User:Algrim Whitefang/Sandbox1

< Algrim's Sandbox 2 >

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Dargus Mortane
Dargus Mortane, the Grave Lord, was one of 20 superhuman Primarchs created by the Emperor of Mankind in latter years of the 30th Millennium as a commander of one of the Legiones Astartes - the Space Marine Legions. He was the lord and master of the XVIII Legion - the Grave Lords. All his life, Dargus was tortured by visions of a dark, malignant entity that haunted his dreams, whispering promises of power of death over life.

He was a merciless and unforgiving warrior who believed in delivering retribution and merciless justice to those that would dare reject the will of the Emperor and embraced something else in His place. He was a master of using fear and psychological terror tactics as potent weapons against one's foes, teaching his warriors to be as cruel and merciless as necessary to put down the enemy.

An insular and taciturn Primarch, Dargus sought his own objectives away from the rest of his fellow brother Primarchs, leading the XVIII Legion at the forefront of Imperial expansion efforts during the height of the Great Crusade. But some say, this overconfidence in his own abilities, or perhaps maybe arrogance, saw the Grim Lords Legion suffer a terrible fate when they overreached and took the Great Crusade into the dark and foreboding, unexplored region of the Ghoul Stars themselves.

When Dargus and his Legion returned from the Outer Dark to the Imperium proper, they had been irrevocably changed, becoming the living embodiment of harbingers of death, having fallen to the corrupting influence of the outcast Chaos God of Death - Nerull - and damning both himself and his Legion to a living hell.

History
A foreboding and haunted figured, obsessed by death and punishment, and an unshakable belief that mankind were fallible and weak-willed creatures who needed to be cowed into submission and reminded of their proper place in the higher order, Dargus Mortane and his Grave Lords were shaped by the savagery and darkness of Posul, just as much as they were by the gene-craft of the Emperor of Mankind.

Child of the Grave
According to the heretical text that chronicles his life, entitle the Libris Mortis, or Book of Death, the Primarch Dargus Mortane recalled his descent from the heavens in a bright flash of light to the feral and savage world of Posul. Through the machinations of the Ruinous Powers, XVIII Legion's Primarch and his 19 brothers were stolen from the Emperor's subterranean gene-labs of Terra, located deep below the Himalaya Mountains. The embryonic forms of the Primarchs' gestation capsules were cruelly ripped through the Warp and scattered across the galaxy, landing on various worlds that would come to shape, mould and define each Primarch. Of all the worlds upon which the Primarchs were scattered, few were as terrible or deadly as the frigid and perpetually night-shrouded world of Posul.

Located in the Segmentum Tempestus, this unforgiving and ancient planet was classified as a Death World - a world that was inimacable to all human life. It was perpetually shrouded in darkness due to the distance it lay from the system's star and was thus also classified as a Night World. Its surface was craggy, frigid and mountainous. This world was inhabited by fierce nomadic tribes that knew neither sunlight or joy, for these things did not exist on Posul. The sun never penetrated the planet's inky atmosphere, and the air was choked with the stink of blood and smoke. The inhabitants of this planet endured a brutal life of darkness and constant inter-tribal bloodshed marked by cannibalistic rituals which involved eating the flesh of their slain enemies to ritually gain their strength.

Often times, a Posulan youth would have taken hundreds of skulls before reaching adolescence. These humans had devolved from their ancestors who had become trapped on the planet millennia earlier, during Age of Strife, and were forced to eke out a pitiful existence on the lethal and unforgiving world. Mortane's capsule impacted upon a rocky plateau of the inhospitable planet, strewn with heaps of ripped and torn, decomposing corpses left in the wake of a recent battle between warring tribes.

Unlike many of his fellow Primarchs, Dargus Mortane was left to raise himself in the vast, mountainous region where his capsule had landed. Growing at an exponential rate, he was forced to spend his early life surviving by instinct and steely determination, fending for himself by feeding off the predatory animals that roamed the vast craggy peaks. Even as a young boy, feral and savage, he possessed frightening strength and an indefatigable will enmeshed with a superhuman and watchful intelligence. By day, he observed the ceaseless warfare between the barbaric tribes, hearing the din and clash of war and the screams of the dying. At night, when he slept, he would dream of distant worlds, fighting wars amongst the stars, the mounds of dead heaped upon worlds he had never seen. Often, he would wake with the screams of the dying in his ears, unsure whether or not they were real.

When he reached adolescence, he encountered a small group of savage hunters while foraging for food. They made the mistake of trying to kill him. Reacting on instinct, the young Primarch savagely killed them to survive. The youth observed that these creatures, though similar in appearance, were not like him. They were slow and weak in comparison and were no match for the nightmare they encountered. Like those he had often observed, he ritually ate the flesh of his enemies, his mind absorbing the whispers of thoughts of the slain tribesmen, leeching speech and the arts of war, his mind rapidly assimilating these new things as only the mind of a transhuman Primarch could. Taking the primitive weapons of his fallen foes, the young Primarch used them to sever the heads of the slain tribesmen, and took them as trophies. Wanting to know more about these frail creatures, he used their stolen memories to locate their village.

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Nerull
Nerull, also known as Neros and Nekrus, is the Chaos God of Death, Atrophy and Pain. His domain encompasses death and all things of the grave, as well as the most basic and primal fear of dying. He is also a god of pain in all its forms. Worshipped by some as a god of ecstatic agony, in other quarters Nerull is revered as the god of torturers. Though he is considered a minor Chaos God, his power and influence is considerable, and at times, is said to even rival any one of the four major deities of the Chaos pantheon. Within his realm, total annihilation is the fate of the majority of humanity upon death; and the afterlife is open only to those driven to nihilism by an over-indulgence in sensual experience and willful perversion. The 'saints' of this domain are beatified by the misery of fleeting pleasure and their total inability to find lasting satisfaction. The god of this realm is neither omniscient or omnipotent, but entirely malevolent; consciously moving to corrupt the natural functionings of existence.