As the ultimate Fabius Bile fan, I figured I'd ask you: Fabius Bile made clones of each primarch, right? What do you think he did with the clones that weren't of Fulgrim or Ferrus?
Fabius strode down the nave of monsters, his attentions drawn to the humming bio-unit which occupied the altar-point. He recognised it for what it was immediately. He’d had twenty of them constructed, according to a very specific set of criteria. One for each of the Emperor’s sons. It had taken him centuries to acquire the necessary genetic material for such an endeavour. He had consigned entire systems to the cauldron of war, just for a splash of old blood on a ragged cloth, or a bit of scrimshawed bone. ‘And I would do it again,’ he said.
- Josh Reynolds, Clonelord
He actually cloned all twenty of them. Since he worked closely with the Alpha Legion, he probably recreated Alpharius/Omegon as a single being and added the two missing Primarchs. But he ‘only’ brought three of them to maturity. First Ferrus (several times). Then Horus (who was then killed by Abaddon on Harmony). And finally Fulgrim.
He had something of a ‘primarch phase’ during which cloning them was actually a kind of hobby for him. And he also tried several times to raise Fulgrim – which the original Fulgrim, as soon as he found out, did not like at all and had stopped by his Champion in a very terminal way.
‘I knew he would send you,’ said the creator. ‘As he had before. The eager sycophant. You were always so desperate to please him.’ The child writhed beneath the warrior’s boot, but his assailant’s eyes, and the radiant sword, remained unmoving. ‘And what would that make you?’ the warrior sneered. ‘You, who ignores his law? You believe that you can defy him, time and again, and not pay the price for it?’ The warrior looked down. The child coughed, clearing enough of the amniotic fluid from his lungs to loose a cry so pure, so heart-achingly beautiful, so like that of their father,
-Ian St.Martin, Lucius – the Faultless Blade
Since Fabius knows that Primarchs are genetically programmed to seize control of their environment as soon as they grow up, he almost certainly did not allow any others to reach full maturity. He himself says that he does not yet fully understand how certain things work with Primarchs (for example, memory). He can reproduce this feature, but does not know how it originally was implemented.
‘I found it in one of the other chambers. This is the skull of a Bharghesi,’ Fulgrim said, as if dredging the word up out of some vast reservoir of memory. ‘Why do I know that word?’ ‘The Primarchs – the first Primarchs – somehow encoded their memories in their blood and marrow, like a cogitator backing up its data. A process I still do not fully understand, and have not been able to replicate with any success. That is why it was possible to recreate them – you – in full.’ He paused. ‘You know the word, because we – you and I – fought the Bharghesi, millennia ago.
- Josh Reynolds, Clonelord
With these uncertainties and risks hanging over him, he will almost certainly have left the remaining seventeen as foetuses in tanks, not letting them mature. So it is highly unlikely that there is a new Curze or an undamaged Angron running around somewhere. And no one else in the galaxy has the knowledge necessary to reproduce Fabius' work.
But who knows? Perhaps there is still a complete laboratory setup on one of the numerous bolthole planets that Fabius uses, and it could be used to allow the Primarchs to mature?
Fabius himself definitely does not want that. The man is so very much ‘No gods, no masters!’ He believes that the new humanity doesn't need some god-like rulers over them and obviously implements this independency into his New Men with a passion.
But there are enough others who desperately want a Primarch to take them by the hand again.
With Fulgrim's bloodless return in Jude Reid's boring novel, the chapter ‘Phoenician on Callax’ is closed – but if I were Eidolon, I'd rather try my luck with another clone than this watered-down version of my father that GW has unleashed on us! 😂
I love the Galaxy's most hardcore anarchist/atheist so much!!!!!!!
