The Ultramarines Chapter has produced some of the finest servants of the Emperor in the history of the Imperium, its greatest heroes a byword for the courage and honour that is their credo.
There was a time when it appeared that Demetrian Titus, the Captain of the Chapter’s 2nd Company, would eclipse them all before a cruel turn of events saw him exiled and presumed dead for many years. Now, in the Era Indomitus, Titus has returned to fight alongside his battle-brothers once more, and perhaps resume his meteoric rise to the heights of command.
Issue 498 of White Dwarf delved into the history of the legendary star of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. To celebrate his arrival on Prime Video's Secret Level, we're reproducing the article here on Warhammer Community so fans can see what he has been up to the last few hundred years.
On the orders of battle compiled by Imperial logisticians in the early stages of the Fourth Tyrannic War, the name of Demetrian Titus appears as a Lieutenant of the Ultramarines Second Company. To have attained such a rank is a notable achievement, typically following a period of distinguished service as a sergeant, and authorises the warrior to command fully one-half of the lauded Battle Company in the field on behalf of their company commander. The veterans of the 2nd Company fighting Tyranids and other horrors in the Bastior war zone know that Titus has already exceeded this honour, having served as that company’s captain before the incumbent, Sevastus Acheran, and his predecessor Cato Sicarius.
Demetrian Titus was born on the agri world of Tarentus around eighty years before Hive Fleet Behemoth invaded Macragge. The only child of a humble family of modest means, Titus was chosen from the promising youths of his generation by the selectors of the Chapter’s Scout Company, and proceeded to excel at every trial put before him on his path to becoming a Space Marine. After little more than fifty years, he had risen through the ranks to become a decorated warrior of the Ultramarines 2nd Battle Company – one of the finest fighting units to be found anywhere in the Imperium.
The Second Company is frequently called to fight in the defence of the Imperium far from the borders of Ultramar. So it was when the bio-ships of Hive Fleet Behemoth invaded the Ultramarines’ realm during the First Tyrannic War, Titus was far from Macragge and was not able to fight in the defence of his Chapter planet. Astropathic distress calls struggled to escape the throttling effects of the Shadow in the Warp, but a few finally reached the distant Second Company strike forces who raced back to Ultramar to support their battle-brothers. They arrived too late to participate in the Battle for Macragge itself but formed part of the reinforcing waves that scoured the defeated invaders from the other worlds of Ultramar.
In the aftermath of the Battle for Macragge and the horrific losses suffered against the Tyranids, the Chapter had to be rebuilt. The veteran 1st Company had been wiped out, and Severus Agemman, then commander of the Second Company, was chosen to replace the fallen Saul Invictus as the Chapter’s First Captain. Lucian Trajan, Agemman’s senior sergeant, was promoted to the rank of Captain of the Second Company, and Titus was honoured to serve under Captain Trajan as the sergeant of his Command Squad. The newly reformed Second Company took part in multiple purge operations to cleanse Ultramar’s worlds of xenos taint, Sergeant Titus was dispatched by Trajan to lead multiple kill teams to eradicate any surviving broods they discovered. It was here that Titus developed what would become a distinctive trait of his; studying the tactics and strategies of Mankind’s alien enemies through the expedient of close-quarters combat. Where other senior figures might be content to sift through second-hand data and the reports of others to learn how best to combat their foes, Titus has long valued personal experience of how xenos creatures fight.
Trajan and Titus fought together for nearly a century, and both flourished under the tutelage of Captain Agemman. While some believed Titus would have made an excellent captain, he was content with his place in the company and the Chapter, wishing only to serve his captain and the Emperor in whatever capacity was asked of him. By contrast, during this time Cato Sicarius, proud son of a noble Talassarian family, had expected a vacant captaincy in the 8th Company to be bestowed upon him, only to see it granted to Sicarius’ brother-in-arms Numitor instead. Sicarius was forced to learn a humility that came naturally to Titus before he would receive the honour of a company command within the Ultramarines.
Perhaps because he repeatedly demonstrated selfless dedication to the Chapter before personal aggrandisement, Titus would achieve the rank of captain before Sicarius – although the honour came at a great cost. Captain Trajan’s Second Company was tasked with responding to an Aeldari invasion of the civilised world of Beta Arcturus, which had once been a planet of the Aeldari empire. A warhost of Craftworld Biel-Tan had issued Beta Arcturus’ governor with one local day – approximately nine hours – to withdraw from the planet or face the wrath of the craftworld. The Ultramarines responded to Beta-Arcturus’ astropathic distress call eight days later, by which time most of the planet’s cities had been set ablaze by the vengeful Swordwind hosts of the Asuryani. The strike cruiser Righteous Fury engaged the Biel-Tan ships orbiting the beset world, simultaneously launching an assault force in demi-company strength under Trajan’s command in Drop Pods and Thunderhawk Gunships directly at the location of the enemy commander.
