Hi everyone, my name is Phil. I'm currently the PM leading the iOS growth team on Google Photos. Before I took that role, I was a PM responsible for launching YouTube TV's advertising platform. And I also worked on Google Messages on Android, where I was responsible for the conversation experience and growing RCS adoption. I also loved my free time meeting founders and seeing how I can help with anything related to growth, product, marketing and go-to-market. And today I want to talk about something that is very much a core part of the product management experience. And something that I'm particularly trying to work on myself, which is navigating ambiguity and uncertainty, especially within the context of strategic decision making as a product leader. As a product manager, our ability to drive impact for businesses and the users we care about is ultimately going to be determined by how well we enable our teams to consistently identify opportunities and execute. And today, while I'll be drawing a lot of on personal experience, lessons, mistakes, I've learned as a growth PM, a lot of the principles we'll talk about today I think apply across a variety of different decision making. Scenarios across different flavors of product management. So before we begin though, I do want to make a quick disclaimer, which is everything I share today is my personal opinion, and Google is not responsible for any content or opinions expressed by me today. And none of the content I'm using or sharing is confidential. All right, so with that out of the way, let's jump in. There's this really beautiful quote from French author, Andre Gide, that I always try to keep in mind, especially on a really tough day, and it's one does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore. And as PMs, as much as we'd love to have a crystal ball and have everything all mapped out in front of us, uncertainty is where most of us are actually navigating a lot of the time. And it's uncomfortable, but I also think it's where that's where a lot of the interesting challenges and innovation comes from. Like if everyone knew exactly how to grow a user base or win market share or delight a specific segment of users, I don't think the job would be as challenging or fulfilling or fun. So my goal today is to share some lessons I've learned, helping teams navigate ambiguity. And I'm essentially trying to break down, I think, decision making in those scenarios into its critical components. Especially I think those three things I've noticed and learned from high functioning teams and seeing high functioning leaders masterfully navigate ambiguity. And my hope is that by sharing some of those lessons with you, by the end of this talk, you'll also have a toolkit to do the same. And specifically it's how do you define the right goals? How do you effectively communicate in a way that instills confidence? And how do you maintain your and your team's energy and morale and resilience when things get tough? And I don't want to just talk about why these things are important, but also hopefully I can highlight some practical specific steps you can take to embody these things as well. So I want you to imagine that you've just been hired as a new product manager and especially when you're in a new product or growth leadership role, teams are really excited, right?  You took a reforge course, you read Lenny Ritchiske's newsletter and you have all these frameworks that you're excited to apply from things like jobs to be done to Porter Seven Powers.  But you know, naturally, as you kind of get to know the problem space, you quickly realize like, hey, this thing is really, really hard, probably harder than you thought it was. And you realize that there's no foolproof recipe for how teams can reliably acquire new users, how they can improve retention or how they navigate shifting their strategy or redesigning their business model. And, you know, a 10 step framework isn't going to save you from the hard work of actually thinking through some really hard, ambiguous problems. And ultimately what your team wants besides impact is strategic clarity. They need to know what are they doing? Why are they doing it this way? And what role does each of them play in determining the outcome? And it's our job to help our team as well as our leadership, I think, answer these questions. And what I've experienced, too, is that when we don't do a good job of that, there are some worrying symptoms that start to crop up. The first is you have a really hard time prioritizing. It's ambiguous which activity is actually going to drive the most impact and you don't have the systems in place to address those trade-offs in a principled way. Second is misalignment within teams. Without proper context, people will rely on their individual opinion rather than align towards a shared purpose. And what you end up with is different teams prioritizing different outcomes that make sense for them locally but might not necessarily be optimal for the entire business. And you can start seeing that your UX feels muddied and unopinionated when the strategy isn't clear, the team may start making inconsistent and compromised choices. This is where that term shipping your org structure I think surfaces as well. Teams also start to focus over focus on short-term results because they crave certainty. And without strategic clarity, teams will over-index on short-term easy optimizations rather than thinking about long-term value creation. And over time, as team over-optimize, they reach a local maximum-hit diminishing returns on their efforts. And when that happens, you start seeing it negatively impact the morale of your team. The work feels burdensome. People no longer feel a sense of pride in terms of the things they ship. And if they don't feel like they're getting the context and resources they need from your strategy, even the highest performers will churn because they don't believe in, they don't understand, or they don't feel like they could properly execute a strategy. And as you see these things crop up, it's usually a sign that you have a deficiency in one of three categories. It might be that you're not aligned on the right goals. It might be that you're not communicating your goals or your approach effectively. And maybe you're also not managing your and your team's relationship with uncertainty. And I've definitely been there and it's not fun. But I've also seen great teams pull themselves out of it and great leaders also succeed by resolving some of these issues. And today I want to explore how you can have a sort of principles, practices and systems in place where you can effectively do all three of these things to allow your team to succeed despite facing a difficult and ambiguous challenge. So the first is to define the right goals, you need to focus on outcomes, not outputs. Now, what do I mean by that? What are outcomes and what are outputs? The best way to illustrate this concept is by going through some hopefully relatable scenarios. So I think most teams have a mental model like this. They think of their product as the system customers come in. We measure some interaction they have with our product via product metrics like click-through rate, order volume or like individual feature engagement. And then there's some change in behavior and we measure that in the form of output metrics like daily active users, retention and revenue and lifetime value. And oftentimes the output metrics are the sort of like North Star metrics for your business and individual teams and product leads own a product or feature level metric that level up to those output metrics. In a way this model was created to, it was our best attempt to measure what sort of value we're providing to our users and to our business. And they're an imperfect way of assessing how people interact with our product and how they change our behavior. So there isn't anything fundamentally wrong with kind of this model, but my argument is that this model becomes problematic when it becomes a tool to prioritize and plan. And let me give you a hypothetical example to illustrate this. So you are the PM responsible for a shovel product. Users rent a shovel from you each day with the goal of digging a big trench. And let's say it takes the average user about 10 days to dig a trench and you charge them a dollar each day they need to rent your shovel. And as a business you care about revenue, right? So how do you increase revenue? Well, you can't really convince people to dig more trenches than they need. So what you really want is people coming back and renting more shovels. Your north star metric, just like the north star metric of a lot of prog teams is retention. And that's how your team is going to prioritize and evaluate its work. A few of you probably know where I'm going with this example. And so as part of one of your sprint, your team launches an experiment where they actually reduce the size of the shovel. So the trench that once took 10 days to dig now actually takes 15 days. And the experiment is a big success because the cohort you gave the smaller shovels to now have to come back 15 days rather than 10 days. And now you make $15 rather than $10, you know, you get promoted for improving retention, even though you've technically made your product much worse. And this is an exaggerated example, but it serves to highlight how messed up this model can be if we're not careful and don't do some deep thinking. And I would argue it's actually really easy for prog teams to get themselves into situations like this only that the consequences in those scenarios aren't as obvious. And so what I'm trying to illustrate is that we run into problems when we start with an output metric like retention and work backwards trying to figure out how to optimize it. When we start with an output metric, we're defining success based on the specifics of