 The brutal exigencies of warfare often breed moments of inspiration, those born of the sheer desperate rush for survival. Death and the threat of it is an extremely potent motivator to the human mind, be they baseline or seemingly transhuman. When doom is imminent, it inculcates situations where solutions thought mad or impossible suddenly seem incredibly and potently viable. Survival comes at a price, and precisely what that price will be is often as malleable as the morality or imagination of those paying it. The Horus heresy was a breeding ground for such situations and such ideas. Necessity became the matriarch of invention in the age of darkness. Such ideas were not merely technological nor even ideological. In some cases they were logistical, biological, for such is the case with the subjects of this record. An often little acknowledged aspect of the profound changes wrought upon the legion as Astartes, loyalist and traitor both, during the great heresy was the means by which they replenished their losses. The subject, as it turns out, is as deep and as painful as most any other topic born of those dread times. Know then that this is a record of Astartes' aspirants from the age of darkness, those raised to something beyond human in the depths of the worst chapter in galactic history. A record of Space Marine inductii. The process of creating a space marine was, to say the least, deeply involved. While one has explored the topic in greater detail in a previous record, it can be suffice to say here that, optimized, the Astartes ascension procedures are the work of years. Legion and laterally chapter, gene rights and chirurgians, bend their every effort to the careful cultivation of an initiate's implants, their psychoconditioning and their memetic buffering, in order to create the finest soldier possible from the broadest genetic base they are allowed to utilize. The efforts of the biologians were bent to preventing tissue degradation, organ rejection, or grand mal-psychotic breaks. Fatalities were inevitable, even more so amongst legions whose gene seed could be considered problematic. The arithmetic of the Imperium's human resources deemed this acceptable costs for the crusade. Gene adepts labored to reduce such costly failures whenever possible. The last human life was nothing compared to the loss of gene seed, as well as legion time and resources. Alongside the arduous phases of implantation and conditioning, the initiate is inducted through legion training regimes, honing all aspects of mind and body simultaneously. All with the aim that, in the span of years, a human boy can be raised to the peak of mankind's genetic engineering, to become a transhuman weapon, a juggernaut of Imperial fury bred for the conquest of the galaxy and the slaughter of millions. That these starties, these space marines, would die in combat was a certainty. The unification wars had taught the emperor much, not only the dangers of unstable, hot-housed genetic sciences, so apparent in his thunder warrior prototypes, but even amongst his finest creations, the custodians. Members of the vaunted Ten Thousand had still perished in the fires of unity, despite them being the ostensible pinnacle of the emperor's genetic science. However peerless, the master of mankind could not create invincible warriors. Rather, he sought in his research the proverbial center, a middle ground between the blood-soaked, brutal efficacy of the thunder warriors of the Ligio Cataeus, and the painstakingly hand-crafted masterpieces of the Ligio Custodes. The Astartes were as much a product of expediency as anything else. There is no better weapon than one that can be mass-produced. They were far from disposable, but they represented the best balance of time, effort, resources, and ability the Imperium would create. And, despite losses, it was rare that the actual combat effectiveness of an Astartes Legion was ever threatened by combat attrition. The genetic crisis of the Third Legion's gene seed reserves threatened it from the beginning of its existence, but these were not losses sustained by warfare. They were quintessentially atypical. The closest the Imperium clove to such an instance was during the infamous Rangdan's unicides, conflicts that obliterated the First Legion Dark Angels' numerical superiority over their fellow Astartes, but did not in truth hamper their ability to conduct themselves within the broadest scope of the Great Crusade. In the two centuries of galactic conquest, the Imperium was never challenged in its ability to produce Astartes at a rate that vastly outstripped the demands placed upon it by those who had fallen in their duty to the legions. This status quo was utterly obliterated by the outbreak of the Horus Heresy. The Warmaster, in pitting the Legion as Astartes against themselves, achieved what no external enemy had ever come even close to, shattering the transhuman soldiery of the Imperium irrevocably. Even the war's opening salvos, the Battle of Prospero, the Istvan atrocity, and the Dropside Massacre, claimed more Astartes casualties combined than, it was estimated, the entire death toll of the Great Crusade. By the time the war had been acknowledged as having truly broken out, four legions had been reduced to shadows of their former selves, the Thousand Sons, the Ravenguard, the Salamanders, and the Iron Hands, all barely clung to existence on the peripheries of the conflict in those early years, maimed beyond belief. The Space Wolves had fared little better. The sixth legion was