#I wanted to do something with Slaanesh that GW historically hasn't done:

[lumi-klovstad-games]

The Rise and Fall of the Wardens of Tamasa, and the Doom of the Euphoric Ravagers

In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, there is only War.

This Darkness and Conflict has a way of testing the souls of all men, and unfortunately many are found wanting in the end.

The Chaos Marine warband known as the Euphoric Ravagers are a cautionary tale, and a tragic example of how even the best and brightest might fall into corruption and heresy, and the greatest tragedy was that their fall stemmed from their genuine desire to serve the God-Emperor of Mankind and to live righteously.

Initially founded some time after the 34th millennium, the Wardens of Tamasa grew into an Ultramarine successor chapter of great repute. Their assigned sector in the Segmentum Obscurus was regarded by many as “a little Ultramar”, with a dozen worlds noted for their high populations, excellent standard of living, and exceptional degree of safety relative to other nearby sectors.

Having tempered their armor against Ork invasions and Khornate Cults, the Wardens developed a reputation as a noble chapter who could break even the sharpest blades turned against them. Steadfastly rooted in the teachings of their Primarch, Roboute Guilliman, they were driven by a strongly held deep desire to emulate his greatness and honor his legacy.

As the centuries passed, they became warrior philosophers who carefully studied the history of their Primarch and the deeds of their Ultramarine sires and their brothers in the myriad Ultramarine successor chapters. They sought to be the epitome of discipline, order, and strategic brilliance — a star for other Chapters to fix their course by and chart their way to greatness and glory in turn.

And, for a time, it was good. Very good.

By the 39th Millennium, the Wardens of Tamasa had become heroes known far and wide, household names celebrated throughout the Segmentum. Imperial Guard Regiments were proud to serve alongside them, and other younger Space Marine Chapters looked to them for inspiration. The worlds of their sector were called “The Jewels of Tamasa” and were both prosperous and patriotic. Their Chapter Master at this time, Uraius Goremman, led them with unwavering devotion to their cause of emulating their Primarch, and was regarded by all as a wise and just leader much as Guilliman had been.

But they had been noticed by a gaze apart from the adoring eyes of the Imperium of Man. A terrible unsleeping eye in the Warp had caught notice of something stirring in the hearts of the Wardens, a weakness the chapter was unaware of, and one that could be exploited for dreadful purposes. The Wardens of Tamasa had unknowingly acquired the interest of Slaanesh, the Emperor of Excess, Prince of Pleasure, Duchess of Desire, Lord of Lust, and Countess of Chaos.

It started benignly enough: friendly rivalries emerged between the Wardens and other Ultramarines chapters. These were encouraged by Chapter Master Goremman, as these rivalries inspired his men to do better and accomplish more. But in time, the chapter became less concerned with simply living up to Guilliman’s vision and more obsessed with becoming “Ideal Sons” of the Primarch. It was not enough that they live up to his vision and embody his values, they had to be better at it than the other Ultramarine successors, and perhaps even better than the Ultramarines themselves. 

The Wardens’ obsession with perfection began to take root and consume them, their once-noble and healthy pursuit of being better scions of Guilliman transforming into an unhealthy fixation on order and discipline, and a firm belief in the preeminence and supremacy of their Chapter over all others. The seeds of Slaanesh’s corruption had taken root, nurtured by the Wardens’ unquenchable desire to mirror their Primarch. Unknown to the Wardens, Slaanesh had seized upon this opening, this weakness that formerly was their strength. The God of Obsession and Prince of Perfection entangled their minds with visions and dreams of grandeur and glory, and promises of unspeakable power to enforce their will upon their sector. The whispers grew louder, growing into sweet and haunting melodies that gnawed upon the Wardens’ subconscious and dominated their dreams. Their obsession with discipline and order grew ever more engorged, and their need for precision and perfection, though it produced ever more glorious results upon the battlefields of the Segmentum Obscurus, gradually alienated their friends and neighbors as it became more and more of a liability.

