaps it was channelling mockery straight from the mouth of a god. Either way, Lorgar met the next attack with a laugh. The bloodthirster’s axe crashed against his swinging maul. One of the weapons shattered with the same ease as the daemon’s teeth. Metal debris burned in the air, flickering with ghost-white fire, before clattering across the sand.
Lorgar advanced, his maul still raised. ‘You quote my home world’s holy scrolls to me? Is even this moment supposed to be a lesson? Even this?’
The daemon’s wings snapped out at full reach, darkening all view of the horizon. The display sent the foetid, spicy reek of spoiled meat emanating afresh from its pinions. It wasn’t finished. It wasn’t even close. It needed no axe when it bore such claws. It never needed to walk, when it possessed those wings.
But it was bleeding now, and Lorgar’s disquiet had long since burned away in the wind. He didn’t fear the thing. Every broken fang heralded triumph, as did every droplet of molten brass blood running from its black gums and each grinding crackle from its shattered knee.
‘I will not die here,’ the primarch promised the daemon.
The bloodthirster’s answer was to roar again. This time, it threw the primarch from his feet, sending him tumbling across the rocky ground. Dull snaps sounded from beneath his armour; jagged spurts of pain pinched inside his chest. Even the fibre-cable cushioning wasn’t enough to prevent broken bones. He crashed to rest against a jutting rock, and in dragging himself back to his feet, he caught sight of Ingethel – its warmish form coiled as it crouched in the sand.
Cracked ribs stole the strength of his voice, rendering it a wheeze. ‘Help me, you spineless bitch.’
Ingethel slithered away, chittering with frightened laughter, leaving a thick sidewinder trail in the red dust.
‘You die next,’ Lorgar breathed at its retreating back. That, too, was a promise.
But Ingethel could wait. Thumbing the trigger brought his crozius back to electric life, just in time to fall under the shadow again.
Sonic booms rent the air with each thrash of the whip. Its lashing impact carved ravines in the sand – canyons Lorgar rolled to avoid, while desperately evading each strike. Each breath brought fresh pain to his broken bones. Each inhalation was strife in the thin atmosphere.
Another rift in the rocky sand yawned to the side as he weaved away from the touch of the lash. It split the ground with a thunderclap, throwing him off balance again, beyond the means of armour stabilisers to adjust for. The daemon’s immense hand, deprived of its axe, reached to clutch at the prone primarch, and Lorgar reacted purely by instinct. He raised his hand to meet the downward grasp, little caring how his eyes burned and streamed with psychic fire. The great red fist crashed against a psychic barrier, knuckles crackling like loose gravel.
Lorgar struck. The crozius sang its tempestuous song, thudding against the curled claws and pulverising the black iron bones beneath its flesh. Blood sprayed from the split skin, splashing molten brass across the primarch’s gauntlets and chestplate.
The whip lashed back, snake-keen and vicious. It spiralled around his arm and crozius, biting with barbs. Lorgar staggered, his armour joints whining at the sudden, harsh movements as the wounded daemon pulled him closer. Its breath hit him in another rancid blast, though the creature didn’t roar. It was done with such displays; as Lorgar leaned back, boots scraping across the sands, he could see the beast’s intentions all too easily. Its jaws were already falling open, offering up broken fangs as a weapon where an axe and whip had failed.
In the past, he’d imagined his death more often than he cared to admit – wondering if it would come in the distant cold of a deep-void battle, or the burning warmth of a blade to the back.
Despite their vaunted immortality, despite the invulnerability bred into their bones, a primarch was still a being of flesh and blood. One of Angron’s snorted witticisms came back to him in those moments Lorgar mused over mortality: if something bled, it could be killed.
Everything bleeds, Lorgar. His brother’s words, cutting right to the quick even years after they were first uttered. Tanks bled fuel and coolant. Aliens bled blood and ooze. Angron had never stood upon a battlefield and failed to apply his own brand of tortured logic to the conflict.
