Huron Blackheart

Before he was Blackheart, he was Lufgt Huron, and there were few finer commanders in all the Adeptus Astartes. As Chapter Master of the Astral Claws he ruled the volatile stars about the Maelstrom and was named Lord of the Maelstrom Zone, entrusted with holding that daemon-haunted region against every horror that spilled from its storms. For a time he served the Imperium faithfully and well, but power and long isolation bred ambition, and Huron came to believe that the worlds he protected owed their loyalty to him rather than to a distant and ungrateful Throne.

That belief hardened into open defiance. When the Imperium demanded its due in tithes and gene-seed, Huron withheld them, and when a fleet came to bring him to heel, he ordered his defences to open fire. So began the Badab War, a savage decade of fratricide in which loyalist Chapters were sent to break the renegade and his allies. The fighting was long and terrible, but its outcome was never truly in doubt, and by its end Huron's home world lay shattered and his Chapter was all but destroyed.

Huron himself was struck down in the final battle, the right side of his body ravaged by a dying loyalist's melta blast. He should have perished, but his most devoted followers bore his ruined form into the Maelstrom, and there his Apothecary and Forge Master laboured to remake him. They rebuilt the Tyrant as a fusion of flesh and machine, more cybernetic than living, and from that crucible of pain he emerged transformed in spirit as well as in body. He cast aside the name Lufgt Huron and took a new one: Blackheart.

The two hundred survivors of his broken Chapter became the Red Corsairs, and Huron forged them into the largest renegade warband the galaxy has ever known. From hidden anchorages amid the Maelstrom's warp storms he unleashed fleet after fleet upon the Imperium, raiding, plundering, and enslaving across the Eastern Fringe. He welcomes all who would join him, and every raid swells his host with renegade Astartes and captives broken and remade into loyal reavers, so that his strength grows where other traitors' wanes.

What sets Huron apart is his mastery over the very powers that consume lesser men. He wields Chaos as a tool, calling upon its gifts and its daemons without surrendering his cunning or his will to any single god, and he is served by a bound daemon-thing, the Hamadrya, that perches upon his shoulder and lends him its sorcerous might. A brilliant strategist and an unrepentant pirate-king, Huron Blackheart schemes without end to carve out a dominion of his own, a corsair empire built upon plunder, terror, and the broken chains of everyone he has ever betrayed.