Fabius Bile

Fabius Bile, who calls himself the Primogenitor, was once the foremost Apothecary of the Emperor's Children Legion during the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy, rising to Chief Apothecary and Lieutenant-Commander with authority over the gene-seed of every warrior in his Legion. Ten millennia later he serves no god and no Legion, selling his genius in gene-craft to whichever warband can meet his price, and answering to epithets — the Spider, the Clonelord, the Manflayer — that reflect a career built entirely on the remaking of flesh.

Even those who despise him admit no gene-wright in the galaxy matches his skill, a reputation that keeps his price met however monstrous the commission. Bile's experiments began as an attempt to arrest the genetic corruption creeping through his own Legion, but by the era of the Heresy his ambition had already outgrown loyalty. He is sustained today by the Chirurgeon, a spider-limbed surgical engine fused to his spine, forever outrunning a wasting affliction by discarding one cloned body for the next, so completely that no one, Bile least of all, can say with confidence which incarnation is truly original. Among his most infamous works was a cloned Horus, grown in secret to seed the fledgling Black Legion, a creation ultimately destroyed before it could be used. From his hidden laboratory-fortress on Urum he commands a shifting Consortium of fleshcrafters and renegades, each drawn by the promise of gene-craft no other quarter of the galaxy dares attempt.

Bile's true obsession is the New Men: a self-declared perfection of humanity, genetically superior post-humans he has scattered across the galaxy in defiance of gods, Legions, and the Emperor's own unfinished work alike. Loyalty to gods and Legions alike he discarded long ago as one more obsolete organ, kept only so far as it still serves the greater work. He has died more times than any record can account for, and every time, death has proven to be merely his next experiment.