Somewhere under a dead world called Solemnace there is a perfect clone of Fulgrim standing in a case. Grown whole from pure Emperor’s Children gene-seed, unbroken, ten thousand years younger than the Daemon Primarch who took Ferrus Manus’s head off on the black sand of Isstvan V. It’s filed away in the private galleries of a Necron who has more or less forgotten he owns it.
The Necron is Trazyn the Infinite, and the reason I keep coming back to that case is that r/Warhammer40k spent a good chunk of last week arguing about it. Would the clone be a loyalist? What happens if it wakes up and walks out? Nobody has a clean answer, which is why it’s been stuck in my head all week.
The clone is canon, by the way. This isn’t a fan invention that grew legs. In Josh Reynolds’ novel Fabius Bile: Clonelord, Trazyn cuts a deal with Fabius Bile: eighteen thousand samples of pure Emperor’s Children gene-seed going one way, and coming back the other way, a perfect clone of Fulgrim plus a Space Marine officer named Perfector Flavius Alkenex and his warriors thrown into the bargain. Bile got raw material for his endless meat-tinkering. Trazyn got a primarch for the shelf.
What Trazyn the Infinite actually collects
Trazyn calls himself the Archaeovist of Solemnace, which is a grand word for what he does, which is steal things. He wages war only to expand his collection and mostly ignores whether the war makes any strategic sense, though his campaigns tend to line up with someone else’s military goals by pure accident, and his allies have learned to just take the win while he wanders off with whatever he came for.
You can’t really kill him. He’s called the Infinite for a reason. White Dwarf ran a scenario years back with the wonderful title “Bring Me the Head of Trazyn the Infinite,” and the entire joke was that taking his head doesn’t take. Cut down the Trazyn in front of you and you’ve cut down a Lychguard he was never really wearing, while his consciousness snaps into another body somewhere in the room. There’s a bit in an older White Dwarf where Cato Sicarius decapitates him mid-conversation and Trazyn just keeps laughing from across the ruins.
So what’s in the galleries. The preserved head of Sebastian Thor. The wraithbone choir of the Altansar craftworld. The ossified husk of an Enslaver. A twelve-metre Krork warboss that fought in the War in Heaven, whose armour Fabius Bile reckoned was more advanced than his own. A group of Raven Guard and Salamanders snatched mid-fight from the Drop Site Massacre and frozen ever since. Ursarkar Creed, the Lord Castellan of Cadia, grabbed in the last moments before the planet died. Katarinya Greyfax, an Inquisitor he later let go, who went on to serve Guilliman. And a giant of a man in baroque power armour, face contorted in a permanent scream, who the codex never bothers to name.
That last one has launched a thousand forum threads and I’m not going to add to them here. Point is the collection is enormous, and a lot of it is people.
He also doesn’t care whether any of it is accurate. His grand tableau of the death of Lord Solar Macharius has about a tenth of its Guardsmen kitted out in uniforms that are three hundred years wrong for the event, because Trazyn couldn’t source the correct ones and decided the spectacle mattered more than the bootlaces. That detail tells you how he thinks. The display has to look right from a distance, and nobody on Solemnace is ever going to walk over and check the buttons.
The soul is the part Fabius can’t copy
The Fulgrim clone gets stranger the longer you look at it, and most of the strange parts don’t have canon answers.
Cloning a primarch’s body is not new for Fabius Bile. He did it once already with catastrophic results. After the Heresy he got hold of Horus’s corpse and grew clones of the dead Warmaster, and the Sons of Horus spent years hunting down and killing every single copy in a run of wars so shameful that when the last clone finally died, Abaddon renamed the whole Legion the Black Legion to bury the memory. So a cloned primarch is possible. We also know roughly what it does to everyone who finds out one exists.