Lorgar hauled back against the drag, succeeding in doing nothing beyond pulling the coiled lash tighter. The daemon’s clumsy, shattered hand reached for his torso, and the primarch’s kick crunched into its thumb, mangling it further.
With a roar, it lifted him from the ground. In the time it took to spit a curse, the beast snapped its jaws on his free arm, cracked incisors scraping across the ceramite. Melted brass droplets dripped from the creature’s bleeding gums.
He was not used to pain – at least not physical agony. The pressure constricting his arm was incomparable to anything else he’d experienced. Ceramite split in metallic rips, threatening the sealed integrity of his armour plating. Something in his elbow clicked, then crunched, then snapped entirely. The fist at the end of his arm fell loose, the fingers relaxing, no longer obeying his mind’s impulses.
With a fury even his brother Angron would have admired, the primarch wrenched his crozius free with a final scream. The hammer head crashed against the bloodthirster’s temple in a cacophony of breaking bone, shattering its cheek, eye socket, and the hinge of its jaw. The grip relaxed immediately, dropping the primarch to the sand.
He landed hard, heaping more abuse on his ruined arm, but kept a grip on his power maul. With a roll through the beast’s stampeding hooves, Lorgar struck the creature’s other leg, smacking a blow right against the thing’s kneecap. This time, the crack of splitting bone was enough to cause him to wince even through his own pain.
The bloodthirster howled as it fell, crippled, to the sand. Worthless legs stretched out behind it. Before the wings could even beat twice, Lorgar vaulted its back, boots clinging tight to the leathery flesh, and pummelled a single strike to its ridged spine. Another tectonic crackle heralded the daemon’s backbone giving way for good. One wing ceased its ignoble flapping, slapping against the sand and twitching with spasms.
The primarch hammered its club-hands aside as they reached back, deforming the fingers beyond use. Only then did he move around to face it once more, meeting its fevered, bleeding eyes. The blood running from its maw was already cooling in the sand, fusing its jaw to the ground.
A nasty smile coloured his lips. ‘What did you learn from this?’ he asked the creature.
It snuffed at him, almost dumbly bestial but for the enraged sentience drowning in its eyes. Even crippled and broken, it sought to drag itself forward, as if the primarch’s very life was some intolerable insult.
‘Rage without focus is no weapon at all.’ Lorgar raised his crozius. ‘Take this lesson back to the Blood God.’
For the second time, his hammer fell, butchering the incarnated essence of a god.
-Aurelian, Chapter 9
PSYCHIC MASTERY
Lorgar is able to amplify his physical attributes as well as those of his warriors around him:
A sound like the crashing of tides in the Sea of Souls swept through the ravine, and Lorgar felt the heat of his own fury made manifest. He felt his unchained power reaching out, not only to enhance his physical form, but reaching to his sons across the battlefield.
-The First Heretic, Chapter 26
Hol Beloth, a Word Bearer commanding officer regards Lorgar’s psychic mastery is above anything any other Word Bearer can produce:
The brotherhoods fight with supreme devotion. Beloth or his immediate officers have selected and anointed many of the zealots personally. They are conduits for the warp-magicks used by the highest ordinals of the XVII to enrapture their warhosts.
Hol Beloth is ambitious. He wishes to be more than a commander and more than a conduit. Such status has been promised to him by Erebus and Maloq Kartho and other, unnamed shadows that stand beside them sometimes and mutter in the twilight. He will be invested. He will be greater than even the Gal Vorbak. But he must prove himself, though he has proved himself in war a thousand times before.
This is a new form of war. This is a warfare that has never been unleashed openly before. Beloth must achieve his objectives, and perform his duties well. He must prove that he can command and control men and un-men alike.