our solution rather than the underlying outcomes I think people actually care about. When you think about it, that's not really how the world works, right? A person evaluates a medicine by how effectively it can solve a health issue, not by how often they need to take it. And if you're training your dog, you care a lot more about how well behaved your dog is and not how many hours of training received or how it was trained. I think what we need to do instead is to think of the outcome first. And what I mean by that is understanding that people ultimately want tasks completed, faster, cheaper, and easier. And the nice thing with is by starting with outcomes, you're forced to think about context and the situation with which your solution operates under. And it's also very test dependent. Like for example, an SUV's utility will be very different when driven on like a wide road than say trying to go down like a super narrow alleyway. And then with this context, I think you're forced to think about how efficiency is ultimately the fundamental thing that drives value. Again, users want things faster, cheaper, and easier. And if your product isn't more efficient than an alternative, the user just isn't going to be motivated to try and use it. Sure, you might be able to win some users over with some marketing tactics and growth hacks, but you're not going to be able to keep them long term. You need to overcome inherent inertia, laziness, and fears of users. And if you can consistently show that your solution is more efficient than the predominant way of solving a problem or resolving a particular task, then they will choose your product over and over again as their solution. And I think sometimes by doing this too, it forces you to see that there's sometimes some fundamental conflict between the value you're trying to provide to customers and the value you're accruing as a business. And I would argue that surfacing this conflict is a good thing because ultimately the viability of your business is going to be determined by how well you could align your success with the outcomes of the customer. So if you think back to our shovel example, end of the day, people just want their trenches dug, right? And ideally you want to help them do that faster, easier, and cheaper. And you see some conflict with your business model. Maybe you have to evaluate, hey, maybe we don't go with this like rental model and we should just charge for purchasing the entire shovel. Or maybe you decide that you don't charge users if it takes them longer than expected after a certain number of days to dig a trench. And I'm not saying that these conversations are easy. I think what I'm starting to illustrate that if you think of outcomes first, you're forced to lift your heads up and try to resolve this inherent conflict so you could better align business outcomes with user outcomes. There's also another problem too where we should just accept that products and businesses are complex. I don't think any of us will end up working on a product where the top line metric is as straightforward as the shovel example. And outputs are concrete and quantifiable in terms of metrics while user outcomes tend to be more fuzzy and subjective. And when we act like there's a perfect metric that could perfectly measure a user outcome, it's sort of like fitting a square peg into a round hole. We need to understand that all metrics are proxies for the outcome. And we need to stop treating messy subjective problems like they're super well-structured ones. That's not to say that we just throw out metrics altogether. You still need goals that are quantifiable and concrete. But what I mean by focusing on outcomes is a reminder to not shortcut the deep qualitative thinking necessary when defining goals. You need to ask yourself like, what is the problem I'm solving? What is the natural frequency of that problem? What is the expected behavior within the context users are operating under? And the takeaway here is that if you can make a habit of thinking about user outcomes, you'll be much closer to aligning the success of your product with what the user's value. So we've taken that first critical step of crystallizing where do we want to go by defining goals appropriately? And now the next challenge is figuring out how do we get there and how do we communicate? How do we get there? And the way we traditionally do that is with artifacts like road maps, OKRs and, you know, processes like annual planning. And just like my gripe with how a lot of teams do metrics, I also have a bone to pick with how we traditionally build road maps. Much like how outputs imperfectly measure outcomes, the traditional roadmap is an illusion of certainty being applied to an ambiguous situation. It's sort of like we're not really sure how to solve this complex problem, but because we work so hard constructing this concrete artifact, we can trick ourselves and believe that the mystery and ambiguity are no longer there. And the problem, though, is that I think road maps quickly become very prescriptive in terms of dictating the actions of our teams. I think we've all been there where like your team feels like a feature factory where you're focused on launching a feature by a certain data at all costs where you're incentivized to stick with a plan even when circumstances change around you. And, you know, there's been some kind of innovation there. Like the OKR process was an attempt to give teams more flexibility by telling teams, hey, here's the outcome we're trying to achieve. Here's the metric we're trying to hit and having the teams work through how they actually get there. But what I've seen at least achieving that level of hands off approach is often easier said than done. We all start off well. We define the key results and objectives for our teams. But then we continue to dictate the actions and launches and timelines. And the reason we do this is because as leaders, even though we intellectually understand that we need to give our teams latitude, I think emotionally we crave the certainty of needing to know exactly how our teams plan to reach those outcomes. And it's human nature, right? Like we want to know how we're progressing. And especially when a problem space is ambiguous, we gravitate towards something concrete and certain. My suggestion here is actually think of artifacts like roadmaps as tools of communication rather than contracts. Our jobs as product leaders is to find better ways to communicate progress that also accepts the realities of an open-ended uncertain path. And one tool I really have learned to love is the opportunity solution tree popularized by Teresa Torres. It's a really elegant visual representation of how you plan to reach a desired outcome. And the OST has three main components for those who aren't familiar. The first is desired outcome. So like what is the outcome your project aims to achieve? And just like we talked about before, give it your best shot at trying to measure it in a concrete way. The second is opportunities. These are the pain points we can solve to help our users achieve the desired outcome. And what's important about opportunity is that there needs to be some sort of evidence either through customer interviews or product data. Opportunity should not be based purely on your own intuition or assumptions. Solutions on the other hand, like these are our ideas for solving those pain points as well as the experiment assumptions and hypotheses that you want to validate or disprove. And so you have a goal and what I love about this framework is that the tree structure showcases a reality where there's more than one path to achieving the desired outcome. And you're also forced to acknowledge what you know now versus what you need to find out, which I think is a really important thing to consider when you're solving ambiguous problems. And so to kind of illustrate this, I want to go through kind of like a quick high level example to show you how you would work through this with your team step by step. So let's say you're the PM of a ride sharing app and your goal is to increase the number of successful rides where a user is happy with the whole kind of experience end to end. This is sounding a lot like a PM interview. And okay, let's say happiness is kind of a hard to measure thing, but you take your best shot and let's say you believe the metric to increase is an increase in the number of five star rides per week. Not a perfect metric, but directionally enough for us to get started. So where are your opportunities to move that metric? Well, you have some research that points to some pain points. First, you know that canceled rides make users unhappy. You reduce canceled rides, you probably get more happy users at the end of a successful ride. People could be unhappy because the ride took longer than expected. Maybe the general comfort of the ride is also a factor that you've seen in research. And what you do now is like you want to drill down to each opportunity. Okay, so let's look at rides taking too long. Well, how do we define too long? What's causing that? Do we have data to show that our drivers are actually driving slower? Maybe you don't. There's no evidence of that. But maybe you do have evidence that users have different expectations depending on how long the trip is actually supposed to take. For example, you could say that users taking a short trip appear to really value quick pickups and drop offs. Or users taking slightly longer trips may value a smooth and uninterrupted ride experience. And maybe you also see that on long journeys, users have a really high value for comfort, given that they're in the car for such a long time. Now, the important part here is before jumping into solutions, you work with your team to answer, hey, which opportunity if we solve it is most likely to drive towards a desired outcome? And what