Towards the end of the Age of Strife, the Emperor crafted 20 magical clone babies that he called Primarchs. The forces of Chaos didn’t like the Emperor very much, so they kidnapped his magical clone babies and threw them randomly all over the galaxy, and the Emperor had all kinds of adventures finding them again. This thread is about the eleventh magical clone baby the Emperor recovered – Lion El’Johnson, Primarch of the 1st Legion.
Lion crash-landed on the heavily forested world of Caliban, a world where the people lived in a feudal society and the planet was sentient and all of its native animal life driven to hate humans with an unholy passion, like Harry Harrison’s Death World novels. Lion wasn’t found by anyone at first, and spent ten years living alone as a feral child in the jungle. After being shot with a bolt pistol by one of the nobility of Caliban, Lion was taken in by a man named Luther, and taught the ways of humanity. Like Tarzan, and unlike every other feral child in history, Lion took to courtly manners and language and sophistication like a duck to water.
Lion’s reunion with The Emperor was fairly uneventful as these things go, but Lion’s meeting with his space marine legions and how the noble knights of Caliban reacted is where the juice in this story is. The Space Marines were prideful and arrogant, the knights were prideful and arrogant, and no matter how much Lion would single-handedly beat the crap out of both of them, they would be surly and recalcitrant. Every time he thought he’d finally gotten it through their thick skulls that he was their boss and their clone-father, there would be another minor rebellion that he would have to suppress.
Matters came to a head during the Horus Heresy, when Luther, the man who was like a father to Lion and Lion’s closest advisor, caught a little bit of the chaos infestation that was going around and fired on Lion’s fleet above Caliban. Lion absolutely lost his shit and started a massive planetary bombardment before teleporting down to the castle Lion and Luther shared to fight Luther. As the planet was literally being blown to pieces around them, they fought as only family can, with tears and snot and bitter recriminations flying everywhere. Finally, Lion was beaten into a coma, Luther finally fought off the Chaos and was devastated by what he had done to his son, and the planet Caliban was blown into itty-bitty pieces.
Like King Arthur, Lion’s body was put into a secret cave in the remains of Caliban and Luther promised that his son would return when the Imperium needed him. Smash cut to about 11,000 years later and the Imperium was split in half by the Great Rift and Rowboat Girlyman could only seize the reins of half the empire! That’s when Lion arose, like a pretty princess kissed by a strange man, to save the other half of the Empire! Lion and Roboute are both distracted by keeping their half of the Imperium of Man from falling apart, but it’ll sure be fun when they meet up with each other!
Enjoy your Day Thread, everyone. Maybe your favorite shitposter from the past will be like Lion and return to save the Avocado from itself.