He is hungry for power. Erebus and Kor Phaeron were always the greatest adepts, since the earliest days, but now the primarch seems to have exceeded them. His essence is frightening. Lorgar is transcendent. It is not simply the power, it is the fluid subtlety with which he employs it. Just being near Lorgar is a privilege. Being apart from, like here on Calth... it feels like the sun has gone out.
Hol Beloth believes that Erebus and Kor Phaeron are painfully aware of the way they have fallen behind. He believes they watch the primarch and crib from him, borrowing tricks and talents they have learned by observation, and then deploying them with stiff, crude proficiency. They are not adept any more. They are struggling to keep up with Lorgar’s mastery.
It is as though they are borrowing from another place, while Lorgar has become one with that place.
Hol Beloth intends to ascend to a place beside his primarch. He will burn Lanshear for the right to do so.
-Know No Fear, Part 3, Chapter 2
Kor Phaeron, the First Captain of the Word Bearers who has been gifted immense psychic powers is able to incapacitate Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the Ultramarines with strain. Lorgar is said to handle such power with even greater ease and mastery:
Kor Phaeron greets Guilliman with a beam of smoke-light, a column of wretched darkness that bursts from the palm of his right hand and smashes the XIII primarch into the chamber wall.
Guilliman gets back up, but he is shaken. The wall is crumpled where he struck it.
Kor Phaeron cries out, a bark of straining effort, and manufactures another ray of smoke-light. Guilliman is charging, but the beam slams him back into the bulkhead with a kinetic slap so powerful that it rings out with a deafening sonic boom.
Guilliman staggers up, falls, and then half rises, clenching his power fist. The ceramite of his breastplate is cracked. Guilliman coughs, and blood drips from his mouth. He tries to stand.
Kor Phaeron blasts him again, this time with a weird, negative electricity that crackles around Guilliman and causes him to seize in violent spasms.
Guilliman is left on his hands and knees, his cobalt-blue plating scorched, his head bowed, his whole form smouldering as the superheated armour burns his skin.
-Know No Fear
Lorgar blocks sniper fire with a psychokinetic shield without even paying attention:
Lorgar’s ridged boots crunched down on the rubble, grinding the rocks to pebbles and dust. Sniper fire lanced the air at once, flaring with frustrated light as it impacted against the psychokinetic shield shimmering around the primarch’s armour. Khârn shouted a warning, but Lorgar paid as much attention to the centurion’s cry as he did to the incoming storm of fire that supposedly threatened his life.
-Betrayer: Part 1, Chapter 4
Lorgar pulls a thunderhawk gunship from the sky with psychokinesis with ease:
An Ultramarines gunship rattled overhead, rows of heavy bolters chattering and flashing in the dust-brought darkness. That got the primarch’s attention. Lorgar turned in a measured, fluid arc, dragging Illuminarum’s brutal maul-head across the ground before roaring as he hurled it skywards. The crozius spun in an energised blur, crashing into the cockpit’s reinforced windshield with a shatter loud enough to be audible over the gunship’s protesting jump jets. As the Thunderhawk banked away, Lorgar raised his hands towards it, fingers curling into claws. He gripped it, holding it in the air.
And he pulled.
The gunship’s engines coughed black filth and shuddered in the sky. Lorgar pulled again, a prophet clawing wisdom from the heavens. The gunship fell, smashing into the broken avenue with an ear-aching crash of tormented metal, engines aflame, hull mangled.
-Betrayer: Part 1, Chapter 4
Lorgar digs out Angron from under dozens of meters of rubble. While simultaneously sends Ultramarines flying to die against rocks and regular soldiers even farther, pulping against rubble:
The Lord of the Word Bearers started hauling the rocks free and casting them away from the buried, collapsed road, with the same untouching ease as he’d pulled a gunship from the sky.