The rivalries grew more tense and strained, as they became less about pushing chapters to mutual excellence and more about proving the Wardens’ superiority. They started to treat their allies more dismissively — such allies served little purpose but to enable the glory and perfection of the Wardens of Tamasa, after all. This conduct gradually worsened as the Wardens treated any failure to uphold the Codex Astartes harshly, and any who failed to fight exactly as they perceived Guilliman would have were punished severely. As their micromanaging and perfection complexes grew, both their non-Astartes allies and the other Chapters became distant from the Wardens, dooming them to become even more entrenched in their darkening spiral as Slaanesh and its daemons subtly fed the Wardens' darker natures, pushing their obsession further and further.

The Jewels of Tamasa began to lose their sparkle, as the glittering worlds fell into the fundamentalist tyranny of the Wardens; the planetary governors obviously couldn’t be trusted to keep order adequately, so the Wardens literally replaced them. As the Jewels fell to the growing Military Junta of the Marines who once ensured their safety, the vivacious standard of living once known on those worlds and celebrated throughout the region diminished and was replaced by a totalitarian state who ensured order through fear and the harshest punishments for any infraction, as any crime or misstep, no matter how slight, became a blasphemy against the God Emperor and the memory of Roboute Guilliman. Every flaw had to be stamped out by force, because the Wardens had seen the true nature of humanity and realized that what they were doing was necessary, essential even, to realize the visions of their beloved Primarch and the God-Emperor of Mankind. Despite their brutality towards the populace, the Imperium of Man did little to respond; the Imperial Tithe was still being honored, and the populations held fast to Imperial Laws, and so the Wardens were permitted to manage the Jewels the way they best saw fit.

It is not known precisely when the Wardens of Tamasa had become irrevocably doomed to their fate, but the time of their fall into darkness is well known. Their push towards perfection damned them in the final decade of M39, as their habit of placing the Captain of one of their 10 Companies as the governor of each world of the Jewels led to an impasse — twelve worlds, but only ten captains. Chapter Master Goremman held council with his Captains as they strove to understand how their Beloved Primarch had failed to arm them for this eventuality and how to proceed. 

What followed broke the Chapter in two.

Chapter Master Goremman, having long held himself to be the paragon of Guilliman’s virtues, was the most vulnerable to Slaanesh’s insidious and corrupting influence. What had been whispers in the beginning were now a heavenly chorus guiding him at all hours, pushing him to seek answers in forbidden knowledge and rituals that promised him the strength and perfection he now constantly craved. In his desperation to attain what he most desired, Uraius Goremman sealed his own fate, and that of his chapter: Goremman decided that the words of the Codex were Absolute, sacred law. There were not "too few Captains" to govern the territory. There were simply too many planets.

With all the compassion and empathy of a raw blade swinging hungrily for the neck of an innocent, Goremman ordered "the surplus" to be "dismantled and redistributed"; two whole planets of the Jewels were to be destroyed after they were stripped of anything of value. This decision horrified the younger captains, who as far gone as they were still acknowledged that their Primarch would never destroy something so practically valuable as two whole Imperial worlds, especially heavily populated and productive worlds, to correct a math error. This disagreement swiftly led to fracturing in the chapter between the younger idealists that made up the Guilliman Loyalists and the older, more experienced (and much more thoroughly corrupted) Goremman Hardliners.

Goremman initially appeared to cede to the Loyalists logic, but their victory was short-lived and trivial, as Goremman emerged after a short period of seclusion and meditation in which he had consulted the heavenly chorus in his mind how he should proceed, and the music had answered. He ultimately declared what just a few months earlier might have been blasphemy in the chapter: Guilliman had been flawed, and not the Icon they had thought him to be. The Chapter Master “reconsidered” Guilliman to be “a flawed but well-meaning prophet”, a great and mighty but ultimately “lesser figure meant to kindle greatness in those who were truly destined for perfection”, namely, the Chapter Master and those who shared his views. It was up to them to “finish” the Codex Astartes by purging it of its imperfections and expanding it as needed to best accomplish their mission, including the establishment of as many companies as would be necessary to ensure the Chapter’s domain — and already it was obvious that the Chapter Master was anticipating expanding his realm further, turning greedy and lustful eyes to the neighboring and technically still-allied sectors as the music in his mind sang of how he could bring those neighbors closer to perfection as well. While the veteran companies agreed with Goremman, the younger Captains and Companies were incensed at the idea their Primarch and his Codex could have possibly been imperfect, and this insult to his memory and his magnum opus had proved the final straw.

