Perturabo - Origins: When the primarchs were scattered across the galaxy from the Emperor's gene-laboratory beneath the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains on Terra by the Chaos Gods, Perturabo landed on a Civilised World named Olympia. The full details of this early period in Perturabo's life remain somewhat mysterious, with the only extant accounts give to Imperial Iterators many standard years later, and ever distrusted even then as coloured by Olympia's endemic intrigues. The most reliable information points to Perturabo as having been recovered from the rocky wilds outside the city-state of Lochos by its ruling Tyrant's guards.They had been pursuing tales of a strange and wondrous boy wandering between outlying minor settlements and outcast communities -- the boy plying his way both as a fighter for hire and as an artisan of phenomenal talent despite his great youth, staying in no one place for any length of time before moving on. Tales of the boy had reached the court of Lochos and Dammekos, a shrewd and cunning ruler, and he had been intrigued enough to despatch his retainers to find if any truth was in them and if so, how indeed they could be turned to his advantage.Perturabo was discovered climbing the mountains below the walls of Lochos. The city guards, having realised this was no ordinary child, brought him before Dammekos, the ruling Tyrant of Lochos. On seeing the strange boy in the flesh, Dammekos put him to the test, witnessing his ability to defeat warriors twice his size and many times his age in combat on the one hand, and the boy's ability to solve any puzzle put to him by the Tyrant's own scholars on the other.Dammekos was intrigued enough to offer the boy a place in his court. Between the boy and the Tyrant a bargain was struck; fealty, loyalty and service on the boy's part and on that of the Tyrant, patronage and protection, and access to the finest military training and scholarship the Tyrant's resources could confer upon him.Later accounts differ of what came after. Many paint the boy as a prodigy of staggering and indeed inhuman ability, who spent his life in an unending regime of solitary training, and devouring whatever learning and lore was set before him, or he could dig out himself to study. Others make veiled references to a child who was both cold and devious, a rapidly growing boy who never fully accepted his lot, never truly trusted the Olympians and refused to return any affection given him by his adopted father. Dammekos spent plenty of time with his new adopted son, but never received any affection in return.There was a mysterious explanation for Perturabo's inherent mistrust, unknown to anyone but himself. Upon reaching the summit after climbing the rain-slick cliff, the exhausted youth had peered towards the heavens and gazed upon a strange, nebulous stellar maelstrom erupting across a corner of the heavens. When he inquired of the Tyrant's guards whether they could see the strange phenomenon, the bewildered guards replied that they could not. For the rest of Perturabo's life, this maelstrom would continue to look down upon the primarch; making him feel as if it judged and measured his worth and spied on his every movement.A life lived beneath its cold scrutiny made him brooding and loath to offer his trust, ever-watchful and aware of its baleful glare. It would be over two standard centuries later before he found a reason to venture into this strange star maelstrom's mercurial depths, a galactic phenomena whose name he would coin, a name that would one day strike fear into the hearts of all those that heard it. This stellar maelstrom, in truth a giant rift between realspace and the Immaterium, would one day be known as the Eye of Terror.Many Olympians saw the boy as a particularly cold and brooding child, though the fact that he was a genetically engineered superhuman who had been mysteriously thrown onto a far-off world with no idea of his origins or purpose was certainly not conducive to the development of a trusting nature. Despite his aloof demeanour, the adopted boy learned from the culture in which he found himself the arts of the siege, for Olympia's myriad warring city-states afforded plenty of opportunity to study both the theory and the practise of this highly specialised branch of warfare.Upon his age of majority, the foundling took a name for himself to be known all his adult life, but against custom he chose not to honour the family into which he had been taken by assuming one of the names of its venerated history as expected. Instead he chose an ancient name that he had long favoured, a name that some claimed had been found in a forgotten text from before the fall of Humanity during the Age of Strife -- a text written in a language only the boy in his precocious ability had succeeded in translating: Perturabo.What true meaning it held, he did not divulge. To war the young Perturabo now set himself, and in this he had much to work on. Dammekos was a powerful Tyrant, but he and his realm were beset by rivals and bitter vendettas on all sides, and having given an oath unbreakable, Dammekos' enemies were now Perturabo's. Granted first minor commands, the young primarch ascended the ranks of his adopted house's armies at a frightening rate.Victory after victory followed under his command and his legend grew, as did the mercenaries and war-artisans flocking to the banner of Dammekos in their lust for success and plunder. But more than mere success in battle did Perturabo bring to Lochos, and even from the beginning was his genius noted not simply for war, but also invention. Having absorbed with superhuman clarity the breadth and depth of Olympia's science and artisanship, he soon surpassed it on every level and from his chambers a constant stream of blueprints and discoveries sprung, encompassing everything from revolutionary new machines, to treatises on architecture and production methods, and even ground-breaking works on medicine and astronomy.But it was first and foremost by his advances in warfare that Perturabo's dark fame was bred and his legend as the "Hammer of Olympia" was born. New weapons, munitions and hitherto unimagined siege engines were all birthed at Perturabo's hand and, in a brief span of standard years, it was they and Perturabo's own generalship, now as warlord to the Tyrant Dammekos, that made Lochos the most powerful and feared domain on Olympia, with a hundred others underneath its heel, and countless more cowed into de facto submission to its rulers.Perturabo's score upon score of military victories brought no peace to Lochos however, only dominance, and the growing threat of an enemy within, the assassin's blade and the poisoner's kiss. It is believed that a great many attempts were carried out upon the life of Lochos' "Lord of Iron" during this time, both by subjugated Tyrants reasoning -- and rightly -- that without Perturabo, Lochos' supremacy would crumble, and by those who to Perturabo's face called him family and friend, but who secretly held him in terror or jealous hatred.The primarch, now full grown, towered over them all both in stature and intellect, but cared little for the baubles and trappings of power, and nothing at all for the falsehood of court. Aloof, prideful and justly wary of friend and enemy alike, Perturabo is depicted in the evidence of the time increasingly as a particularly bloody-handed warlord even by the standards of his intrigue-prone world, to whom mercy was an alien concept, and who would meet any insult with murderous violence. The steel executioner's mask and the ancient Kaveathos heraldry warning death to the transgressor were Perturabo's signs and seals, and promised savage punishment in repayment of failure by those beneath him, just as it promised death to his enemies.It is of note that despite the fact that should he have wished it, Perturabo could have overthrown his "master" Dammekos and displaced him as Tyrant of Lochos, he did not do so. The primarch it seems, would not break his word or his bargain willingly, and Dammekos, for all his vainglory and corruption was careful never to give him cause or excuse to do so.It is thought perhaps that true to his oath, Perturabo would have let the aging Dammekos die a natural death as he remained unprovoked, hastened by the Tyrant of Lochos' own licentious excesses, before taking Lochos and then all of Olympia as his own in time. What he would have made of his world then can only be guessed at, for it was not to be, as a new star had been seen in the heavens -- the Emperor had come for his lost gene-son.