The 40k Lorecast - Episode 147 - - Word Bearers pt 4 - Erebus loses his face, Lorgar loses his legion, but then things get better

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

On Today’s cast we close out our coverage of the Word Bearers. Opening with the tail end of the Hersey with Layak’s arrival on the scene. Then jump over to Erebus’ terrible plan of converting Sanguinius (why would that have ever worked). And then of course over to Lorgar trying to use Fulgrim to usurp Horus. We then get into the Word Bearers post Heresy quite a bit as their actions there are both fun and telling of their real role in modern 40k.PatreonMerchandiseDiscord Link:Our WebsiteRetro RecallBrad ChannelOur Sponsors:* Check out BetterHelp and use my code betterhelp.com for a great deal: https://www.betterhelp.com* Check out BetterHelp and use my code betterhelp.com for a great deal: https://www.betterhelp.com* Check out Pebl and use my code hipebl.ai for a great deal: https://hellopebl.com* Check out Quince and use my code quince.com/40klore for a great deal: https://www.quince.com* Check out Quince and use my code quince.com/40klore for a great deal: https://www.quince.com* Check out Shopify and use my code shopify.com/lore for a great deal: https://www.shopify.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to the 40K lore cast. Welcome to the 40K Lordcast. With me, John Barcati and Bradchester. This guy. Today we'll be concluding our coverage of the word bears with the end of the heresy and a very rapid jump into their actions after the heresy. We'll explain more. Why, John?

Because there's like 17 novels where you have to cover later and I'm like trying to half cover them now. I'll explain it when we get there. But once again, as always, 40K lorecast, weekly show in the lore of the Warhammer 40K universe, releasing every Monday at 7 p.m. Eastern. Please follow and comment. It helps. It takes like two seconds.

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and experience. Nerd. Nerd. A link to our other show, The History of 40K, where we're joined with Alan and discussed the history of the game on the tabletop. Those can be pretty fun.

You can also check out my other show, Retro Recall, where I play old video games, sometimes begrudgingly, sometimes with joy. That's just what happens with little video games. And if you like us, I want to support us two great links. One, to our merchandise.

It's well made and it's funny. So get some merchandise. We can have stickers, as Brad learned a couple weeks ago. You know, it's all the top right now? stickers. I feel like they all stickers only went to the top because I have made no changes at the website. Zero changes. I swear to God they weren't there. Zero changes. I mean, my train doesn't work. So there's a real chance that I was wrong because I've been wrong and I'll be wrong again. At a certain point, you should work on being right a few times though. Nah, let's not worry about those kind of things. I have, you know, instead of being right, I like to be excited.

Yeah. This old phrase yelling, second best thing to being right. But the other way to help us out is join our Patreon. Again, Patreon's great ready to support anybody that you like. It's a wonderful way to support artists, although some people have patrons for no good reason. Whatever, I'm getting trouble, but there's some patrons. I'm like, really? Also, maybe this also a lot of GoFund means where you're like, no. Anyway, but our Patreon, you get this show and the history of 40K for $4.99 a month or $1,04, Goyanese dollars. So, Guyana, it's a really interesting country because it's in South America, but it functions like it's in the Caribbean. It's a country in South America, and it's the head of Karakom. So figured that one out. But they do speak English, and it was an

English colony, and it's probably because the English and Spanish weren't getting along great at that time. So Goyana was trading with Jamaica and Trinidad and had to kind of be left alone by all the other guys down there. Now, Goyana is situated within the Amazon rainforest, and it is pristine. It actually has more biodiversity per square kilometer than anywhere on Earth. Scientists go there just to kind of wander around and discover new species by accident. You can Google some of the fun stuff they have there. They've got their national bird is called a Kanye Fescent, and it's known as the strangest bird alive. So enjoy that, Google.

They also found a blue tarantula, so that's a cool thing. Now, Goyana, though, is famous, unfortunately, for 1978. This is where the phrase, drink the Kool-Aid comes. from. This is where Jones town is. Jim's Jones decided to build a colony in the middle of the jungle, and that's Guyana. Now, things weren't going great. He had a fix. And fun fact, craft foods, the maker of Kool-Aid, have insisted for, what is this, 60, 50 years now that it was not Kool-Aid they drank, but the cheap knockoff Yel-Sert. And I could not care less if this is true. I just enjoy this super lame attempt by them to get everyone to stop saying, drink the Kool-Aid with a super

nerdy response being, you know, technically actually wasn't Kool-Aid, rather than what they should have done, which is what do people that know drink for their last meal? Cool-Aid. Just saying. And also potential advertisers, I am available for freelance marketing. I await the calls on a more. You should sit next to the phone on that one, Chad. Anything now.

Any day now. I think it's better. What are people that know drink for their last meal? Coolade. It's a great one. You have a guy on death row or just a bunch of people, you know, in the jungle in a wooden hut. Just throwing it out there. Now, positive note, Goyana had for a long time an extremely poor country.

But in 2015, the largest oil reserve in Western Hemisphere was discovered there. So it actually has the fastest growing economy on the planet. It is pushing towards Middle East Gulf right now. So there we go. And yeah, we have a listener there, maybe two. I can see you. And yeah, I'm aware of you. All right.

Lastly, our Discord. So we always have a link to our Discord because we'll keep an link to our Discord. Great place to interact. You've been having a lot of fun there recently with a lot of people interacting on telling me stuff I got wrong, but more importantly with the launch of 11th edition, some of the new books coming out. Really great place to learn the lore, have a conversation with other people, find recommendations for other things, especially with navigating the new 11th edition.

It's been kind of great. But anyway, let's get into this. Hi, we finished our last cast. Lorgar and Erebus were each a big sigh, buddy. Because Lorgar is an idiot. All right. So the last cast, Lorgar and Erebus, they're each trying to create their own champion of Korn.

Karn wasn't technically elevated at this point, but he was set in the path. And during this time, Lorgar starts to turn against Horace. He sees Horace as a week, like soon-to-be puppet of the chaos gods. And in Lorgar's mind, he's unworthy. It's weird about it because he looked at it at two things, too, because Lorgar felt that he was becoming a puppet,

but he also felt that he wasn't assuming all of their gifts at the same time. It was written two different books that way. Yeah. And in the end, I don't think it was either one of them. I think he's just mad because he was the one that discovered the chaos guys. You know, he was the architect of the heresy, and I felt that no matter what, this would eventually drive him that his big brother was still in charge. I think that he was going to be no matter what. Because in different books, they've talked about different things that were all contradicted.

