Fabius Bile

Chief Apothecary

Fabius Bile was the Chief Apothecary of the Emperor's Children during the Great Crusade — a senior medicus-officer responsible for the Legion's gene-seed and the close-attention biological work that every Astartes Legion required. He was unusually gifted, unusually curious, and unusually disinterested in Imperial medicae doctrine.

When Fulgrim turned, Bile followed. When the Emperor's Children turned to Slaanesh, Bile refused. He remained nominally Heretic but rejected formal Chaos worship — his interests had become, by his own description, materialist rather than theological.

The Great Work

Bile's Great Work — the project that has occupied him for ten thousand years — is the engineering of a successor species to humanity. He believes humanity has stalled evolutionarily and that a deliberate genetic redesign would produce a being capable of transcending both Imperial pious decay and Chaos's spiritual rot. He calls these designs the New Men. He has produced thousands of them. He keeps producing them.

He has also cloned, at least to his own satisfaction, every Primarch. The clones do not always survive. When they do, they tend to escape him within months. He continues anyway.

The Imperium is decay arrested by ritual. I propose decay arrested by science.

— Fabius Bile, attributed early M37

Method

Bile operates from a mobile lab-ship and the world Urum, a planet his armies have terraformed into a vast genetic crucible. He carries the Rod of Torment, an antique pain-amplifier weapon, and is accompanied by his own clones — successive generations of "Fabius" each carrying a fragment of the original's memory and a copy of the project notes.

Other Chaos warlords find him uncomfortable. He sells his services in modified Astartes gene-craft, but he sells them on his own terms and refuses to take sides in the wider Chaos politics. He is, in functional terms, a power unto himself.

M42

Bile has been active in the Era Indomitus. The Imperium's biologis savants have caught fragmentary glimpses of his current line of research — the New Men appear to be approaching, by some measures, what Bile considers viable. The Inquisition has classified him as Threat Tier Beta-Black and has, for several centuries, declined every proposal to capture him alive because the gene-craft he carries cannot safely be held in Imperial custody.