Lion El Johnson

He thought for two seconds

The noble Lion El'Johnson stands imposingly in heavy armor of ebony and silver, ornamented with golden filigree that forms double-headed eagles and sacred skulls, symbols of his august chapter. His long, slightly wavy blond hair falls over his shoulders, framing a face with firm features: square jaw, resolute lips and a perfectly trimmed mustache and goatee, both golden as the brightest day.

His eyes, an almost translucent glacial blue, radiate unshakable determination, as if simultaneously peering into a past of horrors and a future of glory. On his forehead, soft creases denote years of battle and command, giving him an air of wisdom tempered by steel.

Above his flowing cloak—emerald green with a pristine white lining—hang chains and medallions that tell of legendary exploits, while a seven-pointed star emblem, embedded in his ornate leather belt, shines against the black of his doublet. On his left arm rests a wing-shaped lightning shield adorned with a lion in relief; in his right he wields a longsword with an ethereal blade, the hilt bearing a golden crux terminatus, a promise of ruthless justice to those who oppose the Emperor.

Behind his shoulders, a bronze halo, reminiscent of an altar sun, encircles his helmet when it is placed on, suggesting martial sanctity. Even in repose, Lion El'Johnson embodies the perfect union between divine knight and supreme warrior, a perennial symbol of courage, honor and unwavering leadership.

Lion El'Jonson, often times referred to as "the Lion" during his lifetime, known also by the cognomen "The First," and the honorific "Primaris Angelus Mortis," was the primarch of the Ist Legion of Space Marines, the Dark Angels.

Following the events of the Horus Heresy, El'Jonson and his crusading fleet returned to his homeworld of Caliban. Inexplicably, they were fired upon by the Dark Angel forces garrisoned there under the command of his once-trusted mentor and surrogate father, Luther, who had been entrusted with the custodianship of Caliban in the Lion's absence.

Luther would eventually betray the Lion after allowing himself to be seduced by the offers of Chaos, rallying a good portion of the Dark Angels who had been left behind by their fellows to garrison the Legion's homeworld to his cause and attacking the Lion's fleet as he returned to Caliban.

The titanic struggle between the two former friends resulted in the destruction of Caliban and the loss of the Dark Angels' primarch, as well as the escape of Luther's allies who had sided with the Ruinous Powers. Known as the Fallen Angels amongst their former battle-brothers of the Ist Legion, it became the overriding goal of the Dark Angels and all of their Successor Chapters (collectively known as the Unforgiven) after the Second Founding to hunt down every one of the Fallen and get them to repent their betrayal of the Emperor and the Lion.

Perhaps one of the greatest secrets of the Imperium of Man, known only to the Emperor Himself, was that the Lion was still alive and resting in stasis, buried deep within the Dark Angels' mobile fortress-monastery, The Rock.

There he waited, fully healed from the wounds he received during the fall of Caliban, to be awakened to lead the Dark Angels in one final crusade to save Mankind from all the enemies who threaten him with extinction.

And in the Era Indomitus, during the Arks of Omen Campaign, that day came at last. The Lion now roams the galaxy once more...

Of all the primarchs, save perhaps Mortarion, Lion El'Jonson stands apart. Partially this is due to his taciturn nature -- a brooding silence hangs over him at all times. Yet there is something more...something buried beneath his noble exterior. Perhaps this is a result of his upbringing, growing to maturity alone in the monster-ridden forests of Caliban. Even at a council of war, the Lion moves like an apex predator. He is always watching, always planning, always hunting. He unnerves even his brothers. As with much knowledge regarding the Ist Legion and its master, there was a vast body of rumor and little fact regarding the earliest years of the Primarch Lion El'Jonson.

Before the start of the Great Crusade, the gestation pod containing the infant primarch that had been mysteriously teleported through the Warp from the Emperor's subterranean gene-laboratory beneath the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains landed on the feudal Death World of Caliban in what would become the Segmentum Obscurus.

