Amihan Chainbreaker and the Chainbreakers
By author Metempsychosis
The Twenty-Third Primarch: Amihan Chainbreaker
Name:
Amihan Chainbreaker. This mysterious figure is known to the galaxy by a multitude of sobriquets and titles: Ulilang Kaluluwa ("the Orphaned Spirit"), the Lady of the Mountains, the Bane of Kings, and She With A Thousand Faces. Once called "the Brown Devil" by the Silver King of Auriga, but that was long ago.
Appearance:
In her 'real' and 'default' form, she is brown-skinned, dark-haired, grey-eyed, with the tall stature of her siblings. She is one of the Imperium's greatest beauties, a striking figure with her shapely proportions and relatively light air compared to her siblings. On formal occasions and times she goes undercover, she enjoys fine dress and civilian attire. But ultimately she is more comfortable, or is at least more often seen, in either the uniform of a guerrilla or Power Armour.
Still, she is a master of disguise owing to her background. Using her psychic powers, she can and does take on a plethora of other faces.
Talents and Personality:
"There can be no tyrants where there are no slaves."
—Amihan Chainbreaker
Aggressively cheerful, aggressively freedom- and justice-loving, and preternaturally charismatic, Amihan does her duty but tends towards at least learning the reasoning for most of the orders given to her. She is something of a philosopher, and butts heads at times with her 'father' and siblings on many issues. Still, despite her charisma, she knows how to keep secrets.
Her greatest strengths are in subversion, guerrilla warfare, and gathering support for a cause. A short speech is usually enough to get people on board with whatever she is planning. Unfortunately, as good as she is at winning people over and winning wars against cruel tyrants, she is less good at actually settling down and running the states she establishes—accidentally leaving a trail of feudal princedoms where she intended to establish more democratic worlds. Still, she is skilled at breaking rebels, for she knows the practice and theory of rebellion quite intimately. The Merdekan Free State, built upon the ruins of the Aurigan kingdom and other polities in her region of space, is one of her few successes in state-building, mostly because she is often forced to leave it to her more administratively inclined civilian subordinates. Thankfully, she does have something of an eye for competence and delegation, and when she does need to cut out dead wood and uproot stubborn bureaucrats with feudal ambitions, she is usually able to find competent replacements whom she can trust.
She is quite able to turn almost certain defeats into crushing victories. Furthermore, unlike most who do this, she usually knows how to use such victories to her advantage. Despite herself, she is a strategic and tactical mind, built for war, and knowing this, she has eventually learnt over the course of her wars to leave peace to those who know it well while she serves the cause of mankind.
Homeworld:
Since her wars against Auriga, the Merdeka system remains a beautiful, peaceful, and prosperous ocean world. It now stands as the heart of the Chainbreaker Legion's fortresses and the capital of the Merdekan Sector, formerly the Merdekan Free State. This republican sector of the Imperium answers in theory and usually in practice to a civilian government, but more often than not its leaders defer to the will of its superhumanly charismatic Primarch and her subordinates.
Psychic potential:
Among her siblings, Amihan has somewhat higher than average psychic skills which are usually focused on augmenting her already formidable charm. With her telepathy and divination, she can choose to take on almost any face.
Background:
"The tyranny of some is possible only through the cowardice of others."
—Amihan Chainbreaker
Merdeka was a Paradise World, a summery and self-sufficient planet spinning around a young and Sunlike star, home to a number of cultures that interacted relatively peacefully with one another. It was a relatively peaceful oasis in the midst of a chaotic patch of space where interstellar polities vied for supremacy. So it was inevitable that it would be seized by one of these interstellar polities.
The kingdom of Auriga was a minor interstellar polity, quite feudal and brutal in its history and culture, ruled by a Silver Lineage of Kings, vying for power against other kingdoms in this region of space. Auriga tended towards the usual xenophobia and hatred for psykers. In the course of its wars, it colonised the minor world of Merdeka and molded its local industries to serve the kingdom.
Thus for decades did the Merdekans languish under Aurigan subjugation, forced to pay tithes of blood and resources to its lords and churches, forced to vacate ancestral lands for Auriga's lords to build summer homes on the Paradise World, and forced to see their families slaughtered should they dissent.
