Ludoldus

Ludoldus was one of the most storied High Marshals ever to command the Black Templars, a figure whose deeds spanned the long millennia between the thirty-ninth and forty-first centuries of the Imperial age. From his seat at the head of the Chapter he set in motion campaigns of such scale and duration that they outlived the men who began them, and his name became synonymous with the Black Templars' creed of ceaseless, unending war.

His most enduring legacy was the launching of the Morator Crusade, a war of such vast ambition that it was conceived to burn on without cease, a crusade eternal in the truest sense. He is remembered too as the driving force behind the Vinculus and Jerulas Crusades, campaigns recorded in the Chapter's annals as having been fought across spans of time so great that later chroniclers struggle to reconcile them, a testament to the strange and elongated legend that has gathered about his name.

Ludoldus went to war encased in archaic Terminator armour, wielding a combi-plasma gun with which he scoured the enemies of the Emperor from the field. Mounted upon his ancient plate was a lantern, said to have been blessed by the Blind Sisterhood of Luxvitas Binary, whose light was reputed to pierce even the roiling darkness of the Empyrean. In the void and on the battlefield alike it burned as a beacon, a fixed point of faith by which his warriors might find their way and take heart.

Though the precise dates of his rule have blurred into legend, the shape of Ludoldus endures with perfect clarity: a High Marshal who bore the lamp of the Emperor's faith into the deepest dark and, by its light, led the Black Templars ever onward in their unquenchable crusade. Later generations of the Chapter have measured their own devotion against his, and few among the Eternal Crusade's commanders are held in higher honour.