DISCLAIMER: The characters in this story are inspired by the background of the Warhammer 40,000 intellectual property that belongs to Games Workshop Ltd. This is fan fiction, and no challenge to their ownership rights is intended.

Goge Vandire is a name written in to the annals of Imperial history in blood. Often literally. No single mortal has commanded authority on the scale at which he exercised it at his height. His name is as synonymous with unspeakable evil as that of the Warmaster, Horus himself.

And yet he was just a man.

Where did such a man come from? What drove him to the steps he took to secure power to himself and, once he had it, how did he come to misuse it so grievously?

I have scoured the records - many of them once thought lost or placed under the unbreakable seal of the Inquisition - to uncover his forgotten story, piecing together his childhood, his apprenticeship, his rise to power and his descent into madness and death.

It is not the story you might expect...