Such was the state of Merdeka when Amihan's pod landed on one of Merdeka's larger islands during one of the megastorms that the planet experiences at times. She was adopted by a somewhat well-off native family, one of many quiet dissenters against Aurigan rule. Although she was given an Aurigan name, her parents gave her the Merdekan name that she would be known by: Amihan, for the fierce north wind. She had a happy enough childhood, one of relative comfort as middle-class shopkeepers, though she and her family chafed under Aurigan rule. She mastered the tongues of Auriga and the many dialects of Merdeka quickly, and followed the route of dissent that her parents tread, writing treatises on reform and political theory and biting satires against Aurigan tyranny while gathering a growing movement against foreign rule. Growing unnaturally fast led to the other shoe dropping for her, as she began making trouble for Aurigan authorities and assembling the foundation for an interstellar insurgency.
When her father was arrested and executed by the Aurigan authorities alongside a number of Merdekan dissenters, that was the final straw for her. For now left alone and isolated, their support system cut off by the intimidation of the colonial authorities, her family was forced to move to the mountains, and there she hid her mother and siblings while she began a revolution.
"Slavery is the daughter of darkness: an ignorant people is a blind instrument of its own destruction."
—Chief Librarian Marina
As the Lady of the Mountains, and wearing a thousand faces, Amihan built and led a small but growing network of saboteurs and insurgents. She used this to slowly but surely subvert the whole planet to her cause, uniting them in hatred of the Aurigans. Eventually, with a mix of Aurigan war-weariness and her own charisma, she spread her network offworld to other systems, causing the collapse of the Aurigan kingdom and the rise of the Merdekan Free State, which—high on the fervour of triumph and revolutionary ideals—tried to spread those ideals to other worlds.
Of course, then came the growing pains of the Free State, because Amihan, for all her high ideals and skill at masterminding and leading an interstellar revolution, was not an administrator. Factions formed against her leadership, and as she purged the more restive elements of the revolution she had begun, she wondered at times whether this whole enterprise was worth it. Then she looked at what she had built, the people she had freed, and she was content.
Still, the Emperor's coming to this region of space was something of a blessing, as Amihan's revolution had begun to fracture, and the Aurigans had begun to rise up against her heavy-handed rule. Despite this, Amihan was reluctant to cede control to her supposed sire, until he revealed to her his plans and vision for the galaxy to be. Since then, even with all the doubts then and since, she has served as one of his loyal daughters, a knife in the dark to strike at the heart of a thousand worlds, a hammer to break the chains of a galaxy full of tyrants.
The XXIII Legion: the Chainbreakers
Name:
Before the Legion was reunited with its Terran counterpart, it was a scattered bunch of cells with many names. After the Emperor came and revealed himself to Amihan and her league of revolutionaries, they took one of her names for the whole Legion, becoming the Chainbreakers.
Insignia and Appearance:
A broken chain is their sigil, and turquoise their Power Armour when they are not on the field of battle. When they are, the said Power Armour is painted in more practical colours.
Gene-seed Status:
Relatively stable and takes relatively easily to most, with a genetic anomaly that allows average Space Marines of the XXIII Legion to temporarily disguise themselves as ordinary humans. This is not as strong as Amihan's own far more formidable shapeshifting talent, whereby she can take upon virtually any form she pleases; but it is surely necessary to the revolutionary style of warfare that the Legion practises.
Legionary Assets:
The Chainbreakers number approximately 200,000 to 250,000 Space Marines, usually on the lower end of that number, most of whom have been recruited from Merdeka and surrounding worlds. Of course, that count does not include the vast number of auxiliaries and intelligence networks who work alongside them.
The Gloriana-class battleship Liberty is the flagship of the Legion, but her overwhelming firepower is not often used. The tactics of the Legion clash with the usual tools of such a starship.
Legion Organisation:
The XXIII Legion is very fluid. It is structured less like a Legion and more like a terrorist network, or an agency of spies, than most Legions. Only the high command, composed of Amihan and her direct subordinates, have full control of the entire Legion. Otherwise, each cell of a dozen Space Marines operates nearly independently, unless called to assemble under a single muster by the Primarch or her Legion's high command. More often, the mid-tier captains of the Legion gather various local cells under fluidly structured companies to fight in a sector.
Expertise and Combat Doctrine:
Subversion and guerrilla warfare is the traditional modus operandi of the Chainbreakers in combat. Cooperation with auxiliaries and civilians is paramount to their style of warfare. Overwhelming firepower and direct action are done as either a last resort or when victory is all but assured. Thus the Legion has generally been used against other human states, or at least states inhabited partially by humans.