I can't talk about it. Yes and no. My viewpoint on it has always been. I think Lorgar, you're right. He looks at Horace as not accepting the gifts because his horse tries to claim. I'm still in charge. I'm still in charge. But the same time he's being possessed.

I viewed it more as Lord Guard looked at Horace, kind of the way that a lot of failed athletes, like, you know, people like, I don't know. There's no one I can think of, but who was really good in high school at football, no one I'm thinking about right now looking at, just messing with you, buddy. Who would make a comment, like, if I were taller,

you know what I could have done? Like, that type of thing never comes up, Never comes up. I just hypothetical. We're doing a hypothetical human being here. Hurtful. Hurtful talk. That one was so easy.

But that's how I viewed Lorgar. As Lorgar looks at Horace and says, if I'd had those powers, the things I would have done with it. And I think that's how you can make those two, because they are contradictory novels, a line where it was, you aren't being what I would have been

with all of that type thing. Yeah. I think it's just a lot of resentment on this. And to be fair, Luger's not 100% right or wrong because Horace is falling apart right now. Horace is, I mean, we're going to get to it in a second, but we got to take a little break before we get there because we have to call it about someone named Zardu Lyak.

Because Zardu is really important. He's going to be much more important. He brings him with him to go see Horace. Yeah. Zardu becomes a very key character for a chunk of time. And he's going to actually matter more, not it. He doesn't matter in this cast a little bit, but in the cast, we're going to do it.

like five or six months, he's going to matter even a lot more. And I'll explain more than that in a minute. Zardu was a chaplain for the word bears during the early parts of the heresy, back when they were anti-religion. And he was part of what was called the Asian Circle. And the Asian Circle was the specialist who would go after a planet was conquered and seek out and destroy all the artifacts and religious symbols. During this time, though, we started having visions while he was doing it. And the visions were of Lorgar, telling him do uncover the same? secrets of the emperor to learn the real truths the hidden by the emperor from everybody else. And these visions are a function because Lyak was really a super powerful psycher.

This is post the what's it called thing. So he had to kind of hide him a little bit, but not that much. He actually gets a couple words of enunciate, basically the words of creation later on. Liyak is wildly powerful. He gets those from dreams, though. And the truth is, in my opinion, he was just being fed by chaos. Because he was, because he had, it was a cyker, the barrier between him and the

imitarian wasn't strong. They were able to reach into him, and they began twisting him and moving him their ways. So as he starts down this path of chaos, first, he stops destroying the idolatry he finds in worlds. He just just consumes it. It starts reading all of it. It's certainly Lorgar, actually, to be honest. And he starts sparing the lives of people and a lot of the.

relics on the world that he is supposedly freeing and moving from religion. So he's just, you know, he's a bad guy, effectively. He's another mustache twirling bad guy. Again, another guy, yes, when they do the pictures of the drugs and everything else, thereafter he's into chaos, but they're so comically evil. Him and Aramis. The six-eye glowing helm, which we get to in a second, doesn't help. It's still better than the fact that Aramis has the full tattoo.

scarred into his face and head. Nothing wrong with tattoos. I don't have any on my face, but I'm just saying it's because I haven't thought of one that was worth it yet. And everyone I've seen with them, it hasn't worked out. Not so much. Now, after monarchy, Zardu goes full chaos. He takes command as a first chaplain of the awkward gate, which is the chapter within

the word barriers that are especially zealot followers. And Zardu ascends to the lead role due to Erebus picking him. Erebus just looked at this guy. I was like, yep, you are, you are on team, Erebus. Yeah, I love that he goes, who needs to be in charge at the Oaker Gate? And there was the guy going, I'm super evil. He's maxing out points in character creation and evil. You're like, that guy.

I think it's also, I think Erebus might have one chaos God say, yeah, it's Zardu. And he went, oh, okay, cool, Zardu, it is. Now, as he was picking his hand just goes directly to him. Yeah, it's a Ou-Gie board that. works. Yeah. He goes right to Z. All right. So Zardu is one of the more hardcore chaos elements of the heresy. Some of the characters that we discussed, they're like chaos adjacent because they were infused with chaos power without knowing it. Like early Karn. Early Karn's a good example. Karn was always evil,

but later he was. But a lot of those guys, what they were getting there was a little bit of the carrot, a little bit of a carrot, a little bit of a carrot, until they're too deep. in. Yeah. They kept taking the rewards that they didn't know where they were coming from. They just, I'm awesome and I'm becoming more awesome. And then you down the line. Like, oh, I gave my soul over.

Oops. Whereas Zardu's. Oops. Hibis and Erebus where it's like, wait, what are we doing? Yeah. Okay. I'll drive this party bus. Let's go.

Yeah. That guy did not read the terms and condition. He scrolled to the bottom and said, I accept. To the point where Zardu accepts demon possession in an epic well. because he becomes a Galvoreback. And all the other Galvorebacks became the way because they were in the warp, got killed by what's her name, and that demons possess them. Or, you know, picked up a demon blade and that possesses them.

Nope. Zardu just gets so full of hate and anger that it just basically happens. He just, he becomes angry enough that chaos infuses him because he was like, he was converting his chapter over to chaos. And at one point, like, has he changed the name to the unspeakable? speaking, he finds a demon helm, just does, and bonds it to his own face with chains so that no one will ever see his face other than the gods of chaos. But his helm looks awesome, by the way. It's a super cool thing. And if you, I'm going to cover this in brief. If you guys want

to know more about Lyak, the Crimson Apostle is the novel this comes out of. But Lyak at this does this kind of really good side journey in this novel. And it's a nice, GW does a lot of these. I'll call it there. It's wicked. Let's just call it what it is. How did I get here? That's what these are. But he has a nice wicked knockoff and it's well written. So go with it. He travels to a place called Helwin, which is a former word bearer world and has gone dark. And once he gets there, he finds three of his former associates had turned away from the word bearers. And he begins, become an independent colony. This is earlier in the heresies. So this isn't the later stages. And he discovers, Zardu discovers, it's a wonderful warning that he just blows off. It's almost

like inverted Christmas Carol here. Oh, they find the actual truth. Is Christmas Carol the one with Scrooge? Yes. Okay, good. Thank you. I'm not great at this stuff. So yeah, I love this. Zardud discovers the real truth, which is that the everyone there is being affected by chaos. They realize chaos is always destined to lose. All three of these people, he's, he meets or tell him, yeah, these world fell to chaos and then we all started killing each other because that's what chaos does. It's always a pyramid scheme. They're always scheming against each other.