left licking its wounds after the Prospero invasion. Even within the Warmaster's own ranks, his own Sons of Horus, alongside the Emperor's Children, Deathguard, and World Eaters, had all suffered their most significant losses to date, during the purging from their ranks of those suspected of remaining loyal to the Emperor over their Primarchs. Once launched, the pace of the war was unrelenting. As the Warmaster carved out his Dark Empire in the Galactic North, the Shadow Crusade against Ultramar claimed the lives of some 80% of the Ultramarine's legion, the largest, numerically, of all Astartes formations. The Night Lords and the Dark Angels sparred in the Thramas Gulf. The Alpha Legion's coils ensnared the White Scars, and the Blood Angels fought the Devils of their worst nature in the Cygnus Cluster. All was death and destruction, and the Astartes of the Imperium and Warmaster alike fell in their tens of thousands. The immense slaughter immediately reversed the status quo each legion had always persisted under. Losses, now, outstripped recruits. In many cases, to devastating degrees. Each legion was posed a question, how to solve this problem before they became extinct. There was no singular motivating command issued to the legions, loyalist or traitor both, for when their Inductii programs began. Neither the Emperor nor Horace Lupacal issued some grand proclamation of recruitment to begin these processes. They were instead dictated, in many cases sooner rather than later, by the grim realities of the war that was unfolding. How the Warmaster intended for his war to be a fast one, the truth of the conflict descended into year after year of incessant slaughter. Every setback Horace faced, every bulwark the Imperium threw up against him, all led to more and more carnage. Escalating battles, escalating catastrophes, tidal waves of casualties, bleeding strength from the Legion as Astartes. The war spread far and wide and consumed swades of previously dependable Imperial infrastructure. Supply chains were sundered utterly, never to recover. Fleets and armies were cut off, forced to fend for themselves for years at a time. Necessity became the sole overriding consideration. Practicalities demolished both cultural legion traditions and well-established safety protocols. Workarounds, ad hoc measures, and simple violations of science were the order of business, as hundreds, if not thousands of commanders and legion apothecaries galaxy-wide found themselves placed under extreme duress to swell their rapidly depleting forces. The availability of supplies, the quality of facilities, and an individual commander's morality, or utter lack thereof, were now what played the quintessential role in Astartes' ascension, unshackled by disaster from any sort of centralized logistical standard. These Astartes, born of the war and the breaking of an empire, came to be known, collectively in history, as Inductii. Two key aspects of Astartes' development were identified early as having the most potential for time-saving methodology for their creation, training, and implantation. Grimly, the former of these two, training, was the facet that proved the easiest to modify, yet in truth saved the least amount of actual time. As the war escalated, secure training facilities became increasingly difficult to maintain, save for those within the most stable of imperial core systems, centered around Terra and Ultramar, and within the benighted depths of the warmaster's dark empire, and his most distantly held galactic rim clusters. Even still, these programs alone could not manage the output that the legion as Astartes demanded, leading to many legion Inductii being trained quite literally on the field of battle, scant few live-fire exercises being almost immediately succeeded by the actual war they had been created to fight in. Several legions actively approved of this brutally effective means of winnowing the strong from the supposed weak, forging warriors of greater metal from the chaff of recently raised soldiery. The world-eaters, most notably, eschewed almost all other training regimes in favor of using Inductii as essentially cannon fodder to protect veteran Astartes, a practice totally prevalent after the fall of Boat. Those that lived were granted privilege in scavenging rights, as well as potential fast-tracking through the legions rapidly disintegrating command structure. This was not a practice restricted to the traitors. Several blood-angels forces cleft from the main body of the legion operated in an almost identical fashion. Other legions balked at the attrition rates such training would have caused, seeing it as little more than wasted efforts and resources. A new method was sought, and seemingly arrived at broadly simultaneously by both traitor and loyalist sides. Hypno-Indoctrination. A means by which a legion aspirant could be rapidly psychoconditioned with pure knowledge and experience, this process was conducted through deeply invasive memetic injection procedures. Mental conditioning was a standard aspect of Astartes' ascension. All legions had utilized it since the emperor's development of the procedures to ensure loyalty and obedience from their Astartes, a deference to command authority, and an inbred desire for cohesiveness in combat. It had a latter effect of obliterating childhood memories and personal attachments, further maiming the ability of the subjects to feel empathy. In short, a process to create the most dependable soldier possible. The developments in Hypno-Indoctrination