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How do?

Yes, it’s the third AHC thread. Cue trumpets and that.

This time, let’s discuss what lead to the missing Primarchs being missing.

Now, to set the scene....we can reasonably infer that The Emperor was actually fairly pragmatic during the Crusade, and fairly tolerant of his Sons foibles and oddities.

Ref - Word Bearers. Censure, but no decimation etc. Off on a Crusade of Penance. Humbled and shamed, but not physically punished (so far as we know)

Ref - Angron. Completely hatstand. The loose cannon’s loose cannon.

Ref - Sanguinus. Now there’s a genetic deviant if ever we saw one. Dirty mutant - Emps didn’t care one jot.

Ref - Magnus. Totally buggered up Emp’s plans. Royally so. Russ was dispatched to return him to Terra - the massacre not occurring until Horus perverted those orders.

So that’s four examples of varying severity - but all (birth right notwithstanding) which wouldn’t be tolerated in the modern Imperium.

Rather begs the question of just exactly what the missing Primarch’s do to be utterly erased? Do you believe their Legions were wiped out, or redistributed? Are they even dead, or smuggled away for a rainy day?

What’s your head canon on this most deliberate of mysteries, Dakka?

I'm working on a story about The Lost (the second primach) and The Purged (the eleventh one), that I will publish her when it will be finished; I hope you will understand if I don't reveal nothing about that.

Totally understandable, and let me know when you’re done!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Forgot to add the standard AHC caveat.

Remember, this is Head Canon. Therefore everyone is right, and no-one is wrong. If your only posting to dunk on another post? Please don’t

I will post the stori in the "Dakka fiction" section of the forum, because if I'm not wrong these are the rules, but here I will post the link.

Sanguinius gets the 'beauty = morality' exception.

Magnus gets the 'necessary tool' (or component) exception. Someone was supposed to be the living power source of the throne

Lorgar, I suspect, got the premonition discount. At least part of the Emperor knew this would be the shape of things to come, Lorgar just got his timing wrong.

Angron gets the point and click kill exemption. Even during the crusade, a genocidal tool was useful. He just needed a handler with better target selection.

----
As to the two <deleted> Primarchs my personal headcanon is that they're irrelvant details that don't matter, just there to make the setting look deeper than it is.

But my guess would be that one of the missing made an alliance he shouldn't have. Willingly went along with a xenos race and would have formed a very practical long-term alliance that would have screwed up the Human-only club.

The second would be the flipside of that- Missing primarch #2 ended up controlled by something. Those weird worm-aliens from the RPG, enslavers or whatever. He had to be culled for his own good.

Though they probably happened in reverse order to make their extermination go down easier for Russ (or whoever got the job to kill them). The necessarily killing acting as an 'easier' moral event horizon for the 'human purity' extermination.

Neither of the scenarios can be ignored the way the example primarchs can, or worked into the narrative of the 'Great Crusade.'

What strikes me as particularly telling is that both Legions were expunged as well as their Primarch.
This leaves three distinct possibilities in my head:

1) Whatever transgression was so wholly unforgivable as to warrant the scorched earth approach, seems likely to have taken place after said Primarchs were reunited with their Legions; or
2) The issue was genetic in nature and left both Primarch and gene-offspring completely unsuitable beyond mere mutation, for instance they wound up gibbering drooling simpletons unable to squeeze a trigger; or
3) The problem was solely with the Primarchs, and the Legions were quietly disbanded and put to other uses, perhaps extra troops for the other Legions or subsumed into some other aspect of the Imperial war machine.

Despite the many flaws of the primarchs, none of them ever questioned the emperor's plan for the imperium. The closest we saw before the heresy was Jaghaitai Khan and Corax with their antiestablishment philosophies. If they had ever voiced these concerns, we may have seen them end up like the other two primarchs. Perhaps that is the line that cannot be crossed. The emperor strikes as an objectivist, where everything is either a tool or an enemy. The two things a man cannot control are alien minds and invisible deities in the sky. No aliens, no religion. So narratively speaking, those would be good subjects for the missing primarchs to have objections against.