None of the chaos gods can ever actually win because they wouldn't be able to continue to be in existence because they wouldn't have enough of the elements that make them them. It's always going to fall apart, period. And they find this out and explain and he goes, that's stupid. Yeah, he basically doesn't come up that stupid and no, not for me. And in the process, he breaks his brain by finding it out. Yeah, it does. Effectively ends up in like a loop where he just can't get out of because he's, I think it's, um, ooh, here's an old movie reference.

Is it war games the one where they make the AI play Tic, Tecto? Yeah. There we go. Yeah, it's a. Yeah, that's so he, but he's the AI in that. And he's struggling. So his way to solve it, though, is to rip his own. eyes out with his power clawed hands and then cut six holes in his face, which he then shoves

demon orbs in, so palan tears. And now he has the coolest model in all of 40K heresy. So there's that. Yes. But Zardu learns no lessons from this and goes, I love the chaos gods. I'm going to embrace the chaos gods. And as a reward for doing that, the chaos gods give him the ability to thrall basically anybody. He can do a little spell and people are mildless of balls. I think he's against Semic and Nussia. I think he's words of powering on this. Yeah.

But he's got creation of words. It is, it's a strange novel because the entire novel is, hey, man, don't do this. And he goes, we're going to get into much much later. But Arabis does this. And in some future books, people that have way less psychic power than others end up doing wildly powerful things because they're almost, it's your D&D and you get your mid-level character gets thrown an artifact effectively. That's how these are.

These are things that they can't do normally, but they give gifted a huge amount of power. That makes sense. The cool thing about Zardu, though, is he rejoins the word bears for the battle on Koff. And there, two main things happen that make him really important. First, him and his chapter, The Unspeaking, were on the front lines against the Ultramans on Kalth, and they were the ones who were turning themselves into demons. They were just summon demons into the fight and charging it to Ultramans. But it was kind of a suicidal charge, so almost all the chapter ends up dying on Kalth or getting trapped on Kalfe, except for him.

He's able to leave. The more important one, though, is Liyak becomes Lorgar's closest confident because Khorferon disappears into the warp at this time. Erebus bails. So Lorgar is kind of running out of people the normally looks to. And Laiac becomes awesome. Secondly, to be fair, again,

Erebus goes on a full side quest, 100% for the chaos guys. Oh, yeah, 100 minutes. So Lorgar is sitting around and his dad is gone. His number two is not that reliable. So Liyak firmly supplants himself as Lorgar's number one guy.

Now, speaking of Erebus, fun story on Erebus. We talked about this last time after New Syria. Erebus is a little bit persona non-grata and word bears. Very much so in world eaters. Very much so in world eaters. After those events, Erebus just goes back to Horace to join him on the campaign. Because Erebus's plan since the beginning was not to be Lorgar's right hand. It was to be Horace's.

And so with that in mind, He came to Horus with a really bad idea, just terrible idea. And Erebus meets with Horace, so this is, Lord Gar is not present for this part of this, and discusses how they both know about the red thirst within the blood angels. Because Horace had walked in on Sanguinius killing some of his gene children, who had succumbed to it, and Sanguinius had confided in Horace what was going on. And the chaos gods just straight up told Erebus. told you got to say about it.

Yeah, he knew about the thirst. So, Erebus proposes, why don't we set a trap for the blood angels, a trap that'll put so much rage into them that they'll fall, and then Sanguineas will have no choice but to give himself over to chaos. And we cover this in the Blue Angels cast, so I'm going to Cliff notes this thing here. Horace sends Sanguinius, who's unaware of the heresy, to Cygnus Prime. There, the Blangels were supposed to fight a xenotiric known as the Nephilim, who'd been enslaving the people there, but it was just demon.

all demons. It was 100% a trap. Yeah. It was a trap. Yeah, exactly. It's a pure Admiral Akbar. They get there. There are no Nephilim.

They're just a lot of greater demons. Sanguinius gets dropped because Cobanda kills so many blood angels that he actually at the second backlash drops him. Cabanda ends up about to steal the soul of Sanguinius. What? Steal, something about to give it to him. When instead, some random apothecary jumps up and goes, I'll do it.

And runs through the portal. instead of it. So the apothecary named Maros saves Sanguinius and the Blood Angels. And then Sanguinius gives to the Hogan finger and gets up and puts his booty's muddy ass kicking on. Cabanda does not do well. Obliterates a cabana.

And so the plan of this trip was to go out there and come back with a demon-infused sanguinius. And all they came back was a demon-infused apothecary. Known as the Red Angel. He'll come up more later. But that's it. But this is a failure. And Erebus is furious. Furious because of the failure, but also because I think someone has to do with Lorgar, because Lorgar heard about the plan and told Arabis,

this will never work. This is pointless. This is a stupid idea. The guy that's not turning to chaos is sanguineous. So, basically, you're trying to convince the emperor to turn against the emperor. What do you, this is not, actually, that would have gone better, candidly. That might have gone better. Emperor would have listened to you. Yeah. This was just stupid. And so Lurgar told, him like this is the dumbest plan I've ever heard you're going to fail and so arabus is in his my head's like I turned horace I'll turn sanguineous the problem for arabus he's not a great loser and so back on the vengeful spirit the word comes back about the

failure on sickness eribus gets heated and he starts chastising horace for not following through the plane correct you're not saying enough of it he starts shit-talking horace Chastising would be nice and probably would have got him not about to get obliterated. However, he was not. He was talking a wild amount of shit. Horace's response seems, it seems fair and imbalanced. He grabs Erebus, takes the anathema dagger and carves all the skin off Erebus's face. That's that.

Just removes it all. It grows back, though. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. For all of our Aribus fans who are nervous, don't worry, it grew back. Yeah, he had to have cool chaos tattoos all over his head. So yes. Yeah.

