 It's pursuit is the metric by which so many of those who hold aloft the sword or the firearm are judged. It is a calling for those who take to the field of battle in defense of an ideology or a nation or a species. There are some who consider it an archaic concept, needless and shapeless ideal in an age ill-suited for such apparently noble aspirations. For what is the duty of a soldier but to kill, and what is killing but a hideous and barbaric act? Yet for those who chase this aspiration, it is a calling that brings an ability to kill that barbarity, meaning to the senseless hell of war. Conflict can be an inferno of raging irrationality and in-duty, well, a clear light is found, cutting a path through all the morass of blood and death. The soldiers of the Emperor's great crusade had duties stirred within their hearts by the pounding words of the iterators and the omnipresent gaze of the master of mankind himself, to unite the race of humanity, to bring the very stars themselves to heal under our control. In the quest for this ideal, there were those amongst his greatest legions that devolved the path of duty into something akin to high art. Know then that this is a record of the paragons of the legionesistates, those who relentlessly pursued the noblest ideals but never at the cost of their pragmatism. The 13th Legion, Ultramarines The first founding of the Emperor's legionesistates was undertaken during the catatlysmic crucible of the Unification Wars upon the human homeworld of Terra. Common across all during this time of forging was an initial alpha induction phase, where several thousand potential astartes were implanted with the legion's gene seed in order to determine the genetic material's viability and to sift out any potentially unforeseen mutations or complications. Such issues were of a special concern. The Emperor and his genesmiths had noted marked deviations in many of his legions during this period. The 8th Legion, for example, developed pale skin and eyes that balked at the harsh radiation-soaked sunlight of Terra's wastelands, but functioned superlatively in its darker dungeons. The 9th Legion, by no means of official explanation, were transformed into transhumans of angelic countenances, but were in possession of appetites altogether more dreadful. The neophytes of the new 13th Legion, however, faced the rigors of Astartes ascension and emerged with firm passes. The legion's genetic template yielded full implanted organ functionality with no notable mutations or deviations from the admittedly only recently established baselines. Psychological profiling undertaken during the Legion's Alpha induction indicated that hierarchical esteem was an endemic trait amongst the 13th. They displayed a natural deference to authority and a supreme dedication towards the completion of orders and objectives as a coherent whole. This was especially notable alongside fellow legions undergoing similar induction waves. The 5th Legion, for example, displayed a notable tendency towards individualistic beliefs and behaviors, as did the 12th and 6th, the latter being so ill-disciplined that they alone among the Emperor's Foundling 20 required disciplinary officers to keep them cohesive. Aggression in the 13th too was perfectly in line with acceptable margins for Astartes. All reports circulated throughout the Emperor's laboratories spoke highly of the 13th Geneseed Mark. While not trending towards combat specification, the Astartes of the newborn Legion were soldiery par excellence, delivering even in this early stage a force of arms that could bring all the transhuman fury expected of their Geneseed strain, but tempered with an inherent discipline and superlative willingness to simply do as they were told. Owing to this relatively incredible genetic stability, Terran recruitment for the 13th Legion was not limited to any one area or genealogical subgroup. The mid-Afric Hive oligarchs, the sub-equatorial Maglev clans from Panpocro, or even the Anthropophagic Reavers of the Caucasus Wastes, were all applied by the Legion's enlistment press gangs. But as diverse in culture, ethnicity, and location as even these three examples alone are, keen scholar acolytes of the Unification Wars made certain one special pattern from monks to these groups. They all possessed a marked resistance to the Unification that was offered by the Emperor. All of these regions had resisted the Emperor's armies to the bitter end, being brought into the Imperial fold not by negotiation, but near abject extermination. Their ruling regimes had been broken and gutted, and their populations had been rendered as little better than refugees, plying Terra's most well-worn trade routes. It has been theorized by Imperial scholars that the ease of adoption and psychological reformatting that typified the 