Remembrancer

A Remembrancer was a civilian artist, historian or journalist who was a member of the Imperial Remembrancer Order that accompanied the Expeditionary Fleets of the Great Crusade in the early 31st Millennium.Their function was to chronicle all the glorious deeds of the Space Marine Legions and the Imperial Army in the course of the Crusade so that the future posterity of the Imperium of Man would know how humanity had come to dominate the galaxy. The Remembrancers were overwhelmingly natives of Terra who had been ordered by the Emperor to accompany the Expeditionary Fleets led by the Astartes, who very grudgingly accepted them aboard the starships of their fleets. Showing the common disdain for journalists held by warriors of every generation and era, the Remembrancers were generally disliked by the Primarchs, the Astartes and the line troops of the Imperial Army. Leman Russ, the Primarch of the Space Wolves, once suggested that all Remembrancers should be armed and prepared for battle if they wanted to see the front lines of a war. However, Fulgrim, the Primarch of the Emperor's Children Legion, took a fundamentally different view and welcomed the Remembrancers among his Astartes and troops, believing that the promotion of an artistic sense was every bit as important to the life of a warrior as was training in the arts of war. The Remembrancer Order included many different forms of artists and journalist within their ranks, including poets, imagists (photojournalists), historiographers (historians), documentarists (journalists), painters, sculptors, actors, singers and even composers. Once the Horus Heresy began, most of the civilian Remembrancers in the Expeditionary Fleets that served Horus and turned to Chaos were slaughtered by the Traitors within the fleet to keep them from documenting the betrayal. One exception to this were the Remembrancers of the 28th Expeditionary Fleet, many of whom were exposed to the Chaos corruption of the planet Laeran and subsequently turned to the service of Slaanesh themselves, just like the Emperor's Children. It is unknown what happened to the records of the Great Crusade and early Horus Heresy era created by the Remembrancer Order; such records have been lost to the threadbare Imperial chronicles that exist of that time in the late 41st Millennium.

Notable Remembrancers

 * Ignace Karkasy - poet, slain by Maggard, the mute, genetically-enhanced bodyguard of the Remembrancer Petronella Vivar aboard the Vengeful Spirit, the flagship of Horus' 63rd Expeditionary Fleet. Karkasy was not the most upstanding of men, and was known for his ascerbic nature and love of drink, but his poetry was known for always telling the truth, a trait that earned him the respect and protection of Captain Garviel Loken of the Luna Wolves, but which also ultimately cost him his life.
 * Euphrati Keeler - Imagist, escaped the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet and Horus' slaughter of all the other Remembrancers present on the Battle Barge Vengeful Spirit with Mersadie Oliton and the Iterator Kyril Sindermann aboard the Imperial frigate Eisenstein commanded by the Loyalist Death Guard Battle Captain Nathaniel Garro with the help of Luna Wolves Captain Iacton Qruze. Keeler became an avid proponent of the Lectitio Divinitatus, the forerunner to the Imperial Cult that held the Emperor of Mankind to be a God. Her faith in the Emperor would prove to be so absolute that it would provide psychic protection against the powers of daemons summoned from the Warp, and Keeler would go on to become one of the earliest saints recognised by the Imperial Creed.
 * Mersadie Oliton - Documentarist (Journalist) who served as the personal Remembrancer of the deeds of Captain Garviel Loken of the Luna Wolves.She was close friends with the poet Ignace Karkasy and the Imagist Euphrati Keeler, but Ignace and Mersadie were far more skeptical of the doctrines of the Lectitio Divinitatus than Keeler, the future saint of the Imperial Cult.