Legion Weaknesses:
For all its idealism and skill at subversion, the Legion is prone to fragmentation, usually on doctrine but more often simply due to its inherently fluid structure. Cliques and factions emerge often among the ranks of the Chainbreakers—cliques and factions which the high command is sometimes forced to suppress.
In addition, the Legion's structure makes direct mass actions a difficult proposition and large-scale battles a hassle to manage, for their strengths are geared towards guerrilla warfare, ambushes, and small-scale combat.
Beliefs and Practices:
"When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon."
—Amihan Chainbreaker
The XXIII has ever been a more independent-thinking and democratic Legion than most of its peers, though always deferring to the will of its Primarch, whom the Legion reveres as a sign of human potential. Still, there are ideological threads that keep the Legion together as one under the Primarch.
One of those ideological threads is, as said before, the belief in human progress and potential, embodied by their Primarch and her father the Emperor, whom they accordingly follow. Another is the fierce belief in the injustice of tyranny and artificial hierarchies as embodied by the Aurigan tyranny. The seeming contradiction in these two ideas is a complicated one, and has led to disagreements among different factions of the Legion, disagreements which are allowed and encouraged by the Primarch. What all can agree on, however, is a belief in the inborn dignity of all thinking beings, or at least a respect for their intelligence and creativity.
As a matter of principle and against the Aurigan enforcement of its church, Amihan had allowed, practically mandated, freedom of belief during her revolution, which continued through all her campaigns. The XXIII is thus generally ambivalent on the Imperial Truth, with some rejecting it and keeping to the old ways of Merdeka, some inspired to follow the rejection of religion, and most just superficially holding to it while still clinging to certain superstitions and spiritual disciplines. Amihan herself is of the last persuasion.
On psykers, the Legion has been accepting of them compared to most, a legacy of Auriga's anti-psyker oppression. Amihan upholds the idea of the inborn dignity of all people, and this extends quite far, including abhumans, with whom the Chainbreakers uphold ties of human kinship, however distant.
On xenos, the Chainbreakers are ambivalent, though philosophically they hold to upholding what dignity other species had. Since the Emperor came, the Legion has remained ambivalent on interactions with xenos, though they take a somewhat more wary stance with them than Amihan's followers prior to the Emperor's arrival.
Recruitment and Discipline:
The worlds of the Merdekan Free State are the usual recruiting grounds of the Chainbreakers, but as the Great Crusade wore on, the Legion has begun recruiting from the other worlds it 'liberated', training their daughters in the ways of sabotage and subversion, propaganda and guerrilla warfare.
Characters of Interest:
Chief Librarian Marina, Equerry to the Primarch—Amihan's right-hand woman and chief bureaucrat, Lady Marina is known for being the greatest among the rarities of the Legion: a talented civil administrator. Thus the Primarch relies on her to establish civil administrations that work on the worlds that the Legion pacifies. A woman with a strong belief in the principles of her Primarch, Marina holds to the ideological tenets of her Legion to the point of holding to the same spiritual disciplines. Marina's temperament is somewhat more cynical than her Primarch's, having a sense for factional politics. She also covers her Primarch's other weaknesses, establishing stable political systems loyal to the Imperium (usually by looking for and purging the most restive of the factions subverted to the Imperial cause) in the aftermath of XXIII Legion operations.
Chief Apothecary Emilia—Amihan's chief scientist, Emilia of Cathica was a comrade-in-arms in the revolution against Auriga, a talented scientist, and leader of a more radical faction of the revolution, though not herself a native Merdekan. Though holding sympathies with Amihan's beliefs and loyal to the Primarch, Emilia had a more humanist-utopian attitude and wanted to go further. With the Emperor's coming, Emilia saw a model to aspire towards, and she wholeheartedly embraced the humanist and utopian goals of the Imperial Truth. Emilia was thus an enthusiastic volunteer to form and head the Legion's Apothecarion.
First Spear Radha 'Redhand'—A recruit from the Agri-World of Prasad, Radha is one of the major military minds of the Legion, second only to her Primarch. She has brought the 'peaceful annexation' of more than a few worlds and the 'revolutionary uprisings' of many more. Radha is also a strong psyker with a mystic bent, one of the more spiritual Space Marines among the Legion. She has clashed more than once with her superiors, especially the Chief Apothecary, but she has remained one of the most effective leaders on the field and is thus allowed to continue as she does.