were crude iterations upon established processes. Not only now would the Astartes in question receive a full bevy of legion conditioning, he would also come with memetic packages to ensure a legionary was born with combat experience they had not actually obtained, but could nevertheless recall. The process had, according to records of extremist security levels, been trialled during the unification wars centuries before, but it was ultimately abandoned due to results that were inconsistent across the board, as well as ultimately ineffective compared to a more robust and stable training regimen. During the galaxy-shattering heresy, of course, the luxuries of relative peacetime were discarded. The degrees of success Hypno-Indoctrination yielded, and precisely what information was imparted, was as diverse as the legions and the wars they fought in. Inductae, in the forces of the shattered 19th Legion Ravenguard, for example, were implanted with guerrilla warfare tactics and logistics. Intended, of course, to be committed to the non-stop campaigns of sabotage and harassment, the broken legion had effectively committed itself to in the aftermath of the dropside massacre. Even within legions, the techniques varied. Imperial fist Inductae, raised upon terror, were imparted with the knowledge of siege warfare, while those drawn from the 7th Legion-held world of Cthonia, homeworld of the traitor Warmaster himself, were shunted far more stringent compliance packages during their indoctrination, entirely owing to lingering imperial distrust as to the cultural loyalty of the Cthonian population, fearing that the influence of Horus Lupercal may yet persist. That such a thing was even possible, is in large part a byproduct of the bastardized process itself. Necroportical examinations of Astartes corpses recovered during the post-Siege of Terra reconstruction revealed significant amounts of minor to sometimes severe neural degradation. Scarring in the prefrontal cortex points towards these Astartes as suffering issues with decreased inhibition and heightened aggression, likely deliberately created thus. Other areas of the brain responsible for memory indicate that Hypno indoctrination took an even more severe toll on Astartes recollection, obliterating all traces of their previous lives, only for the apothecaries of their programs to greedily fill the void with traits deemed by the legions in question to be agreeable. Despite significant distaste amongst many veteran legionaries, for both the process and the inductee eye it created, Hypno indoctrination rapidly became standard practice after the initial waves of losses in the heresies early years. It was, by and large at least, a relatively benign form of increasing recruitment quotas and replenishing battlefield casualties rapidly. Where significant opposition or controversy was courted was in the expansion of the process referred to commonly as flash indoctrination, which used the actual memories of fallen Astartes in the memetic packages shunted into the cortexes of inductee eye. Naturally, many saw this as the ultimate desecration of their fallen brothers, turning the deceased into little more than cogitator drives to be plundered for the value of their hard fought and harder won battlefield experiences. It has been noted by what chroniclers, legion or otherwise, were allowed to observe the process, that it strayed into the realms of those spoken of in the ancient Terran work the Necromantie, the divination of the dead, while those even more versed in Arcana, forbidden, recognized its adjacency to the neurotheurgic technology of the keys of hell, employed by the 10th legion iron hands in their most desperate hours. The comparators are apt. The memories implanted via this medium were done so quite bluntly, smashing into an individual psyche like a siege weapon, overwriting the person that he once was. It was not for naught that the emperor placed such processes out of the reach of the vast majority of the imperial regime at the outset of the crusade. It is commonly believed its use was restricted purely to the clades of the assassinorum, where massive lifetime investment in the skills of a particular operative was never allowed to go to proverbial waste. For a start, the process transformed aspirants into uncanny simulacrums of the deceased, where memories of a life led in the legion conflicted with the actual lived reality of the inductii themselves. Aspirants created in this fashion were far more often than not shunned by those they remembered calling brethren, pariahs even amongst a broadly snubbed class of recruits to begin with. Flash indoctrination was uncommon, broadly speaking. aforementioned resistance at all levels tended to outweigh practical concerns, especially when the more simplistic, robust, and less disrespectful hypno indoctrination packages could replace actual harvested memories. This being said, once again the 12th legion world eaters, especially in the wars later years, were eager employers, collecting the cortical tissue of those who had perished in their gladiatorial pits and forcing it into the minds of press ganged aspirants, overwriting humanity with a pedagogy of bloodshed, murder, and unquenchable rage. It has also been, albeit laterally, discovered that the first legion dark angels, especially those recruited on caliban, bore hallmarks of the process, but any more specific and dedicated capacity. Given that legions penchant for secrecy, one is forced to suppose that the angels utilized flash