Every brother carried a wound out of his exile. Mortarion’s was the only one inflicted at the moment of rescue, by the rescuer.
The Poisoned World
Barbarus was a world of eternal toxic fog, and in the fog above the human settlements lived warlords — cruel, inhuman overlords who harvested the people below like a crop. The pale child raised among them turned on them. He gathered the hardiest of the common folk into a force he named the Death Guard, and one by one he hunted the warlords into their poisoned peaks, climbing higher than any lungs but his could bear.
The Stolen Victory
Then the stranger came. When the final and mightiest warlord remained, the Emperor offered his aid, and Mortarion refused it — this kill was his birthright. He climbed into vapours that would slay a legion, and short of the summit, even his iron body failed him. He collapsed. It was the Emperor who struck the final blow. The son accepted the Fourteenth Legion from his father’s hands, and Horus himself — campaigning near in the Zhao System — came to clasp his hand and say, my brother, welcome home. But something on that mountain never came down.
The Dusk Raiders Remade
The Legion he took had been the Dusk Raiders of Terra, who struck at twilight in unpainted marble-white plate, one arm crimson — the Emperor’s red right hand. Under the Pale King they became the Death Guard: implacable, poison-proof, an infantry hammer that endured what no one else could endure and never, ever stopped walking. He towered over them cowled and lethal, war-scythe in hand, his silent Deathshroud at his back.
Remember the mountain. Fifty years later, all of us would pay for those last hundred steps.
Questions from the Archive
Where was Mortarion found?
On Barbarus, a toxic death world ruled by inhuman warlords. He raised an army of resilient commoners — the first Death Guard — and hunted the warlords through the poisoned mountains.
Did Mortarion defeat the last warlord of Barbarus?
Not alone. He collapsed in the toxic gases short of the summit, and the Emperor struck the final blow — a stolen victory Mortarion carried bitterly ever after.
What legion did Mortarion command?
The Fourteenth Legion — formerly the Dusk Raiders of Terra — renamed the Death Guard: attritional infantry without equal, enduring toxins and fire that would annihilate any other force.