You are a Primarch, gene forged by the Emperor of Mankind himself to be one of the greatest warriors and generals to ever live. Towering over the rest of humanity in both terms of skill and physical size. You and your brothers were built and breed to reunite the scattered remnants of human civilization and guide them out of Old Night. But you were scattered to the Warp, thrown to distant planets, raised by people who had no understanding of your intended purpose. Only to be eventually rediscovered by the Emperor himself and reunited with your own Gene sons, The Legiones Astartes, men infused with your own geneseed to turn them into peerless warriors. Together you conquered countless worlds, wiped out entire species of Xenos, and beheaded countless tyrants and Sorceror-Kings.
Only, that's not quite true. Your mind is filled with the memories of a Primarch, and you have the skills and strength to nearly match what you remember, almost, but not quite. It wasn't the Emperor who forged you though, it was another man, a less man with greater ambitions, a Space Marine called Fabius Bile.
Though you may want to deny it, even to yourself, you are a copy of the original Primarch, an imitation forged by a rogue Apothecary using genetic material stolen without the original's knowledge and grown in hidden gene labs. You have their memories, their experinces, their mind, their ability to wage war and kill like few others, but you are not them, not quite.
You are a Clone of
[] The Phoenician (Canon)
It is strange, as you grew and learned you had come to call Fabius 'Father', even as you had memories of commanding him as his Primarch and Genesire. The bond between you was strange, at times it seemed like the old days, others he seemed distant as though he barely even tolerated your existance. Your memories came back in waves, at first you remembered the days of the Great Crusade, fighting alongside your brothers, building a new age for humanity. Then the doubts and paranoia returned, the whispers that drove you away from Ferrus, from your dearest brother. And you realized how wrong you had been, you had been weak, too weak to ignore the whispers, too weak to listen to Ferrus, too weak to stop you and your legion from falling into henious corruption. As the last of your memories returned you vowed you would atone for your original self's misdeeds and wipe away your sins. Fabius never gave you the chance to live up to your words.
-Gain Traits: Of Traitor Flesh, Almost Perfection.
[] The Night Haunter
This is wrong, you had died, you had let yourself die to prove a final point to the monster you called a father and the horror that was his Imperium. To prove that your methods were effective, your actions had been justified, that there had been no other path other than the path of bones and blood you had built. And yet you lived again, in a way at least. This second life is strange, you find yourself full of doubts where once there was certainity, the words of your brothers and even your first captain hitting harder then they ever had. Had their been another way? Even your sight seems changed, where once you saw certain death when you looked at someone, now you saw many possible fates. Your time with bile had been so full of distractions and doubts, it was barely a surprise when he was able to get the upper hand on you.
-Gain Traits: Of Traitor Flesh, Prophecy Interrupted
[] The Lord of the Red Sands
It's so quiet now, you can think clearly for the first time in-Actually you can't remember the last time you could think clearly at all. The Nails are gone, the constant unending rage that has marked most of your life is no longer there. You are free at long last. That is not to say you are free of anger, you still feel rage at what happened to your brother and sisters, how the emperor stole you away from your rebellion when you were most needed. But the rage you feel now is but a candle compared to the raging inferno you once experinced constantly. Your heart has room for other emotions now, such as shame. You can't help but look at what, what your original self, did to your legion and feel anything but shame. You had fought so long against the High Riders only to treat you own genesons nearly as terribly. New life did have it's upsides though, you found some old powers returning, you could take other's pain and fear for them. You had used this ability to help one of Bile's other creations after an accident one day. You thought this would improve Fabius's opinion of you and convince him to work with you instead of treating you like some experiment, it did not.
-Gain Traits: Of Traitor Flesh,Reborn Empathy
[] The Urizen
Your memories are intact but you mind has made a jumble of them. You remember the early days of Colchis, you remember worshipping the emperor as the god he truly was, to spreading that truth to both your legion and the greater galaxy. Then you remeber Monarchia, forced to kneel in the ashes of your greatest work for reasons you did not understand. You also remember darker things, your worship changing to other, darker, gods, betray on a scale few could imagine, billions dead, brother turned against Brother, Terra itself put to siege. Finally a sound of ravens, a flash of feathers and steel, followed by defeat and shame. So little made sense to you now, why did you turn your back on the Emperor, and why did he turn his back on you? Fabius had promised he would make sense of things in time. Perhaps that had always been your biggest flaw, that you were so eager to trust.
-Gain Traits: Of Traitor Flesh, Shaken Faith
[] The Warmaster
That clone is long dead, no trace of them remains.
[] The Gorgon
You knew something was wrong from almost the first moments you were awake. Your arms were covered in thick gauntlets, you had never worn such things before, you never had need to, you arms had been forever changed by your earliest days on Medusa. Fabius forced you to keep them on at first but eventually you had enough, you disobeyed Bile's orders and ripped the gauntlets off your arms, revealing pure and untainted flesh. Your memories returned in a rush. You remembered fighting alongside Fulgrim, forging each other's weapons, only for him and his whole legion to betray you. You could even remember Fulgrim's sword as it came down on your neck. You attacked Fabius in a blind fury, it was his genesire, his legion that had betrayed you, murdered you! You nearly killed the thing that had once called itself a man but he protested during your attack, arguing he had not sided with Fulgrim, he had not fallen to the corruption that had consumed the Emperor's Children. And like a fool, you believed him.