…
Khârn saw Lorgar’s silhouette in the dust, hurling great rocks and slabs of fallen architecture aside with telekinetic fury. The primarch was digging deep, well below street level, leaving the air tense with a pall of psychic resonance sharp enough to breed migraines and toothaches among those nearby. Any Ultramarine descending into the hole died without Lorgar even sparing a glance; mirage-waves of kinetic pressure slammed into whole squads, hurling them away to die against the rocks. The human soldiers caught in those careless expulsions of force flew even further, pulping against the rubble where they landed. Lorgar kept digging.
-Betrayer: Part 1, Chapter 4 & 5
Lorgar throws a piece of masonry as large as a Rhino at a Warhound Titan with incredible speed, crushing its head:
A Warhound Titan, hunched and hungry, stomped its way through the dust cloud, bringing its weapons to bear on the primarch. Khârn drew breath to shout a warning, exhaling in wordless shock a second later.
Lorgar, his gauntlets rimed with psychic hoarfrost, lifted a chunk of broken masonry the size of a Rhino transport and hurled it across the avenue. Such was its speed that dust-waves parted in its wake. With the majestic toll of a ringing bell, it collided with the Titan’s armoured wolf-head cockpit, flattening the crew chamber and sending the Titan slowly, so slowly, toppling onto its side.
-Betrayer: Part 1, Chapter 5
Lorgar raises a kine-shield that is able to block two plasma shots from a Warhound Titan. Each of these shots are as hot as a sun:
Imperial plasma technology combined elemental gases to form the fire that licked across the skin of stars. In ancient ages, the process was better known as fusion – the ionising of hydrogen at a hundred million degrees – to recreate the heartbeat of a sun through human ingenuity. Cooking the plasma was half of the ritual. ‘Unleashment’ was the rest. Among the hallowed halls of the Legio Lysanda and the various Collegia Titanica, unleashment of their god-machines’ plasma weaponry came with a wealth of prayers, invocations, benedictions, and the burning of a specific scent of incense.
The Warhound fired, its comet-tailed bolt of raw plasma contained within an engineered magnetic field to prevent the projectile’s dissipation from the ionised atoms flying apart. Venting began at once, ghosts of coolant steam slashing from the relief ports along the Titan’s weaponised arm.
The unleashment incinerated the dust, burning the air clear, and splashed a sun’s core into the crater for the fraction of a second. The World Eaters caught at the blast’s edges dissolved into bones and armour shards spilling through the air, eroding to powder, and then to nothingness.
In the crater’s pit, Lorgar stood with his peaceful eyes raised to the staring Titan. Ash drifted away from his armour, the last remnants of the holy parchments bound to the ceramite. The air rippled with the force of his focus, and the kine-shield he kept raised with his outstretched hand. The ground by his boots, in a spread of several metres, was unharmed rock. Everything else was burned into sludged, black glass.
All three crew members leaned forwards in their thrones. Kei raised his targeting visor.
‘What am I seeing?’ he asked. ‘It can’t be.’
The Moderati Primus, Ellas, narrowed his eyes to squint. ‘Is that…?’
‘Fire, damn you!’ Delantyr was yelling. ‘Fire again!’
‘Brace for–’
‘Just fire!’
Lighting failed in the cockpit as power bled from the reactor. The tech-priest’s voice snapped over the vox with uncharacteristic urgency.
‘Core hypovolaemia threat,’ he practically whined. ‘And we aren’t br–’
Ardentor fired again.
The discharge sent the Titan rocking back two steps, its splayed claw-feet crunching into the avenue to avoid falling. In the wake of its release, the weaponised arm hissed steam from its coolant vanes, like a forged blade quenched in water.
The lights reactivated. Kei’s targeting visor came back online a moment later, and the control consoles followed.
‘He must be dead,’ Delantyr whispered. ‘He has to be dead. We’ve killed a primarch. Walk us closer.’
The Warhound realigned, coming around to stare back down into the crater.
Kei’s eyes flickered between the annihilation below and the pulsing chime of auspex contact. ‘Inbound engines,’ he said. ‘Legio Audax. And gunships – declaration signatures marking them as Seventeenth.’
