Morrigan

== History ==
=== Childhood ===
When the twenty primarchs of the Space Marine Legions were scattered across the galaxy in a mysterious accident, one came to rest on the planet Barbarus, a world wreathed in poisonous fog where the most advanced technology was that of steam power.
The pre-industrial population of the world was split into two groups: the controlling warlords; inhuman necromancers with fantastic Warp-derived powers, and the Human settlers, who had been trapped on the planet millennia before and were now forced to eke out an existence essentially as farmers in the poison-free valleys of the planet, fearing the wrath of the necromantic Overlords and their foul creations.
The primarch-child was taken in by the most powerful of the Overlords, who found her amongst the corpses of a battlefield where he had been engaged in one of the endless conflicts he fought with the other Overlords. The infant primarch was screaming and wailing where a normal child would have suffocated and died long before.
The High Overlord, Necare of Barbarus, took the child in with the intention of creating a daughter and heir, naming him Morrigan -- "child of death" in the local Barbaran dialect of High Gothic.
Morrigan was kept by the High Overlord in a small tower positioned at the limit of even her superhuman tolerance to the toxins in the air, while Necare moved his own fortress to the highest peak of the world, beyond where even Morrigan could go.
He trained the child, who had a highly keen intellect and voracious appetite for knowledge; Morrigan learned everything from battle doctrine, to arcane secrets, from artifice to stratagem.
However, the young primarch's questions began to turn towards subjects the Overlord did not want to talk about, namely the pitiful creatures in the valleys that the many warlords preyed upon for corpses to reanimate and bodies to warp.
=== Deliverance of Barbarus ===
Finally, knowing she would be unable to find the answers she desired from her adoptive father, Morrigan broke out of the fortress that had been her home and prison after killing several guards stationed at the gates of the fortress, and headed for the valleys of Barbarus. Breaking through the poisonous mists, Morrigan discovered that the prey of the warlords were in fact the same species as she and swore to deliver them from their oppression.
The people of Barbarus were slow to accept this pale, gaunt stranger from the mountains, but Morrigan was given a chance to prove her worth when creatures enthralled to another warlord attacked the village. Seeing that the peasants were unable to effectively fight back, Morrigan joined the fray, wielding a massive harvesting scythe that made short work of the beasts. The warlord smiled when Morrigan advanced upon him and withdrew to the apparent safety of the deadly fog, only to be pursued and butchered by this inhumanly resilient Primarch.
Accepted into the village without further reservation, Morrigan began to train the villagers in the art of warfare. Soon, representatives from other villages journeyed to learn from Morrigan, while the villages scattered across the valleys of the world were transformed into strongpoints. Morrigan travelled from settlement to settlement, teaching, building and defending her people.
She recruited the toughest, most resilient men she could find, forming them into small units that trained under her supervision. She enlisted the aid of blacksmiths, craftsmen and artificers to create suits of armour that would allow men to travel through the poisonous fog. As each battle in the mists was fought, Morrigan and her Death Guard would learn how to better adapt the armour, and themselves, to reach the more poisonous heights. Eventually, only one peak denied them access, the one on which Morrigan's adoptive father had made his home.
=== Coming of the Emperor ===
Despite her adoptive father being a ruthless necromancer, Morrigan felt reluctant to attack the man who took her in and called off the planned attack on the advice of Calas Typhon, who warned that he was not yet ready to face the High Overlord even with the new suits of armour. Returning to the village, Morrigan's mood darkened when she found her people talking not of her victory but of the arrival of a benevolent stranger who promised salvation to the people of Barbarus.
Finding this stranger in conference with the village elders, Morrigan claimed that her people needed no outside help. The stranger commented that even Morrigan and her Death Guard were having trouble pacifying the final warlord, and offered a challenge. If Morrigan could defeat the High Overlord Necare, the stranger would leave. If not, Morrigan had to swear fealty to the stranger and the Imperium of Man he represented.
Ignoring the protests of her Death Guard, Morrigan left alone to confront her adoptive father, motivated by a compulsion to prove herself to the stranger below. The confrontation was brief. The air surrounding the High Overlord's fortress was so poisonous and toxic that parts of Morrigan's armour began to rot away.