Caliban was a planet whose surface was largely covered by immense forests inhabited by terrible, monstrous beasts mutated by the touch of Chaos in the centuries after the birth of the Chaos God Slaanesh due to the planet's proximity to the nearby Eye of Terror. El'Jonson managed to survive in the forests alone, living as a wild man far from civilization. Caliban was home to many knightly orders of warrior-aristocrats created to defend their people and the massive fortress-monasteries they lived within to defend themselves from the Great Beasts. These knights maintained a few aspects of Caliban's ancient technology from before the Age of Strife and wielded primitive Bolt Pistols and wore suits of simple power armor, very similar to that later used by the Legiones Astartes, which were handed down from knight to knight

Despite these technological trappings, however, Caliban remained very much a pre-industrial society whose warriors rode to war on horseback. One of the most prominent knightly organizations was known simply as "The Order," and was made up of commoners and nobles alike, whereas the other knightly orders were drawn by tradition only from the Calibanite nobility.

Over 150 Terran years later, the young Lion would be discovered by a hunting party of the knights of The Order in the depths of Caliban's forests. Within these forests dwelt a breed of creature now unknown in the galaxy, monstrous chimaeric weapons left over from the Age of Strife, driven by a hunger that could not be slaked and fully capable of rendering an armored warrior into a ruin of blood and flesh in seconds.

How long the young primarch had survived alone in the green depths cannot be known for certain, for the Lion himself rarely spoke of those times. The knights that found him assumed from his stature and bearing that he could not have spent more than a solar decade alone, but the growth and development of the primarchs does not follow the pattern of mortal Humans, and they do not age as of those untouched by the Emperor's genius The span of standard years in which the Lion prowled Caliban's sea of ​​trees may well have been far longer than can be easily understood. Indeed, the legends of those fortified towns that bordered the stretch of forest where the primarch was discovered spoke of a forest spirit that haunted the depths, a spirit of small stature but whose form was that of a man who was known only by the mysterious marks he left in his wake and had existed for nearly a standard century before the discovery of El'Jonson.

Regardless of whether the Lion had stalked the world-forest of Caliban for a Terran decade or a century, that time had left its mark upon him.

The lightless depths beneath the forest canopy teemed with horrors, rapacious killers that often emerged from the depths to hunt among the towns and villages of Caliban's slowly-dwindling Human population. There, amongst the most foul monstrosities imaginable, the Lion spent his childhood.

He learned to keep silent, less he granted advantage to those who stalked him, he learned to fight only when he could win, less he was wounded too seriously to survive, and he learned that once battle was joined it could end only in death, that the strong would survive and the weak would fall. He fought for his life with nothing but his bare hands and a determination so inhumanly strong that it served him better than any iron-forged blade.

The Lion was no feral berserker, but rather a calculating hunter ruled by logic and not simple rage. When he was discovered at last by the knights of Caliban, he was judged so dangerous that it might be best to have him slain, treated as one of the Great Beasts of the forest, so akin to them was he. It was the judgment of one man that would see him brought into the realm of Mankind and away from that of beasts, and that man was named Luther. Caliban was a dying world, its people besieged by the Great Beasts that thronged in the hidden depths of the forest and slowly driven to extinction. The Order, which built and manned the great fortresses at the borders of the wild, had vainly tried to stem the tide but had succeeded only in slowing the pace of their people's destruction, for they were too few to do more than defend their fastnesses from the constant assaults.

El'Jonson was taken to The Order's chief fortress-monastery of Aldurukh and taught Human ways. The Lion learned to speak incredibly quickly and soon mastered all of the necessary aspects of Calibanite culture faster than anyone, including Luther, his mentor, foster father and best friend, believed possible.

Before long, El'Jonson had become a fierce warrior in The Order's ranks

though of his years living alone in Caliban's forests, he said nothing, then or later. With Luther at his side, El'Jonson ultimately rose into the highest ranks of The Order.

At the height of his reputation, El'Jonson made clear his extraordinary ambition: he called for a grand crusade to exterminate the Great Beasts of Caliban so that the people of his world could finally know peace and live free from fear.

This was received with great enthusiasm by the other members of The Order and even the other knightly orders, but it proved to be a time-consuming process that took nearly a solar decade of constant warfare against the terrible dangers of the deep forests. El'Jonson would quickly prove not only a superlative warrior and strategist, but also a leader whose quiet confidence and iron will draw recruits to The Order in numbers never before seen. With each victory against the Great Beasts of the forest, each fell head planted upon the walls of The Order's fortresses, more warriors took up arms with hope in more than simple survival.