Delantyr spoke through clenched teeth. ‘They’re too late.’
The primarch of the Word Bearers had fallen. His armour, once red and engraved with scripture, was an ashen husk of charred plate. Cracked and weeping skin showed around the patchwork spread of bleeding burns. Not a patch of skin was left untouched. He didn’t rise from his knees. He didn’t lift his head. He did nothing at all.
-Betrayer: Part 1, Chapter 5
Lorgar bolsters some Angron’s strength even though he’s heavily injured:
The Word Bearer lifted an immolated hand. He couldn’t speak, could scarcely move, but he added the dregs of his psychic push to his brother’s strength. The raised hand trembled – where it wasn’t cooked bloody, its burn-sores were weeping.
-Betrayer: Part 1, Chapter 6
Lorgar demonstrates and explains his knowledge of psychic arts:
The World Eaters primarch pulled a book from the closest shelf and fanned the pages, not reading a word. ‘We are dealing,’ he said flatly, ‘with foolish mysticism.’
Lorgar’s irritated smile was visible beneath his hood. ‘Listen and learn.’
He spoke a single word, scarcely more than a whisper, but it threw Angron and the others from their feet with a hurricane-blast of wind. Three bookshelves exploded, quite literally blasting apart in a storm of splintered wood and powdered parchment. Khârn managed to arrest his skidding tumble by jamming his fingertips between two marble flagstones. Argel Tal and Angron crashed past him, their armour shedding sparks as they scraped over the cream-coloured stone.
The wind from nowhere vanished as suddenly as it arrived. Khârn was first to his feet.
‘I-I know that tongue,’ he said to Lorgar.
‘I doubt that, Khârn,’ replied the primarch with surprising gentleness.
‘Argel Tal spoke it,’ he said, ‘on Armatura.’
‘Ah. Then you do know something of its power.’ Lorgar waited until his brother and son rejoined them from across the chamber. ‘That, my brother, is what I mean. Reality obeys certain laws. Gravity. Electromagnetism. The nuclear forces. Cause and effect. If I breathe in, my body converts air into life, unless I am too weak or diseased for the process to continue. There are millions of laws that are unknown to all but the most enlightened. Magnus knows many more than even I, but I have learned enough. It is not magic.’ He fairly sneered the word. ‘It is manipulation of the infinite potential that is the source of all realities. A blending of components from the universe of flesh and blood and the divine realm of pure aether and emotion.’
Angron was silent several moments, his brutal face troubled.
‘That noise you made,’ he said finally. ‘That “word”. What was it?’
‘It is for the best that I do not speak it again,’ said Lorgar, smiling sardonically. ‘The books I just destroyed were very valuable, and I’d rather not lose more of them.’
Seeing his brother’s expression, Lorgar’s smile became more sincere. ‘Some words and sounds shake the foundations of reality. For example, the concept and sound of a hundred and one blind men choking and gasping as they all drown at the same time serves as the name of a certain daemonic princeling. Compressing that noise and its meaning into a single sound can be enough to draw that entity’s attention and render it easier to summon. The word I just spoke was… similar. I see the question in your eyes, and yes, I can teach you this tongue.’
KhÃrn spoke without meaning to. ‘That’s how you’ve healed yourself.’
-Betrayer: Part 1, Chapter 12
Lorgar reknits his skin with what I assume is biomancy, a school of psychic power:
Khârn spoke without meaning to. ‘That’s how you’ve healed yourself.’
Lorgar nodded, though he didn’t pull the hood back. ‘It is. The pain, however, was indescribable. Were I mortal in the usual sense I’d be dead from the attempt alone. Reknitting skin and muscle meat is easy enough in principle, but everything comes at a price.’
