 What must it be like to be condemned? To know that ultimately your life is forfeit, your existence insofar as reality will acknowledge it, abruptly far more finite than you could have possibly imagined. Humanity has never been well capable of reckoning with our own tenuous mortality. The terror of what may wait for one at the instant of death drives many of us into behaviors and beliefs impossible otherwise. For the terror of this flesh-clad impermanence is universal. We all, I am sure, wish to believe that we will be resilient, noble, accepting once we are perched upon that proverbial ledge, but history has shown otherwise. At best we can hope to leave a legacy. We mark upon the passage of time through our deeds and devices, but it is never for us to decide precisely what that legacy is. The subjects of this record were people, humans like you and I, thrown into the furnace of war used for their skills, courage, and altogether darker traits, before passing into the annals of history to remain there as a footnote of greater things altogether. They are a legacy of days. Many within the Imperium wish to remember only in lurid prose or redacted records, if they wish to acknowledge it even at all. There were tools, weapons in the shapes of men, who won for their lords a world and paid for it with their bodies, but not in their humanity. You know, then, this is a record of the Imperium's first genetically enhanced soldier, the fists of the Lord of Lightning, the Thunder Warriors of the Unification Wars. It is unlikely that the first Thunder Warriors were the Emperor's first feet of Geno creation. No matter how gifted a mind of science, as he was known to have possessed, this soldiery were as much a product of Terran history as they were of Imperial Artifice. In the millennia before the revelation of the Master of Mankind, the homeworld of humanity had been a torn and bleeding place. A toxic wasteland caught in the darkest depths of that epoch known to scholars as the Age of Strife. A galaxy-wide phenomenon, old night lasted for millennia, a time during which the vast interstellar realms of humanity were sundered by warp storms, sudden psycheremergences, alien invasions, demonic incursions, and dozens of other calamities. Old Earth, dependent on her offworld colonies for survival, swiftly crumbled into anarchy. The veil of civilization that the humanity of the Dark Age of Technology were so confident in ripped off by the sudden deprivation of basic resources. Whatever polity had ruled the homeworld, its name now lost to the grains of history collapsed swiftly, the planet breaking apart into the nation states that it had sought to place in the past. With no ability to harness faster than light travel, the pattern was repeated throughout the salt system itself. In short order, the various planets, moons, archaeologies, and habitats began to look out only for themselves, and war amongst each other for control over this resource or that. Earth and Mars, the largest of the system's regimes, vied back and forth for control of the inner planets, but neither could muster anything approaching a decisive victory, as the basic economies of each were shattering with each passing year. Approximately by the 28th millennium, all traces of advanced technologically powered civilization on terra had been stripped away. Without the advanced climate control systems keeping the planet's biosphere nominally intact, old earth was rendered a toxic, fume-choked thing, poisoned by the atomic weaponry unleashed by petty warlords, ravaged by renegade thinking machines and genetic monstrosities, able to do not but tear at itself in lunatic terror. The Age of Strife upon Terra was one of the barbarian descendants of humanity squatting amidst the ruins of once empire. The technology of the Dark Age prior could no longer be wielded. Few lived who remembered how, and the basic infrastructure required no longer existed in any meaningful capacity. Scraps of Techno-Arcena were now prized possessions of savage warlords and mad kings, ill-understood but nevertheless quite deadly. Weaponry is of course the most obvious and efficacious example that was oft recorded prominently in the scattered histories of the era. But no less relevant were the genetic devices and crafts left over from humanity's downfall. The species of the Dark Age of Technology had made gigantic strides in its cracking and weaving of the human genome. So robust were some of the products of this age that they still survive even to our 41st millennia, in the squat shape of the kin of the Votan. The situation on Terra however did not call for the creation of a stable mining cast species. It demanded warriors, super soldiers, and thus was the genocraft of humanity turned to the creation of monsters. Devices previously used for completely different purposes were forced to become parts in processes dreamed up by the deranged, vomiting forth horrors hitherto undreamed. Eras of lawlessness and civil strife perennially create environments where the worst examples of humanity will flourish, and the age of strife was, if anything, absolutely defined by these wretches. Those with knowledge of the scientific arts untrammeled by ethics, morality, or empathy found themselves prized courtiers for the rulers of these