Mortarion - Seeking Answers: Chagrined by his defeat at the hands of Jaghatai Khan, Mortarion abandoned the pursuit of the White Scars and instead led his Death Guard in a spiteful, punitive rampage across the systems of the lost Prosperine empire. World after world soon fell to this horrific onslaught, and yet the insular and secretive Primarch seemed preoccupied by some other, unspoken goal.Finally he found what he sought for upon the world of Terathalion, a former library-world where knowledge coalesced, all under the benign guidance of distant masters on Prospero. When his voidships emerged from the system's Mandeville Point in 007.M31 and spread out through the local system, they were not the sleek and gloriously decorated crimson-coloured system-runners of Magnus the Red's XVth Legion, but corpse-grey, vast-hulled leviathans.Moreover, it was no mere squadron that had arrived, but an entire Death Guard battle group. Mortarion ordered the orbital bombardment immediately. When the bombardment finally relented, the few survivors crept slowly from whatever refuge they had been able to find. Thinking for a moment that the worst was finally over, they soon saw dirty contrails of Drop Pods split the smoke-barred skies. The entirety of the Death Guard Legion had come to the doomed world.Though still gravely wounded and in deep pain, the Death Lord teleported down to the surface, seeking a mortal woman. Upon her discovery, he had his captive teleported with him back aboard his flagship, the Endurance. Within his private quarters he interrogated the woman, who in truth was a daemon in possession of the woman's body.Mortarion had never encountered its kind before, believing his father, the Emperor, that such fell creatures did not exist. Now one of the denizens of the Empyrean stood shackled before him. The Primarch sought answers from the daemon. He wanted to know why his brothers Lorgar and Fulgrim willingly trafficked with the creature's kind. The Daemon explained that Mortarion's brothers had come to see the true order of things.Despite all that had occurred, Mortarion still believed that all sorcery was a cancer. He still believed that humanity must guard against it -- push it back. After destroying an entire world in his search for answers, he yearned to know the truth about Chaos. Mortarion knew that he was now surrounded by the damned. Jaghatai had been right -- the Death Lord was on his own with them. The Warp stained everything. But he would endeavour to understand it -- to overcome it. The daemon's final task would be to show him how.But the foul creature laughed at Mortarion's efforts. Like thousands of other mortals the creature had encountered over the aeons, each was convinced that they alone could find a way to negotiate with the gods of the Warp with little to no consequence. The daemon explained to the Primarch that the Empyrean had many great forces within it, and one of them had Mortarion's name etched over his rusting throne. He was still waiting, though not for very much longer.It mattered not how many trinkets the Primarch rattled or waved -- this power of the Warp would not be denied. He had claimed Mortarion as his own champion. The Primarch was enraged at the creature's proclamation -- even his father the Emperor could not claim him.But Mortarion admitted that he was guilty of patricide long before the seeds of treachery were sown in the Warmaster Horus' heart. He had seen them all -- the tyrants, the witches, the xenos filth. Only he remained pure, free of the corruption wrought by the Warp. But the daemon could see through all of the Primarch's lies and self-delusions and taunted him -- he didn't look all that pure to her at all.The daemon continued to taunt the Primarch, goading him. If he wanted to know the truth, then it would be revealed. The creature's bonds were suddenly shattered and her human shell peeled away, revealing her glossy, insect-like true form. Though the Primarch's physical strength was enormous, the daemon knew that it would not help him, for she was not a creature of realspace, defined and constrained only by laws and powers that the Primarch feared to invoke. In an attempt to resist the daemon's brutal attack, he tore at it with his hands, still relying on the immeasurable strength in his transhuman musculature.Enraged, Mortarion called upon his own innate psychic abilities that had always been buried deep down within him. The glorious stink of learned sorcery and hedge-magick was now pungent and inescapable. The power of the Warp was within him, and he was using it willingly, in spite of every one of his protestations. As the daemon sagged back against the wall, feeling her soul pulled back to the Empyrean by the Primarch's psychic might, Mortarion continued to hammer her furiously with his fists, pouring out all of his fury onto the broken physical shell.The daemon was the first to see a fragment of what Mortarion would eventually become in later centuries. As the creature died, and her quintessential matter was sucked back into the maw of the aether, she managed a mock salute, "Hail, Master of the Plague!" Mortarion stood over the crushed heap of broken flesh, breathing heavily. For too long, he had been used by all sides in the great conflict.The void around him now seethed with witchery, more virulent than ever. He could feel its tendrils grasping for him. The Death Lord knew he would have to learn more. He would have to master all the paths of ruin. He would, as perhaps he had known but refused to believe for a long time, have to become the very thing that he had always hated, a psyker, a master of sorcery and the powers of the witch. A sorcerer just like his foster father on Barbarus. Mortarion made his peace with the truth, believing that it was better to be a master of the Warp than its pawn. "So be it," he thought to himself. "It starts here."