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 14th magical clone baby the Emperor recovered – Lorgar Aurelian, Primarch of the 17th Legion.

Baby Lorgar, known as Young Baldy to his friends, landed on the planet Colchis. It was a desert world, and dominated by a single theocratic government. Young Baldy had been initially adopted by a nomadic people who disdained the ruling religion, and was named Lorgar, which means “rain-maker” in their language. But a priest of the The Covenant, the globally dominant religion, found the magical clone baby and killed Lorgar’s whole clan to steal him away to glory in the capital.

Lorgar was fascinated by the religion of his kidnapper and astonished the lawmakers and priests with his understanding of it. He believed there was a great unifying power behind the four gods of Colchis, who tempered the cruelties of the lesser four. He began preaching his reformed vision of The Covenant, winning millions of followers, for whom a message of “no slavery” and “less random cruelty” truly resonated. Of course, the established hierarchy of The Covenant disapproved and tried to eliminate Lorgar.

Lorgar was having none of that and led his followers in a world-shaking jihad, converting entire city-states with only the power of his rhetoric, and putting entire nations who had defied him to the sword. Many miracles were reported and attributed to Lorgar, which only cemented his followers’ faith. Only a year after Lorgar’s ultimate victory and reformation of the One World Religion, the Emperor came to Colchis, and Lorgar proclaimed him the unifying God he had been talking about. Colchis peacefully and happily joined the Imperium.

Lorgar and his new legion were fanatical in their devotion to The Emperor, and established great cathedrals and shrines to The Emperor’s godhood on every planet, thoroughly and (usually) peacefully indoctrinating the worlds they conquered into ultimate loyalty to Lorgar’s vision of The Imperium. Thing is, The Emperor was one of those militant atheists, the kind of guy who would corner you at a party and lecture you for hours if you said “God bless you” to someone who had sneezed. When he got wind of what Lorgar was doing, he was furious!

Lorgar and his Word Bearer legion had established Monarchia, “The Perfect City,” on the planet Khur. It was devoted in every way to the divinity of The Emperor. The Emperor had it razed to the ground, and Lorgar and the entire legion were forced to kneel before his brother Rowboat Girlyman and his legion of Ultramarines and apologize for being such dum-dums as to believe in magical sky-fairies who granted wishes. Lorgar was humiliated, he was devastated, he quietly turned the burning faith in his heart back to the Old Gods of Colchis, who were, in fact, the Chaos Gods.

During the Horus Heresy, The Emperor broke the promise he had long ago made to Lorgar about leaving his world in peace and had the planet bombarded until it literally broke into pieces. In a bit of irony, after the Horus Heresy, the holy book Lorgar had written about The Emperor became the basis on which the Imperial cult of the God-Emperor was built. It could be argued that Lorgar was the one who ultimately won this family squabble.

It’s probably for the best that we don’t make this Day Thread a perfect thread, dedicated in every way to the divinity of some jerk who doesn’t want or deserve it. But keep in mind Lorgar’s inciting theological revelations – no slavery and slightly less random cruelty.