Fractures in the chapter which had been developing for years over matters of orthodoxy, culture, and policy finally cracked wide open, and the Wardens of Tamasa split apart, roughly along the lines of older radicals loyal to Chapter Master Goremman, and younger idealists who felt the ideals the chapter stood for were more important than any individual leader, especially as Goremman's instability had been visibly growing. Someone needed to make a stand.

The resulting civil war tore the Chapter apart. After six years of hell, the damage done to the former Jewels of Tamasa was catastrophic. As the pro-Goremman Hardliners exterminated the Roboutian Loyalists, they succumbed to the pleasure of punishing the unworthy and the imperfect with brutal treatment, torturing them in hellishly delightful and horrific ways before taking the ultimate pleasure in executing the infidels. With the extermination of over half the chapter and their subsequent devastation of the worlds they once watched over for failing to live up to their impossible standards, their fall was now complete, and the Chapter was declared Excommunicate Traitoris by the Inquisition. A task force was hastily reassigned from any nearby Space Marine deployments and sent to wipe out the Wardens. Consisting of two companies of the Iron Hands successor chapter the Dawn Stalkers, one company from the Raven Guard successors the Mentors of Deliverance, and a company and a half from the Ultramarine successors in the Azure Magisters paired with the Astra Militarum’s Ephriosian Deathtalons and the Picicrean Black Hawks, the task force departed on a retaliatory Crusade that ultimately saw the Wardens of Tamasa cut and run rather than face destruction, with the now heretic chapter fleeing into the Eye of Terror, not to be seen for over a century.

What emerged from the Eye was not what went in over a century prior. While the Wardens of Tamasa had been corrupted, they had still ultimately desired the best for the galaxy, if only as they saw it in their narrow and murderously dogmatic view. However, the hundreds of Chaos Marines of the Euphoric Ravagers that revealed themselves were a different and even more dangerous beast. While within the Eye of Terror, Chapter Master Goremman had utterly surrendered to Slaanesh’s chorus in his mind. The tendrils of corruption snaked and wormed through his psyche, reforging his mind and soul into something beautiful and terrible: the Chaos Lord Argathes, the so-called “Lightbringer of the Violet Expanse”. His transformation had marked the Wardens’ final descent from well-intentioned extremists into blasphemous anti-crusaders who had eyes on establishing their OWN Imperium of Man, one free of the imperfections of the current system and where instead every soul with the power to act seized on their OWN sense of law and order. This blasphemous Imperium would have at its height Argathes himself, a twisted high priest to impart Slaanesh’s love, wisdom, and adoration to the people.

Donning garish colors and obscene symbols that marked them as Slaanesh’s devoted warriors, the Euphoric Ravagers became a force of unspeakable violence and debauchery. Their once pristine and gilded power armor was now adorned with the garlands of excess and perversion, reflecting their new allegiance and their disdain for the imperfect disciplines of the Imperium. Under Argathes’ leadership, the Ravagers stormed across the Segmentum, indulging in their newfound hedonistic desires, corrupting and devastating all they touched. Their acts of barbarity and perversion became the stuff of nightmares — men, women, and children fell to their knees, driven to howling madness by the overwhelming sensations and displays the Ravagers unleashed, and no one would be spared.

