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 twelfth magical clone baby the Emperor recovered – Perturabo, Primarch of the 4th Legion.

Perturabo landed on the planet Olympia, a rocky, mountainous world covered with independent city-states that were constantly squabbling because none of them could win a decisive victory against the impenetrable mountain fortresses the citizens could retreat to in times of war. He was adopted by a man who called himself the Tyrant of Olympia, and with Perturabo’s magical clone brain at his disposal, he started cracking open fortresses like an otter with an oyster. Perturabo got to be very good at sieges.

When the Emperor came and took Perturabo away from Olympia, Perturabo was really excited. Set-piece battles and flanking maneuvers and savage melees! All kinds of new wars, Perturabo thought. Then the Emperor consistently put Perturabo in charge of every. single. siege. in the galaxy. Even the useless bloody sieges with no tactical value but we couldn’t let any planets not be brought into the Imperium, right? As the years went on, Perturabo grew bitter and envious of his brothers who got to do sick kick-flips or whatever it is that non-siege generals get to do.

To make matters worse, when Perturabo was given his legion, he examined their service records and decided they didn’t live up to his standards, so he ordered them to literally decimate themselves (kill every 10th soldier in the Legion). And *then* as if that wasn’t enough, Perturabo had only been gone from Olympia for ten lousy years when all the city-states started revolting, and he had to come all the way back and reconquer them. He offered the citizens a choice – decimate yourselves or be entirely exterminated. Perturabo liked decimation.

When Horus started his coup, he easily got Perturabo to join him by offering to let him fight any kind of war he wanted, and to kill as many people as he wanted instead of limiting himself to 1 in 10 like he’d been doing. Perturabo… well, happily is a strong word for anything have to do with this Primarch, but he joined with more enthusiasm than he’d shown for anything in DECADES. When Horus’s coup failed, unlike most of his other traitorous brethren, Perturabo oversaw an orderly retreat, and even let his Legion trap and massacre a huge amount of Iron Fist space marines on their way out, as a treat.

Today, Perturabo and his strategery is more or less the only reason the forces of Chaos present any meaningful threat to the Imperium as a whole. Poor Perturabo has been overseeing yet another goddamn siege for the past 11,000 years.