She collapsed at the gates of the Overlord's citadel, bellowing challenges to Necare. The final thing Morrigan saw before she almost blacked out into unconsciousness was the Overlord of Barbarus coming to kill her and mocking her for her weakness and failure. At the same time, she heard a voice that was not her own within her head, seeking to make contact and impart what it called the true lesson about how to defeat death.
Morrigan did not know it, but this voice was that of the Chaos God Nurgle, who had already chosen Morrigan to become his greatest mortal champion. But it was then, at the final moment before the High Overlord at last took the life of her wayward foster son, that the stranger suddenly appeared, leaping between the two and slaying Necare with a single thrust of his flaming sword.
When she recovered, Morrigan swore fealty to the stranger as she had promised, who revealed himself to be Morrigan's true gene-father, the Emperor of Mankind. The Emperor granted Morrigan command of the XIV Space Marine Legion, then known as the Dusk Raiders, who quickly adopted the name, iconography and dogma of Morrigan's Death Guard. However, the Emperor's slaying of the Primarch's adoptive father -- the Emperor's denial of her final vengeance, of the proof that she was worthy -- became a grudge Morrigan forever after held against Him. It would coil within her heart like a rancid viper, and provide the seed of weakness that the Plague God Nurgle would later exploit.
=== A Mournful Unity ===
True to her oath, Morrigan bent her knee to her new-found father as soon as she was sufficiently recovered to do so, although her final act of defiance on Barbarus would leave scars upon her both physical and mental that would never fully heal. A skilled warlord in her own right, Morrigan was immediately given command of the XIV Legion of Astartes which carried her genetic inheritance, and did so on her own terms.
Gathering them before her, a grim and spectral figure robed and bearing the great black scythe that had once belonged to her nightmarish foster-father, it must have seemed to the Terran-born Dusk Raiders that an ancient, graven image of the Grim Reaper had come before them as their new master. Her words were simple and delivered in a harsh whisper that never the less carried to each and every one: "You are my unbroken blades. You are the Death Guard. By your hand shall justice be delivered, and doom shall stalk a thousand worlds."
The Legion's name was then changed in accordance with this decree, and Morrigan's words were engraved above the airlock door of the Battle Barge Reaper's Scythe in honour of that moment. By this simple decree the Dusk Raiders were no more, and the records and annals from that day forward would carry this new name as one to strike fear into the hearts of Mankind's enemies.
The XIV Legion's Astartes had been primarily Terran-born before Morrigan joined the Legion; after that time almost all of the Legion's Neophytes were drawn from the Feral World of Barbarus. This changed the culture and traditions of the Legion, so much so that by the last days of the Great Crusade in the early 31st Millennium, there were increasing tensions between the Barbarus-born Astartes and the Terran minority who remained in the Legion and who remembered the Dusk Raiders' earlier martial traditions brought out of Old Terra.
These tensions became most clear in the period directly preceding the first battle of the Horus Heresy at Istvaan III, when approximately one-third of the Legion was judged by Morrigan to be likely to remain loyal to the Emperor when the Legion joined the Warmaster Hathor in her rebellion against the Imperium. Many of these Loyalist Death Guard Astartes were Terran-born, former Dusk Raiders like Battle-Captain Nathaniel Garro of the 7th Great Company whose loyalty to the Emperor outweighed their devotion to their Primarch.
=== Great Crusade ===
"Say what you like about the Fourteenth Legion. They are mean, ugly bastards but tenacious. There's no one else I'd rather have by my side in a war of attrition, and almost anyone else I'd rather have against me."
: — Ferrus Manus, Primarch of the Iron Hands Legion, after the compliance of One-Five-Four Four
In the solar decades that followed the renamed XIV Legion fought tirelessly in the service of the Great Crusade. Never relenting in battle beneath their Primarch's gaze, they pursued the liberation of Mankind with a fervour the Great Crusade had never known. Their restless fleet ploughed the cold void from one campaign to the next, resupplying on the move, never pausing but to make war. The Death Guard did not garrison, they did not build, they only tore down and slew, coldly, determinately and with the inexorable progress of a contagion or a tsunami wave, and worlds fell before them.
Over time Morrigan shaped the creed and practice of the Death Guard, her beliefs in many ways forming a natural extension of their own, beliefs and doctrine becoming ever more refined and extreme. At the heart of them was the unshakeable determination that Mankind should be free of oppression and terror.
