Alpha Legion: 10,000 year old marines?

[Inquisitor Engel]

Less than a millennia has passed for the Night Lords of the 10th Company... They haven't recruited or anything since the Heresy during Soul Hunter... Very few actually comment on it. For most Chaos Marines... it's not been 10,000 years of relative time.

[Legatus]

Less than a millennia has passed for the Night Lords of the 10th Company... They haven't recruited or anything since the Heresy during Soul Hunter... Very few actually comment on it. For most Chaos Marines... it's not been 10,000 years of relative time.

I think it was even less than a century for Talos and the gang.

 

(That led to one of the issues I had with Soul Hunter. None of the Night Lords in Talos' company was older than 300 years. Later they fight against some Blood Angels, which as we all know have a very high lifespan, and would possibly all have been older and more experienced than the Night Lords or Talos' company. And what's more important, the Blood Angels had a venerable Dreadnought with them which had been a Dreadnought since the Horus Heresy. The Night Lords had a Dreadnought too, but not only was this one less than 100 years old, it had only just been awakened from Stasis in it's Dreadnought form for the very first time.)

[Trel]

The Alphas are the Alphas. Anything could have happened. Some went to the Warp and became immortal. Some may be in stasis waiting to be activated so they can play their part in some millennia-long conspiracy.

 

My thoughts on this: some are hiding in plain sight. :wub:

 

Since the Imperium's beaurocracy is so convoluted is it outside the realm of possibility that they just set up a bunch of "front" Chapters? Imagine the Legion just went to ground, so to speak and groups of a thousand now call themselves "the Emperor's Hammers" or something. They get some of their operatives to falsify a few records and next thing you know, they are receiving full Imperial and AdMech support with one (or both) of the Primarchs still alive to continue whatever their plans may be, with the Imperium completely unaware that the Alpha Legion is still very much in existence.

 

Heck, the Alphas who show up as Chaos Marines may just be a smoke screen.

[alphariusomegon20]

I suspected as much. I know there's no upper limit given to how long a Space Marine can live, but at the same time there don't seem to be many 10,000 loyalists (only ones that come to mind are that one Space Wolf Dreadnought and a Salamander from a BL book who would die if moved).

 

 

The reason why on the Sallie was he had been sitting for 10K years and most of his muscles had atrophied. The way I've read into it, Marines have no shelf life, other than dying in war.

[Valtonis]

the Space Wolves 13th Company were with Russ before the Emperor came to Fenris and they are still around

[Legatus]

The reason why on the Sallie was he had been sitting for 10K years and most of his muscles had atrophied. The way I've read into it, Marines have no shelf life, other than dying in war.

There was a warp storm involved. The Salamander's Apothecarion even mentioned how it was technically impossible for that Salamander to still be alive.

 

 

the Space Wolves 13th Company were with Russ before the Emperor came to Fenris and they are still around

They have been in the Eye of Terror for the past 10,000 years.

[Hellios]

Less than a millennia has passed for the Night Lords of the 10th Company... They haven't recruited or anything since the Heresy during Soul Hunter... Very few actually comment on it. For most Chaos Marines... it's not been 10,000 years of relative time.

 

We have no idea what the average time is for a chaos space marine... Most people like to forget it works both ways and that warp time means some marines may have been around for more than 10,000 years.

[Trel]

the Space Wolves 13th Company were with Russ before the Emperor came to Fenris and they are still around

 

So there were Space Marines on Fenris before the Emperor brought them to Fenris? :mellow:

 

Nevermind the vagaries of time and space in the Eye of Terror, the older generations of Marines were simply made better, with newer equipment, a better understanding of the technology, and gene-seed that hadn't degraded over ten millennia. Those Heresy-era Marines may well in fact be functionally immortal.

 

Today's Marines are copies of copies of copies. They may only be able to live a thousand years, but the Marines who were built directly off the template of the Primarch...who knows?

[Legatus]

There may have been some advanced technologies that allowed them to turn grown men into Marines, but generally not all gene-seed has degraded since then. The Ultramarine gene-seed in particular is described as being as pure to day as it was ten thousand years ago. Which, considering the relatively short time and that the process is strictly controlled is not really surprising.

[Trel]

There's no way to be able to tell that one way or another.

 

Sure, the Ultramarines' gene-seed may be as pure as it ever has been, but what about the machines that control the process? Ten thousand years ago they understood it, now the chapter masters are sacrificing chickens in front of a blood transfusor thinking that it will supplicate a malfunctioning pump valve. Moreover, the gene-seed may be pure in that it won't cause a random mutation in the patient, but it may still have lost some potency.

