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 journalists 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 thread-bare 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 also stood out for always telling the truth as Karkasy saw it, 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 that was commanded by the Loyalist Death Guard Battle Captain Nathaniel Garro. Keeler and the others had only escaped the Vengeful Spirit with the help of the 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. Oliton managed to escape the slaughter of the Remembrancers ordered by Horus alongside Keeler and the Iterator Kyril Sindermann with the aid of Captain Iacton Qruze and make it to the frigate Eisenstein, which escaped the slaughter of Istvaan III and made its way to Terra to warn the Emperor of Horus' betrayal.
 * Petronella Vivar - Documentarist (Jouralist) who was the arrogant scion of a Terran noble family who sought to become the Warmaster Horus' personal Remembrancer. The Vivar family was well-known on Terra as the documentarists who had chronicled the Unification Wars that had ultimately unified Terra beneath the Emperor's rule in the 29th Millennium and also for recording the deeds of the early days of the Great Crusade when the Emperor had rediscovered all his sons, the lost Primarchs. She was later killed in her own luxurious quarters aboard Horus' flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, to protect the secrets that Horus had revealed to her after his corruption by Chaos.
 * Kallista Eris - Historiographer (Historian), who was also a powerful psyker with the ability to read the memories and emotions associated with any object. Eris was also gifted with powerful precognitive visions. She was assigned to record the deeds of the Thousand Sons Legion on their homeworld of Prospero but was ultimately consumed and torn apart by the power of the Warp when the Thousand Sons used her abilities to foresee the coming assault on Prospero by the Space Wolves Legion of Leman Russ, long the bitter rival of the Thousand Sons and their Primarch Magnus the Red.
 * Ostian Delafour - Sculptor who served with the Emperor's Children Legion in the 28th Expeditionary Fleet. Delafour was a sculptor of immense renown from Terra whose sculptures were so exquisite that he had been patronised by the Emperor and soon came to the attention of the Primarch Fulgrim. Delafour ran afoul of the composer Bequa Kynska, who also accompanied the 28th Expeditionary Fleet, when he refused her attempts at seduction because of his love for the painter Serena d'Angelus, who was also a Remembrancer of the 28th Expeditionary Fleet. Kynska retaliated by preventing Delafour from traveling to the surface of the world of Laeran where he was ironically spared from being exposed to the Chaotic corruption unleashed in the rest of the Legion by their exposure to the Temple of Slaanesh in the Laer species' capital. Delafour fell from Fulgrim's favour after he critiqued Fulgrim's own attempts at the sculptor's art, finding them so perfectly flawless that they lacked the imperfections that gave great art its soul and character. As the Emperor's Children fell to the corruption of Slaanesh after conquering the Chaotic world of Laeran, Delafour remained isolated in his studio, creating an extraordinary statue of the Emperor of Mankind that was perhaps his greatest work. When Fulgrim entered the studio and saw the statue, he was deeply angered by both the greatness of Delafour's work that he could not match and by the heroic image of the Emperor he believed had betrayed him and his brothers. Fulgrim slew Delafour by driving his sword through both the statue and the sculptor's body even as he defaced the statue of the father he intended to betray.
 * Serena d'Angelus - Painter who served with the Emperor's Children Legion in the 28th Expeditionary Fleet. Serena was exposed to the Chaotic taint of Slaanesh when she visited the surface of the world of Laeran with many of her fellow Remembrancers. The Chaotic corruption took root in her and she soon began to resort to foul incidents of brutal murder so that she could produce Chaotically-tainted paintings using the blood and other bodily fluids of her victims. One of these paintings, a garish horror that was intended to be a likeness of Fulgrim, ultimately became the resting place for the Greater Daemon of Slaanesh that inhabited Fulgrim's Daemon Sword, and later for the soul of Fulgrim himself after he was tricked into allowing the daemon to possess his body. Like all those corrupted by Slaanesh, she was overcome by the need to seek constant stimulation through the pursuit of ever more extreme and perverse experiences. Yet Serena gradually fought the corruption and came to her senses by seeking out Ostian Delafour for help, with whom she had shared a romantic connection before her exposure to Slaanesh's power. Sadly, Ostian had already been murdered in his studio by the Primarch Fulgrim for creating a sculpture of the Emperor that had angered him. Overcome by her guilt and sadness at the death of the man who had loved her and tried to rescue her from the grasp of Chaos, Serena committed suicide by impaling herself on the same sword that had taken Ostian's life and was still imbedded, along with Ostian's body, in the remains of the statue of the Emperor he had so perfectly crafted.
 * Bequa Kynska - Kynska was the greatest composer and musician of Terra who accompanied the 28th Expeditionary Fleet at the request of the Primarch Fulgrim who wanted his Astartes and Imperial Army contingents to be exposed to high culture. Kynska was an extremely self-centered hedonist who enjoyed a variety of sensual perversions even before she was ultimately corrupted by Slaanesh, and her natural predilections later made her a willing servant of the Prince of Chaos. She was known for her blue hair and other outrageous cosmetic choices. Bequa sought to seduce the sculptor Ostian Delafour, but when he rejected her because of his love for the painter Serena d'Angelus, she spitefully intervened with the Emperor's Children to prevent Delafour from visiting the recently conquered xenos world of Laeran. Ironically, this malicious act spared Delafour from being corrupted by exposure to the Temple of Slaanesh in the Laer species' equivalent of a capital city. But Kynska was exposed to the Chaotic energies of Slaanesh and the corruption of the Prince of Pleasure inspired her to create what she believed to be her greatest work, a symphony called the Maraviglia. The symphony was actually a discordant acoustic work of Chaotic sorcery that when performed for the corrupted members of the 28th Expeditionary Fleet opened a portal through the Warp and allowed Slaaneshi Lesser Daemons called Daemonettes to possess several of the singers and other musicians. At the same time, it inspired scenes of mass slaughter by the corrupted Emperor's Children Astartes throughout the Remembrancers' space on Fulgrim's flagship. Kynska herself was ultimately slain by a Daemonette who had possessed the body of her lead singer during the perfomance of the Maraviglia.