13th Legion's gene seed was a final weapon against these intractable populations. Effectively, the Legion was a means by which what remained of their best and brightest young warriors could be transformed into exemplars of the Imperial cause, and more importantly denied to these cultures as recruits for some sort of recidivistic terrorist movement. Per Alex Govion, in their seminal Tactica Ocidentalis, an examination of storied campaigns of the 13th Legion during the course of the Shadow Crusade with diverse discussions upon the trials and tribulations of the realm of Ultramar, the 13th Legion were a, quote, masterful tool of population control. Here, cast as if by an artist working their marble with the foot soldiers of unity, come to take away your sons and transform them into the image of your enemy. And there was nothing you could do to stop them. They were the Emperor's genetic authority, the Lord of Lightning's command over the human genome itself. This hypothesis sees further evidence in the fact that the 13th Legion was, by what records survive, seemingly never deployed against other areas of the homeworld that, similar to their recruitment grounds, were holding out bitterly against the tide of unity. While the 7th and 8th legions saw heavy action in the closing days of the Unification Wars, the 13th's first active deployment was alongside the 16th Legion during the Lunar pacification waged against the moon's gene cults. The invasion would see the 16th Legion granted its first cognomen, the Lunar Wolves, and for the 13th earned them numerous campaigns during the Solar Reclamation, including many honors won during the brutal extermination of the Sol System's 10th and artificial planet, the Xenos Warmoon of Sedna, on the outer edges of the Kuiper Belt. The war orphans of Terra were performing admirably, showing not one niota of the rebellious spirit of their birth populaces. Owing to the manner of their recruitment, they were informally dubbed the war-born by their fellows. No official records remain as to the reaction this engendered. The 13th appears to have borne it with a subtle pride, seeing the discarding of their barbarian origins in favor of the imperial cause as the noblest of all callings, despite it having been anything but voluntary. Following the Solar Reclamation, the outward imperial expansion of the human realm was a thundering military juggernaut. The Emperor's genius was writ large in those early days, as a population base of the Terran Imperium was merged with the logistical and material might of the Mechanicum of Mars to create a simply extraordinary pace of galactic conquest. The 13th Legion was at the Imperial Vanguard, courting the highest favor of the Emperor's War Council. They proved disciplined to a fault, but unlike the brittle and brutish tactics of the Fourth Legion, the so-called Corpse Grinders, where the forlorn stubborn lass stands that cost the 18th Legion so heavily, the 13th's superlative skills in adaptation allowed it to achieve marked tactical success over a staggeringly diverse range of Xenos enclaves and human regimes encountered by the early Crusade, all while keeping casualties to a minimum. The previous two legions mentioned had similarly high retention rates to their gene seed, but psychological deviances towards both acceptance of attrition and refusal to retreat meant that they were never able to approach the tally of victories the 13th was able to achieve. The Emperor had designed each of his legions to bear a mixture of temperament and ability, distinct from that of their fellows, is unquestionable, it is a historical fact, but this application within the field brought a practical reality that was perhaps quite different from one theorized in a lab on Terra. The 13th bore not the fury of the Revenant Ninth, nor the subtlety of the clandestine 20th, but in them was born a mixture of strictness and resolution that made them perfect for large theatre level operations, especially ones that placed them in close alignment with other Imperial forces. They worked better than perhaps any other Legion with regiments of the Exertus Imperialis and Solar Auxilia. His cohesion grew to such a degree that on numerous occasions, Astartes' caudras from the 13th were dispatched to serve as tactical or disciplinary advisors to newly founded regiments from newly compliant regimes, an act most other legions derided as being utterly beneath their honour, their time, or their resources. It was, of course, far from a pointless waste of time. The 13th would use these missions with mortal soldiers to catalogue and inload as much information, martial or cultural, about these newly refound societies as possible, seeking to broaden their understanding of recently defeated foes in order to better combat future ones. Diversification, and