Others have mentioned the xenos idea. I like it and it's pretty reasonable that someone must have thought of cohabitation. Not every human is a paranoid xenophobe. I would also just want to see a primarch in Eldar-esque armor.

I think the relgion aspect would make for some interesting ideas. The last church is till a personal favorite of mine. One of them could be a prototype Lorgar. The emperor only sanctioned Lorgar because, at the end of day, the Emperor could manipulate his faith. It was something he could control. But what if a primarch worshipped something that wasn't the Emperor, or at least didn't see a problem with letting others worship what they wanted? That wouldn't have sat well with the emperor at all.

regarding Sanguinuous, he was terrified of the secret getting out, in part for fear of a purge. and this seems to ber a recurring theme among the astartes. if they have a major genetic issue, keep it secret, FROM EVERYONE. one would think there would be a reason for this, partiuclarly given that taking it to the emperor would, seemingly be the best way to fix the issue. So I'm definatly inclined to suspect there was some sort of genetic deviancy or corruption. on the other hand, other chapters that had severe issues, like the 1k sons and emperor's children where fine.

One thought that I once had regarding the whole "expunged from record" stuff (but it's really just a thought, nothing fleshed out) is that one primarch lost and was literally killed under circumstances and by an enemy where that should not have happened. Most of the Primarchs were still mortals, yet the imperium by and large believes them to be almost invincible. So A Primarch stepping out of his transport at the beginning of a campaign and being killed by something like a random renegade soldier with a Meltagrenade luckily hitting a vital spot might have shattered the legend in the making that was intended to push the imperium forward. Imagine the poor dude not even beating one single enemy before he wents down. Maybe top it of with his demoralized legion then - by failure of leadership, bad luck etc. being (almost) wiped out with him by a force of mere mortals. So after the others and/or the Navy took care of the unnamed enemy, big E decided that for his whole crusade thing to go forward it is best to never mention this again.

Personally, I like the idea that one of the 2 missing legions was corrupted by some horrible space parasite/mind control/disease/evil artifact/whatever (NOT Chaos though) prior to re-unification with their Primarch. When he discovered his legion's dark secret, the Primarch confronted his progeny over it whereupon they fought and killed him. Upon learning of this, Emps dispatched the Space Wolves to wipe the legion out and erased all traces and evidence of the affair.

The other primarch's capsule flew through space and time and eventually landed on a dark, feudal world where he was found and raised by a tribe of barbarians and later known as Sigmar Heldenhammer.

There are tons of possibilities with this that make sense to varying degrees. My sort of "outside the box" thought on one of the legions is that maybe there was nothing inherently wrong with them and they didn't break any real rules or anything like that... Maybe one legion just failed at something so incredibly and totally that the Primarch chose to have his legion expunged from history...

Essentially, they were tasked with something that seemed so simple that they couldn't fail, yet due to some unfortunate events they did fail. Rather than have his legion be forever known as "The Legion That Failed" the primarch asked for one last mercy from his father which would be to have all records of he and his legion redacted so that no one would ever know of their failure. The Emperor, knowing the power of propaganda, agreed because if word got out of failure on that scale it could destroy the morale of the entire crusade.

I think another likely scenario for one of the primarchs would be that he was killed as a child on his homeworld. Finding this to be the case his legion was just folded into another, and, again due to the influence of propaganda, rather than have it known that a primarch could be killed they just removed all the records of his existance.

I think both of these possibilities could be tied to the XI legion based on what Horus said during his vision:



Obviously, his comment is super vague, but both of my theories could fit within its bounds.

 Mud Turkey 13 wrote:
There are tons of possibilities with this that make sense to varying degrees. My sort of "outside the box" thought on one of the legions is that maybe there was nothing inherently wrong with them and they didn't break any real rules or anything like that... Maybe one legion just failed at something so incredibly and totally that the Primarch chose to have his legion expunged from history...

