His swords are called Severance and Rebuke. He dual-wields, a long blade in one hand and a stubby axe in the other, and he’s got the kind of moustache you only grow when you’ve been around long enough that nobody’s going to tell you to shave it. That’s Kaius Konorius, the new Ultramarines character Games Workshop revealed this week, and the very first thing the reveal wants you to know about him is that he’s old. A grizzled blademaster. A veteran’s veteran. Trained beside Marneus Calgar and Ortan Cassius back when all three of them were still neophytes on Macragge.
Which is a lot of history to hang on a model that nobody had heard of on Sunday.
Kaius Konorius arrived as the week-two reward in the Siege of Death Mire, the global campaign GW is running to launch the new edition. Every week the Imperium wins the online results, they hand the Space Marine playerbase a new model. Week one it was some Outriders. Week two it’s Konorius. He is, very literally, a prize for Marine players logging more games than Ork players, which was always going to happen, because there are more of them.
The Ultramarines found a legend down the back of the sofa
The lore they hung on him is the part I keep chewing on. Konorius wasn’t written as a fresh-faced up-and-comer. He was written as an ancient. The official line is that he was a neophyte at the same time as Calgar and Cassius, then spent the entire Era Indomitus “tutoring battle-brothers in bladework on Macragge,” and only got pulled out of the training halls recently. So he’s been on the Ultramarines’ home world this whole time, teaching swordsmanship, while the rest of the Chapter went off and fought the most eventful stretch of its ten-thousand-year existence, and none of those records ever found room to name the swordmaster who stayed home.
I find this genuinely funny. It’s the narrative version of a company introducing you to a bloke at the Christmas party with “oh, Dave’s been here longer than any of us, runs the whole archive,” and you’ve worked there four years and never once seen Dave. Where was Dave during the Tyrannic War? Teaching a class, apparently. Marking neophytes on their parry drills while Behemoth chewed through the Eastern Fringe.
And look, I want to be snide about it, but the honest answer is that this is more or less how you’d expect a fighting order this old to actually work. Of course there’s a sword instructor on Macragge that nobody outside the Chapter has heard of. There are probably hundreds of them. The Ultramarines are the size of a small nation with its own fleet, its own worlds, its own standing army in the Auxilia. The surprise is that GW looked at one anonymous sword instructor and decided he was worth a full character model, a name that sounds like a Roman law firm, and a backstory retroactively welded onto two of the Chapter’s biggest names.
Because that’s the trick, right there. Stick the new guy next to Cassius and you borrow Cassius’s gravitas for free. Ortan Cassius is one of the oldest characters the Ultramarines have, a cyborg zealot who’s been Master of Sanctity for something like nine centuries, which is roughly nine hundred times longer than my Cadians have sat undercoated in a drawer. He’s been in the lore since I was in school, since before I was in school. Put “he trained with Cassius” in the first sentence of a reveal and the reader’s brain fills in the rest for free.
Why Calgar pulled Konorius out of the training halls
The in-story reason for dragging Konorius out of the training cages is the actually interesting bit, and it’s really a story about Calgar.
You have to go back to Vigilus. During the War of Beasts, back in 8th edition, Calgar cut a deal with the Aeldari and used the whole affair as bait to lure Abaddon the Despoiler into a personal duel at a place called Saint’s Haven. The stealth half worked: a cloaked Eldar ship rammed the Vengeful Spirit while everyone was watching the duel. The duel half went badly. Calgar, the finest warrior the Ultramarines have produced since Guilliman himself, got beaten hard enough that the records just say he was “badly wounded.” In GW’s language, when it’s a Chapter Master, that phrasing means he came a lot closer to dying than Macragge likes to put in writing.
So now, some years and a Rubicon Primaris crossing later, Calgar has apparently decided he never wants to be caught in that position again without a blade at his shoulder. He remembered the neophyte who used to put him on the sand in the training cages, went and found him, and made him his personal champion. That’s the whole story. The Despoiler nearly killed him, and it rattled him enough that he wanted his old sparring partner within arm’s reach for the rest of the war.