evidence do we have to support that? Maybe evidence that one happens more frequently or leads to more pain. Maybe one of these opportunities just seems more actionable today than the others. Sometimes the opportunity is obvious. Sometimes it's not. The important part here is that you have a common language and approach, and you're all on the same page in terms of which criteria you apply to decide which opportunity to pursue. And with this tree structure, what's really nice is that people can follow your thinking if you're documenting it properly along the way. And let's say you arrive at the conclusion that the biggest opportunity comes in short trips and decreasing the pickup times for those users. That's where you can start formulating your hypothesis. So maybe your hypothesis is time waiting to get picked up is a much larger share of the overall trip for short trips. Like if the whole ride only takes 10 minutes and you spend 10 minutes being picked up, it's a pretty unpleasant experience. So your thinking is if you can lower pickup times for these short trips, the trip will feel faster and these users will feel more satisfied. Now you ask yourself, what is the minimum viable test we could run to actually validate that hypothesis and prove we're actually solving this problem and increasing happiness? And so you do, okay, for this cohort of users for this amount of time, if they call trips of a certain length, we make sure drivers prioritize picking them up, which will subsequently shorten the pickup times. And we'll say our hypothesis is valid if we see a 10% increase in 5-star ratings for users on short trips that got those prioritized rides. Then, as your experiment concludes, you surface the results of each experiment on your OST as well. And be inquisitive and ask the like now what so what sort of questions is the opportunity larger or smaller or more or less actionable than we believed has the problem become easier or harder to solve? Is this still the right opportunity to pursue or do we need to update or cross off completely different parts of our opportunity solution tree? And the point of this exercise isn't to say that this magical framework is going to solve every challenge you have in your business. Really my intent is showcasing how it's really good to embrace a strategy that's based off user outcomes and hypotheses. What I like about this framework is that it allows us to accept the unknown as a natural part of this discovery process and that uncertainty isn't something we need to eliminate at all costs. This is sort of how you build a roadmap of what you need to do as a team driven by hypotheses you have. And with this sort of framework, you now have a shared language and a set of practices to flexibly and adapt to reality. Alright, so we've talked about defining the right goals. We've highlighted some ways to communicate and execute this uncertain path you're undertaking. Those two things are, I think, like the birds-eye view, but now I want to zoom in and talk about what do you actually do day-to-day when you're kind of in the thick fog of uncertainty? So in this section, I just want to riff on some really helpful lessons I've sort of learned over the years and emulated from really excellent leaders I've seen. And sometimes I actually write these things down and stick them to my laptop to remind me to practice these things obviously not perfect, but I can confidently say that the days where I do these things effectively, I think the team really benefits from them. The first is to operate transparently and predictably. So to level set, I think here's a pretty sobering statistic for you that I think Microsoft published this, actually, and I've actually kind of experienced this firsthand. Only about 10 to 20% of experiments will lead to results you expect, essentially positive results. So if that is the baseline, that's a lot of failures. And even the most optimistic and resilient among us, I think would have a really hard time getting punched in the gut that effectively or that often. And nevertheless, your job as a leader is to ensure you and your team cope with that baseline and can still operate effectively. And what I've seen is that I think there's a tendency for product and growth leaders to brush quote, unquote, failures under the rug. So you think of like all the dead ends, you had all the experiments that didn't deliver the results you hypothesized. It's important to stop thinking of those as failures. In my mind, the real failures are when experiments deliver inconclusive results. Failures are when you catch yourself saying things like, oh, we didn't move this metric, but maybe it's because we targeted the wrong cohort or, oh, we didn't achieve this outcome, but maybe it's because we didn't set up the experiment in a way to actually test the right hypothesis. And how you avoid that is you need to shift your mindset from how do I maximize metrics with this experiment to how do I make sure we maximize learnings? And it's also important to not learn in private, learn in public, socialize your learnings far and wide. Even when things don't go your way because you'll be surprised, the learnings likely can get leveraged in places in ways you haven't anticipated. And what's nice about that is that if people see that you are transparent, if people see that you're able to detail the rationale behind your decisions, if you're able to articulate what happened, they trust that you're able to think deeply about what to do next. And that's really powerful in countering people's sort of anxiety and impatience. Being predictably consistently transparent is really powerful, especially when the outcomes themselves aren't predictable. And sometimes that could even mean saying, I don't know. And that sometimes even means saying, hey, my bad, I was wrong about that one. People need to feel like they can always rely on knowing what's happening, what you're doing next, and why. And if you can do that, people feel invested and gain confidence in not only your process, but you as a leader as well. Another tip is to focus on what you can control. You can't control the outcomes. You can't control and you can't know what's going to happen next. So what you can control is, I think, how effectively your team is executing. There are so many things you could do to ensure that your team is learning as quickly and effectively as possible.  Hopefully using some of the frameworks we talked about. Are you thoughtful about communicating your thought process and next steps effectively? Are you showing up every day, engaged and excited, and also setting a good example for your team? Like these are sort of things that you can control and I think they're very much things that should be part of our focus. And so, I don't know, I think the other thing that we talk about a lot is like shots on goal. Definitely maximized shots on goal.  And this isn't to say you should just blindly kick the ball wherever you go, but it's a reminder that you should try to learn as much as you can as quickly as possible. And you might not have all the answers now, but the more you learn, the closer you'll get to uncovering the path towards your goal. And I would say like an underrated sort of competitive advantage of product teams or just businesses in general is how well they can understand their users, how well they can understand their market, and how well can they get signal on where the opportunities are and where they can iterate to capture those opportunities. And that comes from maximizing your shots on goal and trying to learn as quickly as you can. And another tool I found that's really useful is to have some cadence of what we call learning reviews. It seems some high functioning teams do this really well. So instead of going through a summary of last month's metrics and launches and milestones, shift your focus to this month's learnings. Don't just ask, hey, what did we do? Make sure you chart your progress by also asking, what did we learn? And five questions that come up that tend to spark really good discussions during these reviews. What did we try? What did we think was going to happen? What did we learn? And what are we going to do next based on those learnings? And what's important is that like, if you take a learning focus lens in these reviews, it's really effective at reminding you and your team that their work is valuable, even though the problem space is inherently difficult. The learnings should be the star of the show, and the launches and impact, et cetera, should be there for context, rather than the other way around. And at the end of it, I think it's important to remind your team of how they're continuing to contribute to this expanding corpus of knowledge about their users and their market and their behavior, and remind them of that competitive advantage of, hey, we are building our moat with some of the insights we're gaining here. So as we wrap up, let me just quickly recap some of our key takeaways here. The first is to find the right goals, focus on outcomes, not outputs. Don't treat concrete metrics as a shortcut to thinking deeply about users and the context they operate under. Second is have a roadmap as a communication tool and communicate through hypotheses rather than features. They're not hard set instructions. There are ways to communicate your thinking and your learnings. And third is like create a culture that celebrates learning. Navigating ambiguity requires embracing the unknown and resilience. Remember that what you can control is how you approach each day, how effectively and how quickly your team is learning, and how well they're kind of celebrating these learnings as well. So to close, I know these principles sound simple. I don't think I'm winning any Nobel prizes here for delivering them, but I do really believe they are the cornerstone of your success as a decision maker. And I also know they're much easier said than done, but I'm convinced that if they're things that you can work on, you'll be equipped with the skill set to tackle complex challenges with confidence, to lead your teams effectively, and to always keep an eye towards the ultimate goal of delivering real value to the customers you care about. And you're here in this webinar because you're an eager learner with a growth mindset trying to get better each day. And I think tackling these sort of product challenges should require the same ethos and approach. Thank you, everyone, for sticking around this long. And if you found valuing the insights shared today, please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. If you feel like you could benefit from any sort of, I think, guidance or discussion or consulting related to product management, growth or anything really, please don't hesitate to reach out. Like I mentioned earlier, I love working with product leaders meeting other product managers, love meeting founders. So if there's anything I could help with, especially related to product growth and marketing and go-to-market, my inbox is open. Thank you. Thank you for your time and attention today and wish you all the best in your product journey. Thanks so much.