more importantly, codification of military stratagems, was fast becoming the Legion's hallmark, and their appetite for new martial knowledge was relentless. By the third decade of the Great Crusade, the Legion had attained a character truly unique from their cousins. Recorded interactions with other members of the Great Crusade show that in personal disposition they were forthright and honest, having little time for abstracts or esoterics, but never as cold and mechanistic as, say, their comrades in the Iron Tenth. In the field of battle, their modus revolved around the swift accomplishment of specific predefined tactical objectives, assigned to different astartes on a squad-based level by a strict delineation of combat roles. The result was that, as the battle progressed, the 13th's successes would form a rising crescendo of miniature victories, culminating in a theatre-wide ultimate triumph. Despite being renowned for their pragmatism, they were not without their own sense of honour. As a whole, the 13th were markedly competitive with their cousins, especially those that had been reunited with their primarchs, against whom they routinely pitted themselves, metaphorically, of course, in attempting to outdo tallies of victories. Ormorial pick archives show that during this period, the Legion was adopting a tradition of wearing the honours worn in one campaign or another. For example, those companies that had been crucial in the Abhuman Annihilation campaigns in the Cancerai Nebula embraced the Midnight Blue and Death's Heads emblems of the Eighth Legion with whom they had fought, while the heavy armour companies crucial in the Cypra Mundi triumph wore a blazing emerald upon their right pauldrons to commemorate the incandescent green atmosphere aurorae of that specific world. Yet throughout these years, no formal name had been granted to the Legion by explicit request of the Legion itself. The Legion's first Lord Commander, Gren Vesotho, is recorded to have said, quote, I am told that once the numeral 13th was taken as an ill omen by the weak-minded and those enslaved to the lies of superstition. But in the Emperor's service, we shall make it a byword for redemption and glory. Nevertheless, informal cognomance developed, as is typical in essentially any military campaign. The Warborn is a name we have already discussed, but rather than one being attached to the Legion as a whole, those companies that had one of the aforementioned honours or other, or those to whom a particular method of warfare had become the du jour assignment, were successful in earning titles of their own. Many survived through the heresy years, and then afterwards still. Nemesis, the aurorans, the mentors, these are all names that will no doubt be immediately recognizable to any scholar of the Adeptus Astartes. Designations, which, with reasonable certainty, can be traced back to individual companies within the Thirteenth's days as a neemless Legion. Three decades into the Great Crusade, and the Legion's numbers had expanded exponentially. From the 8000 that had left the Solar System, the Thirteenth now counted 33,000 Astartes amongst their number. Primarily owing to their tactics, based as they were on prioritising the avoidance of combat losses, the Legion benefited extremely well from the inherent stability of their gene seed, allowing them to claim something of a lion's share of potential recruitment candidates. The War Council, after all, reasons that the coin of human lives were better spent in the genetic forges of the Thirteenth than other markedly unstable legions like the Fifteenth. The Thirteenth's primary battlegroup was granted full autonomy from the primary Imperial expeditionary fleets, those consisting at the time of the Emperor's own generalship, Horace's command of his Lunawals, and what remained of the maimed Third Legion, and Ferris Manus' Tenth Legion, Iron Hands. These other battlegroups formed the Trident of Advances into the wider galaxy, but besides them, the Twelfth Expeditionary Fleet of the Thirteenth Legion was assigned to the exploration and conquest of the dense core systems of the inner Galactic Disk. Success was immediate and consistent. The Legion made what the Divisio Militaris regarded as excellent progress, bringing worlds into compliance with minimal losses and infrastructural damage, but at the same time not withholding the genocidal power of humanity whenever alien worlds were encountered. This progress would, unfortunately, be arrested when word reached the Twelfth Expeditionary Fleet of a crisis brewing in the Osiris Cluster. A group of eleven star systems in close proximity to one another, the Osiris Cluster nestled in the inner portion of Segmentum Solar's second quadrant. Without warning, it had declared its intent to secede from the Imperium, a