Nomus Sardauk

Remembrancer sketch from Carpinius' *Speculum Historiale* of Nomus Sardauk.

"*I am the Collective.
I am the Sum of all parts.
I am the Eighteenth Legion.
I am Nomus.*"
— Nomus Sardauk, Primarch of the Steel Legion
**Nomus Sardauk** was the brilliant but distant Primarch of the XVIIIth Legion - the Steel Legion. Nomus was a technological genius struggling to reconcile his cyborg nature with his longing to understand the Human condition. Denounced by some as more machine than man, Nomus's idealism and naivety would be manipulated by the Stormborn to trick him and his Legion into betraying those they once called brothers.

## History

As had happened to all his brothers, Nomus had been scattered to the four winds by chaos. The world upon which he landed was called Saepio. This name, a bastardization of the Proto-Gothic verb "to think", hailed back to the world’s earliest days. Unlike most of the worlds upon which primarchs found themselves, Saepio had not originally been intended as a colony. Instead, it had been a military installation, an entire world devoted to the creation and testing of new, ever more terrible, weapons of war. Yet at some stage its past it had been the site of an experiment that had gone horribly wrong, transforming the world’s surface into an uninhabitable hell hole. It was on this surface that Nomus crashed.

Even for a young primarch, the world’s surface would be uninhabitable for more than a few days without protective gear. However, the young Nomus had barely taken a few steps from his pod when he was found by Saepian scavengers, drawn to his location by the crash. They had expected the wreck of a ship. Instead, they found a metal pod and a dazed, confused child, unprotected against Saepio’s radioactive winds. They took him in and took him back with them to their home: a sprawling slum complex many kilometres under Saepio’s surface.

The people who had found Nomus were descendents of Saepio's earliest inhabitants, the military personnel and scientists who had overseen that last, dreadful experiment. They lived in massive slums underneath Saepio's surface, only going up to the surface to scavenge what machine parts they could from the ruined facilities on Saepio’s surface. Yet nonetheless, they had not completely escaped the effects of the radiation that swamped their world. Most were sickly, suffering from rad-lesions and similar ailments due to their long exposure to the radiation. They were also often malnourished, thin and stunted as a consequence. Because of their long existence underground, all had adapted to have pupils that were larger than those found in the eyes of normal humans in order to take in as much light as possible. Due to all these mutations and sicknesses, the Saepians of this lower caste, the Laborans, were obsessed with the machine, incorruptible and strong, compared to their flesh. Among them it was deemed a great honour to have been able to replace a limb with a bionic. It was among these people that Nomus began to grow to adulthood.

However, as he grew older and his abilities became more apparent, he came to the attention of Saepio's ruling class, the Prudens, or wise. Unlike the Laborans, the Prudens lived in floating sky cities, far above Saepio's hellish surface and in these cities they had "transcended" their humanity, integrating themselves into a vast AI network which they called the Overseer. Through this network, they ruled Saepio, each one of them having immediate access to all the information collected by the combined network, giving them an unrivalled vantage point from which they could observe everything that transpired upon Saepio. They used this to extract as much from the Laborans as they could, taking all the basic materials scavenged by the Laborans and giving them a drip feed of vital machines, water purifiers, solar power units and even medicine, in exchange. This exploitation enabled them to live lives of stupendous luxury in their grand cities in the clouds.

However, all this brilliance was merely a mask. Underneath it all, the humans on Saepio was slowly dying. As a military installation, they had never been intended to function as a separate world and so had been heavily reliant on imports from off world. Following the catastrophe, all off world support had been withdrawn and so the Prudens had been forced into a desperate search for something capable of stopping the eventual dying out of human life on Saepio. While they had made progress, they had not found any definitive solution, only stop gap measures. Then they found Nomus and in the child’s remarkable abilities they saw the potential to finally stop the decay and death of humanity on Saepio. So, without thought for the child’s feelings or indeed that he had any, they took Nomus from the only home he had known outside his pod and integrated him into the collective as a central processing unit for the massive network.

In the years after his integration, things seemed to look up. Materials were processed with a new efficiency, new places and methods to produce food found and the opulence in which the Prudens lived increased a hundred-fold. Yet at the centre of all this was Nomus, watching, waiting and learning. While his feeling were dulled by his new connection with the Overseer AI, he was still able to feel a sense of injustice, both at the task he was being called upon to perform, oppressing the Laborans for the benefit of the Prudens, and at his abduction from what had, until then, been his home. However, he realised that he could not fight the Prudens. Not yet.