indoctrination in situations of extremis, where the closely guarded information of a deceased legionary was deemed far too essential to waste, and must have been imparted upon a newly raised inductii. Regardless of legion, flash indoctrination was a lesser utilized tool in the creation of inductii. It had a marked tendency to create unstable individuals, whose own minds were often at war with themselves far more so than it did creating a legionary of any ability. As with all things concerning inductii however, if those in charge of a particular recruitment drive saw these astartes as nothing more than stopgap tools to an end, any such issues could be deemed negligible. Had any in those benighted days been able to grasp the scope of inductii ascension procedures on a galactic scale, the use of flash indoctrination would have likely marked the first step upon roads altogether darker. Much of what has been contained within this record thus far has amounted to corners cut, procedures amended, and safeguards removed. The changing of the emperor's ordained processes, most churidly, but on the whole minor adjustments in the name of expediency. The astartes they produced, while often marred by flaws, were nevertheless legionaries to the undercerning. Had times been different, they would likely have taken the line alongside their brethren without much comment. The Horus heresy, as in so many other respects, proved a fertile ground for minds dark, corruptive, and ambitious, as well as a combination of all three. Once the standards of Astartes ascension had been tampered with, the proverbial seal was broken. Horus' war shattered conventions. It opened paths for all manner of personages to tread at their leisure, powered only by their own aspirations or hubris. Be they motivated by the call to conquer the Imperium or uphold it, by desperation or desire, minds brilliant in both senses of the word, turned to machinations, and wrought upon the flesh of the Inducteae in their care, horrors, immense and myriad. Secrecy, for so many of these projects, personal, was paramount. There will never exist a record in totality that we can explore in its truest scope. Some became so utterly infamous as to gain a foothold in history, of course. Chronicles, one has yet to commit, will no doubt reference the berserkers crafted in their thousands by the world-eaters on the world-bod. Planets aplenty were given over to the factories of the Iron Warriors, into which supposed billions were marched as chattel for Pertorabo's legion to use either as Inducteae or simply as human vats for organ storage and maturation. Memories of the Age of Strife often pale in comparison to the atrocities committed by the legions in the name of their own recruitment. Even the mad genotirants of old night could not conceive of operations on the sheer scale that was seen in the later heresy years. There are, of course, the most obvious of corruptive acts on the most profound level. Those Inducteae born of communion between Astartes and Warp Entity. Pacts struck between the traitor legions and their never-born allies were in place before the outbreak of the heresy. The Galvorback, the so-called blessed sons of the word-bearers, proceeded the events of the Istvan system by decades. As corruption spread throughout the traitor legions, as the war progressed, as more and more of the warmaster's subjects turned to full-throated abasement before the greater intelligences of the Dark Pantheon, such practices were extended to Inductae, fertile flesh in which eldritch abominations could swim and cavort and sculpt. Such creations were invariably lesser than those that had preceded them. There were never those that achieved the supposed unity of soul and solace that the Galvorback had attained. The practice could nevertheless, with decent reliability, produce powerful, if volatile, shock troops. Little more than base monsters pointed towards an enemy and unleashed, terror weapons in a mutated form of a space marine. Physical augmentations could be hot-housed by the Warp creature's mutagenic influence, or replaced by altogether more abominable changes. Arms becoming fused blades of armor and bone, for example. Legs could turn from plant-grade to digit-grade, allowing an Inductae to bound across the battlefield at literally inhuman speeds, while above them soared others on hideous bat-pinions. Nomenclature, for these abominations, varied by legion. To the Sons of Horus, they were the Looper Callie, a twisted take on their Primarch's name. The word-bearers referred to them as Gal Mordek, lesser than the Blessed Sons. The Night Lords turned them Shkiadar in the sibilant language of Nastramo. Logs extracted from the captured 8th Legion cruiser, Sins in Penumbra, translate the Cognomen to Devoured by Shadow in Logothic. The Sons of Curs viewed these wretches with disdain, seeing them as nothing more but tools for war-making. Certainly not legionaries, certainly not brothers. Elsewhere, changes profound and horrific were being wrought through means altogether mundane. Through a corruption of the culture of perfection that had abounded in the legion since its creation, the 3rd Legion Emperor's children indulged in a dizzying array of well-documented and thoroughly infamous bodily modifications. The trailblazer in this field was Apothecaryphabius, of the 28th Expeditionary Fleece, a breaker of boundaries even in the pre-heresy years for his forays into manipulation of the bodies of Astartes under his care. Unfettered by any concerns of oversight