To some, treachery comes in a burst of rage, a storm that blows in almost out of nowhere. In others, it is a terrible culmination of a buried issue, a doubt, a hatred. In yet others, it is a pollutant, nurtured over many years, a contaminant of the soul that saw no attempts at healing, for none were desired. It is treason wholly embraced, wholly desired, kept clandestine until the time is right for a blade to be plunged into a back. For some, treachery is tragedy. For others, it is a sin that must never be forgiven, never forgotten, for there can be no absolution for such craven perfidy. Know then that this is a record of the fanatical. Once the incarnate bearers of the Imperial Truth now laid as low as any can fall through basest duplicity and heinous deceit. The slow poison at the heart of the Imperium of Mankind, the 17th Legion Word Bearers. To many of the Ligionesistates, founded as they all were amongst the fires of the Unification Wars on ancient Terra, their purpose was initially unclear. For these legions, it appeared that only through blooding themselves in catatlysmic conflicts did purpose become extant, that in the reunification of their homeworld could they find their truest purpose. Destiny, it seemed, was only to be discerned through the savagery of battle. Not so for the 17th Legion. The grand aspiration of the Emperor, so-called even during those days, was not simply the lunatic whimsy of another Terran barbarian warlord. Many a petty king had desired to rule the homeworld. None save the Emperor, wished to unite it in the truest sense of the word. His was not simply a war of conquest and control, but ideology. As the Thunder Warriors had carved a path through the mad warlords grasping glomerates and tinpot despots of Terra, the Emperor brought the conquered masses his imperial truth, the foundational tenet of his grand imperium. Superstition and ignorance had plagued humanity for millennia. The darkness of the Age of Strife, mankind had regressed into the feckless depths of witless adoration for the divine. Plagued now we were at the parasitic spiritual suckling of a myriad of gods and spirits. Shunned did we the light of science as dangerous, choosing instead to place faith in the unknowable, damning ourselves to trifling lives spent in the benighted reaches of fantastical delusions. The Emperor sought to banish these, but not simply as countless such men have throughout history to supplant them with another faith in their place. No, the Lord of Lightning strove to cut through the gloom of barbarity with the shining swords of rationality, superseding all religion with the pure light of science. Under the Imperial Truth, there were no gods, no demons, no heavens, no hells, no spirits, no afterlife. The rational, atheistic ideology promulgated by those who fought for unity was unlike any that had been seen on Terra since the Dark Age of Technology. And it was for this war, the struggle for the human mind, that the Emperor created his 17th Legion. From its inception, the 17th were a legion apart from their fellows, both in terms of operational remit and their own humours. All the starties fought with devotion and duty. They are, and were, fundamentally psychoconditioned to do so during the mind-demolishing processes of their ascension. The 17th, however, did so with an onus subordered on the fanatical. Despite zalatry being, nominally, the enemy of the Imperium, the legion were rapidly becoming the embodiment of secular extremity. The starties of the 17th were deliberately recruited from the remnants of populations that had been exterminated by the Emperor's armies. These shattered nations and regimes produced children raised to know the crimes of their ancestors. Early Imperial iterators ensured that none were under any doubt that their continued existence was owed purely to the master of mankind's mercy. Ironically, given their futures, they shared similarity with the nascent 13th Legion, the so-called war-born, who were likewise raised from ravaged kingdoms. The 17th took their obligation, born of a birthright unasked for and continued in violet thanks to the Emperor's military regime, and turned it into a dour yet intense devotion to their duty as genetically enhanced soldiery. While other legions may have granted acknowledgement to a spirit of defiance present in a foe as something admirable or misguided, the 17th saw the enemies of the Imperium as nothing less than traitors to the human species. They were to be regarded not with pity, but hatred.  There was to be no negotiated surrender to the Legion, no terms of capitulation. The Legion asked for none. Only when the foe prostrated themselves and submitted wholly to Imperial mercy would any quarter be offered, so that they could begin to atone for the crime of standing in the way of human unification. Unique amongst the legions of the unification wars, known only as they were by numerical designations until much, much later, the 17th were granted upon their creation the name Imperial Heralds. One legion amongst twenty, not for a special honor, but a statement of purpose, where they lay in the Emperor's vision. There were enemies of the Imperium that stood against the Emperor by what they perceived as divine writ, foes fueled by their convictions to whatever religion animated their misbegotten hearts, or who simply could not dwell within the world of secularism the Emperor's hosts imposed. To these wayward minds the Emperor presented his Imperial Heralds, and with them the ultimate demand. Recant or face annihilation. The Imperial truth brooked no exceptions. All religions were to be annihilated under the Emperor's word, for if even a shred of belief in their supernatural natures remained, it would be akin to the roots of weed in the soul of mankind. Pay, of course, no heed to the Treaty of Olympus the Emperor was to conduct to it the Mechanical of Mars, and the preservation of the worship of the Machine God, and he himself as the Omnisire. This is, of course, an altogether more political move. To the vast majority of the Imperium, the Imperial truth was the literal only path. The purpose the 17th were crafted for was one it took to heart with the conviction of, ironically, the zealot. Upon the eve of battle, the 17th would dispatch a single warrior, clad in black, to demand the foe's surrender, one final time. To be chosen to be these bearers of the word was a supreme honour to the Astartes of the 17th, a mantle, once given, that was never removed. Many of these heralds would die in the conducting of their duties, dragged down by fanatical hands, even as they slew dozens of their deluded attackers. However, some could, and did, deliver a total surrender upon the power of their oratory alone. The exaltation of the Imperial truth, the visions of the Emperor, and the glory of what was to come, delivering a cowed enemy into the hands of waiting iterators for further psychological conditioning and cultural editing. However, should war fall upon the 17th to prosecute, it was a duty they undertook with fire and fury, leaving none standing in their wake. Those that observed them in battle spoke of a methodical functionality within their war-making, a rigorous destruction intended to wipe all traces of enemy's existences from history. This extended too long after the final shot had been fired, final soldier slain. When the foe had been utterly broken, the Imperial heralds turned their attention upon the culture itself. They turned libraries into massive pyres, immolating millennia of knowledge for the crime of having belonged to a society in thrall to wayward ideals. Atop these conflagrations they melted the false idols of the fallen foes and burned heretical figureheads alive atop grisly stakes. No traces of the beliefs were allowed to remain, whether in the physical or ideological realm. Decenters and recidivists found themselves kindling for the pyres just as their books were. War for the 17th Legion did not begin and end on the field of battle. It extended far beyond that. The Imperial truth was their greatest weapon. This earned them a newer and informal cognomen, one by which they were known far more wildly than their official title, the Iconoclasts. With a cold fury born of unshakable convictions, the 17th Legion cut a swathe through the barbarian beliefs of old night, conquering religions as well as nations. The result was an armed force of total cultural genocide. Unlike other legions that simply contented themselves with or or ordered to defeat the enemies of unity in military body, the 17th warred against this and the civilian mind. Conquered populations