“For over four decades the XVIIth Legion wore the false face of loyalty and planted the seeds that would eventually bloom into civil war…”Īfter Monarchia, it is clear that Lorgar spent a significant amount of time systematically purging his own Legion of any dissenters – a slower, more methodical version of the betrayal at Isstvan III. However, with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the razing of Monarchia was the first domino to fall in the Heresy, and Lorgar would stop at nothing to prove the Emperor wrong, and that divine beings did exist among the stars. Lorgar seemed to accept his humbling punishment, and fought ever harder afterwards in the name of the Emperor. Lorgar and his Legion were forced to kneel before Guilliman and the Emperor, and accept that their belief was wrong, and the Emperor was no god. In the Censure, Monarchia was levelled by the XIII Legion, and the populace reduced to ash. The Emperor could not allow this to continue, and took His son Guilliman to chastise Lorgar for these foolish beliefs.
#HORUS HERESY WORD BEARERS FULL#
Worse, they had taken the world of Khur and raised the “perfect city” of Monarchia, which was full of graven idols of the Emperor as a god, where the populace sang hymns of worship to His name. Shortly after this, troubling news reached the Throneworld of Terra – Lorgar was openly espousing worship of the Emperor as a divine being, in direct conflict with the atheist teachings of the Imperial Truth. Whatever the reality, the Imperial Heralds were swiftly renamed the Word Bearers. These efforts had a dark side – some say Lorgar was throwing his Legion into warzones to “filter out” the older recruits through combat casualties, allowing him to swell the ranks with newer, freshly indoctrinated, Legionaries who would be more pliable to the Word of Lorgar rather than the Imperial Truth. Lorgar quickly turned his legion into a blazing sword in the Emperor’s hand, sweeping across the galaxy at the head of the Crusade, each Imperial Herald a warrior of zealous fury and unshakeable faith in their Primarch and Emperor. When the Emperor arrived on Colchis with Magnus the Red, Lorgar knew his time had come, and his faith had been rewarded. The Aurelian had risen to be a ruler of the world, and worshipped as divine by his people – yet he dreamed of the return of a golden “ onegod ”, which he prophesied would one day come to pass. Lorgar himself had been raised as a Priest of the Covenant on the world of Colchis, an arid planet deeply steeped in religion and old gods. It may be their close involvement with the wychery and warpcraft practiced on these doomed worlds that helped hasten the fall of the Word Bearers we will never truly know. If a world refused to accept the secular Imperial Truth, the Imperial Heralds would be responsible for tearing down their idols, burning their sacred texts, and purging incorrect thought from the subjugated populace. Grim Astartes clad in black, bearing skull helms, would be dispatched to any worlds who resisted the Imperium for religious or superstitious reasons, and would deliver an ultimatum: “ recant or be destroyed.” The Word Bearers were known at their Founding as the Imperial Heralds, and they held a unique role in the growing Imperium at the outset of the Great Crusade – they were to wage the ideological war, as well as prosecute vicious combat against the foes of mankind.