That detail does more for the character than any amount of stat-line teasing GW could do. A Chapter Master appointing a personal champion is a quiet admission. It says the man who’s faced Swarmlords and Necron overlords and the Warmaster of Chaos now travels with someone whose entire job is to step into the killing blow meant for him. Calgar wouldn’t have wanted that before Vigilus. He’d have seen it as an insult to his own sword arm.
The Black Templars choose their champion by vision. A battle-brother wakes from a fevered dream knowing the Armour of Faith is his to wear, and that it’s his turn to walk out ahead of everyone and probably die. Konorius got the job because a friend asked him to. There’s something almost domestic in that, an old man calling up an older friend and saying come and stand next to me, I don’t trust the galaxy anymore.
The bit where I felt like an idiot
When the reveal dropped I did something slightly embarrassing. I assumed I’d forgotten him.
The name Konorius rang no bells at all, but the reveal was so confident about his supposed history that my first thought was “right, he’s from a novel I never got round to, and I should probably already know this.” So I went off to the wiki to catch up, found him listed among Calgar’s fellow neophytes with a tidy little citation number next to his name, and only then clocked that the citation was dated the same week as the reveal. There was nothing to catch up on. The history got written on Monday. I’d spent a solid five minutes feeling under-read about a man who is, as of writing, four days old.
So yeah. Konorius. Old guy, big tache, teaches sword. Been on Macragge the whole time, allegedly. Fought next to Calgar and Cassius as a kid, allegedly. Two named weapons, one halo, a face like a retired sergeant major who runs the local rifle club. I don’t hate him. I want to be clear about that, I don’t hate him. I just think it’s funny that the wiki had his life story before the studio paint was dry.
I showed the reveal to Pete, one of my garage-group regulars, who’s painted Salamanders for over a decade. His first reaction wasn’t about Konorius at all. It was, and I’m quoting, “the Ultramarines get a bloke who teaches PE and my lot still can’t buy a plastic Bray’arth Ashmantle.” Which is fair, honestly. There’s a whole shelf of would-be Salamanders characters stuck in Forge World resin or in no material at all, and meanwhile Macragge just conjured a brand-new hero out of a training-cage anecdote and a spare sprue.
The armour, the axe, and the moustache
The model itself wears armour styled after the Victrix Honour Guard, and that’s the one part of the design that isn’t spun from thin air. The Victrix are Calgar’s 1st Company elite, the veterans who double as statesmen and diplomats, the sort of Ultramarines who can win a warzone in the morning and negotiate the surrender terms over lunch. Dressing Konorius in their pattern of plate tells you he ran with them at some point, or earned the right to it. It’s a smart bit of visual shorthand, the kind GW’s designers are very good at now.
Bare-headed, he’s got that moustache, which the internet decided within about an hour makes him look like a 1970s cop, and I can’t unsee it now. Helmeted, he’s a fairly standard crested faceplate. Severance is the sword, Rebuke is the axe, and I genuinely had to look twice to be sure the axe wasn’t Severance and the sword Rebuke, and I’m still only about eighty percent confident I’ve got it the right way round. The dual-wield pose actually reads as a duelist rather than a bloke holding two weapons because the sprue came with two weapons, which is not a given with these things.
I’ll probably never own him. I play Imperial Fists, and my Cadians have been half-built since before my daughter could walk, so a fourth Ultramarines character is the last thing my shelf of grey plastic needs. One thing I settled on years ago was not buying models just because the internet’s excited about them, and I’ve mostly stuck to it, mostly. But I get why people will grab this one. It’s a lovely sculpt. GW’s studio doesn’t really miss on hero models anymore.
The campaign state, for anyone dropping in cold. The Imperium is 2-0 up in Death Mire. Two zones are still live, Hive Heart decided by online submissions and the Gallows Space Port decided by results played in actual Warhammer stores. Everyone who logs a game goes into a draw for a thousand-point army. Two more weeks to run, two more reveals to come.
If the Orks somehow claw a draw out of Hive Heart and the spaceport, we might even get a greenskin model out of it, which Pete and I would both far rather see than another blue guy. But the Imperium’s ahead and the Marine crowd isn’t going to suddenly stop turning up to log games. So the smart money says the next thing to walk out of Death Mire is another loyalist, and somewhere on Macragge there’s presumably a quartermaster nobody’s ever heard of who’s about to become extremely important.