Such freedom could only be won in the Primarch's mind by destroying those that would shackle and devour humanity. This was a war to be fought without mercy or limit, without restraint or relenting. The battle for the human future was one that could only be won by enduring any hardship, no matter how terrible, and not shirking from any act, no matter how savage in pursuit of victory. This single end, the liberation of humanity to Morrigan's creed, justified any means.
Morrigan believed that victory in battle came through sheer resilience, and Hathor, who used the strengths and weaknesses of the different legions to create the most efficient fighting force possible, used her legion in co-ordination with Morrigan's frequently. Morrigan and the Death Guard would draw out the enemy and tire them down, and then the Luna Wolves would strike. This combat tactic worked brilliantly, and Morrigan grew close to Horus.
Morrigan was a grim and driven Primarch, her breathing apparatus and scythe an inseparable component of her aspect. The pallid, hairless Primarch was viewed by others as a freak, and was distant from all her brother Primarchs save Hathor the Warmaster and Kassandra Curze the Night Haunter, the leader of the Night Lords Legion. Some Primarchs, such as Juno Guilliman, feared that Morrigan was more loyal to Hathor than she was to the Emperor; however, at that time, the Emperor claimed that loyalty to Hathor was de facto loyalty to Himself. Events would prove the Emperor sorely mistaken.
==== Inheritance of Barbarus ====
"Pain is an illusion of the senses, fear an illusion of the mind, beyond these only death waits as silent judge o'er all."
— Primarch MorriganSolar decades of endless battle changed the Death Guard, and over time the Terran influences on the Legion became less and less apparent, with the panoply and traditions of the Dusk Raiders and the Officio Militaris erased in favour of Barbarus' bleak creed of war.
The bare ivory-grey unpainted ceramite that Morrigan favoured for the Legion's Power Armour became increasingly less adorned, save for new murky-jade markings set to echo the corrosive-resistant swamp mud applied to coat the iron plates of the human warriors that had once served the Primarch of Barbarus, and shorn of older heraldry and Terran influence.
The martial stratifications of Old Earth's warmasters were done away with too, and eventually the XIV Legion's Librarius was disbanded thanks to Morrigan's hatred of witchery such as that the hated charnel masters of Barbarus had once wielded.
Morrigan's hand and mind was at work everywhere remaking her Legion, from changing tactical doctrines to equipment procurement and, some say, behind the selection of candidates and changing practices in the Legion's Apothecarion, where she gained the latter knowledge to interfere. With the prevailing conditions on Barbarus and the foul beings that more than likely still stalked the planet's fog-shrouded mountains and deep swamps, there were whispers that the human population that remained would have been better off if they had been euthanised or displaced to a "cleaner" world for the sake of the sanity of future generations.
Morrigan would have none of this, for Barbarus now belonged to her people, bought and paid for by generations of blood and terror, and its strongest sons would now serve as recruits for her new Death Guard.
As for the purely human Death Guard that had once fought for her against the overlords of Barbarus, many now became the masters of that world. A dread aristocracy they soon became, while the youngest and strongest like Calas Typhon took full or partial conversion into the Legiones Astartes, heedless of the high fatality rate that late induction carried with it. This was deemed a small enough price to pay to continue in the service of Morrigan their saviour.
With new recruitment at issue, Barbarus itself in a short span of Terran years became little more than a factory of sorts to produce new recruits for the Death Guard Legion, and intake from other sources of recruitment to which the Legion had title dwindled to a mere handful, unless the pressure of fatalities in the field proved too great.
Morrigan's resistance to the use of bloodstock other than that of Barbarus wavered only because of the need to keep her Legion's strength battleworthy in her eyes. Recruitment solely from Barbarus was however aided by the high suitability of the planet's hardy feral population to the conversion process. The Legion's gene-seed seemed to amplify the uncommon resistance to contagion and toxins in its Barbarus candidates to unheard-of levels.
As fresh intakes of new Space Marines came in from Barbarus, the surviving core of Terran blood in the XIV Legion became a minority as the Great Crusade burned on across the stars, the Death Guard at the forefront of the fighting in the most hellish war-zones imaginable. Although second perhaps in their gene-mother's eyes, the Terran contingent remained stubborn in the ranks, hardened veterans and a force to be reckoned with in the Legion.
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Category:Death Guard
Category:Characters
Category:Female Characters
Category:Primarchs
Category:Royal Family