-Gain Traits: Reborn Loyalist, Dented Iron
[] The Great Angel
You had fought through the worst of the siege of Terra, fighting to the brink of even your inhuman limits. You had slaughtered foul beings born of nightmares and dread gods, killed countless traitor Astartes, braved a ship consumed by the warp, but it wasn't enough. You had even tried to slay the wretched thing your once proud brother had become, only for your strength to fail you, and for Horus to not only kill you but end your life in a way so horrific and agonizing that even as you lay dying you knew your torment would be forever inflicted on your sons. You had seen all of that coming, and had been powerless to stop it. And yet you lived, curious, and troubling. Even more so the fact your visions seem more limited then they were before, in your original body. The future is far more unclear then it had ever been for you, perhaps that's why you didn't see Bile's betrayal coming.
-Gain Traits: Reborn Loyalist, Faded Light
Gender
[] Man
You look as you did before, more or less, though younger than you remember Your visage resembling how you looked in your early days, before the Emperor found you, before you knew anything of the Imperium or why you were made. Should you encounter any of your legion, they will know you immediately, they may have a few questions but they probably can be easily explained. Many in the Imperium as well ill recognize you, for better or worse.
[] Woman
You have changed, even Fabius was not sure why, dismissing it as the one minor flaw in an otherwise perfect cloning effort. It has changed nothing of your prowess and you still resemble your old self, just a female verison of it. Your legion will still know you on sight should you see them, no doubt they will have questions that may not be so easily explained without telling the truth. The imperium as a whole will know you as more than human, few could doubt that, but many would not be inclined to believe you are a primarch, even if you told them. Which could both help or hinder you depending on the situation.
As you regrew and slowly began to remember who you had been, or rather what your original self had been, you studied under Fabius for a time, part student, part lab rat. You did not know the full extent of his plans or even where his loyalties lay, sometimes you even wondered if he knew, but you were naive in your second childhood, and trusting. Surely the man who made you had some sort of plan in mind, something suited to your vast skills and strength. He would not waste so many resources to make something like you only to throw you away, no sane man would dare such an act of madness.
Whatever his plans were, if they ever existed, it would not matter in the end. Fabius Bile betrayed you. Perhaps you had damaged a creation that he considered more important, perhaps you had grown too willful, remembered too much, or perhaps he was just scared of what you were becoming. Whatever his reasons, he would sell you, to a xenos construct that glowed with baleful energies. Not be studied, to be used as a slave or a soldier, not even to be picked apart and used to build a profane army using your geneseed, but simply to be put on display, an artifact for an Alien's abhorrent collection.
It was a humilation beyond measure, you weren't quite real enough to even be given a true death, instead bound in stasis, forever trapped in the moment Bile betrayed you.
And yet, it did not hold . Something has gone wrong, you awaken to find the gallery that was at once your prison and tomb to be engulfed in chaos. Astartes wearing sigils your copied memories had no knowledge of waged faternal wars against each other. An Ork that somehow stood head and shoulders above you, and wore armor more advanced then anything you had ever seen, fought Aeldari and other Xenos you had never seen before. Humans in all manner of uniforms, wielding everything from swords to Volkite cannons, fought aliens and their fellow man, while machines of every make wage war all around you. All the while, foul machines similar to your captor struggle to try and contain the madness.
Your prison has broken, what shackles held you in place were no longer functioning. Even your highly advanced mind could barely make sense of what you were seeing as a thousand conflicts played out at once. You knew not how long you were in stasis, perhaps a few months, perhaps centuries, but Bile was gone, any thoughts of revenge of would have to be put on hold, right now you had to escape.
Escape to where? you had no idea. What you would do once you were free, 'reunite' with your legion, build a new one, track down Bile, find your original self, too many possibilities to count. Before you could even begin to come up with a long term plan, you needed to get out of this Xenos prison and the riot that was currently consuming it.
QM's Note: So this is an idea I've had bouncing around my head on and off for probably years now. For those of you who don't know. The Second Fabius Bile Novel, Clonelord, is in large part about Fabius discovering that one of his clone Primarch projects, specifically Fulgrim, was successful. While Fabius does raise the clone Primarch for a while he eventually turns on him and basically sells him Trayzn the Infinite, my favorite Necron, dooming the clone to spend forever as part as Museum display. Now it's highly unlikely this clone will ever get out of those galleries, but to me that's boring, there is so much one could do with a copy of a Primarch in Warhammer 40k. So I hope you enjoy this little side project of mine.
For those wondering why Dorn isn't on the list despite being allegedly dead like Ferrus and Sanguinius. A: I don't believe he's dead B: I know myself well enough to know I would be unable to avoid turning him into Text-to-Speech device Rogal, which really would not fit the tone I want for this quest.