profound act of resistance that the nascent Empire could not possibly brook. Chartist merchant shipping had been seized, and all word had been lost with Imperial Governors and iterators within the volume, now being presumed dead. That the Imperium had been taken by surprise here was obvious yet understandable. The Cluster had seen a relatively bloodless compliance, many of its worlds joining the Imperium willingly, and others presenting only the resistance of certain vested interest groups. The Thirteenth Legion had a hand in many of these compliances. The Cluster's rebuke of the Imperium was now a threat to their honor and their victory tally. It simply could not stand. As it happened, the Twelfth Expeditionary Fleet was the closest in proximity, and as yet unengaged in active compliance operations, making the Divisio Militaris' redeployment requests an incredibly easy decision for Legion Master Gren Vesotho. A full invasion was immediately launched in the Septus system, deemed by intelligences as the rebel headquarters. The Twelfth Expeditionary Fleet crashed into real space and swept forward towards Septus XII. Vesotho was following the tried and true spear-tip tactic favored by Horus Lupacal and his Lunar Wolves. The Thirteenth Legion, seeking to emulate the Primarch and end this rebellion as soon as humanly possible, with a decapitation strike against its leadership. Vesotho's command staff drew upon the wealth of knowledge they had gained about the world, its culture, and its technological capabilities that they had diligently logged and codified following the Legion's role in the Cluster's compliance. The combination of such tactical acumen and the 16th Primarch's most devastating military maneuver assured Master Vesotho and his senior staff that a quick victory was assured. It was quite the historical shame that every single assumption they made was completely wrong. The attack on Septus XII targeted an environmentally sealed hive city turned cabasette by the locals. Orbital strikes pierced its outer shell, the great rents torn in the protective shielding, the perfect breach for Vesotho to lead a mass aerial drop by legion stormbird wings. Resistance was immediate and far, far more resolute than the Thirteenth had predicted. The just-landed Astartes were assailed at first by hundreds and then thousands of civilians in a tidal mob, the humanity of the world seemingly rising as one against the invaders like antibodies upon a bacterium. Dead-eyed Hab residents seemingly sewn into pressure suits charged Astartes lines, using mining blast charges as crude but devastatingly effective suicide bombs. The Thirteenth responded in admirable time, shifting tactics to attempt to stymie the horde and inflict mass casualties. The enemy, however, was completely different to what they had been actively planning for. Vesotho broke legion protocols in order to continue this attack, unwilling to lose the beachhead that they had so sorely achieved. Reinforcements that had not been expected to even be required were hurriedly deployed from orbit, and advances were finally mounted deeper into the hive, the legion claiming predetermined objectives with their customary professionalism, but only doing so at the cost of starkly higher than average casualty rates. It was not until numerous objectives had been captured, and the legion fully committed and embedded within the hive city that the actual trap was finally sprung. From within the corona of Septus' star emerged five hourglass-shaped starships, clearly Xenos in origin, but of an unknown provenance. Shipboards in Soria registered them approaching the orbital volume of the planet with astonishing speed. Realizing the trap that was falling upon his legion, Vesotho ordered an immediate retreat, only to find his ground forces facing renewed and somehow more ferocious assaults. Waiting stormbirds were assaulted by a horde of an unprecedented size, mobs of civilians using industrial tools to try and cripple the machines, as hundreds of their fellows attempted to pin Astartes in place through sheer weight of numbers. In the void above, battle was joined, the guns of the fleet made fully active only just in time, thanks to the exceptional training of the crews to exacting legion standards. The weaponry of the unknown enemy was devastating, a form of exotic particle whip that tore at void shield and hull alike, while answering torpedo barrages and interceptor flights were swallowed whole by what appeared to be caged gravitational singularities. The 12th expeditionary fleet fought as best they could, driving one of the strange starships to retreat, but only at the cost of a dozen imperial ships. Withdrawal of the Xenos craft signaled a new stage of the battle, as the mysterious enemy finally made physical presence. Encased in what appeared