Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work (Warhammer 40,000)

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His words were cryptic, mentioning secret pacts forged on the Red Planet and long works at last drawing to their conclusion. Satisfied, Cawl took his leave of the primarch and returned to his forge on Mars to oversee these projects to completion.

In the wake of the Great Rift, Belisarius Cawl turns his attention to the abandoned world of Sotha. Once home to the Scythes of the Emperor, it also hides a long-buried secret...and an ancient evil.Belisarius Cawl and Roboute Guilliman, deep beneath the surface of Mars, oversee the final stages of development of the Primaris Space Marines. What surprised me about this novel had to be all of the additional elements woven into the narrative. I wasn't expecting all of the tension, the intentional foreshadowing, for example. Nor was I expecting to laugh at points. And yet that is exactly what happened here. Does Not Like Magic: The majority of Tech-Priests have an inherent mistrust, at best, of psykers and Psychic Powers in general due to their inherent illogical nature. The 8th Edition rules represent this with the Mechanicus specific Tactical Objective "A Victory for Logic" that grants the Adeptus Mechanicus player extra Victory Points for killing enemy psykers. Cawl himself is over ten thousand years old, predating even the Imperium itself, though how exactly he has sustained his life for so long is unknown. Cawl has been memory wiped at least twice, leaving his own origins a mystery even to himself. [6] It is thought that he has used forbidden alien methods technology with mechanical bionics to sustain his life at the cost of any humanity he may have had left. [5] Heresy-era

Even those Tech-priests that began to understand the reality of the dire situation were loath to call upon their Imperial allies for aid against the Necrons for fear of being branded Hereteks. Cawl and Friedisch successfully fled the Trisolian System and sought refuge on Terra, where Cawl had been recalled under a pretext by Ezekiel Sedayne, the brilliant geneticist and the second director of the Biotechnical Division whose main task was creating and improving the genetic lines of the Legiones Astartes. Even Evil Has Standards: The Priesthood may be a cult of techno-worshiping fanatics with few scruples, but one Tech-Priest was so horrified by their use of phosphex weaponry that he destroyed the last STC in existence containing their designs. As a result, the Mechanicus now has reverted to the less powerful phosphor weapons and the last few remaining phosphex guns have been relegated to being rarely-used, sacred relics... but not before being used to burn that particular Tech-Priest at the stake. The Reborn Aeldari guided the Celestinians through the Webway to the Realm of Ultramar in the Eastern Fringes of the galaxy, now also under ferocious assault by the forces of the Despoiler. After some initial distrust, the Celestinians were ultimately taken by the Ultramarines who called Ultramar home to the realm's capital world of Macragge. Though he had lived ten thousand years, the changes Cawl had wrought upon his body to support his mind through it had stripped most of his Humanity away. His emotions had become ghosts in the great mechanism of the Cawl Inferior that his mind now inhabited, and mediated through the machine, they should have been practically absent. But surprisingly, the Cawl Inferior's emotionless pronouncements often contained elements of sardonic humour from time to time, even in this soulless facsimile.In fact, many Tech-priests hated Belisarius Cawl, viewing him as an Arch-heretek who disregarded all of the Machine God's commandments. Cawl believed that only envy motivated them if they knew the extent to which his knowledge outreached theirs. Some would move to destroy Cawl and his creations. Empire with a Dark Secret: It is heavily implied that the Tech-Priests may be worshiping the C'Tan known as the Void Dragon, who is possibly imprisoned on Mars. The Emperor arranged things so their designs and beliefs were inspired by the Dragon without ever really focusing on it. Warhammer 40,000 has countless novels at this point, providing insight into some of our favorite characters. Now, it's time for Belisarius Cawl to get his own novel. That's probably a fact that will make more than one fan scream from excitement, right?

