Varro Tigurius

The Strongest Witch of Ultramar

Of all the gifts the Emperor seeded into His Adeptus Astartes, none is more feared by the souls who carry it than the witch-sight, and no son of Ultramar has carried it further than Varro Tigurius. Born of Macragge — the fortress-world the primarch Roboute Guilliman raised into the capital of the Ultramarines and the heart of the realm called Ultramar — he was marked from his first days in the Librarius as something rarer than gifted. His tutors recorded a mind that reached past the wards meant to contain it, that heard the susurrus of the Immaterium where others heard only silence. The Chapter elevated him to Chief Librarian while he was young by the reckoning of his Order, and in the centuries since, no rival has come close. He is held, plainly and without exaggeration in a Chapter that distrusts exaggeration, to be the strongest psyker the sons of Guilliman have ever raised.

The Edge of the Warp

The Warp — the parallel sea of raw emotion and predatory daemons that underlies reality and through which the Imperium's ships must sail — is no abstraction to a psyker of his rank. It is a presence at the edge of every waking hour. Where his battle-brothers in the Librarius draw on it cautiously, in measured draughts, the Chief Librarian wades far out into the current, reading the tides of probability for the shapes of things not yet come. The price of such sight is exacted nightly. He does not sleep as other men sleep; the futures he glimpses crowd his rest with the screams of battles still unfought, with the faces of brothers who will die on worlds that yet stand untouched. To know what is coming, in the grim arithmetic of the 41st Millennium, is to grieve it long before it arrives.

I have seen the death of this world a hundred times. Tonight I will choose which hundred-and-first it shall not suffer.

— Varro Tigurius, on the eve of Behemoth

The Shadow in the Warp

His prophecies have purchased survival for Macragge itself. In 745.M41 a shadow fell across the astropathic choirs of the eastern Imperium — a void where the comforting glow of the Astronomican should have been, a silence the navigators named the Shadow in the Warp. While others puzzled at the dimming, Tigurius read it correctly: not a void but an appetite, a vast migratory horror drifting in from the intergalactic dark. He carried the warning to Marneus Calgar, Lord Macragge and Chapter Master of the Ultramarines, and named the thing by the title history would keep — Hive Fleet Behemoth, the first of the great Tyranid invasions, an ocean of bio-engineered organisms that strips worlds of every living cell. The warning bought the days that mattered.

The Battle for Macragge

The Battle for Macragge that followed was the closest the Chapter has come to extinction, and the seer's foresight is the reason there was a Chapter left to remember it. Forewarned, Calgar mustered the home world's defences, drew the orbital plates into a single fortress-net, and met the swarm on prepared ground rather than being swallowed unready. The cost remained monstrous — the First Company died almost to the last warrior in the underground hive-tunnels, holding the swarm's flank so that the planet above might live. But Macragge endured, the hive fleet was broken, and the Ultramarines learned the shape of an enemy that the wider Imperium had not yet imagined. Behemoth was only the first wave; the lesson Tigurius wrung from it would arm Mankind against every fleet that came after.

The Hood of Hellfire

He does not walk into the abyss unarmoured. Upon his brow he bears the Hood of Hellfire, a psychic hood — a relic of articulated, psychically-attuned crystalline circuitry — that focuses and amplifies the raw current of his mind, lending him a steadiness in the Warp that unaided will could never hold. With it he turns aside the bolt-pattern of enemy sorcery, splits the future into branching paths he can read like a chart, and looses his own power as a weapon when prophecy gives way to battle. To his Chapter Master he is two things at once: a seer who counsels before the guns speak, and a blade drawn when counsel has run out. Few advisors in the Imperium are trusted as Calgar trusts the witch at his shoulder.

The Bargain of the Prophet

There is a loneliness woven into the office, and the brethren of the Librarius have learned to leave it untouched. The man who sees the future cannot share its full weight, for to speak every doom aloud would unmake the morale of those who must yet fight. So Tigurius carries the dread alone, parcelling out only the warnings that can be acted upon and swallowing the rest. He has gazed upon the deaths of worlds, upon ruin that has not yet happened and now may never, because he saw it first and spoke in time. That is the bargain of the prophet of Macragge: he stares into the dark so his brothers need not, and he comes back from each vigil a little more haunted, a little less able to look away. The greatest seer of the Ultramarines pays in sleepless centuries for every life his sight preserves.

He does not sleep. He keeps watch, so that Ultramar may.

— A Codicier of the Macragge Librarius