to be biomechanical containment suits, Xenos borders materialized via teleportation assault on surviving imperial ships, assaulting the crews not only with ethereal fire projected from their wrist-mounted gauntlets, but also psychic powers undermining the very minds of the humans aboard. Visotho's final act from the surface was to issue a full-scale withdrawal order, not only from the planet, but from orbit and the system. To the Legion Master's credit, this was done far sooner than any of his contemporaries may have ordered it. Visotho ensured his life was sold, covering the retreat of his astartes by Stormbird. His final act was to transfer all command to a successor, Marius Gage. Largely thanks to Visotho's call to retreat and Gage's own professionalism, what could have been an utter disaster had been turned merely into a bitter defeat, but one that was to wound the Legion not just in body. The Xenos strain, later named by Mechanicum Biologis adepts as the Osiron Cybrids, had enslaved the populations of the cluster through grand psychic manipulation. This first contact had cost the 13th Legion some 6,500 astartes, the worst single loss in the Legion's history, not even counting the death of their Legion Master. Approximately 20% of its overall strength had died. The vast majority of those had been Terran veterans, who had served with the 13th since the Unification Wars. Marius Gage was now in command of a bloodied Legion that nested within itself a cancer of doubt. Never before had the 13th been so humbled. Never before had their tactical acumen been so thoroughly subverted, and their confidence as a fighting force was nearly shattered by the experience. Reorganizing, redeploying and re-arming with astonishing speed, the 13th Legion threw itself into the fires of a short, honorless Purgation campaign, scouring the Osiris cluster of the Cybrids and their mind thralls, burning world after world so that they may yet bear the tread of Imperial colonists in the future. What emerged was a Legion that found its pride still smarting, its certainty still shaky, and its future unclear. But as the expeditionary fleet began to forge a path towards the Galactic East, a revelation was set to occur. The Primarch of the 13th Legion is perhaps the most renowned of all in Imperial history. Notwithstanding his present role, reborn into our benighted epoch as the resurrected Lord Commander of the Imperium, the Primarch ensured that tales of his early life were made widely available for Imperial iterators, being keenly aware of the propaganda coup his personal legend was for the fledgling Imperium. While age, ideology, and redactionism have all played their parts in embellishing and distorting the truth biographical, studious examination of what records revive allow a clearer picture to emerge. Rebut Gulliman had fallen in his birthing capsule, scattered from terror by dark and insidious powers, to the mountainous planet of McCrag in the eastern fringes of the galaxy. Unlike so many of humanity's furthest flung colonies, McCrag had preserved much of its society through the wretched millennia of the Age of Strife, its success in retaining what treasures of the Dark Age of Technology it yet did was thanks in part to a deeply authoritarian society, predicated around the preservation of the social order at all human cost, but additionally the almost miraculous preservation of warp-capable spacecraft. Through these and numerous other sublight vessels, McCrag was able to retain contact with nearby inhabited worlds in its local volume, however tenuous and dangerous the connection may have been. In doing so, the planet was able to prosper and survive while so many other human worlds regressed or simply faded into the ashes of history. So it was that when the infant Primarch was discovered by a group of McCragian nobility on a hunting trip, they knew instantly that this was a device of science and technology, as opposed to the superstitious reactions of those who had discovered Primarch's fallen upon less advanced worlds. One of them, Conor Gulliman, adopted the child as his own, recognizing him as something truly unique. The child reboot displayed the same rapid growth and advanced learning capabilities as his brothers did on their adopted home worlds, but with a noticeable predisposition towards the assimilation of philosophic, scientific and historical knowledge, as well as the ability to deduce astonishingly accurate conclusions from what, to others, would have been deemed essentially fragmentary information. As is common with all authoritarian societies throughout history, the youth's talents were naturally bent to the art of war-making, a lauded skill upon totalitarian McCrag, and Conor swiftly saw their rapidly becoming unparalleled capacity for generalship his foster son