were instructed in the errors of their ways or, more often than not, the ways of their leaders through incredible brutality. Post-conflict ideological scouring was as invasive, methodical and total as the most fanatical of religiously motivated regimes. Enemies of the Imperial state, judged so by the 17th, were myriad, pernicious and omnipresent. After a fashion, they were something of imperial pioneers for a later concept that would flourish within the minds of more inquisitive individuals. Innocence proves nothing. Civilian populations were culpable, no matter the level of theocracy they lived under, be it an autocratic regime that demanded constant, never-ending worship or a cabal of spirit-worshipping aristocrats, the fate of human populations under them would be the same for the 17th, damned for the crime of resisting unity either actively or passively and treated in precisely the same fashion as their rulers. They were the ideological foot soldiers of the Imperial regime like no other. The bearer of the raptor and lightning bolt banner as an object of, effectively, devotion rather than nationhood or political function. Unity was the destiny of the species. Resistance to it marked you as unworthy of personhood. The binaric view of innocence versus guilt, the fanatical application of the ideology prescribed to them by an authority figure, these would be continual tenants for the Legion as its history wove onward. Elsewhere in the galaxy, onto the Arab scrublands of Colchis, to the 17th Primarch, Lorgar, Plummet. Scattered along with his brothers by an unknown catastrophe deep within the Emperor's laboratory on Terra, the infant Primarch's gestation pod was flung through the warp before reaching its final destination in the sands of that world. The Primarch was discovered by Desert Nomads and laterally by exiled members of the Covenant, a polytheistic religious organization that ruled the planet. The leader of the exiled band, a priest by the name of Core Phaeron, recognized the boy as a singular being and offered him the role of a disciple and foundling within his particular sect of the Covenant. On Lorgar's acceptance, a Phaeron had the nomad band murdered, to wholly disguise the truth of Lorgar's origin. Returning to a Covenant temple and professing repentance for the hard-line beliefs that had seen him and his fellows exiled, Core Phaeron resumed his place within the priesthood with Lorgar as his student and adoptive son. In perhaps one of the greatest ironies in human history, the Primarch of the Imperial heralds was raised in an environment governed entirely by the strictures of the Covenant's old faith. Bligeon suffused all aspects of life on cultures. The entire planet was dominated by the faith and the Covenant's theocracy that governed what was and what was not doctrine. Worship centered around the veneration of a quadrinity of deities believed by the Covenant to govern all aspects of the human soul and the physical world. Lorgar's childhood was saturated with these beliefs. The morning sun was a gift from the gods as was the bounty of food upon his table, the knowledge in his books, the very life that had been granted to him, an orphan in the desert and now sanctuary within a temple. Core Phaeron was not a loving parent for the growing Primarch. He was demanding, expecting more from Lorgar than any other foundling within the temple. He was abusive, both physically and emotionally on a daily basis. The priest was thorough in his attempts to mold the boy into an emotionally dependent state. Lorgar was an empathetic and good-hearted child, one Phaeron wished to break to his will that he may harness the boy's undeniably prodigious talents for later in life. Despite sustained abuse, the Primarch was an ardent devotee of the gods, a willing subject of the Covenant and a misguided son to Core Phaeron. He possessed an insatiable appetite for theology, doctrine and scripture. Lorgar devoured the sacred texts of the temple's library, seeking as best he could resources from other nearby temples and even as a boy, debated theology with the most learned of the priesthood. In his unnaturally quickly reached adolescence, his standing was such that others within the Covenant looked upon him with jealous eyes. Throughout his youth, Lorgar had been stricken with regular visions of a mighty figure clad in shining armor, descending onto the surface of cultures from the heavens themselves. In retrospect, the first signs of his latent psychic abilities, Lorgar himself could only view these dreams through the lens of the religion and the world he was raised from and determined that they were the sign of the coming of a one god, referenced in some of the Covenant's most ancient texts. Monotheism was heresy to the modern Covenant and Core Phaeron was quick to disabuse the Primarch physically of these notions. Despite the sundry beatings of his foster father, Lorgar was even at this stage a subtle being and knew after years of living within the sifting morass of politics that was the Covenant, that his approach must be equally subtle. His proselytizing began small, focusing on the conversion of figures close to him and then figures of influence within their own circles and so on and so forth. Lorgar's oratorial skills were simply unrivaled. Depthlessly compassionate, benevolent and sympathetic, the Primarch had a supreme ability to read and connect with the hearts of his fellow humans. There were seemingly none he could not simply talk to and sway to the essential truth of his beliefs. It was of course only a matter of time before knowledge of Lorgar and his sect of God sworn drew the attention of the Hierarchs of the Covenant, that theocracy viewed with growing alarm those amongst its own priesthood, not to mention the laity, who joined the Primarch's cause. Seizing their opportunity, Lorgar's rival stormed his temple to arrest him only for the attack to be repulsed by the physical fury of a demigod unleashed. The planet was plunged into a holy war the likes of which it had never seen, religious convictions split armies, temples and families alike. For six years, the Crusade ravaged Colchis until finally Lorgar cast out the Covenant's hierarchy from the Cathedral of Illumination in the City of Gray Flowers. Preaching to the assembled masses, the new arch-priest of the Covenant Reformed declared that a year from then the Golden God would return and that he would be known as the Emperor. The Primarch's psychic foresight would prove accurate. A year after he ascended to the rulership, lights were seen in the night sky above the City of Gray Flowers. The Emperor of Mankind descended upon Colchis, his lander wreathed in re-entry fire, his son Magnus the Red, 15th Primarch, beside him. Lorgar met his father at the landing field and it is said upon catching sight of the Master of Mankind he flung himself prostrate in a heartbeat, the force of his devotion cracking the earth itself. His followers did the same and wept to see the prophecies of the Primarch made real. Records show the triumphant celebrations lasted for months, but details of precisely when and how the Emperor removed himself and his newfound son from Colchis are inexact. Some point to him remaining to speak to the population who were so devoted to him, whereas others, possibly recorded by Magnus, recount that he left as soon as was deemed viable. Unease at such blatant and ill-placed worship writ large, if not upon his unknowable visage, then at least upon his actions. What became of Lorgar's faith in the being that was now revealed to his own father and creator? Did conversations with his sire yield any change in the Primarch's belief in that divinity, in religiosity? Sadly no. It must not be said that Lorgar was a simpleton, for that could not be further from the truth. He was a being of phenomenal intelligence, as evidenced by the kinship he shared with him and Magnus the Red, who he spent a great deal of time with in the aftermath of his departure from Colchis. The two were known to have debated matters of theology, philosophy, history, culture, society, politics, and even metaphysics for days on end. Lorgar, ever insatiable for knowledge, devoured every library and archive he came across, often under Magnus' direct tutelage. He did not ignore scientific knowledge. Rather, in it, and the countless records of religions and beliefs long dead, his mind found common threads of underlying holiness. Metatax to all pointers the Primarch believed spoke to the underlying spiritual condition of the universe as it existed. Lorgar, even when presented with the emperor's own imperial truth, was at no point dissuaded from his convictions in the divinity of reality. And indeed, of his father's own inherent godhood. Paradoxically, the more Magnus and the emperor himself denied this to Lorgar, the more it reinforced the persuasion. As who else but a one true god would claim that he was not divine? Inherent in this, are we seeing, quite visibly, the most fundamentally human aspect of Lorgar, that no matter the evidence, no matter the piles of persuasion, hours of conversation, should the emotional core of a belief remain intact, then that belief is essentially inviolate. Such a belief did not spring from Lorgar alone, of course. Since the emergence upon Terra, there had ever been those amongst his subjects that named him a god. The sheer psychic and material power he commanded, the utter singularity of his being, it left few paths for the human mind in rationalizing the simple fact of his existence, even after all the species had suffered through in the millennia of the Age of Strife. In fact, even because of it, the secrets, the knowledge of the Dark Age of Technology was benighted, lost, hoarded, destroyed. Lorgar, at least, had the sense to read the proverbial room. He did not deny his father the Imperial Truth, acceding to it quite publicly, naming all those that denied the Emperor's secularism, idolaters, and unbelievers. It was, of course, a facade. One can happily spend time denouncing the worship of other gods while bearing within yourself the belief in your own true deity. And given what remains of Lorgar's copious personal writing output, this was entirely the case. Amongst the endless praise the Primarch heaped upon his father for his vision for the human race, there is not one scrap of denial of the Emperor's divinity. Perhaps seeing the faith of his son as something that would pass in time, an adolescent fancy, maybe, the Emperor bade Lorgar take command of his genetic progenies, the 17th Legion, and induct the strongest and most capable of his Calchician warriors into their ranks. What exactly Lorgar thought of being placed at the head of a legion charged with the extermination of religion is unrecorded, but it is known his personal beliefs were not widely known at that point beyond, it seems, the Emperor and Magnus.  