From the galactic census during the Great Crusade to studies of communication difficulties in the aftermath of the birth of the Great Rift, it is a knowledge-hoard unlike any other. Belisarius Cawl has invented dozens of weapons, uncovered scores of STC databases, and quested for knowledge across the galaxy, even once venturing into the Eye of Terror. Malfunctions, erasures, and jumbled bibelots have left vast holes in Cawl's ancient memories, but what remains fills vaulted halls the size of a Battle Cruiser. This was discovered by the Scythes of the Emperor, who still guarded the ruins of Sotha after the planet's destruction by a Genestealer Cult infestation and Hive Fleet Kraken during the Second Tyrannic War.During the first solar decade of the Indomitus Crusade, Cawl became increasingly detached from the wider galaxy, instead focusing on his quest to create and perfect the Primaris Space Marines of the Ultima Founding and deploy them wherever the Indomitus Crusade Fleet Primus went to reinforce existing Firstborn Space Marine Chapters or to establish new Primaris Marine-only Chapters. Cawl uneasily accepted Veilwalker's enigmatic instructions to make his way to Cadia, already under siege by Abaddon the Despoiler's massed forces of Chaos, where his timely arrival provided desperately needed reinforcements for Lord Castellan Ursarkar E. Creed's embattled Imperial forces. There have also been references to other Heretek groups who don't worship Chaos but have rejected being part of the Imperium, finding it too stifling. After battling Orks who had been drawn to combat on the empty world with the powerful Mechanicus fleet, he recovered an ancient Necron artefact. He also learned more about the nature of the Cadian Pylons originally built by the Necrons that were tasked with restraining the eruptions of the Immaterium -- especially the Eye of Terror -- into realspace. Know this, slave, roared the C’tan***, that you have earned the undying wrath of Zarhulash. We will meet again, and you shall know the true cost of defying a living god. ‘***

Cawl's knowledge of genetics gained from his soul-merger with Sedayne, along with the potent genetic material contained within the device known as the Sangprimus Portum, allowed Cawl to successfully complete the creation of the Primaris Space Marines and implement the Ultima Founding in ca. 999.M41, using candidates kept in stasis deep beneath Mars from the time of the Heresy until the 41st Millennium. This was the culmination of ten millennia of work intended to perfect the Emperor's creation. Arc Scourge - The raw might of the motive force dances between the splayed claws of the Arc Scourge. A potent weapon of technobanishment, this weapon is designed to target Heretic war engines and exorcise their Machine Spirits with jolts of agonising lightning, disrupting their electronic and mechanical systems. Nearly completed, the gene-forged Primaris Space Marines lie in stasis, waiting to be awakened from their long slumber. Fool*, said the C’tan. It tore itself away from the portal, hanging unperturbed amid the storm of debris flying out of the mountain.* You shall never be free.’ A lash of starlight whipped across the space between them. Cawl’s conversion field flashed brightly.

Cawl knows he has the support of the Man Emperor up stairs on the God Couch, I wonder if the Emperor pulled the same heist upon Molech…] Once in the Ultramarines' Fortress of Hera, Cawl revealed the identity of the artefacts in his accompanying auto-reliquary. He declared that they were intended to resurrect Primarch Roboute Guilliman from the mortal wound that had seen him trapped in stasis in the Temple of Correction for the last ten millennia. In Warhammer 40,000, Mankind's golden age is long past, and many of its technological secrets have been lost. When the Emperor was reuniting humanity, he found on Mars a strange priesthood devoted to the preservation of what knowledge remained. This Mechanicum, later renamed the Adeptus Mechanicus, became a vital part of the Imperium, providing technical expertise, planet-wide factories known as Forge Worlds that produce everything from lasguns to civilian goods, and incredible weapons such as the Titan Legions. They are theoretically subordinate to the Imperium, and their highest-ranking member is one of the twelve High Lords of Terra, but the Machine Cult has its own specialized army, the Skitarii, and run the aforementioned Titan Legions, standing slightly apart from the Imperium of Man despite propping it up. Mars itself is not only the Mechanicus' capital, it's one of the most important Forge Worlds in the Imperium, and houses several Titan legions. They are, for all intents and purposes, their own independent state within the Imperium, and the two are inextricably linked by necessity. The Extremist Was Right: Arks of Omen retroactively gives some grounds to their almost regressive stance towards innovation with the introduction of Vashtorr the Arkifane, a Chaos demigod empowered by craft and creation. Age Without Youth: Tech-Priests can be very old indeed; they tend to prefer methods of their own to the juvenat treatments used by the Imperium at large. These methods preserve life without such niceties as removing the appearance of extreme age. Of course, a Tech-Priest of such seniority is unlikely to have any visible flesh left in any case.