Mortarion origin question

[kiwitexansfan]

Who or what was Mortarion's father?

 

Reading his back story and got to wondering what his father was?

 

It doesn't seem to be human to survive in that environment.

 

Tried searching for answers but my google-fu failed.

[clanfield]

he's a primarch ergo hes a gene construct of the emperor

[Billuriye]

Barbarus' chief warlord. A nurglite and mutant.

[Leonaides]

Iirc they were some kind of non-human race who treated the humans as cattle or playthings... Not necessarily nurgle devotees either.

[Billuriye]

I assumed he was Nurglite because he was able to breathe while Mortarion was choking. Like Typhus laughing at Destroyer Hive while Mortarion and his legion were writhing in agony because he was blessed by Nurgle.

[darknation]

he was a 'necromancer' if I recall correctly - some badass psyker who could raise legions of dead and snort poison / superglue fumes with impunity.

 

Of course, it's also possible that mortarion himself was the Necromancer who, in a pixar-like fashion, grew to love the innocents he was slaughtering for epiclulz and renounced his evil ways, pleaded ignorance and blamed a big baddie who lived up a mountain.

 

After all, no one ever saw the warlord, save for mort and the emperor. The big E beats down mortarion and promises to keep his serial killing hobby a secret from the population at large and his fellow primarches, so long as morty does what he is told (i.e; only murders the people is is told to.) Then, heresy, defeat, blah blah blah, mortarion goes into the warp, finds a mountain, sits on it and starts murdering people to death again.

 

Or something.

[Octavulg]

...Except for the other warlords they saw...

 

Mortarion's father is some indeterminate kind of nasty nasty alien.

[WolfGuardVortek]

I think I remember the Warlords being described as near human. For some reason i've always thought they might be dark eldar.

[Octavulg]

The various quotes from IA: Death Guard that refer to the beings.

 

"The planet was Barbarus, perpetually shrouded in poisonous fog, whose mountainous crags were ruled by warlords with fantastic powers and horrific appetites, and whose human settlers, stranded there millennia before, were crowded into the lowest valleys, beneath the choking mists."

 

This suggests to me that human settlement may not have been voluntary. Barbarus could have been the home world of the creatures.

 

"Legend tells that the warlord walked the sea of corpses for a day and a night in his creaking battle armour, drawn by the wail of the infant. For an instant, he considered ending its young life; but no mere human ought to be able to breathe the poisonous miasma of the heights of Barbarus, much less cry out as this child did. "

 

Creaking battle armour suggests a technology aesthetic that doesn't fit well with any of the known races.

 

"It was a world of constant war, against opposing lords who came with golem armies of stitched-together dead one day, then tormented shapeshifters, more monsters than men, the next. "

 

"However like them he felt himself to be, to them he was little different from the monsters above. Towering over even the tallest of them, gaunt and pallid, with hollow, haunted eyes which betrayed the horrors he had seen, Mortarion terrified most of the settlers. "

 

Could be that they resembled Mortarion.

 

"Beings immune to the toxic soup of the planet's higher atmospheres once existed on Barbarus, building great grey keeps in the mountain fastnesses. When humans came to Barbarus, the horrific conditions from which they had to eke out survival quickly reduced them to a pre-feudal state. The higher beings' incomprehensible powers, their ability to survive where men could not, and above all their hunger to prey upon, experiment with and accurse Humankind caused the settlers to ascribe to those beings a medieval supernaturalism. What manner of creatures these dark overlords were will never be known."

[WolfGuardVortek]

Was I imagining things when i thought them described as near human? I do remember it being said that Typhus has there blood in his veins.

[feifei]

After all, no one ever saw the warlord, save for mort and the emperor.

[Octavulg]

Except for the others that the original Death Guard killed...

[Billuriye]

Was I imagining things when i thought them described as near human? I do remember it being said that Typhus has there blood in his veins.

Yeah that pretty much cements that they were human, a deviant branch of sorts.

[Perrin]

Was I imagining things when i thought them described as near human? I do remember it being said that Typhus has there blood in his veins.