Zenobia the Firebird, Legion Master Emeritus—The Yndonesic-descended Terran-born Legion Master of the XXIII before the discovery of her Primarch, Amihan, in the Auriga system, is a relatively humble woman who has always known herself to be a placeholder. Despite this, Zenobia has an eye for merit and loyalty. Even after passing the torch to Amihan, she is still consulted by her Primarch regarding bringing promotions and bringing people into the inner circle of the Legion.
Like her Primarch, Zenobia is a skilled spy, saboteur, propagandist, and guerrilla, as well as a master of psychological warfare. She is a veteran of a number of successful campaigns against xenos and human polities alike, and she has been an eager teacher and student to her Primarch, contributing much to the Black Book in terms of strategy and tactics. Like Amihan's right-hand Marina, she is a competent administrator and a trusted comrade of the Primarch.
Battle-cry:
"BREAK THE CHAINS!"
"NO TYRANTS, NO SLAVES!"
Legionary History:
When Amihan was discovered in Aurigan space, the unnamed XXIII Legion had existed for over a century, and its Legion Master Zenobia had led it to some victories. In truth, Zenobia and her lieutenants had evolved in roughly the same direction as the Primarch who would come to lead them: as the Great Crusade pushed forth from Terra, the Legion moved from the standard mold into a less centralised network of spies, saboteurs, and subversives who tore other polities apart from the inside, unravelling the fabric of their societies to make them easy prey for the Imperium.
Considering the subversive strategies of Amihan's guerrillas and the revolution-minded bent of her mind in general, the Chainbreaker took to her Legion like a fish to water, finally giving them a name with the epithet she had taken, and giving them a renewed sense of purpose. As Amihan's younger comrades were inducted into the ranks of the Astartes, and as Zenobia and her Primarch built up a rapport to reorganise the Legion, the newly christened Chainbreakers were led to their first truly notable victories. (Zenobia had led the Legion to a number of small victories before this, but the secretive nature of their subversions and the Compliances which they had led had lessened the Legion's prominence compared to other Legions.)
—The Liberation of Prasad
Among the first campaigns fought by the Legion under Amihan was the campaign against the Surya Princely Federation, a sizable feudal confederation united by a strict caste system and other religious ordinances established by the exalted priest-scientists of this polity, who themselves maintained a monopoly on the maintenance of the Federation's high technology while leaving the slave populations of Agri-Worlds such as Prasad in extreme poverty. The Suryans themselves were an expanding power at the time, and were thus increasingly tense as the warrior nobles and agri-worker slaves alike questioned the technological hegemony of the priests. This first campaign was thus well-suited to the skills and tactics of Amihan and her daughters, who with quiet cunning caused uprisings among the lower castes and caused labyrinthine intrigues among the higher castes. Prasad was among the first systems to fall and its revolutionary government the first to welcome the Imperium with open arms.
—The Aludra Campaigns
The Vicariate of Aludra was at its start a small polity compared to what Amihan and her daughters, yet it was an expanding power: the Empty Throne Cult that was at its centre was led by a core of true zealots from harsh desert worlds, missionaries and warriors both, their hearts on fire to wage their holy war across the galaxy in the name of their Nameless God. And they were not mere unthinking fanatics: the elaborate core mythology of the Empty Throne and the Voidborn tribes who adhered to the ways of the Nameless God formed a voluminous theology and scholarship. In the generation between the time of their discovery to the first skirmishes with the Vicariate, the Aludran state (already a formidable polity of many systems) had quadrupled in size and was looking to quadruple once again within the next generation, which (considering the strength of their ideology and the zeal of their missionaries) they well could have, were it not for the Chainbreakers.
Looking to their network of informants and analysing this ascendant religion's ideology, the Legion saw the divisions within the heart of the Cult and across the increasingly diverse empire it ruled. Encouraging ethnic revolts and planting religious schisms among the Empty Throne was a relatively simple task for Amihan and her daughters, though an unease came to the Twenty-Third Primarch as she looked through the libraries of the Vicariate and sought to sift through the dross and collect what scraps she could.