in the post-Istvan chaos, Fabius and his chirogenic disciples pushed the boundaries of what Astartes' physiology was capable of. In his own Legion's case, leading to the early creation of the cacophony, Marines whose augmented biology was capable of producing sonic emissions at lethal levels. Inductii represented Daphabius nothing more than a canvas upon which he could work his art untrammeled. Dubbed the Tirata in what records the Emperor's children kept before their descent into abject lunacy, these Inductii were essentially a test bed for whatever new strand of experimentation Fabius and his cabal were pursuing, be it augmentation of existing Astartes' organs, reconstruction of them, or even the implantation of Xenos' tissues and genetic material. Confirmed accounts of loyalist forces galaxy wide speak of Emperor's children Astartes with a cornucopia of hideous augmentations. Some possessed pincer-like claws in place of arms, others could swell their bodies to grotesque, augurin-like figures through the use of glanded chemical stimulants. Sound producing organs in the neck were commonplace, especially amongst the command cadres of the Legion, but so too were Astartes whose skin had been replaced by chitinous plate that shimmered with uncanny iridescence. Fabius' work was a bizarre mixture of jealously guarded and eagerly exported. Ever a man to see himself as a scientist, he was prone to engaging with his contemporaries from other legions in discussions of his work, yet never revealed the most potent of his discoveries. Physical augmentation became more and more commonplace across traitor hosts as the conflicts progressed and grew more savage, with Inductii forming the perennial test subjects for the most extreme examples. In segmentum obscurus, the tortures and bodily atrocities of Mordrim clan Sahai were wrought upon both friend and foe. Upon the ashen surface of Talarn, the iron warriors developed new techniques for hard-wiring Inductii into armoured fighting vehicles through iterations on dreadnought technology, damning those neophytes to life in a metal shell before they had even earned the honour of falling in battle. Word-bearer formations would replace the vocal cords of Inductii with devices augmenting nothing but the writings of their Primarch Lorgar. Chimeric Astartes, seen in so-called Black Shield formations, Splinter forces beholden to neither Legion nor Allegiance, cannibalized gene seed from across the galaxy. It is a sad truth that even loyalist legions were not immune from decisions made under extreme privation. Of last resorts, there are sundry examples. The Shatter legions were especially prone to such choices. The Iron Hands, as detailed in a separate record by your humble servant, utilize the keys of hell in their desperation. Laterally as well, employing extreme examples of dreadnought-adjacent technology to preserve the lives of fallen Astartes, even if for perhaps a year or several months more. These jewelry-rigged exoskeletons, scavenged from anything from mechanical automata or even civilian industrial equipment, typically doomed the legionaries of the Iron Tenth to death from radiation poisoning severe enough to overwhelm even their gen-hanced bodies. But they did keep them fighting, committing their vengeance upon the traitors. The Ravenguard and their Primarch, Corvus Corax, committed extreme acts of genetic hot-housing in their quest to rebuild their sundered legion post-Istvan V. Chief Apothecary Vincente VI and Majos Genitor Nixon Olandrias of the Mechanicum utilized genetic materials said to have been used in the original Primarch project to create the Ravenguard's so-called Raptors, an ostensibly stable strain of inductii that, laterally and thanks to sabotage by the Alpha legion, quickly degraded into little more than hulking mutant atrocities. It is said that only one in one hundred was even capable of holding a bolter. As with other legions forced into such circumstances, the results of the Raptor project were nevertheless deployed to the battlefield, however mournfully by their legion in desperation. Inductii, by the closing years of the heresy, became a brand of ignominy as much as necessity. The term itself, originating on the world eater's planet of Bod, spread throughout the traitor legions and laterally into some loyalist ones through simple linguistic drift. It was a byword for shame and expediency, of legions sacrificing their standards for the sake of survival, conquest, vengeance, or a mixture of all three. Even for Astartes that were not destined to become the test subjects for insane genitors or apothecaries, even should their ascension procedures be relatively standard, if merely truncated, they were often tarred with the same brush. The Emperor's children, for example, refused to permit their inductii the honor of bearing the Palatine Aquila symbol. The Night Lords relegated the most mundane duties to their inductii, frequently denying them the secrets of the Nostraman language to maintain a camp for true sons of the Eighth Legion. The Sons of Horus operated similarly. The use of Cathonian turns of phrase, or the displaying of Cathonian symbols, if one was not born of the warrens of that world, was considered a gross offense, earning the aspirant the most vicious of punishments. While inductii only became a commonplace term in imperial historiography in the years of the scouring, loyalist legions nevertheless developed their own cognomens for those Astartes developed under such procedures discussed as in this