Captain Trajan met the commanding Autarch of the invading armies in single combat, blade to blade, and slew her as Titus led Trajan’s Command Squad against the elite Aspect Warrior bodyguard of the xenos general. Titus accounted for three of the lethal sword-fighters that day, brutally carving through their wraithbone armour with his snarling chainsword. The aliens were defeated, but in their spite captured one of Titus’ battle-brothers as they withdrew, a young warrior named Leandros. With Biel-Tan blood still drying on his battle plate Captain Trajan led a combat squad to recover Leandros, ordering Titus to secure the battlefield and await their return. The deceptive Aeldari, however, had lured Trajan into an ambush. Revealing hidden forces not yet committed to the battle, the vengeful Biel-Tani surrounded Trajan and cruelly cut him down. Titus led the counterattack that recovered Trajan’s body and assumed command of the strike force that went on to drive the alien aggressors from Beta-Arcturus for good.
Titus’ brevet captaincy was a state of affairs that Chapter Master Marneus Calgar was to make permanent, granting Titus command of the 2nd Company after they bore Trajan’s body back to Macragge to be interred within a grand sepulchre within the Fortress of Hera. Titus went on to lead the Second Company to victory after victory against the mutant, the alien and the heretic. Many senior Ultramarines, such as First Captain Agemman and the Chapter Master himself, regarded him as a model of the humility expected of their Chapter, while also being an exemplary warrior and strategist. Ten years after taking command of the Second Company, Captain Titus led a strike force to relieve the forge world Graia, which had been invaded by the Orks of Waaagh! Grimskull. After displaying an uncommon resistance to corruptive warp power unleashed on Graia, Titus was sequestered and taken away for interrogation by Inquisitor Thrax, whereupon he disappeared from the Chapter annals for a time. Cato Sicarius, who had felt that he had been overlooked for command following the First Tyrannic War, replaced Titus as Captain of the Second Company.
Titus spent more than a century in the custody of Inquisitor Thrax, as the Inquisitor attempted to establish the reason for Titus’ resistance to the empyric energies unleashed on Graia. He was psychically scourged and subjected to brutal mind-trawls, and even though no sign of corruption could be discerned the Inquisitor refused to relinquish his captive. During this time, Chapter Master Marneus Calgar made numerous petitions to representatives of the Holy Orders of the Emperor’s Inquisition, demanding that his captain be returned to the brotherhood of the Ultramarines. Whether these requests fell on deaf ears or were lost in the labyrinthine levels of secrecy and self-proclaimed hierarchy that exists within the Inquisition, Calgar never learned. No word reached him of either Inquisitor Thrax, or his captive, Demetrian Titus, for many years.
INQUISITOR THRAX
Gerome Thrax had served as an Inquisitor Ordinary for more than four hundred years before the invasion of Graia. Having been schooled as an Interrogator by the legendary daemonhunter Inquisitor Phaust, Thrax was an avowed member of the Ordo Malleus. Yet he was also a student of history and believed the monstrous angels of the Emperor’s creation, the Space Marines of the Adeptus Astartes, represented a significant threat to Humanity alongside the existential threat of heresy and the warp. So he took it upon himself to monitor the actions of a number of Chapters, particularly those operating in Segmentum Tempestus and the Segmentum Solar itself, to ensure they did not overreach. The Ork invasion of Graia was not of particular interest to him, and the involvement of the Ultramarines in response scarcely warranted more, given their unblemished Chapter record. But when his agents intercepted binharic distress messages from Graian Tech-Priests identifying a warband of Chaos Space Marines led by the renegade lord Nemeroth on the planet, Inquisitor Thrax summoned the fastest strike vessel he could to bring him to Graia. Thus was Titus’ fate sealed.
Thrax arrived to discover that Titus had been deceived by the daemonically possessed form of a member of the Ordo Xenos, Inquisitor Drogon. The daemon inhabiting Drogon’s body wished to access a warp-fuelled power source that the Inquisitor had been experimenting with before the Ork invasion of Graia, and had tasked Titus with fighting his way past the invading aliens to reach it. Not only had Titus displayed uncommon resistance to the raw power of the warp unleashed by the experimental Graian power source, but he had allowed himself to be complicit in the machinations of a daemonic entity. This was all the reason Thrax needed to take Titus away and perform thorough interrogations of the captain’s body and soul.