—The Vermillion Bird Campaigns
Among the larger and more vicious campaigns of the Chainbreakers took place around the same time as the Emperor's war with the Helestine Imperium: the Celestial Realm of the Vermillion Bird was a vast and wealthy polity, and the core worlds of this centralised empire showed it, between the continent-spanning paradise gardens of the palace worlds such as Lok-yong, the vast fleets and fortress-stations of its military, and the massive planet-spanning administrative centres in systems such as those of Siong-khu and Se-an. Despite this, this empire had become increasingly stagnant and unstable over the years, between the corruption of the central government and the rise of organised crime syndicates and regional cliques. It did not help that the country was technologically backward and its state apparatus overly dependent on a vast bureaucracy run by a caste of hand-picked Augment-Scholars. In theory, the most qualified to aid the running of the realm were selected via a battery of physical and mental tests to be given a number of eugenic enhancements and positions under the Great Kings of Lok-yong. In practice, the whole system had been increasingly rigged, as a number of eunuch cliques and clans close to the Imperial house monopolised high offices and bloated the bureaucracy for their benefit.
Rebellions were increasingly common in the Celestial Realm, from local ethnic rebellions to a massive millenarian revolt which deeply weakened the empire but a generation after first contact, as crime syndicates grew massively and local regional cliques were empowered to deal with the revolt. In this environment so full of advantages for the Imperium, Amihan and the Chainbreakers began their work. Building various social clubs to introduce ideas of reform and better governance, forming networks of intelligence to understand the imperial system of the realm, and establishing relations with non-mainstream ethnicities as well as with some of the regional cliques, the Legion sowed seeds of revolution in the region.
They reaped a bountiful harvest with the Peony Revolution, as the court of the Great King in Lok-yong was betrayed and deposed by their own appointed Prime Minister (appointed as a concession to reformists and in spite of the protests of the Augment-Scholars, who were purged in the chaos) and revolutionaries proclaimed the Republic of the Vermillion Bird. The Grand Marshal Uan Tek-mia, however, was originally a conservative still tied to the imperial system, and when the revolutionaries under made him President of the Republic, he attempted to seize power and proclaim himself emperor, causing the erstwhile Republic to shatter into half a hundred regional cliques across the breadth of the former Celestial Realm.
In this shattering, Amihan and company began their first proper campaign, gaining the Compliances and loyalty of cliques spanning a third of the former empire, even as the rest of the country consolidated behind two loose blocs: the radical People's Coalition with their heady ideas, some of them clashing against one another; and the Vermillion Bird Front, to which the more conservative cliques rallied. Of course, this is a simplification: the various cliques of this era spanning a generation looked out for their personal interests first and foremost, and each of the various cliques operated on different ideologies and creeds.
Thus, with the second campaign waged by the Chainbreakers, more of the fighting took place within and between the two blocs that resisted Imperial rule than between the Chainbreakers and their ostensible enemies. By the end of it, the Vermillion Bird Front fell under the reluctant vassalage of the Imperium while the moderates of the People's Coalition were taken captive and the radicals forced into a Great Trek led by the fury-driven Baq En-le. And during the bloody and chaotic Great Trek, the People's Coalition remnants were twisted by bitterness and rage, and reforged into a sword meant for only one thing: revenge against the enemies of the people of the Vermillion Bird.
In the midst of this, there was peace and some rebuilding, though this peace was tinged with the resentment of the people of the Vermillion Bird against their new masters. This resentment was not helped by the difficulties the Chainbreakers have always had regarding administration.
Then Baq and his rebranded Black League returned. Baq and company were welcomed as liberators by many of the old People's Coalition star-systems, and even a few of the old Vermillion Bird Front's leaders (though not all) defected to the Black League in an attempt to regain their autonomy. This did not end well for any of them, as star-systems held by the Black League fell into vox silence. The Chainbreakers had a vague idea of what was going on regarding the vox silence, though the extent of Black League atrocities were not made clear until the Chainbreakers retook Lok-yong again. In any case, this third campaign was the climax of the wars waged by Amihan's daughters, the hardest and most complicated to deal with, as the Agri-Worlds of the Black League became slave plantations and human abattoirs in all but name, all for the cause of fighting the Imperium.
There was no final decisive battle against the Black League, in the end: Baq En-le was never found, and the leadership of the Black League was even more decentralised than the Chainbreakers, every cell operating autonomously from the rest. The official completion of the campaign was instead set at the capitulation of the Vermillion Bird Front's leadership to the Chainbreakers, roughly a generation after the Black League's return. The moderates of the People's Coalition assembled with the leadership of the Vermillion Bird Front on that day and committed to full Compliance with Imperial standards.
And so, with these victories and others of lesser note under the belt of the Chainbreakers, the XXIII Legion has proven itself equal to any of the others.