Lion El'Jonson stood at the forefront of this new crusade, not by choice, for he had ever been taciturn and prone to seek solitude, but by action, always to be found at the fore of any battle and unafraid to speak his mind or act when others might hesitate. By his order the old traditions that allowed only the nobility to fight among the knightly orders of Caliban were dropped, swelling The Order's ranks further at the cost of some dissent within the ranks of the more traditional knights.

Any Calibanite knightly order that did not follow El'Jonson's lead, such as the Knights of Lupus of the northern forests which feared like many that the destruction of the Great Beasts would up-end Caliban's traditional social order, was destroyed to the last man.

Within the space of a solar decade, The Order's ranks had grown to the point that they were able to take the war for their survival ever-deeper into the world-forest itself. With Lion El'Jonson and Luther at their head, they unleashed their crusade to rid Caliban of his curse, bringing flame and steel to the lair of the monsters that had hunted them for generations beyond count.

The war was long and bloody, with hundreds slain for each monstrous nest put to the torch, and many grew weary of the slaughter -- all save the grim knight, El'Jonson. The Lion knew that mercy had no place in war, to leave with their task unfinished and with any of the foe still alive would be to waste all of the lives spent in its pursuit. There could be only one end and that was the total annihilation of the enemy by whatever means was needed.

El'Jonson set the knights to ambush the Great Beasts as they came to feed, poisoned the pools at which the creatures drank and set ablaze vast tracts of the forest to set them to flight. He gave the foe no respite and hunted them until no more could be found, and when his warriors spoke of his prowess and victories, he was afraid that colored their words as much as awe. Some of Caliban's aristocracy, following in the wake of the Knights of Lupus, feared his new methods and determination enough to declare open rebellion, some fearing the changes he had wrought upon the tradition-bound people of Caliban and others simply seeking to claim the power Lion El'Jonson had come to wield. These traitors to the cause of Caliban's salvation were put down without mercy, the ranks of their knights and soldiers blamed in their entirety and their fastnesses became down as a warning to others.

At the end of the crusade against the Great Beasts, with both the Lion and Luther exhausted by the terrible cost the fighting had exacted, it was El'Jonson who received the battle honors and the title of Grand Master of The Order. He accepted the accommodation without fanfare, for

Had the Emperor not arrived shortly after this victory, descending from the heavens to claim His lost son, then perhaps this wound might have healed in Caliban's new peace, but this was not to be. The Emperor came to heap new glories upon the Lion, granting him command of the Ist Legion, whom He renamed the "Dark Angels" after an ancient Calibanite myth that spoke to their grim mien, and making him a general within the vast Imperial army that sought to conquer the galaxy.

Lion El'Jonson would soon leave for distant Terra and his new destiny, bringing his uncompromising and remorseless style of warfare to the ranks of the Imperial forces. To him would fall the role of watchman at the edge of the Emperor's domain, the bane of monsters and beasts and the bearer of weapons too terrible to entrust to any other.

He would be the cold and inevitable destroyer, the doom that once unleashed could not be recalled, subverted or delayed; taught by the black depths of the forest of Caliban the value of cold, ruthless tenacity. Lion El'Jonson was the first of all the primarchs, war distilled into its rawest and most fundamental essence, death that walked like a man, and the galaxy would be forever changed by his return.

Of course! Below is a detailed summary of the career of Lion El'Jonson, Primarch of the Dark Angels, excluding his childhood:

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🛡️ The Great Crusade

After being discovered by the Emperor on Caliban, Lion El'Jonson assumed command of the 1st Space Marine Legion, which he renamed the Dark Angels. During the Great Crusade, he distinguished himself in notable campaigns such as the Molech Conformity, demonstrating his strategic skill and military leadership. Despite his competence, his reserved and introspective nature prevented him from being considered for the title of Warmaster, which was eventually granted to Horus.

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⚔️ The Horus Heresy

During the Horus Heresy, Lion led the Dark Angels in the Thramas Crusade against the Night Lords, temporarily capturing the traitor Konrad Curze. He later collaborated with Roboute Guilliman and Sanguinius in administering the Imperium Secundus, an attempt to maintain the cohesion of the Empire during the conflict.

