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Navar Hef was a well-known warrior and officer of the Raven Guard Legion during the early 31st Millennium. Born and raised on Deliverance, Hef had already been selected as one of the XIXth Legion’s aspirants before Corvus Corax shipped out to confront his traitorous brother, Horus Lupercal, in the distant Istvaan System. Following the terrible losses sustained in the Drop Site Massacre and the ninety-days struggle for survival of the remnants of the Raven Guards their Primarch placed high expectations in Hef and his fellow aspirants.They, and others like him were to form a new breed of Legiones Astartes, a distinct command known as the Raptor contingent. Unfortunately, unknown to the Legion's highest authorities and Apothecarion, the new improved genetic materiel that had been implanted into Hef had been tampered with by agents of the Alpha Legion, which caused Hef to suffer from severe mutations. As one of the first to suffer from this genetic deviation -- which would quickly become the hallmark of the Raptors -- Hef quickly became a figurehead for those of his brothers afflicted in the same way as he had been. This quickly led Hef to being forwarded to act as second-in-command of the entire Raptor contingent under the esteemed Commander Branne Nev.
History
Little is known about Navar Hef before his induction as one of the Legion's many aspirants, except for the fact that he was born on Deliverance, the Raven Guard's home-moon orbiting the Forge World of Kiavahr. Although the exact date remains unknown, Hef's career was bound to have begun a few short years before the dramatic events of the Dropsite Massacre, as he had not yet been granted all of the necessary augmentations to fully turn him into a Space Marine by the time the surviving Legionaries returned from Istvaan V. Having lost more than 75,000 Legionaries in the Drop Site Massacre, the XIXth Legion's might had effectively been broken. Upon leaving the black sands of Istvaan V, the Raven Guard's Primarch, Corvus Corax, had forever after, turned his gaze upon rebuilding his shattered Legion. One of his first orders was to immediately begin the implantation progress for the current generation of aspirants and turn them into fully fledged Legiones Astartes. Hef's fate however was quite different.
When Corvus Corax finally returned to Deliverance, it was not directly from Istvaan, but from sacred Terra, where he had been granted by the Emperor the keys to quickly rebuilding the Raven Guard Legion -- the genetic knowledge of the Primarch-project. Thanks to these secrets, the Raven Guard's Chief Apothecary, Vincente Sixx, and a high representative of the Mechanicum engineered an improved version of the XIXth Legion's gene-seed, one that would allow the Raven Guard to turn nearly every young male, however physically weak, into one of the Emperor's Angels of Death. Where this process had previously taken many years of surgical improvements and nearly a decade of training, this transformation would now take mere days. This could potentially change the entire balance of the conflict ahead, and Hef's brothers and himself had been selected to become the first generation of the new-founded Raptors.
In stark contrast to previous generations of Raven Guards, the foundation of the Raptors-contigent was a venture of utmost secrecy. Most notoriously the Raptors were not created within the high walls of the Ravenspire, but within the underground bunkers of the isolated Ravendelve complex, a training facility of the XIXth Legion in the inhospitable rad-wastes of Kiavahr. As the gene-seed gradually was declared safe for implementation, the first recruits became Legionaries. With only a limited amount of the improved gene-seed available, a first human test was conducted on ten randomly chosen Aspirants. Unfortunately, Hef was not to be amongst them. In every aspects, the Raptors were superior to the Legiones Astartes : several of the vital organs that had to be surgically implanted in previous generations of Space Marines would now grow naturally - the only element still needing surgery being the Black Carapace. One of the greatest benefits of the improved gene-seed was to be the accelerated growth of the subject, being able to turn an Aspirant into a Legionary in about a hundred hours Terran standard where the previous process had taken many years. Even the precious Progenoid Glands which held the Legion’s future benefitted fro this accelerated growth, but this was only of secondary importance as the Primarch-data allowed Sixx and Orlandriaz to grow progenoid glands from scratch. This would then allow for the Raven Guard to fully bypass the Raptors’ training as Scouts and directly field them as fully battle-ready Legionaries. However, all these boons came also with a price. The accelerated growth put the aspirants bodies under enormous stress - while physical weakness posed no more problem, the effects of the gene-seed and the accelerated cell-gestation emphasized naturally-present conditions and malformations. The Raven Guard lost one of its earliest Raptors to a microscopic heart defect, causing his immediate death. The surviving nine Legionaries quickly became known as the First Nine and they marked a new step in the evolution of the Legiones Astartes.
Raptor
Leader of Monsters
Sources
- Deliverance Lost (Novel) by Gav Thorpe
- Corax: Soulforge (Novella) by Gav Thorpe
- Raptor (Audio Book) by Gav Thorpe