Kelbor-Hal - Origins: Kelbor-Hal was once a brilliant magos of the ancient Mechanicum and a deep believer in the doctrines of the Omnissiah. The fact that such an ambitious and duplicitous individual ever rose to prominence and the eventual leadership of the Mechanicum is one of the great tragedies of Imperial history.It is remarkable to Imperial scholars of today that an individual as extraordinarily gifted as Kelbor-Hal could be so wrong-headed as to bring so mighty and august a body as the Mechanicum over to the service of heresy and rebellion.When the Age of Strife came to an end, the Emperor of Mankind was determined to bring to fruition His future plans for human unity in a very hostile galaxy. He knew the time had come after the birth of Slaanesh in the 30th Millennium reopened the galaxy to Warp travel and communication to unite all of humanity under one banner, and end inter-human conflict.With the use of genetically-modified warriors who presaged the development of the first Astartes, He quickly rose to dominance on Old Earth, uniting the once-divided nations of Mankind's birthplace during the Unification Wars. He then set his sights on the wider galaxy, and with His Legions of newly-created Space Marines at the forefront of His mighty expeditionary fleets, the Emperor launched His Great Crusade out into the void.When the Emperor had first come to Mars after the Unification Wars seeking an alliance between His regime and the powerful Cult Mechanicus, the tech-priests had recognised a kindred spirit; a man of science who valued the power of machines and technological advancement.As word of the "technological divinity" of this strange golden warrior reached the wider populace of Mars, some tech-priests even began to equate the Emperor with the physical embodiment within the universe of their own Machine God -- the Omnissiah. The Emperor forged an alliance with the Mechanicum through the Treaty of Mars -- an alliance of two empires that marked the true foundation of the Imperium of Man.In return for supplying the needed materiel for His armies and building a mighty warfleet in the orbital shipyards of Mars' Ring of Iron for His crusade to reunite the stars, the Emperor promised to protect the tech-priests and respect the autonomy of their Forge Worlds and their freedom to continue to practice their faith, despite the official atheism of the Imperial Truth that the Emperor intended to promulgate across all the other worlds of the newborn Imperium.Kelbor-Hal, then still a magos, had been present when the Master of Mankind had first arrived at Mars on Olympus Mons, but unlike so many of his peers, he had never trusted the Terran interloper.For the masses of Mars, the Omnissiah was now a tangible being, a golden figure that trod the red surface of Mars, but to Kelbor-Hal and those of his ilk, they believed the Emperor to be a False God who had enslaved the Martian Priesthood to His will with lies.This bitter resentment, harboured over the next two Terran centuries, would fester below the surface, until such time when this rancorous hatred would boil over into a terrible rebellion against the authority of this False God.Kelbor-Hal believed the Emperor purposely came to Mars in the guise of the Omnissiah, albeit an incarnate god who came at the head of an army of conquest. The peace that the Emperor had offered the Mechanicum was illusory, a conceit designed to conceal a darker truth.Kelbor-Hal believed that the Emperor offered peace with one hand whilst keeping a dagger behind his back with the other. In reality, the Emperor's offer was an ultimatum, "Join with me or I will simply take what I need from you."Faced with a choice that was no choice at all, Kelbor-Hal had been forced to bargain away the autonomy of Mars and see the sacred Red Planet become little better than a vassal world of Terra, Mars ancient rival for leadership among Mankind.