These veteran warriors’ obsession with perfection rendered them an implacable foe, as they had been driven by their madness to become the apex of the warrior's craft — their movements upon the battlefield were well drilled, and hypnotic in their perfect dance-like coordination. Each soldier’s form in combat was beyond reproach, with every shot and strike delivered with nanometer precision, the way they bobbed and weaved to avoid enemy attacks beautiful and graceful beyond compare. Countless of the Emperor’s faithful failed to so much as make a mark upon their glorious and ruined armor and flesh before being slaughtered in new ecstatic and rapturous ways.

So unstoppable and undefeatable were the Ravagers that they were not stopped for good until the Indomitus Crusade, when Roboute Guilliman, returned from the grave, heard what had become of his wayward successors. Despite the righteous fury that he rightfully felt towards the Ravagers and all that they had become and done, he also mourned them. He could not help but feel partially at fault for their fall, even though he fully admitted to his own errors. They had idolized him, and what he represented, and that had pushed them down a path from which the only redemption was death. Perhaps if he’d been more humble, or admitted to his imperfections more in his Codex… but Guilliman pushed these thoughts from his mind, for they would do him no good. He'd seen enough good men fall into darkness and corruption to know that in the end, it was the Wardens of Tamasa that had created an entirely unreasonable and distorted image of him to follow, and their fall had been their own doing. Now, they needed to be stopped, no more and no less.

And Guilliman knew exactly who to send to accomplish this mission.

Despite his initial wariness regarding the young chapter, the Redemptor Roses — a young chapter of Astartes that was crafted from leftover gene-seed from Guilliman’s fallen brother Fulgrim as an experiment of sheer desperation by the Imperium a few years before Guilliman’s return — had recently proven themselves at the Second Fall of Cannaey against a numerically far superior and far more experienced force of their “brothers” from the Emperor’s Children, and the Roses had not only emerged victorious, but had handily butchered the Slaaneshi Marines present on Cannaey to the last man. Even though the Imperium was unable to retain Cannaey at the battle, the Redemptor Roses had proven themselves both loyal and resistant to Slaanesh’s influence, and had already pledged themselves to eradicating the dark god’s influence wherever it could be found. Furthermore, they proved they had the skill and discipline to defeat Slaaneshi Marines who possessed superior numbers and experience, even in situations other chapters might have considered risky or hopeless.

When the Ravagers re-emerged, this time attacking the Fortress World of Agorus, Guilliman called for the Redemptor Roses to answer — and Chapter Master Gautier Boudreaux heartily answered, mobilizing over three hundred warriors to wipe out the Ravagers once and for all. Accompanied into battle by Agorus’ own Imperial Guard — the Iron Dragoons — with High Judge Archus Landaelian and his 2nd Court from the Ceramite Gavels lending their support, as well as the Sisters of Battle of the Order of the Valorous Sigil, justice was finally served upon the fallen Marines. Completely outnumbered and outgunned, with all escape routes cut off, the Euphoric Ravagers gradually realized that their quest for perfection had finally led to them biting off more than they could chew. Their deaths were assured.

And yet, in that moment, realizing that the end had come, something of the Wardens of Tamasa may have reasserted itself. It is said by all who remember the Euphoric Ravagers' destruction that their Last Stand was a PERFECT expression of the combat strategies laid out in the Codex Astartes — literally a textbook example. As justice for nearly 2000 years of blasphemy and depravity finally arrived and ended their reign of terror, they gave one last battle so beautifully executed it would have made Roboute Guilliman himself shed a single tear of appreciation.

Their last act had culminated in everything that they had originally pursued: the perfect example of Guilliman’s warrior values.

The fall of the Wardens of Tamasa serves as a grim reminder of the dangers of obsession and the treachery that may lurk in even the most noble aspirations. Their tragic fall and transformation into the Euphoric Ravagers is a testament to the cunning of the Ruinous Powers, as they were used as unwitting pawns in Slaanesh’s grand game. Their tale reminds all that no matter the purity of one’s intentions, vigilance must ALWAYS guard against the seductive whispers of the Warp.