So Horace, though, interestingly enough, though, is not done with Erebus. He uses this moment not so much to banish him, but is to reestablish his dominance. So I view this more like pack animals where like the alpha will just attack and put things down, but he won't kill. That's what Horace doing. Like, hey, you don't get to talk to me like that. Are we clear now that I've ripped all this skin off your face with a dagger? Probably the blunt end. Awesome.

Great. But Lorgar at the same time... As much as I hate Haribus, you have to give him credit because he did not back down after he got obliterated. Oh, yeah. He had the skin peeled off his face and went, eh, I'm still good. We'll be right back after a quick break.

Now, let's get to Lorgar, and Lorgar, I'm making a poor choice. So not long after Lehman Russ paid Horace a little quick visit, where he rammed him with a spier that was totally not made of of Zeno technology at the Emperor Stoll. probably Blackstone, but that channels the emperor's power. Anyway, Horace wasn't doing great at this point.

So he's barely conscious, his soul's being sapped. The way that this spear kind of worked was he got jabbed with a spear. It's almost like a tit broke off. All right, they still have some Lord of the Rings. Let's call it. They saw it north of the rings. Okay, he got stabbed with the, what's it called dagger? And now his soul's being eaten by the emperor from afar.

So he has... This is part two of him having to die. deeper into his warlock pact that he's making with the chaos gods. Exactly. As horse is giving himself more and more over to the chaos gods in order to stop himself dying here,

it starts to change him physically, but also changes all of them around him. Like his crew mutates the shit out of the ship. The ship to prove everything. The ventral spirit became just the warp embodied. I mean, the ventral spirit,

let's call it what it is. It becomes the latter part of a event horizon. Yeah, that's where this goes. Now, by the way, Van Horizon is stolen from 40K, so we're credits do. On that one, this is not one of the thieving things they've done. Around this time, Lorgar returns, and Lorgar looks at Horace and just goes, like, what the hell happened to you? He has, because Lorgar has embraced the primordial truth.

He is spreading the primordial truth, but he's not a pile of mess that Horace. that Horus is. And Lorgar looks at Horus as being, okay, he's weak. He's, the chaos infusion is basically poisoning him. And Lorgar can see into his soul and sees that Horus's soul is basically disappearing. And the chaos gods are just devouring and fighting over it. So Lorgar makes a plan. Horus is ready to make this final assault on Terra.

And he orders all of the legion to Ulinar for a final staging. But when this call goes out, the emperor's children don't respond. And that's what I'm kind of realizes, hey, has anyone seen Fulgram in a while? And everyone goes, no, I haven't. Even Petroble is probably like, he's good. Let's not worry about him too much because that dude sucks. So, Lorgar, though, knows where he is.

And he offers to go grab him. And Horace goes, yeah, go get Fulgram. Lorgar grabs Zardulyak, his number one. And they head back to the eye of terror. where. Well, yeah. And they also, they send Perderabo to go get Angron while he goes to get Fulgram. But he also because he's got an ace in the hole for getting Fulgram back.

So we'll talk about that in two seconds here. Yeah. So when he gets times, you got to talk about some true names and make people do stuff. This part's funny to me because they go, they say they go to the eye of terror. They don't go into the I of, well, I guess they enter the eye of terror. And they end up at the Palace of Slenesh, because that's where Fulgram is, hanging out. out with this demon in Kari having the best time. Fulgram is on 100% gap year party right now. Like I want nothing to do with anybody else. And I think what they talk. I'll use the quote from

one of the books on it. Slinishi delights. Oh, I was just going with George Bluth when he's in prison. I'm having the time of my life. And so Lorgar approaches. Fulgram and tells him there's a time for play and this isn't it. And Fulgum is laughing at him saying, why would I leave and go do work? Which, by the way, makes me think if you haven't seen the robot chicken Star Wars episodes where it's like with a droid. You have the droid sitting on the couch, watch. No, I don't want to do it. No, I don't want to do that. Uncle, oh, and this droid is a bad motivator. That was a magically good line. Anyway, this. does, but Lorgar knows this. He doesn't care. So he actually was expecting this. So

Lorgar starts shit-talking Fulgrim. And Fulgram gets up to go fight him. And as he's fighting him, Lorgar was just playing defense. Not that he could have done offense against a forearm snake demon prince, but although maybe he has the rules he has in 10th edition, he could have. Yeah. That was a wet noodle and data sheet. But, Morgar has to, all he has to do is hang out for a couple minutes, though, because Laiac is going to, he has a little bit of a Trump card on this. Yeah. Because he's got Fogrom's true name, which is a full story in and of itself, by the way, and worth reading.

Yeah. Because how he gets, how he comes to get it and kind of throws a couple people into the woods. It's fine. It's chaos. Hey, man, would you read this for me real quick? because you will have your mind wiped once you read it. I would like some of that information, though. Don't worry about it.

You read it out loud. You'll be fine. So, yeah, to Brad's point, Lyak utters Fulgram's true name, his demon true name, and Fulgram is now a sleeve to Lyok. He follows his every command without questioning or resistance, can't resist.

So Lorgar collects Fulgram. Real quick, I'm throwing Fulgram under the bus for this. We did a little bit when we talked to Emperor's children. Fulgram has now failed, what, four willpower saves in a row? Yeah, let's just say if your party's relying on Fulgram to roll better than a six, he's not going to. He's going to roll a one. He does it a lot. Now, a fun thing about chaos gods, unlike your grandma, they don't just give you treats because they enjoy watching you be happy.

Liyak had been gaining a ton of power recently. He strapped a demon hole to his skull. He carved out his own eyes. He's mentally thralling people. And so their demon gods are throwing a bunch of power to him, but there's a catch. And that's because chaos never gives you a finished product. What they give you truthfully is desire. That's the real gift of all chaos.

Number of which God you go with, it's the desire for more is their thing. Slaneh is the easiest one. Corn is just as much. They're all in that boat. And the case of Lyak, he began to see himself as more important and more knowledgeable than everyone else. And so he sees a choice. And his choice is serve Lorgar and attempt to usurp Horus, placing him at the right hand of Lorgar in the ensuing conflict, or betray Lorgar and work his way to the right hand of Horus. given that Horace has already aligned with the chaos gods directly,

and is the current war master, Lyak went with the easy route. So this story's hilarious, by the way. Lorgar confronts Horace and does a whole speech and basically challenges Horace to a fight. And as Horace gets come closer. Well, let's back that up, though, because by the time he gets back,

Horace has now been juiced back up. He's like twice the size. to, yeah. Well, yeah, I'm saying, he's now not suffering anymore from the spear wound. He's actually doubled in size and super powerful. You're like, hey, man, remember when you were going to make your move? It should have been before this happened. It's a hilarious scene because Lord Guard does, like, effectively challenge them to a duel. I am going to usurp you. And as Horace moves forward, he goes, all right, Lyak, get him. Send Fulgram to attack. And Laiq and Fulgram both look at Lord are like, what the hell are you talking about?

