#perturarbo

[askmalal]

“I do not hate his beliefs, even if he is astoundingly narrow minded for one so educated. I do not hate his culture: he has a great love for literature and architecture, even if it is a bit gaudy. I do not hate him, though he delights in treating me as an inferior. I hate his morals. I hate that he values books over people. I hate that he abandons a fight when the battle is not finished. I hate that, what others call cowardice, he calls fatherly love.”

- Leman Russ on Magnus, “On The Primarchs,” Volume VI.

“You delight in allowing others to think you are a fool. The only thing foolish about you, Leman, is that you feel none of us can pierce that veil.”

- Perturarbo to Leman Russ, “On The Primarchs,” Volume IV

[askmalal]

“I never wanted to be a butcher, a killer, a hunter. When I was a child I wept the first time the man who adopted me had me clean my first kill. A warrior should never want the job. They should, instead, want to keep others from shouldering the burden.

This is not hubris or homily. It is truth. I am a warrior who hates war. And so should each and every one of us.”

“I love Konrad Curze. I despise the Night Haunter. I dearly wish our father had the time to do more to help the former and put the other away. Rogal means well, but he does not understand; Fulgrim means well but is blinded by his affection for him.”

“War is the great laboratory of human experience. If only the experiment could end and the hypothesis proven…”

“For things so gigantic, stinking, and brutalist, I admit I have a fondness for tanks. They remind me of my family… oh, relax, Perturarbo. I never said you were the stinking one.”

“In my Eleventh brother, I found a kindred, witty, wise companion. I was never ashamed to call him brother. I will never be ashamed. But that we dare not speak his name again…Father, this is your will. I will obey. He was your son. I am your son. My heart is ripped asunder at your loss. But forgive my selfishness, for so too my own.”

Selections from Vulkan, “On The Primarchs,” Volume XVIII

[askmalal]

“If you want to conquer a civilization, send Perturarbo. If you want to kill it, send Fulgrim. If you want to protect it, send Vulkan. If you wish to erase it from memory, send [REDACTED]. But if you wish to accomplish any of these things without firing a shot, then send Konrad, and give him five minutes to whisper in the right person’s ear while she dreams…”

- The Second Primarch, “On the Primarchs,” Volume II (Banned)

“If I could save humanity without firing a shot, I would. If I could save it by signing a treaty, I would do so. Much as it grieves me, the simple reality of our task is one of a magnitude requiring nothing less than the killing of a star…”

- Sanguinius to unnamed remembrancer, “On The Primarchs,” Volume IX

[askmalal]

“No… no! You will - not - tar me with that brush. I am no fanatic. My belief in a benevolent higher entity does not grant you the right to consider me an idiot. I have never tried to convert -you- to my religion, my faith, whatever it is you want to call it. Has nobody told you, Perturarbo, or is everyone so fearful of your temper tantrums, that a man who does not question his beliefs is the real fanatic? How many times have you lectured me, Russ, [redacted], Vulkan, the others? How many times have you attempted with games of logic and philosophy to change our minds? You have your own religion, and you refuse to dignify it by calling it what it is. Even Lorgar knows when to stop proselytizing!”

- Jaghatai Khan, “On the Primarchs,” Volume V

“I like Father very much. We have our disagreements. But this is the way of fathers and sons. Malcador? Malcador’s only positive attribute is that father trusts him, for reasons I could only fathom. I, myself, would rather listen to Fulgrim narrate his autobiography in the nude while Horus sings Binary Opera than spend another moment in the solitary company of that man-thing.”

- Jaghatai Khan, “On the Primarchs,” Volume V

[askmalal]

“A million times over we have died, fought, struggled, the same as you. We build. We destroy. We build again. We are battle brothers like any other. Do not mistake piety for pacifism.”

- to equerries of Legio X

“[Redacted] is right, you know. This is a monstrous lie. It will cause us nothing but trouble in the end.”

- to Vulkan

“We are equally narrow minded, then, for you would not accept evidence of a differing viewpoint if it slapped you across the face.

- to Perturarbo

“My efforts in diplomacy have failed, then? Then I shall allow the Ashen Circle to speak for me. Burn it all. Each man’s god shall know his own.”

- Compliance of Acheron II

“They don’t understand. Why? Why is this such a difficult concept for them?! He denies his divinity, yet demonstrates godlike powers. He denies connection to any religious tradition, yet places himself adjacent to so many: he is adjacent to Zoroaster. He is a friend of the Buddha. He is John the Baptist. As Alexander, he literally declares himself a god!

And yet he now denies it. He punishes me, he humiliates me, he sends my brother to chastise me. For what? For loyalty? For fidelity? For the adoration of a son for his father?

Very well. If a god denies its divinity, refuses its loyal children, then it remains a god. It is simply a god unworthy of worship.”