He recognized that his faith was not amongst receptive ears, nor bearing fertile ground within his father's atheistic Imperium. The belief that the Emperor was a god was not a new one, yes, and it is doubtless that many within the Imperium believed it so, but did so privately for fear of social ostracization or political persecution. The Primarch never openly spoke about it, but never outright disavowed it. Entrined now amongst his sons, Lorgar was ever quick to deride the worship of other beliefs, false gods, false spirits, false idols, and took part in their extermination now at the vanguard of his Astartes Legion. Where exactly the change within the Legion first began is something chroniclers such as oneself can only theorize about. The details, such as they are, are mired in conflicting tides of zealotry, fanaticism, redactionism, and simple political expurgation. It is nonetheless possible, given later events, to make educated inferences. Lorgar's adopted Colchisian father, Cor Phaeron, remained a close companion to the Primarch. Too old to undergo full Astartes elevation, the priest was instead given a range of genetic enhancements and physical implants, organic and cybernetic both, to render him as close to an Astartes as it was possible for a mortal to become, and yet survive, done upon the insistence of Lorgar and Phaeron himself. The priest was deeply unwilling to surrender his hold and proximity to the Primarch, even under the new Imperial Order, and took the role of first captain within the new Legion. Erebus, an ambitious Colchisian preacher, was likewise ascended, although unlike Phaeron, was capable of surviving the genosequencing to become a fully fledged Astartes, and, laterally, the 17th Legion's first chaplain, ever by the Primarch side. Given these men's role in the horrific history that was to unfold, we can infer their importance during this period of the Primarch's internal theological deliberation, and indeed, in the spread of the faith of the Emperor throughout the Legion itself. It is known from surviving personal records that the High Herald of the 17th, Halic Gar, was one of Lorgar's first converts, as were Majro Vassar and Ustan Cho. Similarly important Terran-born Astartes in the 17th Legion's upper echelons. The Legion's devotion to the Imperial Truth was not so much usurped as insidiously repurposed. Ever devoted to the truth of the Imperial Purpose, the 17th were now thought that the devotion itself was not simply enough, that only in faith could true devotion be found, and there was no higher faith than that in the divinity of the God Emperor. Just quite how Lorgar usurped the passionate non-believers of his Legion can only be guessed at. He was, of course, their genetic sire. They were built from his own makeup. The Primarch was also far renowned for his skills with words, his incredible and truly genuine human warmth, and, most importantly, his patience. Such is the conviction of the zealot, so sure that he is in his cause, so sure he is that it is incontrovertible, that he merely has to persist with fortitude, and all will come to see the world as he does. It is also important to consider within this context how such ideological swings can take place within the context of mass movements. Masses are not swayed by facts, debate, or logic. As cleanly empirical as the Imperial Truth avowed to be, it is an ideology that the 17th Legion accepted with the righteous fury of the fanatic, a mindset that is inherently prone to usurpation. There is no belief that does not conflict with their actual experience. The 17th Legion were responsible for a significant amount of the Great Crusade's most thorough genocides, often caused by the purged population's mere questioning of the tenants that these astartes had come demanding. The reality of slaughtering millions upon millions of their own species did not for a second conflict with their beliefs. This was good work to them, despite the bloodshed, despite the death toll, despite the tides of blood. It was good. All that was needed to sway the masses is internal consistency within the system they are a part of. Repetition, as horribly simple as it may seem, combined with tugging on the emotional roots of their still-so-human psychology was what allowed the pathogen of Lorgar's convictions to seep into the Legion's psyche. The change within the 17th took decades, but it was a span of time their Primarch was entirely willing to commit to. Nothing was more important to him. In incremental subtle changes and additions, the 17th warped from the solemnity of the Imperial heralds into something infused with the religious blood of Colchis. The black-armoured herald astartes that have previously delivered the Imperial truth to the hated enemies on the eve of battle were now dubbed chaplains by the Primarch. To be the spiritual heart of the Legion, warriors who could minister to the thoughts and hopes of their battlebrothers just as well as they could lead them in battle. Ritualistic behaviour became commonplace. Ash from the pyres of torched civilizations was now scattered upon the bowed head of Legionaries. Con fraternities of astartes, terrible precursors to the warrior lodges Lorgar would infect other legions with, sprang up in large numbers. Fertile ground for theological debates, as well as a relentless application of peer pressures. The chaplains were insidious, subtly altering the counsel they gave to their brothers to include shards of Lorgar's Emperor divine teachings, laying the groundwork brick by brick over conversation after conversation. Those of old cultures were, of course, the most amenable to the new faith, many of whom had grown up under Lorgar's rule as Archpriest, or in the fires of the Holy War. Recruits from newly compliant worlds offered to the 17th as fives were simply taught their faith from the get-go and accepted it as the only truth they had ever known within the Imperium. The Terrans, those who lived and breathed the Imperial truth, were a tougher prospect, but as the early conversion of Halak Gar had shown, hardly an impossible one. Combat losses within the Great Crusade would, of course, dilute the Terran elements of the Legion even further, and it is likely that the Primarch and his inner circle used the most hotly contested war zones as a means of easily disposing of the most obstinate Imperial truth adherents. Eventually, Lorgar deemed his great work complete. A move that, unbeknownst to all outside his Legion, which represented his secret victory, he renamed the 17th Legion the Word Bearers. To the Imperium, this was a cosmetic change. It reflected what they believed the Legion's role to continue to be. For Lorgar, it was altogether different. It was now a statement in how he saw himself and his sons as an itinerant preacher, a holy man whose divine role was to bring the true faith of the galaxy to all the humans living within it. Faith in secret is never a satisfying thing, however. The believer is driven by a pathological need to spread dogma, to bring more under what they believe to be the truth. The Word Bearers and their Primarch now had a mission. Upon the broken worlds of the forefront of the Great Crusade, they beheld populations they perceived to be in need of spiritual sustenance. How could they so aflame with their surety of purpose, not pass such rights on to the newest worlds to enter the Imperial flock? So was it that the expeditionary fleets of the Word Bearers began to linger longer and longer upon worlds they had conquered? Chaplains, line-a-starties, converted Imperial iterators, all moved amongst the peoples of these war-torn planets, preaching the Emperor's Divinity. Millions upon millions were swayed to Lorgar's faith in this way, many by the Primarch himself, renowned by his sons for his own ministry, conducted in the manner of a priest of Colchis. He would walk amongst the people unarmored, clad only in a simple robe, his golden tattooed skin showing no signs of heat or cold, his smile warm and completely infectious.  