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He is the son of a Primarch, though he knows not which. The gene-seed which made him what he is now came from a battlefield on which his masters fought a warband of Blackshields. The Apothecaries who tended to his batch of inductees could not discern any particular gene-markers on the resources they claimed, and the wargear of the fallen enemy yielded no clues. He does not know enough to ask this question. The education and hypno-induced flood of information Astartes traditionally received has been curtailed with rapid implantation and the needs of war. Need-to-know for what they call the Newborn has well-defined limits. The closest he has had to an answer came from one of the few times a pure-blood Legionary deemed him worthy of attention. A captain with the Warmaster’s face - pure-blood twice over, a “true son” - approached him in the aftermath of a battle. A power fist had locked around his chin, and the Son of Horus had inspected his face curiously. “Medusan, perhaps,” the warrior murmured, and moved on. He is the son of a man and a woman, and beyond that all he knows is that they screamed when their hab-unit was torn open and soldiers came to take him away. He has learned since that the soldiers were Solar Auxilia, designated Cthonian Jackals. The memory of his past life is gone, as if the early chapters of a book were torn out. More clearly, he remembers the children that his new masters made him kill. Other boys of his age. Once rounded up, they were set upon one another; the Sons of Horus keeping careful count of which were still alive. He recalls gouging another boy’s eyes out, and using the still-screaming youth’s head as a bludgeon on another. His masters marked him as promising for that. When the requisite number was reached, the survivors were rigged up to the torture machines which masqueraded as medical apparatus. He knows not for how long, though he recalls the businesslike way in which the corpses of failed inductees were pulled from the rigs and others put in their places. There is a hierarchy among the Astartes who serve the Warmaster, many-tiered. That, he understands well. The veterans get the best; the Iron and Maximus patterns, with some of the crow-faced design that they call Corvus. The Newborn among the pure-bloods claim surplus suits of those patterns when they can, but mostly make do with more primitive Mk II and their own take on the more replaceable and cross-compatible forms which will one day be grouped under the banner of the “Heresy pattern”. He wears the latter, augmented with pieces claimed from fallen foes. The only way a Blackshield like him, especially a Chymera, attains superior gear without very great favour from his masters is to take it from the dead. Even then it is done at the sufferance of his masters. If a pure-blood officer demands a component or weapon, it is yielded up. He is loyal to the Warmaster, fanatically so. It has been burned into him, as with all the Newborn. Hypno-indoctrination of an intensity never seen during the Crusade is now commonplace, etching zeal into the minds of the new Space Marines. In a way, they are purer than their comrades ever were. They have never served the Emperor, never raised a blade in the name of His Crusade of lies, never once drawn alien blood. His loyalty, ultimately, is to the Warmaster alone. No other Primarch has any hold over him. He is commanded by a Blackshield warlord named Veneloc Jaqar, who answers in turn to Jerrod of the Sons of Horus’ 13th Company. But there is no Primarch above him beyond that. The chain of command leads straight to Lupercal himself. In a sense, the Warmaster might be considered his father. A strange sort of adoptive father, or perhaps one who attends to his baseborn bastards whilst never letting them imagine they can stand level with those who bear his name. He has never looked upon a Primarch. He hopes he might. Some part of him hopes that one day he will look upon a Primarch and know his kin. The merest ghost of fear whispers that when that day comes, it will be a foe of the Warmaster. He will find himself face to face with Dorn, Guilliman or the Lion, and son shall slay father or, more likely, the father will kill a child he never knew was his. He knows the chance is slim, tied as it is to his chances of survival. Terra looms somewhere on the horizon, the girded expanse of Sol rings it, and even before that there is Beta-Garmon barring the way to the Throneworld. Still, he will do all that is in his power to see it. The Blackshield, son of no one, who never knew Terra as anything but the objective, will see it. He will fight in the shadow of the Palace. And in that shadow, he will face the one they call Sigismund and in the Templar he will find his end as so many have. Impaled on the Black Sword, spluttering oaths in the language of the hollow world he never knew, the Blackshield will be ended. But as with so much else in his stunted demigodhood, he does not know this.