-Betrayer: Part 1, Chapter 12
STRENGTH
Lorgar manhandles Argel Tal, one of his favoured Space Marine Captains:
‘They are far from here. And we will tell you something more: neither Erebus nor Kor Phaeron would struggle to accept the truths that we speak. Kor Phaeron has always kept his belief in the Old Ways hidden behind lying smiles, and Erebus drools in the presence of power. Neither of those twisted warlocks would hold their heads in their hands and panic about how the Imperium will—’
Argel Tal’s voices fell silent, quenched by the golden hand around his emaciated throat.
Lorgar rose to his feet in a smooth and effortless motion, dragging the Astartes up with him, the captain’s feet lifting from the deck.
‘You will watch your tongue when you speak the names of my mentors, and you will speak with respect when you address the lord of your own Legion. Is that understood, beast?’
Argel Tal didn’t answer. His hands clawed at the primarch’s forearm in desperate futility.
Lorgar hurled the skeletal figure against the wall. The captain crashed against the metal and tumbled to the floor.
-The First Heretic: Chapter 18
Lorgar sends a Raven Guard Legionary flying over his retreating comrades:
He wrenched the mangled metal from his face and killed his attacker with a single swipe of Illuminarum. The blow sent the Raven Guard tumbling away over the heads of his retreating brothers, crashing down among them.
-The First Heretic: Chapter 26
Lorgar strikes Corax’s armor so hard, its sends out a shockwave that sends all nearby space marines to the ground:
In the seconds’ safety he bought for himself, Lorgar at last landed a true blow. Corax was sent sprawling again as the crozius pounded into his breastplate. The power field around the maul’s head struck with enough force to send a shockwave blasting out from the warring brothers, throwing all nearby Astartes to the ground.
-The First Heretic: Chapter 27
Lorgar hits a possessed Fulgrim so hard it sends him to the ground with a broken chestplate and leaves Fulgrim severely bleeding:
Lorgar’s crozius mace struck with a bell’s toll, echoing around the war room. Fulgrim crashed into the back wall – a porcelain doll in shattered ceramite – and crumpled to the ground.
...
Fulgrim moaned as he began to rise from the decking. Blood made lightning trails down his face from the edges of his lips. Lorgar rested an armoured boot on the prone primarch’s chest-plate.
-Aurelian: Chapter 2
SPEED
Lorgar is able to move so quickly that his brothers aren’t able to keep track of him and even the possessed Fulgrim is unable to react in time to defend himself:
Lorgar was already moving before even the keenest of his warrior brothers knew what was happening.
Fulgrim had a scarce moment to draw a breath, to instinctively reach for his own weapon in a futile attempt to ward the coming blow.
-Aurelian: Chapter 2
ENDURANCE
Lorgar survives a plasma blast from a Warhound Titan:
Cracked and weeping skin showed around the patchwork spread of bleeding burns. Not a patch of skin was left untouched. He didn’t rise from his knees. He didn’t lift his head. He did nothing at all.
-Betrayer: Chapter 5
Horus even remarks how Lorgar was only mutilated by two plasma shots:
Lorgar smiled in the silence that followed his words. After a half-dozen heartbeats, Horus smiled, as well.
‘What really happened?’ Horus asked. ‘Plasma?’
Lorgar waved a hand over his charred face. ‘Plasma. A Warhound’s plasma blastgun. Twice.’
Horus winced, an awed exhalation escaping his lips. ‘You’re lucky to be merely mutilated.’
-Betrayer: Chapter 8
Lorgar withstands being impaled by Corax’s Lightning Talons:
Metre-long talons sank through Lorgar’s stomach, the tips glinting to the side of his spine as they thrust from his back. Such a blow meant little to a primarch – only when Corax heaved upwards did Lorgar stagger. The claws bit and cut, sawing through the Word Bearer’s body.
Illuminarum slipped from the impaled primarch’s fists. Those same hands wrapped around Corax’s throat even as the Raven Lord was carving his brother in half.
‘For the Emperor,’ Corax breathed, untroubled by his weaker brother’s grip. Lorgar crashed his forehead against Corax’s face, shattering his brother’s nose, but still he couldn’t free himself. The Raven Lord gave no ground, even as a second, third and fourth head butt decimated his delicate features.