millennia. Supplied with all the life test subjects they could possibly desire for human life was the cheapest of all currencies. Idiot cretins playing manic god with the human genome, unrestricted by anything save the demands of their masters. They created monstrosities of flesh in their searches for ever more destructive human forms, often dabbling in esoteric warpcraft to further enhance their damned creations to often disastrous and fatal results. The cultural impacts of this degenerate science upon the populace crafted scars that would last millennia. Several modern scholars suppose that this may have been the birth of humanity's fear of the mutant strains amongst us, although one wonders how much of this is simply stoked by the imperial regime for the purpose of granting its populace another scapegoat outgroup to loathe. Much of the genetic heritage of humanity was shepherded off-world to the sanctums of the lunar gene cults, foremost amongst them the selenar, believing that the wretches of terra could not be trusted with their craft lest they dam even more souls to the fires of mad science. It is from this legacy that the thunder warriors were born and were defined by. Terran science of the genomic was in exact, a product of millennia of degradation and superstition. It had allowed the truly monstrous to prosper and experiment, creating monsters of their own. The genetic recidivist Basilio Foe, for example, was a product of the age of strife, an environment that allowed a man of his twisted genius to flourish, tinkering with genomics, anatomy, and the limits of both, like few ever thought to. We cannot possibly know the number of human lives sacrificed upon this malachian altar, fed to the gene furnaces of the behest of unrestricted barbarity. It is like eyes completely unverifiable if their lives actually bought anything of substantial progress. Certainly no improvement in quality of life was made. The geno-engineering of the Terran age of strife was a pursuit done for the sole purpose of creating human weapons. No effort was made to cure disease, for example, merely create even deadlier ones. Conquest, collapse, conquest again, the endless cycle of war for the meager scraps of civilization were fueled by the genetic soldier. Beast things unleashed as animals upon the foe, bloated near corpses swollen with the powers of the warp, mute flesh hulks maddened with pain, too far gone to understand anything about their reality. This was Terra. And into this furnace came him, the emperor. Even in those days this was apparently his title. It must have sounded initially preposterous, but to any who fought with him, to all who pledged themselves to his banners, there felt to be some truth to it. The earliest days of the emperor's unification wars are lost to the morass of history. Dates, locations, battles, all are far too difficult to extract from legends, lost record, and outright propaganda. It is unclear too precisely when the Thunder warriors first walked Terra's wastelands, for their fate was entirely bound up within the emperor's greater works. What can reasonably be established is that, even prior to the wars of unification, even prior to his revelation, the emperor, alongside colleagues whose tales must be reserved for greater and more terrible records, was crafting what would become his greatest feats of gene science. The Primarch project, the work that would ultimately beget the emperor his twenty sons, is believed to have been initiated as early as M29, possibly over a thousand years before the eventual launch of his great crusade to the stars. Even this is disputed, some sources claiming the Primarchs were only created once unity had been nearly achieved. Regardless of the actual date, there are others that point to the emperor's powers even in those early years. Custodies. Since his earliest appearances, the emperor was never without his auric life wards, and the sheer nature of the custodian's biology belies a phenomenal mastery of genome science. They are, and were, truly superhuman, eclipsing baseline humanity in all physical and mental capacities. In these days, second only to the emperor himself in capabilities. Their creation was as torturous as their numbers were small, however. A single candidate would require plucking from thousands of potentials, and even if they did survive the initial genetic conditioning, their further ascension required solar decades of precise bioalchemical augmentation and psychomimetic training. The painstaking increase of their number can be charted across Terra as the emperor brought more and more of the homeworld under his thrall. Upon the pillars of the Black Main of Nassau, one of the emperor's earliest verifiable conquests, our inscription stating he was flanked by four giants in gold. Decades later, the transnordic conflicts confirm there were as many as thirty. Their presence at his side, throughout the span of his entire revealed history, confirms the emperor's procession of fabulously advanced genetic science prior to his emergence. What he lacked were the resources and technologies to actually apply it. The thunder warriors were his solution to the conundrum. Gene's soldiery was needed to conquer Terra. That much is a truism of the era. He could create the custodies, but for each