Essentially, they were tasked with something that seemed so simple that they couldn't fail, yet due to some unfortunate events they did fail. Rather than have his legion be forever known as "The Legion That Failed" the primarch asked for one last mercy from his father which would be to have all records of he and his legion redacted so that no one would ever know of their failure. The Emperor, knowing the power of propaganda, agreed because if word got out of failure on that scale it could destroy the morale of the entire crusade.

I think another likely scenario for one of the primarchs would be that he was killed as a child on his homeworld. Finding this to be the case his legion was just folded into another, and, again due to the influence of propaganda, rather than have it known that a primarch could be killed they just removed all the records of his existance.

I think both of these possibilities could be tied to the XI legion based on what Horus said during his vision:

Spoiler:

"He stopped by the tank with XI stenciled upon it ... feeling the untapped glories that might have lain ahead for what grew within, but knowing that they would never come to pass."

- Horus, during a vision granted to him by Chaos while recovering in the Temple of the Serpent Lodge

Obviously, his comment is super vague, but both of my theories could fit within its bounds.

That sounds like a promising story and would be a nice preamble to how self destructive the primarchs can be sometimes.

Perhaps they learned of the nature of chaos and went on a crusade into the eye of terror and never came back. What little evidence that could be gleaned points to annihilation. Obviously if people learned of the primarch's crusade, they would then ask why and that leads to his discovery of the gods in the warp. Naturally the whole thing is swept under the rug.

So, tied into the idea that the primarchs are each aspects (or based on aspects) of the Emperor, I like the idea that one of the lost boys was exposed to a lot of philosophy, different cultures, maybe even some glimpses of possible futures, and he came to the very rational and explainable conclusion that the Emperor's plans would fail.

He could explain why the Emperor's grand plans were ultimately a bad idea or why the Emperor was actually the greatest problem with the galaxy or why humanity was ultimately unsaveable (perhaps having seen a version of the prophecy from Legion).

When you think about the primarchs, they don't get rattled by much. But mentioning the missing primarchs *does* rattle them. I think that's because thinking about them makes the primarchs remember something worse than scary monsters or even simple treason. I think the missing primarchs make them remember that time the literally supernatural charisma of the Emperor was laid bare as a monster's glamour and the lofty goals for which the primarchs had committed such atrocities were shown to be ultimately in vain.

I'm of the mind that Alpharius had a good relationship with one of the missing Primarch. My reasoning is as such:
We know Khan, Horus, and Alpharius go to confront Malcador regarding the Censure, but Alpharius just seems like such a random pick. The guy we know super little about to the point that we have as much info on him as we do the missing Primarchs. It wouldn't be such a far out idea that, not only did Alpharius still feel a connection somehow to want to do this, but perhaps a partial reason we know so little about him is the same reason we know so little about those two. The reason is simple: they got along well and therefore memories of them going would cause memories of Alpharius to go as well. Couple in the theory that there might have been a third brother per Bligh and theory mongers as well there could be some credence to this.

Before the novels muddied the waters, the hints in the older fluff made it most likely that the two missing Legions sided with Horus in the Heresy (this was outright stated in 2nd edition) and (supposition time) were wiped out, with their records then deleted to complete their 'punishment' for turning traitor. The same couldn't yet be done with the other Traitor Legions, as they're still running around.


Since the Horus Heresy books retconned that to say that both Legions were already gone well before the Heresy, the hint from Sanguinius strongly suggests that the two lost Legions had obvious genetic flaws and so were purged and erased to avoid making the Emperor's creation look less than perfect.

I have always enjoyed the headcanon that they were both simply lost in the masses of Imperial bureaucracy.

So the theory goes, one set of Remembrancers was recording their deeds in the Roman numerals, the other in Arabic, thus leading to the deeds of the 2nd and 11th getting mixed together.