When Word Bearerships eventually hauled anchor, they left in their wake planets that were fully compliant and utterly loyal. Cities had been rebuilt on the ashes of those cast down, and within them were raised mighty cathedrals dedicated to the worship of the Emperor. These worlds undeniably prospered. They complied with every order Terra bade them heed, paid their tithes regularly and often in excess of the demands placed upon them. Their spiritual piety, however, did not go unnoticed. Word spread, as Word is want to do, of the religious worlds left in the wake of the 17th Legion. Rogue traders arriving on Word Bearer worlds were astonished, horrified even to be cajoled with naked religiosity. Imperial forces, Mechanicum, Astartes, or otherwise, that had served alongside the Legion could not ignore its overtly ritualistic behavior, nor ignore the words that had crept into the Legion's vocabulary, so redolent as they were of spiritualism, words like creed, apostate, ministry, heretic. Some openly opined that the iconoclasts of old had surrendered to the same superstitions that they had been created to annihilate. However, when such Word did eventually manage to work its way to the highest echelons of Imperial command within the Divisio Militaris, it provoked no rebuke. For such was the nature of the Emperor's great endeavor, and the sheer scale of it, that the actions of one Legion amongst the remaining 18 engendered little notice, at least initially. Owing to the vagaries of astropathic communication and the distances Word had to travel, simple warped travel chronological disparities as well, in many cases the actions of the 17th were dismissed as simple rumour. Absolute knowledge was rare, is rare. The Great Crusade had greater and more pressing concerns than curious practices that swirled around one of the Emperor's legions. However, starkly disturbing it may have been for the original eyewitnesses. The 17th were, additionally, far from the worst offenders when it came to ill behavior amongst the Legion as a startys, at least by commonly held Imperial standards. The 8th Legion Night Lords routinely flayed the skin of their enemies. The 12th Legion were simply unrepentant butchers. The War Council turned its attention elsewhere, and for a full century, the word-bearers converted unhindered, with no censure and no rebuke. Perhaps fittingly, it would be numbers, not words, that would be there on doing. Whatever the commitment of time it took to conquer a world, the rebuilding of one took far, far longer. This was why it was not a task to be left to a startys. The Imperial's logistics delegated reconstruction efforts to the Adeptus Administratum and the Mechanicum of Mars. The Legion as a startys were not to be burdened by being builders of roads and haps. They were to be the deliverer of worlds into the Imperial fold, not their administrators. Despite this remit, the word-bearers would never leave a newly compliant world until they were satisfied that the society they left behind was prosperous, secure, and most importantly, pious. Their pace of advance over this century slowed to a crawl, while other legions tore ahead of them by comparison. Divisio-Militaris officiants came to notice that their charts were displaying massive gulfs in Imperial volumes, and those gulfs were almost always centered around word-bearer-led expeditionary fleets. One legion alone may bring a hundred worlds into compliance, in the time it took the 17th to ming a mere handful. The Divisio, and ultimately the War Council itself, could not ignore the disparity any further, and in tandem with the reports they had been receiving for decades, dispatched agents to assay the worlds that the legion had left behind. There, they found damning and readily apparent proof. The word-bearers had not been slowed by intractable enemies, but by their own voluntary efforts. Every one of these agents reported the same findings, deeply loyal societies, but loyal on the basis of an entirely outlawed worship of the Emperor as a God. The news was deemed of sufficient importance to bring to the Emperor himself with all possible speed, yet he did not react immediately. Thanks to the records of the Imperial household, we know that he dispatched expeditions of his own, his most trusted Ligio-Castode's agents, to verify these reports. Perhaps he did not want to believe that his son could still be possessed of the delusions he had found him wandering in. Or perhaps... they were simply there to gather more evidence to compile final damning reports from the most scrupulous agents the Imperium could muster. The actions of Lorgar were in direct contravention to the Emperor's own wishes. The idea of a legion slaughtering those who opposed them on the basis of religious conviction was a stark echo of the holy wars that had so poisoned humanity throughout its entire history. It was a crusade in a literal term, spitting in the eye of the Emperor's ostensibly secular repurposing of the word. The very foundation of the Imperial truth was meant to liberate humanity from the yoke of superstition and ignorance, and yet here was his own son and his own legion, damning new Imperial citizens to the blinkered constriction of religious thought. Word 2 had reached Lorgar's brothers. The relationship between the 17th Primarch and his kin was never an especially warm one. He counted only one of their number, Magnus, as a close confidant. Sightlops of Prospero, having been his tutor for the first years, Lorgar had spent following his reunion with the Emperor. The others, to greater or lesser degrees, viewed him as something akin to the runt of the litter. Lorgar was by a long stretch the least marshal of the Emperor's sons. He took no pleasure in the violence his genetically crafted physique was capable of, almost always delegating actual combat to his legion, rarely taking to the front lines except for the most dire of circumstances. He was the Primarch that was most unsure of himself, the one least comfortable with his gifts, the one most prone to doubt, questioning, and introspection. He filled entire volumes with his musings upon all aspects of life, desperately seeking answers to questions far, far larger than even he. His brothers, notably Ferris Manus of the 10th Legion, Angron of the 12th, and Mortarion of the 14th, were often disgusted by their soulful and intellectually inclined brother, viewing him as contemptably weak, a squanderer of his heritage and a betrayer of the role the Imperium had cast him in, and indeed required of him. The Lorgar was preaching the Emperor's divinity, did nothing to him prove his standing in their eyes, merely becoming another facet that was the ultimate waste of him. The Emperor called upon the services of one such Primarch, the Lord of the 13th Legion Ultramarine's Rebut Gulliman, the Lord of a stellar realm of nearly 500 worlds. Gulliman and his Legion were exemplary for having brought thousands of planets into compliance and leaving in their wake thriving civilizations perfectly loyal to the tenets of the Imperial Truth. They bore many similarities to the 17th, but in many other ways were completely different. When these factors were undeniably the path the Emperor wished the word bearers to be set upon. The 13th were architects of incredibly loyal worlds, peerless in their devotion to the Imperium, and unmatched in their productivity within the fledgling Empire, but this never came at the cost of their pace of conquest. If anything, the Ultramarines were fueled by it. Records show that their victory tallies only increased in both quantity and rapidity as the number of worlds they conquered grew. Perhaps it was for this reason he chose the 13th Legion for what was to come. But if so, the subtleties of the choice appear to have been lost. The Emperor's task force, comprised of his custodians, a significant proportion of the Ultramarine's Legion, and led by his own will, entered orbit around the planet Kerr, a world brought into compliance by Lorgar himself decades beforehand. In the wake of the conquest, the Primarch and his Legion had constructed Monarchia, a so-called perfect city, a model of the cities of old cultures, Kerr having a markedly similar climate to the planet on which Lorgar had been raised. It was not the Legion's homeworld, nor the city of Lorgar's foundling, but it was a potent symbol, nevertheless. The Emperor's fleet annihilated it. In an orbital bombardment of purist indiscrimination, the city was raised to ash, the very soil turning to glass from the heat of Starship Lance strikes. The wordbearers, summoned by the distress calls from the world, assembled in their 100,000 strong entirety, only for the truth of the city's annihilators to be revealed to them. By command of pure psychic will, the entire Legion was forced to kneel before the Master of Mankind in contrition, their armor staining with the ashes of those they had once ministered to, and of that which they had built with their own hands. Witnessed by Robot Gulliman, and the Ultramarines, and the Ligio Costones, with tears upon his face, Lorgar once again prostrated himself before his father, but now in shame. The only Primarch in living record to have failed the Lord of Lightning so utterly. The Emperor declared that the 17th had too failed him and humanity. Never again must the Legion profess that he is divine, for he was no God, and would suffer no such worship in his Imperium. That Lorgar was a shattered man in the aftermath of Monarchia is without a doubt. Records show that the wordbearers fleet remained in orbit around Kerr for a substantial amount of time, even to the point that barbed communications threatening further censure were sent from the War Council. Just before this was escalated to the Emperor's attention once more, the fleet splintered and dove into the warp. In the years that followed, the 17th Legion burned a trail through the galaxy as rapidly as any of their cousins had. They seemed, on the surface, to be possessed with a penitent fury, a wholehearted desire to atone for their mistakes and make good on their censure. Relentless momentum typified these years. Some of the Legion's previous critics were for the most part silenced, and many now sang their praises. Satisfied that in their shaming by the Emperor's hand, the veil had been lifted from their eyes. All were, as history has made brutally apparent, utterly deceived. The truth of the matter is beyond horror, but it remains the truth nevertheless. Monarchia had broken Lorgar Aurelian beyond all repair. Everything he had dedicated himself to since his childhood days, the Golden God he believed in so ardently, was as dust upon the mind and as ash upon his tongue. Rebuke, cast out, cast down. The Primarch, had in his despair, cast about for