possessed. One such campaign against tribal raiders in the planet's northern reaches saw reboot achieve stunning successes with historically minimal losses, bringing the tribes to heel under the rulership of the McCragian regime. However, upon the Primarch's return to the Civitas, the planetary capital, the tragedy was about to occur. With the army dispatched to the north, a coalition of aristocrats under a local official named Galen had launched a coup d'etat against Conor Gulliman. These malcontents were ill at ease with the consul's regime, having preferred the ancient order of a feudal society that had, they claimed, preserved McCrag through the years of strife. Whereas previously a collection of aristocracy had commanded the entirety of the world's capital and technology under conditions of familial inheritance and land ownership, Conor, backed by a coalition of wealthy industrial magnates, had been pushing through a vast array of reforms aimed nominally at improving the living conditions of the planet's populace, but additionally forcing the aristocracy, through legislation, to invest in ambitious infrastructure projects their corporate interests controlled monopolies in. Seeing the ongoing tribal conflict as an opportunity to seize the reins of power, the aristocratic cabal struck when Conor and his reform movement were weakest. His demigod son far away. Robert returned home to find McCrag-Sivitas aflame. Mercenary soldiers bought from the deep coffers of the old regime had stormed the senate building, and while Conor had rallied what troops remained in a three-day defense of the legislative complex, he had fallen. The primarch found his adopted father bloody and broken, but still clinging to life. The senior gulliband survived in his son's arms long enough to recount the names of those who betrayed him. Rebut's rage was cold, shackled even now by the rationality the primarch had come to pride himself upon, but no less violent and merciless in its application. The rebels, having moved on to looting the city, were crushed by the loyalist army, seasoned as they were now from long campaigns and unbreakably loyal to the commander that had ensured they were fed, clothed, and billeted better than they had ever been in their careers. Civilian mobs raised by anti-reform rhetoric were similarly dispatched. The bodies of the worst offenders, participants merely in a system of their own exploitation, were hung in the streets for all to see. Order was restored with breathtaking speed. Rebut, as Conor's son, was hereditarily elevated to the role of consul, and with the aristocratic class now the enemy of the state, the primarch's office professed sole control over planetary authority. All lands belonging to the aristocracy, both rebel and previously loyal, were seized, all of their capital secured either in banking systems or private reserves, were also seized, and dispensed to the corporate interests of Conor's reform party. Rebel ringleaders were rounded up and sentenced not to immediate death, but to hard labour, to rebuild the shattered civitas by hand, stone by stone. Needless to say, they did not survive long. Rebut's transformation of McCrag was total, enforced with such precision of vision as only a primarch could possess, but one who had been the beneficiary of an upbringing where he wanted for nothing, not comfort, not occupation, nor education. In place of the feudal regime of times past, the son of Conor brought his father's vision of a capitalist meritocracy to fruition. Hard work and honour were soundly publicly praised, and those who epitomised both were raised to believe that they could rise from the lowliest peasant to holding the loftiest position of the land. The shirking of strict civic responsibilities and legal obligations were tantamount to treason, and those that did would find themselves swiftly punished under a revitalised legal system penned by the primarch himself. Technology, long since hoarded by the nobility, was disseminated throughout the upper echelons of McCragian society in order to utterly reform its infrastructural capabilities and, with it, its production capacities. Little was Rebut to know that as he reorganised society to match his vision, his true father, the Emperor of Mankind, had been battling warped storms to reach McCrag itself. Having made contact with the planet Esbandor, five Terranier standards beforehand, the Emperor had learned of the son of Conor, as Esbandor was on the fringes of McCrag's stellar sphere of contact. When the flagship of the Imperium finally breached real space at McCrag's system, the master of mankind found a world of total order awaiting him. McCrag had prospered under the technological reforms of Gilliman, who had reorganised its stellar fleets to establish frequent and well protected trading routes