Because Lyak had released Fulgram already. And so Horace looks at Lyak and Fulgram, but you guys want any of this shit? And they both went, nope, nope. Nope. And Horace goes cool and beats the ever-living hell out of Lorgar. And then banishes him, much of the chagrin of a badden who wanted to Lord Horace to kill. The Don was so mad about this.

Yeah. He's like, why are you not? mud stopping the chat's bad. You already beat him to oblivion. Kill him. Kill him now. The irony being X-Y works out better for Abidon that it doesn't. Anyway, Horace turns, my favorite part of this,

Horace then turns to the rest of the word bearers and goes, and it also got a problem. I mean, he did the Achilles. He gave the, is there no one else? Lorgar then goes, all right, guys, no one's, it's all right, you don't have to fight him. Let's all go. And all of the word bears look at him,

then look at Lyak and Erebus and go, we're good. And so Lorgaard has to leave on his own for now. It was, yes, for now, because he's got a lot of stuff coming up later. But he did have to leave in full shame on this way. Yeah, it was hilarious. Which I kind of feel what he was trying to do. Orris was trying to let him live in shame.

Like it would be more honorable to kill him kind of thing. But it works out for Lorgar on the end. Yeah. So Lorgar then goes on the long path because he can't return. He knows he's going back to the eye of terror, but he has some more stuff to do because he wants to get better aligned with the dark god. So he does his long journey back to the warp.

And he stops off at these random word-bearer worlds collecting what legionnaires would come with him. And he ends up on this world called Yisemai, where he uses a chaos ritual to, in effect, make a projector. And he just sits there drinking a beer and watches the rest of the hair. I do like the fact that every time he accepts a gift,

he accepts one god at a time kind of thing. Yeah. It's what Abidon's doing right now because he pushes the gods against each other so he never gets taken over. Hey, I'd like knowledge. I want to check it out. And effectively him in a bunch of legionnaires, by the way, effectively just watch the Jumbotron.

Yeah. Yeah. It's what's a Jumbotron of the Harrison? They hang out together. Just like, this is way more convenient. And they watch Horace fail. And once Horace fails, actually technically, Aribus tells him, hey, Horace died. but he's watching it, you know, this stuff.

He then goes, all right, let's bail. And he goes into the eye of terror. When he gets the eye of terror, good news. Because Corferon's just been hanging out in there after almost getting killed by Gilman. Also, you got to remember, let's talk about this. He did not, when Lorgar, and this is where you get Abedon doubled down, Lorgar doubled down. This is where you get the long war.

This is where you get the chaos. Chaos is now playing the long game now. This is not a failure. this is just the beginning of a new longer. Exactly. As long as it takes. And this is why chaos is also gaining winning now and more modern 40K because they're playing the long game or they continually play the long game.

Exactly. But what's cool is Lorgar gets into the eye of terror and he arrives on new Colchis. Because Corfarin, new Colchis was not going to make it and it didn't. And he builds the planet Sakaris there. And this is great for Lorgar. for two main reasons. First, he gets an immediate staging point. So he builds the Dark Council there.

This is a leadership group. It made up all the most powerful of the word bear sorcerers. Really powerful sorcerers here. Yeah, and then they become, they build cathedrals. And so Sakeris has turned into a beacon of warp power.

What they basically use it for, it accelerates, anything that goes around it. I like this a lot because this feels like, for all your D&D folk out there, this is where their castors, I think you take on Thousand Sonscasters because they have places of power. They build these huge cathedrals to the dark gods, the chaos gods,

and they have power there. They have so much more power there than they would anywhere else. Yeah, in effect, whereas a lot of a thousand sons are more powered by Zingch, truthfully, the word bearers are powered by the warp. And they can do rituals way better than anybody else can.

Yes. They also know they have, there's a couple of books I'd let's throw out here. that, but they have some really great, because the word bear, a lot of the word bear's most powerful magic is by sacrifice. Well, yeah, we'll hit on the trilogy shortly. Yeah, just they, it's just, it's really, they, but they find this from an early, early on in their chaos, that they, the most powerful magics are done by sacrificing souls. And they do this really early. The other part though that's important, and this almost matters more, they got a head start in the

work. So all of the other legions come back into the eye of terror. And when they do, they start turning on each other and attacking each other, they're going to steal slaves, power. Let me cover this in another cast. The word bearers were already there and fully fortified. So you really couldn't do much about them. And they were a unified legion. They didn't break up. They're one of the few legions that doesn't turn into war bands. They have war band. They do have individuals who do stuff, but as a core, there's still a governing body of it from the start. And so this is it. Next 10,000 years, Lorgar hangs out in the warp and on Sakeris.

Not idle, though. He becomes the general of his army. He aids them when they're out in the Materium. All eventually we come before he becomes a dark god. He becomes the demon prince of the dark gods. But more on that later. What we're going to do now. Lorgar also goes in, we'll talk about this in a minute,

But he spends a lot of time in meditation in the old temple Magnifico where he's just kind of sitting in his summoning circle for a long time. Now, what's going to happen is we're going to do a little go to the left and then to jump to the right. We're a time warp, guys. We're going to skip most of the heresy. Actually, all of the rest of the heresy. And the reason we are is because short version Horace dies. There you go. Heresy failed.

Now you all know what happens. But the real reason is because we're going to cover the end of death books later this year is the plan. And the word bears are all over that. And it would be six more casts here to do this. So we're just going to kind of jump after that. I wanted to introduce these characters like Lyak. He's going to be like an Arabis are huge in the invasion of soul, massive and the invasion of terror. So we're going to cover them a lot more then.

And we're just going to skip that and go right to post heresy. And I can talk about like trying to solo. Dorn? Yeah, it doesn't go great. It doesn't go great. He's like, I got this, guys. You're like, hey, should we bring the rest of the raid into the room? Now I'm going to solo the boss.

