The Sorrowful Saga of Mortarion: The Unfortunate Son of the Emperor
Part of our multi-part series exploring the rich and complex lore of Warhammer 40,000, today we delve deep into the tragic tale of Mortarion, the most unfortunate among the Emperor’s sons. Traitor, defector, and the embodiment of sorrow and regret, Mortarion’s story is a cautionary tale that echoes across the cosmos.
In the vast expanse of sentient civilizations, the traitor is forever the outcast, the mistrusted. Even as they serve the interests of some, their deeds, tainted with the stench of betrayal, earn them scorn from all corners. The punishment for treason is as inevitable as the rising sun, often delivered from the most unexpected sources. Yet, for the soul, there is no greater torment than the realization of one’s own crimes born from pride and folly. Mortarion, the tragic hero of our story, is such a soul, one who willingly condemned himself to eternal suffering.
A cataclysmic event scattered the incubation capsules containing the infant primarchs across the galaxy. Among these was Mortarion, the future Prince of Decay, who found himself marooned on the inhospitable planet of Barbarus. Few of the Emperor’s sons were fortunate enough to land on civilized planets with welcoming environments, but Mortarion was not among them. His home was a world that personified misery and desolation.
Barbarus, a gloomy orb circling a dim yellow star in the Segmentum Tempestas, was a world shrouded in poisonous gases that blanketed its high mountain spires. Its human inhabitants were confined to the lowlands, where the toxic atmosphere did not reach. Trapped in this oppressive environment, their existence was pitiful, their society stagnant, stuck in a pre-feudal state, unable to invent any form of protection against the toxic air.
Yet, the true horror of Barbarus lay not in its atmosphere, but in its denizens. The planet was home to an unknown xenos race, larger than humans, that dwelt in the upper, poisonous regions. To the hapless humans, they were overlords and abominable gods. These xenos, unaffected by the poisonous air, created massive fortresses from gry stone in the mountains and wielded the energies of the warp to practice necromancy and create battle golems from fragments of human bodies.
The humans, terrified by these otherworldly beings and their gruesome practices, did not resist their periodic ‘harvests’. Instead, they accepted this horrific reality as an unchangeable part of their existence. Into this world of despair and dread, the incubation capsule of Mortarion landed. It was during one of the xenos’ battles that the strongest of them, Ncar, found the infant Mortarion.
Intrigued by the infant’s ability to survive at such an altitude, Ncar adopted Mortarion. The high overlord named him ‘Child of Death’ and treated him with a reverence that belied his previous ruthlessness. However, this ‘paternal’ affection was devoid of any warmth. To Ncar, Mortarion was nothing more than a fascinating anomaly, a tool to be used in his unending wars. This was the start of Mortarion’s sorrowful saga, a journey that would lead him down a path of regret and eternal torment.
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