one was needed an extraordinary amount of time, attention, and resources. There were superlative bodyguards for his personage, but they could never be soldiers of the line. So the emperor did what all warlords of this epoch did. He crafted the most robust weapons he could with what assets he possessed. Any military general will tell you that the best weaponry one can have during a war is one that works. Finding the cardinal balance between efficacy, cost of production, and reliability is a fundamental principle when crafting tools of war. The custodies occupied a cardinal point in terms of effectiveness. No one could best them, but they were simply too few and too expensive. The thunder warriors could be produced from nearly any populace upon Terra, and were brought to their genetically modified maturity through robust geno-engineering techniques replicatable across a very broad technology base. While never reaching close to the prowess and abilities of the custodies, the Ligio Cataegis, as their high gothic name was ushered in, were orders of magnitude faster, stronger, and more resilient than any baseline human could ever be. While a custodies aspirant must be hand selected by the emperor as an infant, a thunder warrior could be any adult male from most anywhere on Terra, provided he was broadly free from mutation. As Terra was a no short supply of humans, or at least those willing to undergo the rigors of such a process, their numbers exploded. They were present in every major military confrontation the emperor fought during the first century and a half of the unification wars, against the Kievan rusts upon the severe ice plain, at the Siege of Abyssinia, confronting the Hoth-Grindal clans at Albia, and thousands more. One of the most brutal conflicts of the period, against the Mauland Sen confederacy in the frozen Nordic conclaves, tested the thunder warriors as never before, pitting the emperor's own gene science against his twisted mirror. The priest king of Mauland Sen was brought to death at the Battle of the Red Frost, as was his horde of cloned gene abominations and witch-marked slaves. It was reportedly the first time an entire legion of thunder warriors was deployed, and given their estimated 7,000 casualties, highlighted the emperor's need for them terribly plainly. Terra was a cocktail of the mad in the amok, but he now possessed the tools he required. The organization of his new warriors appeared to follow, interestingly, the tenants of the ancient Terran warfare treatise the Principia Bellicosa. Like the legion as a startes that followed them, the legio catechus was ordered into 20 legions, each forming its own specializations through decades of conflicts. The fourth legion, for instance, became known by the unofficial moniker of the Iron Lords, and specialized in Siege warfare. In a curiously close parallel to the later Astartes legion that would also bear the same numeral. These legions were all, again similarly, led by Primarchs, although it must be made strictly clear that the term applied quite differently. Thunder warrior Primarchs possessed no genetic relation to their legions, while the emperor's sons would provide the genomic blueprint for the legion as a startes. The catechus Primarchs were more akin to generals, renowned for their combat and strategic prowess, but not sharing anything else with those that followed them. They were, where possible, equipped uniformly. The signature armor of the legio catechus, the Mark I suit of power armor, became an icon for the Imperium by the end of the first century of the wars, despite its many operational issues. Unlike later suits, it was not fully enclosed, with only the torso and arms being actually powered by the loud and inefficient back-mounted power generator. Warrior's legs were invariably plated in simple steel or padded riches. Primacy of protection was given to his torso. Nevertheless, and perhaps as another indicator of the sorry state of Terra's technology base, it was still superior to the primitive powered armor worn by the early Imperium's techno-barbarian enemies. And, when combined with the catechus' superhuman strength and resilience, granted many a soldier the edge required in combat needed to pulverize the foe. Firearms were, initially, las rifles and auto carbines, replaced when possible by the Terran Bolter, refined through Imperial production chains to make it capable of mass production. Close combat weaponry was left to an individual warrior's preference. Powered blades were of course highly prized, but incredibly rare, and the idiotic sequences of inch individual Thunder Warrior meant all forms of melee weapons could be found in any given formation. Unification-era warfare was remarkably brutal, even by the standards of this hateful galaxy. A Thunder Warrior must expect to find himself in melee far more often than not. Stabbing, slicing, crushing, bludgeoning, whatever horrors the strife-torn globe may have thrown at him. The legio catechus served the Imperium well, after a fashion. During his depositions to the first provost marshal of the Imperium, Uwama Kandawire, the captain general of the legio Custodes, Constantine Valdor, likened the Thunder legions to the munitions employed by the early Imperium. Powerful, but unstable. Unlike the Custodes