So for years he lay in wait, learning of them and observing, planning. Then one day, inefficiencies began to appear in the Overseer. Resources going missing or failing to be taxed off of the Laborans. More facilities given to the Laborans than necessary. Information regarding unrest among the Laborans “failing” to be acted upon. Through such seeming inefficiencies and glitches in the Overseer, Nomus managed to feed a spirit of rebellion among the Laborans and sure enough, after little more than a year of inefficiency within the Overseer, they rose up in furious revolt.

With weapons cobbled together from scrap, they took the fight to the mechanical armies of the Overseer. Many times, these war-machines marched out against them yet always, they would make a crucial mistake, react to slowly to a battlefield development or leave an opening in their line, that led to them being defeated. Finally, the Laborans began to storm through the cloud cities of the Prudens, slaughtering their oppressors and discovering the machinery which had been kept hidden from them for generations.

Finally, as they closed in on the last of these cloud cities, the Prudens within it scrambled, trying to man their defences or desperately trying to escape off world. Observing this, Nomus addressed them, stating "I am ðμþ-13768230/Σ, heart of the Overseer system. I have watched and now let it be known that I judge you guilty. I have decided that the following sentence is suitable: death." Following this announcement, he shut down all of the city's defensive systems and all ways of leaving it, trapping the Prudens and leaving them open to the sentence he had judged them worthy of, leaving it to be delivered at the hands of the Laborans.

At the head of the Overseer, Nomus began to rebuild Saepio from the wasteland that it had been reduced to. However, barely had his work begun than Imperial vessels manned by elements of the XVIth Legion arrived in the Saepio system. While Nomus was at first oblivious to their presence, as they drew closer to Saepio the long-range scanners of Saepio's orbital defences picked them up. Intrigued by the new arrivals, Nomus did nothing to impede them. Instead, he boosted the capacities of Saepio's comms interceptors and began to listen in on the Imperial’s inter-vessel communications. From what was intercepted, he deduced that not only were these vessels just the precursors to a larger force, but they were also part of a larger human empire. He therefore took what appeared to be the most logical choice and sent them long range hails, entering into negotiation with the Imperium.

For their part, the Imperials were eager to negotiate with the Saepians as doing so would save them the effort and blood of a full-blown invasion of Saepio. However, as negotiation became longer and more drawn out, Mechanicum analysis could find no discernible pattern in the negotiating stance of the Overseer like they would normally expect in an AI yet the capacities of the Overseer were far in advance of those possessed by an ordinary human or even Legionary. It began to be whispered by senior figures in the Expeditionary Fleet command that this was no normal ruler or AI system but one of the Emperor's lost sons, a Primarch.

So it was that they sent word to the Emperor himself who made haste to Saepio to investigate these reports of a being far in advance of ordinary humanity. At his side came Icarion of the Ist and Pionius of the XIXth. Upon arriving over Saepio and engaging in negotiation with the Overseer, the Emperor was able to see not only that it was one of his sons but also which of his sons it was and so sent word that the XVIIIth Legion was to join him in orbit over Saepio.

However, during these negotiations it was not just the Emperor who discovered Nomus' origins but also Nomus himself. Shortly after meeting the Emperor, Nomus made the connection between his own peculiar abilities and the godlike being who ruled the Imperium. Where some of his brothers fought their father, Nomus accepted his role and, with it, command of the XVIIIth.

## Physical Description

Nomus is an average sized Primarch, which is to say he is as a god among lesser beings, but it is not his physical prowess that makes his dangerous. It is his mind, enhanced beyond any hope to comprehend that is his true weapon. Every iota of information that he uncovers or is taught is stored and categorised for instant access at any moment. He never forgets anything and can perfectly recall and describe details from a conversation centuries ago as if he were experiencing them. However it is not only his experiences that he has access to. Since his rediscovery he has taken to scouring every database and store of information that he can in the Imperium in order to know everything.

However Nomus doesn't merely iterate on existing technology or tactics. He is still a Primarch and he often uses his prodigious intellect to come up with new technologies and innovations. He is said to have been heavily involved in the development of the Tartaros pattern of Terminator armour, providing some unique insights on how to increase mobility without lowering integrity.

On the battlefield he takes in everything, monitoring the sensory input of every single marine, servitor and machine spirit. Through this he knows of the movements of the enemy as they happen, or even before they happen if the enemy is using a tactic that Nomus has knowledge of. The units under his command flow seamlessly around and through one another in an intricate pattern designed to blunt enemy offensives or open their strongholds in the most efficient manner possible.