While Titus languished in a stasis cell in a secure Inquisitorial facility, Inquisitor Thrax continued his self-appointed watch over the Space Marines that purported to keep the Imperium’s borders safe. His voice was one of the first to raise concerns over the actions of Lugft Huron, the so-called Tyrant of Badab, in the years leading up to what would become known as the Badab War. He personally declared six Chapters Excommunicate Traitoris over a century-long period, leading to further bloodshed between the warrior brotherhoods of the Adeptus Astartes. When Darnath Lysander, who had been lost in the warp for centuries, returned to the Imperium, Thrax had demanded that the Imperial Fists hand him over to the Inquisitor’s custody so he could establish Lysander’s purity for himself but was overruled by the Inquisitorial Representative on the Senatorum Imperialis. Thrax was finally undone when he led a strike force of Grey Knights to cleanse the fortress monastery of the Grey Slayers Chapter. The feral world from which the Grey Slayers recruited their aspirants had turned to the worship of unclean powers, and the taint had spread throughout the Chapter. The degenerate Grey Slayers were ruthlessly put down by the Knights of Titan, but during his investigations into the origins of the Chapter’s corruption Thrax was possessed by a daemon of the warp. The Grey Knights, released from any obligation to the Inquisitor following his fall to Chaos, exterminated Thrax as they had the tainted Grey Slayers. As is often the case when an Inquisitor is lost to the Ruinous Powers, a conclave of Ordo Malleus Inquisitors was tasked with investigating Thrax’s dealings to determine how one of their number had been proven vulnerable, to prevent it from happening in future.
DEATHWATCH
After the death of Thrax, forces drawn from the Red Hunters Chapter were dispatched to investigate and secure the Inquisitor’s holdings. In a remote Inquisitorial watch station far to the galactic south, a Red Hunters kill team discovered almost a score of Space Marine interrogation subjects locked in stasis cells, preserved from the passage of time. Titus’ story could have come to an end there, had the Inquisitor responsible for overseeing the seizure of Thrax’s materials felt inclined to conceal the shame of her fellow Inquisitor. Instead Titus, and several other warriors of various Chapters who had attracted Thrax’s attention, were conveyed to the Deathwatch fortress of Watcher Keep to be evaluated.
Titus had surrendered himself to Inquisitor Thrax on Graia without complaint, recognising the Inquisitor’s authority over all Imperial subjects. To risk conflict with a representative of the Inquisition would have been conduct unbecoming a captain of the Ultramarines. Furthermore, while Titus was adamant that he had not strayed from the teachings of his Primarch and Chapter in his service, to take up arms against the forces of an Inquisitor would have surely damned him in the eyes of those who suspected him, even slightly, of heresy. Titus swiftly cast Thrax from his thoughts, as he had Drogon before him, once he learned of his captor’s fate – but his experiences would forever alter his opinions of, and dealings with, Inquisitors.
Titus entered the service of the Watcher Keep watch fortress as a Black Shield, his former identity unknown to those he fought alongside. Having received no word from his brethren since his incarceration, he came to believe that he had brought shame upon his name and that of the noble Ultramarines and determined that he was not worthy to bear the Chapter’s name. If he could serve the Imperium and his Emperor as an alien- hunting battle-brother of the Deathwatch until death claimed him, he would do so gladly, having no more desire for personal glory than he did at the start of his life as a Space Marine.
Amongst Watcher Keep’s kill teams, Titus demonstrated a familiarity with many of the alien species considered to be the greatest threats to the Imperium, though he never gloried in recounting his exploits as warriors of some Chapters might. He took the name Nullus, utterly divesting himself of his past identity to devote himself fully to defeating the xenos. As Nullus, Titus resolved to fight and die, if necessary, as a warrior of the Deathwatch – a state of affairs that almost came to pass during an action against the Tyranids of Hive Fleet Leviathan in the opening stages of the Fourth Tyrannic War.
When the hive ships of Leviathan emerged from beneath the galactic plane in the Imperium’s western reaches, many among Humanity’s defenders in the region had no real comprehension of the foe they faced. Most of the Hive Mind’s recorded assaults on the galaxy to that point had originated on the far side of the Imperium on the Eastern Fringe. So it was that the pattern of confusion and uncoordinated responses that had marked the first Tyrannic Wars were repeated by those in Segmentum Pacificus who were encountering the Tyranid threat for the first time. Yet even as messengers reached Terra and the first Solblade strike forces were mustered in response, the watch fortresses of the Deathwatch that dotted the Imperium’s western bounds were deploying strike forces of alien hunters steeped in the arts of Tyranid-slaying. Watch Master Vaedrian Shenol, the Black Castellan of Watcher Keep, authorised his Watch Company Primus to join up with the Deathwatch forces dispatched from Fort Obsidius into several Imperial systems in Segmentum Pacificus.