‘But he lied to us,’ Lorgar spoke through lips that produced more blood than language. ‘Father lied.’
The claws jerked, snagged against Lorgar’s enhanced bones. Corax tore them free, inflicting more damage than the first impaling had done. Blood hissed and popped as it evaporated on the force-fielded blades.
-The First Heretic: Chapter 27
WARGEAR
THE ARMOUR OF THE WORD
Lorgar wears an artificer suit of Mark III Powered Armour. Artificer units are of higher quality than regular Astartes battleplate. His armour also has a defensive field generator:
Lorgar’s armour no-sells an array of bolter shells, this would tear a regular space marine apart:
Bolter shells cracked against Lorgar’s armour, their heat and explosive debris going utterly ignored.
-The First Heretic, Chapter 26
Lorgar also owns a tri horned helmet that was able to withstand a direct bolter round:
Lorgar’s head snapped back as a bolter shell thudded into his helm, disrupting the retinal electronics and warping the ceramite.
-The First Heretic, Chapter 26
Lorgar owns an archaeotech pistol. These are powerful sidearms from the Dark Age of Technology and are rare, so they are only carried by high ranking commanders in the army. He also carries frag grenades on him:
ILLUMINARIUM
This is a master-crafted Power Maul forged by Lorgar’s brother, Ferrus Manus. He as well as Vulkan and Perturabo were known as the greatest smiths and engineers when it came to forging weapons. As it is a power weapon, it is a surrounded by an energy field that disrupts any physical matter that it comes into contact with:
Knowing the spiteful thought was petty, Lorgar had sought to temper it. ‘One wonders if you are capable of making anything that creates, rather than destroys.’ He tried to smile, hoping it would rob the accusation of any venom as he stood uncomfortably in the heat blaring from the open furnace.
Ferrus had cast a glance over his dark-skinned shoulder and watched his fey brother for a moment, not returning the smile. ‘One wonders if you are capable of creating anything worthwhile at all.’
Lorgar’s golden features had tightened, the smile now etched on rather than worn with any sincerity. ‘You summoned me?’
‘That I did.’ Ferrus stepped away from the anvil. His bare chest was flecked with miniscule marks of burn tissue, hundreds of them pockmarking his dark skin from stray sparks and spatters of molten metal. A lifetime of forge-work, worn like a coat of medals that scarred the flesh. ‘I made something for you,’ he said, his voice as low and rumbling as ever.
‘What? Why?’
‘I won’t call it a rescue,’ said Ferrus, ‘for my warriors wouldn’t stand for that. But I owe you thanks for the “reinforcement” at Galadon Secondus.’
‘You owe me nothing, brother. I live to serve.’
Ferrus grunted, as if doubting even that. ‘Be that as it may, here is a token of my appreciation.’
Ferrus’s Legion was named for the primarch himself. His arms were metallic, but not robotic, as if formed from some alien compound of organic silver. Lorgar had never asked about his brother’s unique biology, knowing that Ferrus would never explain it to him.
As he reached a nearby table, he lifted a long weapon with a sure grip. Without a word, he tossed it to Lorgar. The Word Bearer caught it neatly with one hand, though it was heavier than he’d expected and he winced under its sudden weight.
‘It’s called Illuminarum,’ Ferrus was already working back at his anvil. ‘Try not to break it.’
‘I… I do not know what to say.’
‘Say nothing.’ Already, the falling ring of hammer-hand upon yielding steel.Clang, clang, clang. ‘Say nothing, and leave me be. That will spare us any halting attempts at conversation when we agree on nothing, and have nothing but awkwardness to share.’
‘As you wish.’ Lorgar had forced a smile to his brother’s back, and left in silence. Such was the extent of his closeness to Fulgrim and Ferrus.
-The First Heretic: Chapter 26
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