Yeah, I got this. Yeah. It starts, for a second he was okay. And then he was not. But let's talk about the word bears post heresy because they're actually one of the most active and nefarious chapters post heresy. candidly they're the biggest concern of the inquisition they have the most cultists they have the most cultists they have the most traitor planets and cults going around and they also are willing to sacrifice those cults there is so many fantastically evil stories about the word of guys

one of my favorite is when they saw they had a million cultists run at walls so they could make a ramp of the cultist bodies to get over the walls then they drove rhinos over it but they They also will corrupt an entire world just to do a ritual and stuff out all life on that planet, which they've done multiple times. One of their favorite things to do. Yeah, they are horrifying. And the Inquisition is extremely concerned about them. The thing is, like the Space Marine chapters each have their own.

Obviously, the ultimate hate the word bearers the most. They each have their own thing. The word bearers aren't really a combat chapter. They are. Don't get me wrong. But the real danger is what Brad is said. They just do messed up stuff. And so we'll go through some, there's some codex lore here, and there's some novels here we're going to hit on.

But I want to use some stories here to just really drive this point home. Because first off, of all the legions, they use demons the most. I don't think anyone's surprised by this, but they wage war differently than other legions. With one, they summon the most demons. So they're just, they're very adept at it. But again, their base magic isn't just be powerful psychers in their own. And they're like, I know I need to sacrifice a bunch of stuff willing to do it. Apparently, wildly charismatic because they have even more cultists than Alpha Legion does.

And a lot. And they do this by. If you want to worship the chaos gods, word bearers a good way to do it. Yeah. They're very pro that. And then you find out, oh, am I about to be part of a giant spell? Bummer, which happens a lot. Are you just figuring out now why I cover the Johnstown massacre for this gas?

Ta-da. Look at me being clever. I just love that you're like, hey, I'm in page two of our sorcerer spells and I already have to kill how many people to depower any of these? Well, I like it just because a lot of their sorcerers aren't just like the dudes doing battle front line.

But you give them some time. They will put some serious... I look at their magic as shamanistic, witchcraft, and stuff like that. They're greater rituals, and they will cause, real problems in a sector, when they summon a zillion demons

after they perform a powerful ritual. Yeah, and another cool thing about them is they also use a lot of demon engines. The filers, forge fiends, muller fiends, they're good, Brad. Don't stop telling me to stop playing them. Hellbrutes, those do kind of suck. One of the coolest guys

ever, because they have dark apostles, otherwise known as chaplains of chaos. And this is what they do. So their leadership also is very different. They're more like the Thousand Sun, and sorcerers play a key role in their actions, but they're not just casters.

The 1,000 sons have that. The word bears use chaplains. It's probably the same with dark apostles, who then provide blessings. So instead of casting a spell, like prescience, these guys actually put blessings on them. In fact, their power is, I think, more aligned with Eldar. When I think about the way, in the lore, the way it works,

is like I'm going to power up everybody to do this thing, whereas the thousand sons are more like doom bolt. All right, look, that thing's wrong. Yeah. I'm obliterating what's in front of me. There's so much of a difference in their castra. They've got buff. They have huge buffs.

But the Thousand Suns you think of Doom Bull lighting coming down. The Emperor firing down forced lightning. That's what I think of when I think Thousand Suns. These guys are utilizing ways to influence and buff and using, again, giant rituals, which I still think is crazy. That's what I think when I think chaos, too. I think these dark rituals that come out. And this is aided by their organization.

because unlike any other Chaos Legion, they're the most, they're fully or not that have been in for a long time. Because we're in M-41 right now. So the Chaos Legion is a little bit different. We brought back a bunch of Primarks. Abadon and Typhus are also still there. And they've taken more control. Like Angron now has a lot more control of his Legion.

That's a newer thing. Even more tearing. It's a newer thing. The word bearers have been ruled by the Dark Council for 10 millennia. Yeah. The Dark Council determines what you are going to do. And your goal is to get on the Dark Council. The Dark Console has been kind of forcing the Wheel of the Dark Gods for a long plan, too.

Again, we have the Rift. We got a lot of baggage of Abadon during this. They're doing a lot. The Worm Bearers are active from day one until right now. Yeah, they are still, though. There's a lot of starscream here where they get really close. And they go, ah, Megatron. And then they lose. They are the foil for almost all of. When you're trying to beat chaos and you're You want to show how tough a legion is, word barriers come in to get beat. Exactly. So let's talk about some stories.

So M36, the Garrio sector. They're in a full rebellion. And the guerrero sector sits in the crossroads of warp travel for the planet Arcus. And this is just starboard of the soul system. I'm still doing that. And it's, and it's a. And my favorite part about doing that is how you just had to look up which direction of Starboard is.

Anyway, which one is it bad left or right? What's that? Which one starboard left or right? And then Gordon left. You know why everyone? Because Brad lives next to the water. So it's come up. It would be bad.

It would have been bad. That's why I was chatting. I've done competitive racing and sailboats. If I didn't know, bad things would happen with ropes. That's a fair point. Don't be like David Carradine. Anyway. I'm not editing that out.

For the record, I'm not editing that out. That's staying in. That was a gem. All right. So suddenly the hives all over this planet go in rebellion and the world goes dark. So the sixth company of ultramarines are sent there to put down the rebellion. And when they get there, it's not just the hives in rebellion, but the people had dug massive ruins into the planet itself.

The planet itself. It's so wild. And then began sacrificing themselves to said runes. But it was the ultramarines. They're legitimately powering up the planet for chaos. Yeah, they go, but the ultra means go full doctrine. I mean, it is because, you know, word bears, cultist demons. They were like, all right, we'll start with Devastator, we'll move into tactical,

and then move to assault doctrine. They're just reading from the book. He's like, all right, uh, Tillamond says go to the left. All right, we're going to the left. But in this, it takes the sixth company loses 70% of their forces in this, They eventually do save the world, but that's just an example of, like, how the nefarious the word bearers are. Because the word bears, there were a few word bears there, but there weren't that might.

This was just a world. They were like, I don't know, let's just make everyone there a demon. And the Ultraman said, you go, uh, fine. Then you get the world of conquerors due, which was once hosted to like one of the great imperial triumph. So it's covered in all these hundred foot high depictions of primarious. and the emperor and all this stuff. And so word bearers and cultists

are disfiguring the statues and start tearing some of them down and making it a ritual. So as the whole world goes to rebellion and the Imperium says, screw this, send in Titans. So the Abduptus Titanicus arrives and begins just wrecking shop.