record. The Seventh Legion, Imperial Fists, had formations of centuries. Initiates raised on terra through rapid indoctrination, for example. While not precisely openly disdained, the majority of the Fists were noted to have viewed these inductii with the suspicion a veteran will view a soldier barely out of training, as fundamentally unreliable. Others were far more candid with their scorn. Never one to mince his words, Leman Russ, Primarch of the Sixth Legion, was recorded to have stated to an assembly of his wolf lords to, quote, trust not the pups whose claws have yet to be bloodied, bearing claws that have never rent flesh, and teeth not yet sharpened upon the hides of a foe. That negative sentiments towards inductii emerged in every legion, loyalist and traitor, makes such sentiments impossible to pin to a single catalyst. Similarly, the lack of any fundamental difference in the physical, mental, or psychological capabilities, say for obviously extreme examples previously noted, forced a conclusion that the disdain for the inductii was born of cultural traditions, rather than an actual logical reason. This is not exactly a radical statement. Pronounced cultural shifts amongst the legion as a starties are well documented, especially immediately, pre- and post-contact with their Primarch. Legionaries born of Terra and the Sol system were frequently at odds with those raised from their Primarch's adoptive home worlds, often with extreme examples. The sheer disparity between Ideology's Terran and Deliverance-born amongst the Ravenguard led to rumors of what amounts to a premeditated purge by Corvus Korax, masquerading as combat losses, but seemingly targeted at winnowing out the remaining Terrans from his new legion. Strained relationships between Terran-born Astartes of the 5th Legion Whitescars and their Chagorian brothers persisted to such an extreme degree that the Terran-born wing of the Legion was at extreme risk of siding with Horus when the heresy was brought to light. The success stories of, say, the Ultramarines or the Alpha Legion, in completely avoiding cultural clashes, are of course there, but for many legions divisions persisted. Often a legion would expend efforts in seeking out recruitment from worlds and cultures that were similar to their own. The 1st Legion Dark Angels made deliberate recruitment drives from feudal worlds seeped in caste systems, while raids from the 8th Legion Nightlords on Penal Colonies are well documented. The 15th Legion Thousand Sons made a point of extracting neophytes from comparatively advanced societies, while the 17th Legion Word Bearers simply built their own from the ground up, having demolished the previously existent culture utterly. In some cases this was a success, in others it was a poor salve upon a rift that was seemingly never to be healed. Such divisions only became more pronounced when Terran and homeworld-born Astartes of the Legion were presented with the forms of the Inductii from worlds myriad and far flung, creating a new Other, a new outgroup within the Legion itself. The use of Hypno indoctrination to deliberately supplant lingering cultural attachments among Inductii had an unexpected side effect. While, yes, it could create a legionary who remembered so little of their birthworld as to be a proverbial tabula rasa, it left within a warrior such a void as needed to be filled that they would cling to whatever scraps of meaning could be attached to their new lives. In many cases, the annihilation of their pasts before Astartes ascension forced Inductii to fill said void with the traditions of their newfound Legion without having any actual experiences in the practices and cultural ticks they now aped. To veteran Legionaries, the new intake were aping them, crude parodies spouting phrases and affecting aesthetics they had not earned and did not fully understand. By unfortunate virtue of wanting to be part of something bigger than themselves, it marked them as Other. Indeed, some Inductii took the opposite approach, the Hypno indoctrination proving ill-adept at buffering out lingering social norms and cultural attachments, it forced them to seek out others from their recruitment batches born of the same worlds they had been, creating dozens of fragmentary subcultures within an individual Legion. Both the former and latter categories of Inductii, those desperate for recognition from Legion brothers and those who spurned them utterly, often shared a similar fate. Inductii companies became very common as the heresy ground onwards. Many legions simply consigned their new recruits to their own formations, abandoning all attempts at full integration. The tragedy of this is marked by the time of the Siege of Terra. By 014, M31, millions of Astartes had perished galaxy wide. Those that had fought in the Great Crusade were a vanishingly small minority within their own legions now, bearing memories of an army that no longer existed in the form it once had. Their age had passed and they faced extinction. Their brothers were all Inductii as the term can be broadly applied. Members of legions, all of whom were now shattered to greater or lesser degrees, pale idolons of a time of dreams surrendering now to an eternity of endless war. One is certain that more tales of such Astartes will fill these archival stacks in the months to come, but for now I place my quill to rest. Ave Imperator, Gloria in Excelsis, Terra. You can contact me or follow me on Twitter at Oculus Imperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.