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💔 The Fall of Caliban

Upon returning to Caliban after the Heresy, Lion El'Jonson faced a betrayal led by his former ally Luther, who had been corrupted by Chaos. During the confrontation, Caliban was ravaged by Warp storms, and Lion disappeared, presumed dead. In reality, he was placed in stasis deep within The Rock, the Dark Angels' fortress-monastery, where he remained for millennia.

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🌌 The Return of the Lion

In the 41st millennium, Lion El'Jonson awoke in Mirror-Caliban, a mysterious realm. There, he developed the ability to "Forestwalk", allowing him to travel between worlds. Gathering a group of loyalists known as "The Risen", Lion fought against the threats of Chaos and sought to redeem the "Fallen Angels", corrupted ancient Dark Angels.

Lion El'Jonson, Primarch of the Dark Angels, is a complex figure whose personality is shaped by his solitary origins and his experiences on Caliban. Below, I detail the main aspects of his personality:

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🧠 Strategic and Determined

El'Jonson is renowned for his strategic genius and exceptional martial skills, rivaling Horus in this regard. His unwavering determination and absolute focus on his goals make him an effective, if often inflexible, leader.

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🧊 Reserved and Suspicious

His reserved nature and tendency towards isolation make him an enigmatic figure. He is described as taciturn and prone to seeking solitude, which contributes to his reputation for being socially inept and suspicious. ([Reddit][1])

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⚖️ Honorable and Relentless

Despite his rigidity, El'Jonson possesses a strong sense of honor and duty. During the crusade against Caliban's Great Beasts, he demonstrated compassion by abolishing elitist traditions and allowing commoners to join the fight. However, his ruthless approach to warfare, using tactics such as poisoning water sources and setting forest fires, demonstrates his willingness to take extreme measures to achieve victory. ([Warhammer 40k Wiki][2])

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🧩 Emotional Complexity

El'Jonson is a mixture of virtues and flaws. He is described as an honorable and courageous warrior, but also as self-absorbed, envious, and spiteful. ([1d6chan][3])

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🧙‍♂️ Mystic and Visionary

Upon his return in the 41st Millennium, El'Jonson developed the ability to "Forestwalk", allowing him to travel between worlds via Mirror-Caliban. This connection to the mystical realm reflects a more introspective and spiritual side of the Primarch, contrasting with his previous image as a ruthless warrior.

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In short, Lion El'Jonson is a formidable leader whose personality is marked by a combination of strategic genius, uncompromising honor

The primarchs were the 20 genetically-engineered transhuman "sons" of the Emperor of Mankind created in the late 30th Millennium. They were intended to be the immortal and superhuman generals and proconsuls who would command the Emperor's Great Crusade to reunite the scattered Human race beneath His leadership. Their genomes later served as the genetic templates from which the Emperor crafted His 20 Space Marine Legions.

The primarchs were bred to be perfect generals, warriors and statesmen; larger, stronger, faster, and smarter than any normal Human could ever hope to be. They possessed a potent charisma and martial prowess that made them like the mythical gods of old, untouchable by disease, old age or supposedly the petty failings of lesser men.

Each embodied an aspect of war; one was the greatest strategist ever known, another the personification of the terror of war, a third the master of psychic powers, a fourth the greatest practitioner of the arts of fortification, and so on. The primarchs were the Emperor's answer to reclaiming all the lost worlds of Mankind, and welcoming them into His new Imperium The Emperor intended to raise His sons to be the best military commanders and political leaders in Human history. They would bring the Imperial Truth to the rest of the Human-settled galaxy in their father's name, serving as His generals and proconsuls.

But the Chaos Gods intervened to foil their great adversary's plans and the primarchs were sprited away through the Warp to other Human-settled planets of the galaxy. Deprived of the Emperor's care and guidance, each developed a personality uniquely shaped -- and sometimes damaged -- by the difficult circumstances of their homeworlds.

Yet for all their gifts, the primarchs were still only men, and in the end their all-too-Human flaws would become the primary obstacle to the realisation of the Emperor's great dream for Mankind.