Yeah that pretty much cements that they were human, a deviant branch of sorts.

 

I thought Typhus was a Terran though?

They were there before humans landed on the planet, so they couldn't have been human or a deviant branch, as they would have evolved on Barbarus and not Terra. They are described as humanoid but so are Tau and Eldar tbf. I think they're just a random xenos/psyker race.

Octavulgs last paragraph in his post pretty much ends it.

[Apothecary Vaddon]

Interesting. The wikis have Typhus as from Barbarus, but the older fluff (and those are the only sources listed) place him as a former librarian of the Dusk Raiders, which would mean that he couldn't be from Barbarus. I guess his past is unknown, then.

[Conn Eremon]

Was I imagining things when i thought them described as near human? I do remember it being said that Typhus has there blood in his veins.

 

Well, those quotes of Octavulg's seem to suggest that Mortarion reminded the human settlers of these Warlords in appearance. Since Mortarion is essentially a gigantically-proportioned human, it would suggest that these Warlords looked human-like as well. Just bigger, and with a gaunt look to them.

 

Which could really mean anything. I mean, Orks are human-like to a point.

[Perrin]

Interesting. The wikis have Typhus as from Barbarus, but the older fluff (and those are the only sources listed) place him as a former librarian of the Dusk Raiders, which would mean that he couldn't be from Barbarus. I guess his past is unknown, then.

 

Horus Heresy has him as a Dusk Raider librarian as well, only in The Lion short story though. Suprised it's not mentioned in FotE if it was already established. Didn't Garro get some stick for being a Terran? Bit rich if the First Captain is one as well.

[DuskRaider]

Typhon was born on Barbarus. It's also worth noting that Mortarion forbade the presence of Psykers (most of all Librarians) in the Legion, so Typhon had to keep his gift a secret.

[Octavulg]

C: CSM 3.5 has him born on Barbarus.

[Perrin]

Oh look, more conflicting canon between codex and BL :)

 

The newer source (The Lion) has him as Dusk Raider librarian, but original background has him born on Barbarus, descended from the Warlords who ruled it.

Both are pretty interesting backgrounds really.

 

Also if the newer fluff is taken to be canon, does that mean Mortarion was found relatively late? The Librarian training scheme was founded by Magnus, Sanguinius and the Khan, so Mortarion must have been founded after them for there to already be a Librarium within the Dusk Raiders.

[malika666]

Could be that Typhon was a Terran but integrated that well with those from Barbarus that they deemed him as one of their own. Garro however didn't mingle that well with the locals, thus the distance would have remained.

[Billuriye]

Could be that Typhon was a Terran but integrated that well with those from Barbarus that they deemed him as one of their own. Garro however didn't mingle that well with the locals, thus the distance would have remained.

 

Doesn't explain the Warlord blood. He's obviously native to planet. Either those warlords are "aliens" that can crossbreed with humans or they are humans that adapted to Barbarus all too well. Like Fenrisians adapting to Fenris so much that they've become wolves.

[Wade Garrett]

Just thumbed through my copy of The Primarchs, Typhus is referred to as a Dusk Raider by some kind of warp...thingie that he and Lion El'Johnson previously encountered some time before the Heresy when the Death Guard and Dark Angels combined forces to free the planetary population it had enslaved. What's interesting is that that it specifically mentions that Mortarion was present during this campaign and that he and the Lion did not get along.

 

I may be reading a bit too much into the words of a creepy daemon orb but it seems that there was a gap in between the Dusk Raiders reuniting with their primarch and Mort shutting down the Librarian program and renaming the Legion. Typhus does tell the daemon that things have changed and they are now the Death Guard, presumably he wouldn't have felt the need to do so if Mortarion had already reshaped the Legion in his image when they first encountered the creature. Perhaps it was during this gap period that Barbus borne marines like Typhon started entering the Legion? As for the alleged alien nature of the warlords....this is your body. This is your body on the Warp.

 

Nothing about them couldn't be explained by plain Jane homo sapiens spending a few generations mucking around with sorcerous energies of death and decay.