A clone of the flesh is only ever a copy of the flesh. Fulgrim didn’t fall because of his genes. He fell because he was a perfectionist whose pride got worked on by Horus, and then he picked up the Blade of the Laer, a daemon weapon he didn’t understand until it was far too late, and by the time he beheaded his own brother on Isstvan he was already gone. If you want the full slide from paragon to Slaanesh’s favourite, I went through it in the Emperor’s Children breakdown a while back. None of that is in the DNA. A perfect physical copy of Fulgrim is a body that never met the sword, never got the whispers, never spent ten thousand years marinating in Slaanesh. Whether the arrogance and the hunger come bundled with the meat, or whether they were things that happened to him, is a question the lore has never answered and probably never will.
That’s the whole appeal of the Reddit argument. A blank Fulgrim could be a loyal primarch. He could be a monster waiting to happen. He could be a confused man who wakes up in a glass box on a tomb world with no idea that ten millennia have passed and his sons are wearing his flayed face as fashion. Fabius builds bodies. The soul is the one part he’s never worked out how to reliably print, and nobody knows whether this clone came with one.
So yeah. Trazyn. Robot magpie, been around since fourth or fifth edition, collects stuff. That’s the whole character, on paper. Except the stuff is people, and one of the people is a spare Fulgrim, and he keeps it filed next to the antique pipes.
What the spare primarch is actually worth
I fell down this hole the way you always do, at about one in the morning, meaning to check one fact and instead reading the entire list of Trazyn’s exhibits. That’s how I found the worst one, which I’ll ruin for you: two Sisters of Battle, heroes of a world called Okassis, one of whom didn’t survive recovery, so Trazyn stitched a stand-in Sister’s hand and organs and one cornea onto the surviving sibling to complete the display. I closed the laptop after that one. I’d gone in for the Fulgrim thing and come out feeling slightly ill about a diorama…
I’ll admit something. For years I filed Trazyn under comic relief. The posh voice, the thieving, the running gag about his head. I had him mentally shelved next to the goofier Ork characters, and I was wrong, because when you actually read what he’s got in storage he’s one of the most quietly horrifying beings in the setting. There’s no malice in it. He files a captured Inquisitor and a Necrontyr walking stick under the same heading and thinks no more about either.
And that’s the part that makes the Fulgrim clone perfect, in the grim way this game is sometimes perfect. Think about what that clone is worth. To the Emperor’s Children it’s the Holy Grail, a chance to grow their fallen father a fresh body. To the Inquisition it’s a five-alarm heresy that would justify burning a subsector. To Fulgrim himself, wherever he’s flitting through the warp getting bored, it might be a spare life. It is, arguably, the single most valuable object in the galaxy right now. And it’s sitting in a Necron’s basement with a little label on it, ranked somewhere below the good pipes and above the wrong-uniform Guardsmen, because the being who owns it collected it the way I collect grey plastic I’ll never paint. It’s in a box now, and he’s already three exhibits down the corridor looking at something else.
The clone’s been in that case a while, too. Clonelord came out in 2018, so in real terms it’s been sitting there about as long as I’ve owned my current army. Which I’ve at least got painted. Trazyn’s never going to do a single thing with his Fulgrim.
There’s a version of Trazyn where he’s basically on our side. During the Fall of Cadia he actually played hero, sort of. He turned up, told Belisarius Cawl how the Cadian pylons worked, having found the place using the Celestial Orrery in the first place, and cracked open a tesseract labyrinth full of his human exhibits, ancient Guardsmen and lost Astartes, and threw them at the Black Legion. The books can’t quite decide if he came as a thief or a saviour, and I lean thief. He did it because a galaxy that falls to Chaos is a galaxy where the collecting stops, and Trazyn cannot abide the collecting stopping. He helped hold Cadia the way you’d hose down a burning library, thinking about the books.
Which is the thing that gets me about the Fulgrim clone. Somewhere out there Fabius Bile is still working, still building, and he handed over the most dangerous prototype he’s ever made for a bulk order of gene-seed, because to Fabius it was a fair price and the clone was just one more experiment he’d moved past. Two of the coldest minds in the setting traded a primarch between them like it was a used car, and neither of them thinks about it much anymore. Fabius has a thousand other experiments running. Trazyn has a whole tomb world of shelves, and the spare Fulgrim is just one more thing on them.
Nobody in the Imperium even knows it’s there.
