I liked Magnus. It is not fashionable to say so, and I am too old for fashion.
The Library at the Edge of the Map
Prospero was a world the galaxy had politely forgotten: a remote sanctuary where psykers and scholars had gathered humanity’s surviving learning into one luminous city of glass pyramids. There the Emperor found his one-eyed son — a copper-skinned giant with a mane like a fire, who did not hesitate, did not bargain, but knelt at once. As I am your son, he said of the Legion he was offered, they shall become mine.
The Legion He Saved
They needed to become his. The Fifteenth Legion was dying — devoured from within by the flesh-change, a rapid and terrible genetic decay. Magnus turned the whole weight of his intellect upon it and halted it. His Thousand Sons never forgot that they lived because their father was what he was. In the Crusade years he devoured the archives of Old Earth, soared the aether openly at his father’s side — openly, whatever was claimed afterwards — and with Sanguinius and the Khan championed the Librarius, arguing that a trained psyker is a weapon and an untrained one a wound.
Everything he did wrong, he did trying to be right. When you read of the pyres of Prospero — and you will — remember the day the Emperor gave a dying Legion to the only being alive who could save it. Both things are true. That is what tragedy is.
Questions from the Archive
Where was Magnus the Red found?
On Prospero, an isolated library-world of psykers and scholars. He knelt to the Emperor immediately: ‘As I am your son, they shall become mine.’
How did Magnus save the Thousand Sons?
The Fifteenth Legion was dying of the flesh-change, an unstable genetic decay. Magnus used his unmatched psychic intellect to halt the mutation, saving the Legion.
What was Magnus’s role in the Great Crusade?
The Crimson King studied the archives of Terra, explored the warp openly beside the Emperor, and championed the creation of the Librarius with Sanguinius and Jaghatai Khan.