- to advisors after Monarchia [Passage Censored]

- Selections from Lorgar Aurelian, “On The Primarchs,” Volume XVII

[askmalal]

“I am perhaps overly fond of a quotation from Milton. ‘Where one burns books, one soon burns men.’ Are you familiar with the lesson?”

- to Lorgar

“I don’t care for politics. They are cruelty justified with rules concocted to conceal a lack of concern for human decency. To deny a being her basic rights based upon her color or gender is base and beyond our better nature, yet we can codify a law to do just that and then dismiss such things as ‘political’ rather than confront them for what they are.”

- to advisors during a conference on Terra

“I do not.”

- upon being asked what he felt about the Aeldari caste system.

“I, too, have been accused of being an egotist. I do not pretend that this is always beyond me, though never through intention. Still, I think, it is perhaps better to be known for a bit of pomposity than a measure of false modesty.”

- to Perturarbo

“We do not hate each other. At our core, we are still brothers; jealousy might be the better turn of phrase, both being as close as we are to our father. The difference is one of philosophy. What I called a tactical retreat, he called cowardice. What he calls war, I call excess. My Legion is a scalpel, his a cleaver. They are not used with any less skill when properly applied, but the training regimen is entirely different before they can be mastered.”

- on Leman Russ

“My tongue is bitter with the ashes of memory. Now leave me to my mourning, for I have no poetry left inside to share.”

- upon the news of Rangdan

Selections from Magnus the Red, “On The Primarchs,” Volume XV

[askmalal]

“There is no glory or joy in war. It is constantly dirty, or sandy, or muddy no matter where one is fighting, and the filth gets into everything as well as on every thing. It is either brutally hot or brutally cold, sometimes both. It is periods of bitter loneliness and grinding boredom spaced between burying ones brothers and sisters. It is a species at its’ absolute worse, whose ‘high moments’ are appreciated only well after the fact.”

- to a Remembrancer

“It says something about the peril in which the human race had found itself that our Father created, forgive my arrogant turn of phrase, twenty demi-gods, and used them not to rebuild the earth or solve its woes but to go to the war almost immediately for over two hundred years. Portions of the earth are still irradiated wasteland, but here we are, millions of miles from home because the alternative was to face annihilation.”

- to Vulkan

“I love knowledge as Magnus does. I could spend all my days in a library, if I had the luxury. I think that the distinction here is Magnus’ willingness to save the library before he saves the librarians…”

- An angry aside to Sanguinius after an unrecorded incident with Legio XV

“You are fundamentally wrong. As you yourself once told me, insisting that something is true, no matter how regularly, no matter the conviction, does nothing to make it true. And in this case, you are doing just that. Your grappa has got -nothing- on the whiskey of my homeworld, you tedious pedantic!”

- Correspondence with Perturarbo

The Eleventh Primarch, from “On The Primarchs,” Volume XI (Banned)

[askmalal]

“Let them ask ‘who is he’ all they like, so long as they know I have done my duty.”

“I watched them as he found them all: good, bad, perfect, abhorrent. And I was struck by the reality that all of us, for better or worse, reflect at least one aspect of his extraordinarily complex personality. My father did not raise me, but then again, my father did raise me, if you catch my meaning.”

“(The Emperor) is like many other men. He is of course extraordinarily long lived, and few human beings these days can call themselves Hittites, but the man is essentially human. In all regards, I think, but one. That is this: that he has lived so long, seen so many glories brought down by so many things, that he would sacrifice everything: his loved ones, his anonymity, his immortality itself, if it meant that he could save the teeming, nameless masses. I have never met a person so utterly dedicated to the idea that all should be given an equal degree of peace and prosperity that they’d willingly sacrifice their own, or indeed: deny the same of the one, or two, or twenty if it meant the rest could be saved. What you call callousness, I call love abundant.”

“This wasn’t supposed to happen overnight. It may be many thousands of years before we reach our true, desperately waited, golden age. But the path has been prepared. It is long, winding, treacherous, deceptively cruel, but it has been prepared.”

“Congratulations to my fourteenth brother, who has proven himself the singularly most intolerant being I have ever met. And remember, there was a time I regularly took tea with Perturarbo.”

“There is a phenomenon in nature whereby an animal makes itself the most beautiful, most striking, to attract a mate. But that, too, can be said of predators luring their prey. Watch the Phoenix. Do not ignore the perfumed cloak. There is a wicked thing beneath.”

“I have never felt so powerless as when I saw treachery and vanity destroy [Redacted] from within. I can never forgive that. I will never allow it to be forgiven. That name will haunt my every waking moment.”

- selections from Alpharius Omegon, “On The Primarchs,” Volume XX (Missing, all copies presumed lost.)