with outer colonies in order to transport resources back to the homeworld, ensuring the flow of economic goods across the volume. Indeed, when the Emperor's own battleship entered the system, he was hailed by a patrol group of ships in impeccable combat formation, who, despite being vastly outgunned by the Imperial fleet, stood to their ground and demanded to know the identities of these new visitors. The meeting between father and son was said to have been warm, with the Emperor well pleased by the society he found, and Gilliman, beyond delighted to have found his true father, to whom he swore immediate fealty. As rapidly as it was possible to achieve, the 13th Legion was assigned to Gilliman, who, upon learning of the Emperor's ongoing crusade, needed no urging to take up arms for the Imperial cause. The same deference for authority inherent within the Legion he would now possess was there for any who had the can to observe it in the Primarch, although these few kept their observations to private logs, nevertheless. The Legion, having suffered the Catatlysm of the Osiris Cluster, saw in their returned progenitor renewed purpose, having what doubts remained dispelled by the power of Gilliman's patrician oratory. The Primarch's assumption of command was seamless in the deference the Legion showed to him, and of course could not have come without him placing his unique mark upon their operational aims. Not content with simply wielding a weapon of war, Gilliman envisaged his new Legion as a self-contained engine of imperialist conquest and reclamation, one who would not simply leave a shattered enemy world for others to rebuild, but one who would in their wake actively work to create and maintain orderly, productive, and most importantly, loyal societies. The Legion was to him not simply the astartes of the line, but all who aided them, from the serfs of their starships to the workers who manufactured their munitions. Supply chains, logistical cores, starship crews, all of these were as indivisible from the superhuman warriors as these self-same warriors were from their bolt guns, and all within the entirety of the encompassing Imperium. The first step in Gilliman's reforms was the consolidation of Legion power around McCrag itself. Unlike his brothers, who similarly based their Legion fives on their foundling planets, Rebut's adopted homeworld itself would simply be the fulcrum around which the 13th base of operations would revolve. Utilizing imperial resources newly made available to him, the Primarch expanded the Legion's sphere of influence to all planets in McCrag's stellar locality, and from there, outwards and onwards in an ever-expanding, essentially self-governing realm. Ultramar, as it became rapidly known, was a fertile ground from whence the resurgent 13th Legion would draw its recruits, arms, ammunition, and supplies, and would continue to expand ever-outwards, right until the very first days of the Great Heresy. Privileged in location and early life, Gilliman capitalized upon his position as essentially the sole Primarch in the Imperium's eastern fringe, utilizing the industrial base of McCrag to format the worlds under his purview into, essentially, replicas of his adopted homeworld. Investment in these worlds would, as always, be the work of decades, but as the years proceeded, so too would the gains. To the Legion itself, Gilliman reinforced its existing traditions with the meritocratic operational practices of the McCragian military. The Legion became a rigidly hierarchical formation. Those who comported themselves with skill and honor were rewarded with command and responsibility, but obedience and deference to the chain of command was absolute and inviolable. The 13th had little time for the scramble for personal honor that typified more individualistic Astartes forces, such as the 6th Legion space wolves and 8th Legion nightlords. Doctrine was paramount, but essentially fluid. Legionaries were encouraged to adapt tactics in the field to better suit their enemies, but at the same time would only do so under the watchful eyes of their sergeants and their captains. Outwardly, new uniform livery in a rich royal blue with white and gold was adapted, along with the ultimate lift marking McCrag's volume on ancient star charts, and a new cognomant match. The 13th Legion were now the Ultramarines. The 12th Expeditionary Fleet, resupplied and rejuvenated, expanded outwards from Ultramar's volume with stunning rapidity, carving a path from the Galactic South as far north as the Dominion of Storms and as far southeast as the Ultima Thule on the fringes of the Exo-Galactic Gulf itself. Records from this time claim that during this century of conquest, the Ultramarines reclaimed more worlds than any other single Primarch had been thought capable of in such