Nullus, as part of Kill Team Kasaeran, deployed into the Recidious System via Corvus Blackstar. His squad was tasked with reinforcing the Astra Militarum forces based there, who were already weakened by the toll taken by the Indomitus Crusade muster across the Imperium Sanctus. The kill team’s gunship was brought down by swarming flocks of winged bioforms, forcing the warriors to engage with the aliens on the planet’s surface. Here, Titus was gravely wounded by a monstrous Tyranid Carnifex. As life bled from his torn body, his Deathwatch battle-brothers lying slain around him, he prepared to commend his soul to the Emperor. It was then that Titus was reunited with the warriors of Ultramar, as an Ultramarines strike force arrived to relieve the Deathwatch at the planet Kadaku.
LOST AND FOUND
As the magnitude of Leviathan’s invasion in the galactic west became manifest, astropathic cries for aid had been sent racing through the warp to the farthest reaches of the embattled Imperium. Entire astropathic choirs were burned out with the force of sending messages from Terra to each of the Segmentae Majoris, and into the churning madness of the Great Rift itself. Ultramar had but recently been besieged by the forces of the Death Guard in the hideous campaigns known as the Plague Wars, but still bore the scars of the First Tyrannic War against the Tyranids only a few centuries before. First Captain Severus Agemman, Tetrarch of Konor and commander of Ultramar’s northern reaches, was among the first to assemble a force of veterans to undertake the arduous voyage to Segmentum Pacificus, heading directly for the Bastior Sub-sector. With him went Varro Tigurius, Chief Librarian of the Ultramarines, and it was he who detected the soul-sign of the warrior once known as Demetrian Titus as their strike craft traversed the immaterium. Even as the Shadow in the Warp began to cloud Tigurius’ witch-sight like cataracts, the Chief Librarian recognised he who had once been the captain of the Ultramarines Second Company. As fate would have it Tigurius travelled aboard the Righteous Fury, the same vessel that had borne Titus and Trajan before him to battle many times, and it was this mighty craft of the Chapter that broke warp at the edge of the Recidious System. There, the strike cruiser prepared its Thunderhawk Gunships to deploy to the planet where the broken form of the Black Shield known to his comrades as Nullus lay.
The warriors of Tigurius’ Solblade struck the swarms of Kadaku like a cerulean thunderbolt, gunning down broods of weapon-beasts with the carefully honed discipline of experienced Tyranid hunters. They arrived too late to save Kadaku but the warriors of Watcher Keep were able to recover their dead and wounded and fall back into the Ultramarines’ gunships. All except the ravaged Black Shield, who Tigurius ordered returned to the Apothecarion bays aboard the Righteous Fury.
Titus’ wounds were grave, and it was decreed that he would undergo the Calgarian Rites in order to hold a chance of surviving. Titus withstood the procedures necessary to become a Primaris Space Marine as stoically as he had endured any of Inquisitor Thrax’s interrogations and was remade stronger than he had ever been. When he awoke, he was surprised to find himself honoured with the rank of lieutenant under Captain Sevastus Acheran of the Second Company – a warrior who had only recently left the Scout reserve when Titus was taken from the Ultramarines. Once more Titus resolved to do as was bid of him by his Chapter, and serve under a warrior who held the titles he had once held.
There were those amongst the Ultramarines who were apprehensive about Titus’ return to the Chapter. Chief Librarian Tigurius, however, had performed his own examination of the former captain and found him to harbour no taint, before psychically communing with Chapter Master Marneus Calgar who authorised Titus’ immediate reinstatement. Their word was as adamantine, and Titus was officially welcomed back into the warrior brotherhood of his gene-sire. Lieutenant Titus, once and once more of the Ultramarines Second Company, would bring the wrath of his Chapter to the foes of the Imperium.
You can see Titus in action again tomorrow, in the Warhammer 40,000 episode of the animated anthology Secret Level on Prime Video.
You can also continue his fight against the Tyranids in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, the third-person shooter video game from Focus Entertainment. Set during the Fourth Tyrannic war, you, as Titus, must lead your fellow battle-brothers in combat against the extragalactic alien menace. But, as with the first game in the series, there are a number of plot twists that will keep you on your power-armoured toes for the duration. That chainsword is going to get used a lot!
Space Marine 2 is available now, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Steam, and at the Epic Games Store.
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