These are Titans, not knights, Titans. And as they're going through, turns out there was a part two. to the ritual. Oh, I love everything. This is where I come in to yell because this is so awesome because the Titans are wrecking shop.

I felt we didn't sell these statues on how big they are. This isn't like, hey, statue of Brad in the lobby. And it's, it'd be at least six or five. But these are hundreds of foot tall statues and they start coming to life and start dropping the people's elbow on Titans. Yeah. They start beating up the Titans with. Yes.

Oh, so. bad at the stay puffed marshmallow man yeah that's unfortunate how i see it not go in my mind i got this awesome battle with the statues start coming to life and destroying and then you ruined it with state puff marshmallow man i'm so sad now i mean zool you know let's just call it what it is all right the word bears i'm upset that gw hasn't had the stay puff marshmallow man be part of a gw be part of a word bear ritual it's the safest thing i can think of guys Stay puff more smell of man. All right.

On the shrine world, the other one is on the shrine world of Nephthys Madrigal, the sisters are this reinforcing this world against a demon incursion. And then Lord Vialblight, who's a greater demon of Nergal, wants the world for himself. But he can't get there because the sisters have placed anti-warp ruins all over the place. Everywhere. Yeah. They've done their own rituals because they're powered by the emperor,

who's definitely because. becoming a god but they juice this up until the wordbed they did what they did before the word bears came to the lord vile bright reaches up the word bears for help and so the word bears arrive and since they're not demons they're not affected by the ruins and they begin a campaign not of conquest but of destruction because they're taking a lot of casualties the word bears are but they're destroying the warps yeah because the sisters don't know what they're doing at first they think they're coming to fight and conquer and everything else and And they start taking pretty big casualties because they're just ignoring some of the fights and places that you should be staging on and are making a beeline to destroy these ruins.

And eventually the ruins get low enough that the entire world blinks. And Lord Vialbriot appears with a horrifyingly large, not a plague bearers. All of the plague bears. Conquers the world almost an instant. And then Nurgles most pleased with the word bears. Another good one, though, of how nefarious the word bears are. This is why the English position is so afraid of them, is you can never figure what their plan is. Like on that last one, they started attacking and blowing up ruins.

What are they doing? Oh, it's so someone else can come in. They do the same thing on the night world of Donados. This is all nighthouses. The planet gets attacked. They come together to repel the invaders. This is not hard for knights, by the way. I mean, you're talking the word bears against five nighthouses.

houses. Which the night houses, the night worlds are wildly powerful. This is just tons of knights with also super skilled pilots that have been doing this their whole life. Problem is that as they go to fight, three nighthouses arrive. And that's because the other two were distracted. And the word bears got there and inserted a scrap code into the throne mechanicms, which infects the machine, but also the pilots themselves.

Because the pilot is one with the machine because he's, bonded with it. And now the world becomes, involved in the Civil War, those knights actually believing they'd become chaos nights, word bears. And again, the word bears took casualties to do this. They do this a lot.

But I haven't shit in the towel in a while, so let's have fun with them. So you should also. The current time in this game of Levant, the tower wildly. They got like three more weeks. All right. So the towel arrive in the world of Er Clemiet.

And they say, you should join up. We got this great thing. Life would be better under the towel. And when they get there, the people there are like, yeah, yeah, that's great. But we still got to play the blood tithe. Like, we're getting the blood tithe.

And Tau, we're like, you guys don't have to do the blood tithe anymore. You're with us. Yeah. No, the best. I love that they just say it so matter of fact. It's not like they don't even come across as like hardcore dance about. They're like, it just is a matter of fact. Yeah, the blood tithe is going to do pretty soon.

You're going to tell. No, there's no blood tithe anymore. You're part of the. greater good. It's all good. And then about a year into the assimilation, the word bearers arrive for the blood tithe. And they start slaughtering the populace because that's the blood tithe, summoning demons. And the firecasts to run out and repel it, but it doesn't go well. The entire planet evolves almost immediately into a demon world. Just so it becomes a total shit show. Yeah. Also, the tau kind of bail on. They fight. It is a big fight, but the towel just go,

yeah, we don't, this is, or want this place anymore. This is crazy. You guys aren't, you guys aren't welcomed be part of our greater good club anymore. Yeah. They're like, oh, this sucks. Goodbye. Now, one easy target for the word bears is, of course, the imperial cult, given that their prime arc wrote it.

Wrote the book. Yeah. So they like to target the ecclesiarchy. And there was a really great one in Segmentum Pacificus. So out in the worlds conquered by Lord Solar Macarius, the Ecclesiarchy built a pilgrimage route, wherein Imperial citizens flock there by the billions, trillions, to walk the same path as Lord Solar Macarius. Solar Macarius is also a badass. He's the best Imperial General of all time.

Now, as this is going on, word bearer dark apostles used cultists to begin to infiltrate the pilgrimage, sowing seeds of corruption. Whoa, whoa, whoa, on this. It isn't like six dudes or a barbershop quartet. It was initially, but that's the thing, it was initially. It became more of a cultist movement. That's what's so cool about this. Yeah, they start infiltrating this thing and just making little changes to what people

are saying in the pilgrimage, little changes until all of a sudden rebellion breaks out. And the Imperium has to go deal with it. when they get there, they discover there are billions. Billions. With a B. With a B. Coulthists. All infuse the power of chaos. And so not trying demons, these are just cultists

with a stick going to fight you. Six space marine chapters and way too many guard regiments are sent to system to put it down. And the worlds in question are still not recovered fully from this.

This is like, I think the Minotars were part of this one. These weren't like, you know, Plan C freaking, you know. They were murder shitting the populace. And yes, they had to fight through a billion chaos-infused dudes with a stick. In my mind, because they actually don't say that the entire planet's fall, they just said that they had tons of cultists and all these people that were originally part of this pilgrimage. In my mind, it's still one of those things where Ted, the guy that's just repair shoes is just going, oh, come on. man. Oh, this place is gross now.

Now, I do want to hit on a novel because actually a bunch of novels, just for people, a teaser of them, but I also want you guys to read them. So there's some of the dark apostles series. If you like word bearers, you want to get a good, like, understanding of chaos. These are some of the better ones to read. And there are a really good example of word bear style in that the word bear's goal is rarely conquest. That's what Abidon's about.