a relatively brief timeframe, thanks in large part to Gilliman's peerless efficiency of command. The time and energy spent by the Legion paid off dividends in full. The robust supply lines engendered by these flourishing worlds merely served to better maintain the speed of the Crusades advance, bent entirely as they were to the Imperial war machine, as well as having the benefit of spreading cohesive and loyal Imperial civilization to worlds left in the wake of the military advance. At the same time, the Ultramarines saw a veritable explosion in numbers. Always in possession of one of the most stable gene seeds amongst the legions, when it was combined with Gilliman's genetic material and the Primarch's own logistical skill, the resulting expansion surpassed the expectations of all, even, according to some, the Emperor himself. Ultramar's hundreds of worlds served to supply the Legion with more recruits than any single Legion Fife was capable of yielding, while yet more were continually rendered onto the 13th gene rights by the perfectly compliant worlds Gilliman left in his wake. This, all combined with the legions ever present hatred of the waste inherent in attritional warfare to turn the Ultramarines into something of an expansion juggernaut. More conquests achieved with less casualties yielded more stable worlds for recruitment, which yielded more astarties, which yielded more conquests with less casualties, and so on and so forth. Even when losses were unavoidable, such as the campaigns against the numerous orc empires and tanneryl infestations, the Legion's capacity for replenishment meant it was brought up to, or in excess of, its previous operational strength within mere solar months. Their achievements won them many laurels, metaphorical and literal, from the War Council, the Divisio Militaris, and several of Gilliman's fellow Primarchs. It did, of course, in some ways, serve to distance the Legion from its contemporaries, and the Primarch from some of his brothers. The Legion's signature theoretical, practical thought exercise, wherein ideas of strategy could be organised and explored between astarties of any rank, was openly mocked by members of other legions as performative, while others still rankled at what they saw as arrogance disguised behind a veil of supposed humility. The Ultramarines and Gilliman certainly ensured their public face was one of dutiful modesty, of glories won for the Imperium, not the Legion. With such a character, combined with superlative success by any metrics, would have been bound to draw both criticism and jealousy. By the outbreak of Horus's treason, the Ultramarines were ascendant. Ultramar was known throughout the galaxy as the Five Hundred Worlds, effectively an empire within an empire, a beacon, too many, of what the Imperium was and could one day be. The Legion itself numbered an unheard of 250,000 astarties, surpassing all their fellows by a considerable degree. The only two potential rivals to this figure can only be estimated as such due to information that emerged during the course of and in the aftermath of the Great Heresy. The word-bearers, the 17th Legion, rivals of old to the Ultramarines, had been undertaking a massive and clandestine recruitment campaign to swell their Legion in the run-up to the Istvan atrocities and the Betrayal at Calth. Additionally, the 20th Legion, Alpha Legion, had a completely unverifiable strength during those years, but one would be remiss if one did not include their mention, as certain estimates have put that occluded Legion's strength north of the 200,000 mark. Regardless, the Ultramarines were the public face of the Astarties' numerical superiority, as well as their achievements and the future that was snapping on the heels of the vaunted 16th Legion, Sons of Horus, 9th Legion, Blood Angels, and 1st Legion, Dark Angels. The 12th Expeditionary Fleece, once considered the totality of the Legion's strength, had years before been subdivided into a dozen or so subgroups, as well as companies from the Legion being dispatched galaxy-wide to lead or support other Expeditionary Fleece. Tragically, this seemingly untouchable preeminence was to have dire consequences. Jealous hearts, long since festered in treachery, would seek to turn the Legion's greatest accomplishments to dust before their eyes. A world was selected for such an act. A jewel set amidst the heavens. A colonial start-up. An attempt by Gilliman, who sculpted a world from the ground up in the image of everything he and his Legion and his father were working to create. That planet was Calth. And what would occur? Well, as with all subjects concerning this terrible time, that is a matter for another record. Ave Imperator Gloria in Excelsis Terra at Oculus Imperia. 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