anything that could bring him some measure of purpose in a world that had shorn him of it. Rudderless within a raging storm of his own wounded emotions and ego, Lorgar was counseled and consoled by his closest, Corpheyron and Erebus. From what history can gather? It is these two that carefully chose this moment to introduce into Lorgar's tortured mind the sliver of doubt. Doubt in the Emperor's Divinity. Doubt in the way of all things. And with this, an alternative. Was it not the virtue of the theologian too, on occasion, be compelled to reshape his worldview? Should the faith call for it? Should God be unworthy of worship? Or was it not possible that there were other divinities yet willing to accept it? Lorgar had of course done this before. It had been he who had swayed an entire world, cultures in its magnificence, away from the old faith. From polytheism to monotheism with the Emperor at its center. Well, yes, there was pain in the wastage of that effort. The struggles of the Primarch were not for naught. In the revelation that the Emperor had so painfully bestowed upon his son, could not a truth be discerned? Perhaps mused Phaeron and Erebus. This was confirmation, revelation in the veracity of the old faith. Enduring as it had for countless millennia, ancient beyond record. Was this the truth of the universe? We of the present era know this for what it truly is. The faith of Colchis was the worship of the Dark Pantheon. The so-called Chaos Gods. The greater intelligences of the Imitarium itself. Lorgar's acceptance of this was not without its violence. The Primarch wrote in his journals that he initially lashed out at his counselors, almost killing them for the supposed heresy they were attempting to enveigle into his brain. The issue, if one may present one's own opinions upon the matter, appears to be one of simple spiritual necessity. Lorgar Aurelion was a creature possessed of a pathological need to believe in a purpose. To believe in a being or beings higher than he. The supposed empiric coldness of the Imperial Truth was anathema to him. It is lightly he did not even feel horrified by it, because the concept of a universe bereft of divinity was simply impossible to him. Driven to serve, driven to submit, driven to believe, Lorgar would not have been capable of living without something other than himself to drive him forward. The Emperor, in his ineffable wisdom, had created the Primarchs to fulfill roles. This is about as close as objective historical fact as it is possible to ascertain. The mystery of Lorgar Aurelion is a troubling one to scholars for the apparent contradiction it represents. Why create a child incapable of believing in the ideology you seek to promulgate? One cannot spend too much time musing upon the Emperor's aims. Such a thing is folly of the most extreme sort. It is morose truth, but historical truth, that Lorgar's desire to submit himself to gods drove behaviors, inquiries, and ultimately a pilgrimage. That would lead to nothing less than utter damnation. Approximately forty-terrain years standard. The word-bearers tore out of the galaxy with the frenzy of the repentant. Their work was no longer the steady, almost gentle path of those who wished to build. It was as if the Imperial heralds had been born anew. For all the seventeenth now left in its wake were broken and bloodied worlds smashed into compliance with utter ruthlessness. In place of the considerate, open and eager Astartes that had preceded the censure, the seventeenth were now typified by those that served alongside them as possessing a stern comportment, a dour dedication to duty, and a resoluteness that bordered upon the self-annihilating. This was, of course, only visible to their contemporaries on the ground, to the Divisio Militaris, to the War Council, and to the Emperor. All that was discernible was a healthy uptick in the conquests and system reclamations delivered by the seventeenth Legion. In the grand arithmetic of the Great Crusade, the rebuke of the Legion had succeeded. The numbers were going up in reality. This was far from the truth. Lorgar, despite operating now under the watchful eye of a detachment of the Ligio Custodis themselves, had led an expedition from his Legion into the space known as the Great Eye, a massive warp storm in the Galactic North, in search of revelation, as spoken of in the most ancient of Colchisian religious texts. While the full record of that particular endeavor will wait for a later chronicle concerning the Primarch himself, it is safe to say that, based on all that was to transpire later, that Lorgar Aurelian found within the Eye the truth of primordial annihilation contained within the ancient dogmatica of his adopted homeworld. The second conversion of the word bearers was likely far less formidable than the first one had been. Every Legionary remembered the pain of Monarchia, and those newly raised were taught its enmity from the first days of their induction. What seeds of belief the word bearers now sowed to worlds they delivered to the Imperium was not of a God Emperor, but of the Eightfold Path, of the True Four, of Divinities, of Universal Annihilation, pledging themselves wholly to the Dark Pantheon of Chaos, the word bearers, over the course of nearly four Terran decades, sowed the seeds of Horace Lupercow's grand betrayal. While the Warmaster fired the first shot of the war, it was the word bearers, beyond any shadow of historical doubt, that were the first to fall from grace, and that they did so with total willingness, precisely their role within that rebellion. Well, those dread records must wait until a future day for the Telling. Until such a time, Ave Imperator, Gloria in Excelsis Terra. If you'd like to help support the channel, head on over to patreon.com. If you'd like to receive more updates about the channel and any future videos, you can contact me or follow me on Twitter at Oculus Imperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.


Hey everyone, Shaber1000 here today. We're going to check the one-week progress of our onions and We're also going to plant a couple tomatoes from seeds Hopefully those turn out because they're very special so Let's get into this and check them out. Okay guys, so I did plant some down here They're coming up one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve Looks like twelve of them came up down here. I Just doing an experiment there. I'll explain to you in one of my later videos how well or how bad they do There's four in here. I did have five This one came up last night So one two three four These I'm just going to let grow and see how big they can get And then these ones here will be eaten as just green onions or spring onions I know the lighting's not that great guys, but There's What 68 in here? Yeah, so they're doing really well but 20 minutes after I planted them had a squirrel out here. That's what this is for I did have this covered but As you can see that they started growing up into the screen So I got to keep a close on but like 20 minutes after I planted them They squirrel came out here was eating a bunch of them. I think that's what these bear spots are here for There's one came up there, but Yeah, they're coming up They're doing quite nicely All right, let's go here. I got some potting soil here a couple of these things And let's plant a couple seeds Tomato seeds and I'll talk about them here in just a minute.  I got these Because I ordered them online and they're a really Special tomato one I've never seen before But I'm not going to tell you what they are until they grow and if they don't grow Well, then I can tell you what they were or show you a picture of them But in the meantime, it's going to be a surprise. So we got all these little seeds which is I don't know what that one is Hopefully they're legal Let's see here As you can see they they did come from China. Hey, we got a little piece of paper here It says Well, I can't read that. Well That I can read Okay, so there's a hundred seeds in each pack. All right So I'm not sure Why these are so why these are so different, but we'll plan a couple see these Or like that and these are like this so All right I'll just show you one of these and then I'll get them planted and all water and stuff like that off camera because that That stuff's kind of boring. I know I get it guys, you know, so I don't care much for this soil. I don't know I just It's more like it more like a mulch than it is a soil Okay, so like I said, I'm not sure about why these are different here So I think what I'll do I didn't think there was that many We planted a hundred about a hundred onions and I counted last night so far We've got all together about 78 of them coming up So that's not bad for all them online Okay, so I'm just gonna Put these down in here. I'm just gonna put a couple in so there's that one and then In each one and as it starts to sprout, I'll take it out and plant it over there Now these like I said, I'm not sure About these See it doesn't I can't read this because it's in Chinese This says one two and three. I can't read that But that's all I can read on these so, okay, let me go ahead and get these Planted in these containers, and then I'll be right back with you. Okay guys. I got them all planted not all of them But I got them planted. I got some in here Put a couple over in there, but we'll see what comes up and what don't and Hopefully if they come up you guys will see These these tomatoes are they should be pretty cool if they grow But we'll have to wait and see and if they don't like I said, I'll tell you what they're supposed to be But right now it's gonna be a surprise. So anyway guys, thanks for watching. I appreciate it and We'll see you next week when we check the Onions again, and we'll see how these are doing. Shea bear the methamanal edge. I'm gone for now Bye. Bye guys. Take care. Enjoy the rest of your week