Not wanting this major feth up to get out, the fledgling Imperium sweeps this under the rug, disbands the legions and pretends they never existed.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mud Turkey 13 wrote:


I think another likely scenario for one of the primarchs would be that he was killed as a child on his homeworld. Finding this to be the case his legion was just folded into another, and, again due to the influence of propaganda, rather than have it known that a primarch could be killed they just removed all the records of his existance.

The problem with that one is, it has been stated several times in various SM-centric books/codexes that all 20 primarchs were found and reunited with their legions in the Great Crusade.

Slayer-Fan123 wrote:
I'm of the mind that Alpharius had a good relationship with one of the missing Primarch. My reasoning is as such:
We know Khan, Horus, and Alpharius go to confront Malcador regarding the Censure, but Alpharius just seems like such a random pick. The guy we know super little about to the point that we have as much info on him as we do the missing Primarchs. It wouldn't be such a far out idea that, not only did Alpharius still feel a connection somehow to want to do this, but perhaps a partial reason we know so little about him is the same reason we know so little about those two. The reason is simple: they got along well and therefore memories of them going would cause memories of Alpharius to go as well. Couple in the theory that there might have been a third brother per Bligh and theory mongers as well there could be some credence to this.

...what if Omegon IS one of the lost primarchs? Alpharius keeps himself a secret for the reasons you state and keeps his brother, who is supposed to be dead, a secret.

Unlikely. The two were in their gestation capsule together.

Maybe the two missing primarchs were woman.

Genetic flaws indeed...

I think there've been enough tidbits crop up in the HH series that we can say that something happens during the Rangdan Xenocides* to cause one of them (and their Legion) to be purged.

Not sure whether that's physical corruption or incompetence, though.

I'm also intrigued by the need for Malcador to wipe memories from at least some of the other Primarchs, including Mr Inflexible himself, Dorn - at their request. That says something about what happened, but I'm not sure what.

I guess I'm also curious if the skulls that look to be on a seat of Malcador's with a II and XI inscribed on them are actually the skulls of the missing Primarchs, or just an artist's embellishment.

* - apologies if I've fluffed the spelling there

DELETED

The_Grim_Angel wrote:
DELETED

^ ohh my god it's the entire history of the missing legions!

My idea:

The "Lost" - In one of the BL novels I've listened to there is a conversation where the Lost primarchs/legions are discussed. It is heavily implied that the "lost legion" was redistributed among the other legions (ultra marines mainly). I got the vibe that this was a sad/regrettable event. Which leads me to belive that this was a very early crusade/unity stage and most likely the lost primarch simply died.

We know primarchs are not unkillable by a long shot. If a primarch like angron could be enslaved there could well be a foe that could have felled a primarch especialy early on in the crusade before it gained momentum. After all Horus was also killed (before being revived by chaos)

If a primarch could be killed, the budding imperium could NEVER have been allowed to have this knowledge. The legions perception of invincibility is one of the key things holding compliance and any sign of anything other than perfection would shake the faith in Emperors ambition to the core and people would make plays.

As to how he died? I have a theory that he was either a space battle. After all hurling a primarchs ship into a star/Gas giant would generally do it... basically he didint have the necessary plot armour . Alternative idea is that he sacrificed himself in some epic battle in order to save his legion and the emperor. Big e has to ensure IOm worships only him so having a martyr that could be revered would throw a spanner in his aim of apotheosis..

The "Purged" - I believe the purged primarch was probably ideologically misaligned with the IOM to a degree where he had to be culled. I think the most likely is xenos influence/ not wanting to join the IOM and keep autonomy. So not a betrayal but more like non compliance resulting in execution. However as the wolves did battle with another legion, it would suggest the purged legion was with heir primarch so big E would never hand over a legion to a non compliant primarch. So the more likely explanation is a genetic defect. Most likely some sort of mental deficiency where they gone a bit insane/ too bloodthirsty/ unstable resulting in every world being razed rather than brought to compliance. There is not much point in dead worlds... So a cull had to be made.

