Kor Phaeron

Kor Phaeron, First Captain and self-titled Master of the Faith of the Word Bearers Legion, is remembered on Colchis and in Imperial record alike as the foster-father of the Primarch Lorgar Aurelian, and as the man who ultimately damned him. A priest of the planet's old faith long before the Legion's discovery, Kor Phaeron raised the infant Primarch himself, shaping a child of boundless devotion into the zealous preacher whose faith Chaos would later claim entire. Colchisians and Word Bearers alike came to call him the Dark Cardinal, a title he wore as proudly as any relic of rank. Even those who despise the Word Bearers concede that no other figure shaped Lorgar's fate so completely, for good or for ruin.

Too old by the time of his elevation for true Astartes ascension, Kor Phaeron carries only partial augmentation, sustained instead by bionics, rejuvenation treatments, and a lifelong, corrosive resentment at his own incompleteness. That resentment found its outlet after the Emperor of Mankind humiliated Lorgar and the Word Bearers at Monarchia: Kor Phaeron, with Erebus at his side, secretly preserved the Legion's proscribed faith and steered his foster-son toward the Ruinous Powers rather than let that devotion die. What he could never become through flesh, he resolved to achieve through faith alone, and it is that resolve the galaxy has paid for ever since.

His hand is written across the Horus Heresy's bloodiest chapters, from the Battle of Calth to a failed attempt to turn Roboute Guilliman himself to Chaos, an attempt answered when the Primarch tore one of Kor Phaeron's hearts bodily from his chest. He escaped through the Warp to Sicarus, the Legion's daemon fortress-world in the Eye of Terror, which he has ruled for ten thousand years, directing crusades of faith and feuding without end with Erebus over who truly commands the Word Bearers' broken soul. Neither rival has ever conceded the argument, and neither, after ten millennia, shows any sign of intending to.