 

I'm sure the Chaos Marines call Marines of today "thin-bloods" for any number of reasons.

[Sangneur]

There is fluff if I recall about the geneseed that loyalists use being very weak. Having been both diluted over thousands of years and subject to the incorrect administration due to lack of knowledge. It's entirely possible that chaos marines can still use the proper procedures and such because they never gave awa control of themselves to administration.

 

Even outside the eye of terror the gods grant immortality. Even champions that die from combat an and are often resurrected. The gods gift their champions with immortality, consider Sigval the magnificent, who's been 16 for 300 years, which is a bit much Like Edward if you think about it... *Shiver*

[Doghouse]

The thing you have to remember when looking at survivors of the Heresy is that after they were pushed back into the Eye of Terror at the end of the Scouring the official line was that time passed differently for them there.

So where ten thousand years have passed in reality for the Traitors it could have been a matter of months or even days from their perspective. This was a concept that Andy Chambers came up with during the designing of the third edition to try and distance them from the look and feel loyalist marines and at the time was a massive insight into heresy era armies and the weapons that they had.

 

So you could well still have those that are thousands of years old having come out from the Eye at any point during the last ten thousand years and are being sustained by the fickle whims of chaos or that from their perspective they have only been in the Eye for a couple of days and were fighting at the siege of terra last week.

[Brother Ambroz]

The thing you have to remember when looking at survivors of the Heresy is that after they were pushed back into the Eye of Terror at the end of the Scouring the official line was that time passed differently for them there.

So where ten thousand years have passed in reality for the Traitors it could have been a matter of months or even days from their perspective. This was a concept that Andy Chambers came up with during the designing of the third edition to try and distance them from the look and feel loyalist marines and at the time was a massive insight into heresy era armies and the weapons that they had.

 

So you could well still have those that are thousands of years old having come out from the Eye at any point during the last ten thousand years and are being sustained by the fickle whims of chaos or that from their perspective they have only been in the Eye for a couple of days and were fighting at the siege of terra last week.

 

And yet at the same time as hellios already said that also works both ways, you can have some marines who were fighting at the seige of terra twenty thousand years ago and then you can have the opposite that you suggest.

[Doghouse]

Yeah, the way AC presented it basically these guys were forced into the eye of chaos then have been dropping out back into reality over the last ten thousand years. I think that's the beauty of chaos, pretty much anything goes.

 

So in Akylas' case he could have had them drop into the eye for a couple of days then re-emerge thousands of years later, but it sounds like he wants something the lines of more recent converts to chaos rather than heresy era guys.

 

I think the best bet is to make them former members of the Emperor's Swords chapter and start the cell from scratch, maybe with a seasoned alpha legionnaire to lead them.

[TheDarkApostle]

It's also possible for them to go into the Eye in say M39 and for them to get spat out in M34, some 5000 years BEFORE they even entered, or even were born.

 

The Warp works in mysterious ways as they say :tu:

 

TDA

[Marshal Rohr]

That would be HILARIOUS.

 

You'd get some serious John Connor moments:

 

The Dark Blades were founded in M38, but got thrown through the Warp in M36 and were subsequently wiped out a Millennia later.

 

High Marshal Ludoldus spends his whole life in the Black Templars knowing he'd be sent back through time to fight the Jerulas Crusade.

 

I wish someone from M41 had gone back to the Heresy and told everyone to sit down while he explains.

 

You suddenly have two famous ships as one from the future is transported back alongside its ownself.

[TheDarkApostle]

There was this short short in Heroes of the Space Marines I think which follows an Ultramarine squad who get trapped in a time loop where they meet an ancient Ultramarine on a planet when they get stranded.

 

Turns out the ancient is the final survivor of the very squad who finds him.

 

Then the loop goes on as the squad arrives once more to find the final survivor and on and on and on.

 

For eternity. :ph34r:

 

TDA

[Valtonis]

the Space Wolves 13th Company were with Russ before the Emperor came to Fenris and they are still around

 

So there were Space Marines on Fenris before the Emperor brought them to Fenris?

 

 

i never said they were SMs before the Emperor came.

the Space Wolves who make up the 13th company were with Russ before the Emperor came

 

and like alot of people have said, time flows differently in the warp.

 

outside the war it might have been ten thousand years but it might just be a few decades for some of the chaos legion.

 

there was also a novel by jonathan Green where the SMs of the World Eaters escaped into the warp at the end of the first Armageddon War only to find themselves coming out of the warp at around the time of the third Armageddon war.