Zardu Layak

Zardu Layak, better known by his epithet, the "Crimson Apostle", was the ambitious Chapter Master of the Unspeaking Chapter, of the Word Bearers Legion during the latter years of the Great Crusade and Horus Heresy era in the late 30th and early 31st Millennia. During the Battle of Calth, the "Crimson Apostle" Zardu Layak and his Ashen Circle destroyer units, were charged with enacting some of the worst civilian massacres of the opening hours of the battle. This chapter was known to have largely retreated from the planet's surface during the final hours of the war, and would go onto further infamy in the Shadow Crusade. Zardu Layak's current whereabouts are unknown.

History
Known as the "Thrice-Born," "The Binder of Souls," and "The Voice of the Unspeaking," Zardu Layak's true name is now lost, but it is recorded in his Legion's lore that he was once an officer of the Ashen Circle, a Terran by birth, and a devout destroyer of all that pertained to false superstition and errant creed. He oversaw the burning of a hundred temples and countless tomes of lies in the Emperor's service. That was until the Word Bearer's brutal censure by their ultimate master. As Lorgar led his Legion into the wilderness after their punishment on Monarchia, Layak was contrite and ashamed, soul-sick and lost, and quickly a fervent convert to Erebus' and Lorgar's new teachings in which he sought solace, but even this did not fill the terrible void within him. So it was that when he began to receive visions in which he believed his Primarch spoke to him directly, he concealed them from others for fear his shame had driven him mad. In those visions the golden-skinned apparition of Lorgar bade him to reconsider his work, not to burn the books and lore he encountered, but to read them, covet them, to search in them for the hidden truths that the Emperor had not wished his sons to know. Word upon word, rune upon rune, glyph upon glyph was a new creature born, a creature who named himself from the Book of Lorgar, using the ancient practice of Sortilege, as Zardu Layak, "Eater of Wisdom", but who came to be known more swiftly by his Legion as the "Crimson Apostle" for his fiery raiment and the scalding blood in which he daily daubed his armour.