A lot of great ideas for the missing primarchs. For me the idea that one Primarch was infected or even suspected of being infected by the Rangdan makes the most sense, the 11th probably. While the 2nd had his fate tied with the Ymga monolith. In that case maybe he duplicated his ship and crew and destroyed both fleets in the battle. Or since the Ymga monolith is similar the Hadonex anomaly, then it could be time travel.

@Wyldhunt I like the idea that one of them could see through the emperors plans. If you ever read the Primarch tarot site, it describes that the 2nd Primarch knows everyone’s thoughts, feelings and inner desires. Perhaps he was the closest to the emperors power to manipulate. The 11th was described as arrogant and naive, the perfect candidate to run headstrong into battle and getting killed. Also interesting is that both are described as being friends with Russ, possibly adding context to why Russ didn’t want to attack Magnus and tried to avoid it. He already killed two brothers, one for a transgression and one for mercy.

Or maybe the 2nd used the monolith to travel through time to change the past, only to repeatably fail and accept his fate. Hell maybe the imperium was going to fall to the Rangdan and the 2nd found a way to avoid it, only to know that the heresy was down the road.

Musselman wrote:
[…]
While the 2nd had his fate tied with the Ymga monolith. In that case maybe he duplicated his ship and crew and destroyed both fleets in the battle. Or since the Ymga monolith is similar the Hadonex anomaly, then it could be time travel.
[…]

Excuse me, can you tell me something more about the connection between the second primarch and the Ymga monolith?
In this moment I'm working on a story about the eleventh one (I still don't know if it will be a tale or a short novel), but because I have also some ideas about the second and the false primarch, so I would like to understand if that connection can upset my plans.

The_Grim_Angel wrote:

Musselman wrote:
[…]
While the 2nd had his fate tied with the Ymga monolith. In that case maybe he duplicated his ship and crew and destroyed both fleets in the battle. Or since the Ymga monolith is similar the Hadonex anomaly, then it could be time travel.
[…]

Excuse me, can you tell me something more about the connection between the second primarch and the Ymga monolith?
In this moment I'm working on a story about the eleventh one (I still don't know if it will be a tale or a short novel), but because I have also some ideas about the second and the false primarch, so I would like to understand if that connection can upset my plans.

It is from a novel about Fabius Bile. It is a discussion that could be rumor. It is really the only thing listed as an action done by one of the Lost legions. Here is a link to a Reddit post I found. Good luck on the story, I hope this helps instead of discouraging you from your idea. My story involves Malice the 5th chaos god that was retconned years ago, so I assume most people won’t agree with idea. It also involves them dying during the Rangdan xenocides in separate events.

https://www.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/7jqrqu/interesting_information_on_one_of_the_lost/

Actually I had three different plans for the Lost Primarch (the second one in my headcanon) and that connection is an almost perfect starting point for one of them; so thank you. Now I must start to gather information about that monolith, but first I must work on the story about the Purged Primarch; the eleventh one.
About Malice I don't know: if I'm not wrong there were two chapters (the Relictors and the Soul Drinkers I believe) which were excommunicated because they thought it is possible turn the Chaos Force against the Chaos Gods, so I related those chapter with Malice.

I think the two primarchs are already known. One is Omegeon the twin of Alpharius and the other is Sigmar. That's how I see it anyway. The records are purged because he purged them and Sigmar went to another reality. It used to be that the Warhammer Old World was a planet in the same galaxy.

If I'm not wrong it was stated by the GW itself that Sigmar wasn't a Primarch and you should explain why Omegon would have done such thing: it is an interesting theory, that deserve a better description.

My explanation for Omegon deleting his own records is that no other explanation is given for one Primarch actually being two. It doesn't make sense on it's own but if Omegon happened to end up with Alpharius and they grew up together into the secretive people they are then it makes sense to hide himself in another legion (Alpha Legion). I have no basis in printed materials for this but per the thread rules I am not wrong