He wants to, I'm going to kill the corpse emperor. The word bearers just want boons, the dark gods, and they want to spread the dark gods. They just disrupt and cross havoc. Audio book there in these is pretty good, yes. Okay, cool. So to do this end, the dark apostle named Yaruluk learns of an incredible device within the planet of Tanakrag. Let's go Tanakreg. That works.

and the Imperial Planet is assaulted by Yarra look at his forces. And the PVF just drops like in an instant. They have no chance here. A planetary defense force against a full-blown space marine invasion is adorable. It is the scene from Billy Madison. Like, all right. Now, that being said, they did put out a call before they get wrecked. And the Imperial Guard, the Admec, arrived to put down the assault.

but when they get there, they discover the word bears. This is funny. I don't know. They made Earth elementals, basically. They bonded the bodies of all the people they killed with the rubble from the fortresses they destroyed. They made a stompah, Brad. Call it what it is.

They made a chaos stompa. Yeah, because these were just like abominations. They were amalgamations of just stuff pushed together. I also think it was probably not very pain-free for the people. No, I'm sure they were quite aware of it. The cool thing is the imperial forces are getting ready to fight this chaos stompah. And instead of firing on them, it starts firing on the planet itself because this is actually a Necron tomb world. And Yara, it's unclear of how much he knows here.

Even in the novel, if he knows where the necrons are, it's a little bit tricky. but at the base of this tomb road is a blackstone weapon. And this weapon can turn off the warp to a region of space. And his plan is, I'm going to take this thing, and I'm going to go really ruin the Imperium's Day. Now, the tomb wasn't empty, and the necrons inside of it had an opinion about being woken up. So Yarlik actually dies in this first novel, spoiler alert,

and his second Marduk escapes with a relic. And that's actually, I don't want to spoil. that's the first novel. The next two really follow Marduk. There's a ton of imperial characters to get in there. But I want to cover this. It's super chaotic, though. Yes, because of that.

It's just guys that are like, I am the main character for the chaos gods. And then, well, you're not. And then somebody else picks up and goes, nope, I was always the main character. And that's why I want to talk about people. You guys should read these books if you like these. stories because the whole concept around it is, especially at the end of the first book, Yarrowluck you think is the protagonist. He's not.

He's just a tool to the protagonist. Marduk is a bright. The chaos gods were always behind Marduk. They just needed Yara Lik to do what he had to do so they could fully elevate Marduk. Books are cool. Now, with that, let's talk really quickly, lastly, about the word bearers in modern 40K. We've got 11th edition launching, so we don't really know all that's going to happen, but we've reached the 42nd millennia. The rift has been spread throughout the galaxy,

and the word bearers are out in force, including their prime mark. Lorgar is a full-blown demon prince, and he is looking to do what Horace didn't, not necessarily kill the emperor, but more conquer the galaxy for chaos. For specifically forecast. ass. And with the rift open, summoning demons is easier than ever, and any actions performed in the bacterium are fueling the immaterial at an even higher level ever before. So Lorgar is looking to take advantage of this. And he's basically taken his legion and turned them into chaos black Templars. It is just crusade on crusade on crusade. He's also a huge pain in the ass for the

Imperium because not only is he conquering, he's spreading the primordial truth. He is effectively giving the opposite of the imperial truth. And it is catching on. Very much so. And there are rumors of Lorgar walking around at the head of these massive word-bearer and cultist mobs preaching the word. Now, does that mean we're going to get a model? I, I could, Brad would be so mad. Oh, because it'll be good, too.

Oh, he'll have good rules. He'll have really good rules. He'll have really good rules to be playing word bears on the table. I have actually played word bears. I'm doing it again. Like, oh, yeah. You'll be running Lorgar and Erebus. Oh, that just hurts me a little bit.

Yeah, but they brought back old summoning rules to be there in a second. A hundred percent of all. I mean, brought back old summoning rules. Again, why, there's no, there's no end of my hypocrisy. I would love to play a 2,000 point game of three. thousand points of models. It's significantly easier. To be fair, guys, if they made Lords of Terra models that were good, Brad would play them. Let's not go there.

All right. But with that, the thing is word bear lore is kind of TBD. Actually, all lore is TBD for being honest right now. But with the word bearers, the launch of 11. They're going to make a big push, though. Well, again, we're not talking about a couple of the books right now. Lord Garter makes a pretty big appearance in what's going to happen soon. I'm going to point out, Lorgar has appeared more in modern 40K than the con. Then con. Then con. Pointing it out.

Lorgar. By the way, you're not wrong. He showed up a lot. It's going to be so embarrassing when GW just like all of a sudden releases a bunch of white scar stuff. The con has returned. The con's the next prime mark. And people are like, people are listening to our podcast a couple years.

I'm like, what else is John talking about? Like the number. They're the poster voice. Like all of them. All of them. All the entire hammer and boulter is white scars stuff. It stops being ultramarines in the covers of all the space marine books. It's all white models now.

White scars. Like, all white scars ever. All right. But with that, we're going to break for now. Again, I guess I said, a lot of the word bearer stuff will get covered when we do end of death later this year.

And so if you want to know more about them, there is a ton of great novels on word bearers. You would not be wrong to go look into it. But next week, we're going to do a little one-off. It's a common request we've gotten, has been to go back and talk more about the Titan legions. So we did a little bit of the Nightcast,

but I want to do a cast more time with the Night Legion's. We're also going to talk a bit more about the C-Tan that's totally not on Mars, but 100% on Mars on Mars in the entire reason Mars exists. Just calling it out, but 1,000% there. But we're talking about what the Titan legions are. We really talk more about the Titans themselves in depth of how big they are and some of their roles in the Horace heresy. There's cities.

Yeah. It's just walking. By the way, it's, I'm just going to call it. It's a stupid concept of like, why do we put a bunch of guns on top of legs? So when I blow the leg up,

it falls over. So it's useless. Well, yeah. Certain levels of the Titan also have marketplaces and stuff. Oh, yeah, the Titans are cool as hell, but it's just like,

just get a kick out of it. Like, oh, it's a giant walking robot. What if I blow the ankle up? Shut up. All right. But until then,

John Barsotti, Bradchester. This guy. See you guys next week.