and the later Astartes, Thunder Warriors possess nothing in the way of psychological conditioning. Their crude genetic ascension process and the exigencies of the unification war's manpower demands left no time or room for anything even approximating memetic augmentation. They were effectively baseline humanity hot-housed in a soup of genoconditioning into superhuman physiology, possessing all the typical emotional issues to be found in war-torn traumatized populations, even before their ascension procedures reworked their hormonal, adrenal, and cognitive systems. Once unleashed upon an enemy, be it an army, or a population, they proved difficult to impossible to control in any real sense. They suffered from berserk rages, a battle lust that was impossible for all but the strongest wield amongst them to fight, and displayed, at least in Valdor's judgment, a worrying capacity for this state to be amplified in the presence of warp sorcery. This had the pronounced effect of rendering enemy populations exterminated rather than compliant. Once a Thunder Legion had broken the back of an army that opposed the will of unity, they would simply continue on their rampage, slaughtering the civilian population wantonly. According to the clinical opinion of Valdor, this deprived the Imperium of those that might still have been salvaged for productive employment, a particularly Custodaz-appropriate remark for what was nothing less than genocide. It became rapidly apparent that the Ligio Cataeges were tools of destruction, not conquest. To conquer, one must still have something other than ash and bone left to rule. This was further compounded by issues of their biology. The Thunder Warriors were severely prone to cascading genetic events. The process of their ascension, as previously mentioned, was imprecise, and designed for functionality, not longevity. Nevarje bodies were prone to rebelling against them, causing sudden and massive cellular degeneration and organ failure, all of which was rapidly and ultimately fatal. The briefness of their lives, not to mention their invariably brutal and traumatized pasts, and the nature of the seemingly ceaseless wars they found themselves fighting in, instilled into the Ligio Cataeges a cavalier culture of warriors fully aware that they were unborrowed time. The nature of their genetically certain deaths was a foul one. Blood might rebel against the arteries that carried it, or organs might start to devour themselves, or muscles might explode with breakneck growth, according, again, to Captain General Valdor. The Master of the Custodies felt it a poor way for so proud a creation as a Thunder Warrior to die, and it appeared that they felt similarly. It did predictable things to their mindset, existing as brief, fleeting humans. They became careless of operational considerations, such as the casualties or status of their allies, existing purely to fight on their own individual terms, many no doubt seeking glorious deaths that they would hope live on in tall tales. As the Imperium began to reach a degree of security, with borders being drawn and administrative structures beginning to prosper, there were some within its higher echelons that worried as to where this increasingly ungovernable military element would lead itself. The solution was presented at the order of the Imperial household. Production stays were ordered on Thunder Legion recruitments, ostensibly due to the unification wars now well over a century and a half old, very clearly drawing to their conclusion. The majority of the globe now flew the raptor and lightning emblems of the Emperor, and with the destruction or capitulation of the remaining holdouts assuming inevitability. In 669 M30, the remaining Thunder legions were amassed for an assault on one such regime, who had constructed their hold fast upon the heights of Mount Ararat in the Anatolian region. According to Imperial records and inforeals, the enemy were brought to their end, but the battle had cost the lives of every single Thunder Warrior, marking a noble end to those warriors that had won the Emperor so many battles throughout the decades of the conflict. In truth, the battle had been a betrayal. The Ligio Costode's detachment slaughtered the Cataeus to a man. It was an extermination meant to remove the problem the Thunder Warriors presented. In a civilized and stable terra, the ill-disciplined formations of the Cataeus were far too unreliable to be counted upon, and no longer fit within the realms of the Emperor's plans, for he was about to reveal something else entirely. Of course, it was not simply possible for every Thunder Warrior to be gathered in one place, and not even for all of them to be killed before some escaped. The fastidiousness of the Costodes was superhuman, but not even they could manage so thorough an extermination. Elements of the Cataeus persisted globally, hunted down now by strike sodalities from the Costodes' Ephoroi Division, but it was generally reason that their own biology would catch up to them faster than the hands of the Emperor. In this, the Costodes were largely correct, with several notable exceptions. The Primarch of the Fourth Cataeus Legion, Ushotan, who had been present at the Battle of Maul and Sen all those decades ago, survived with some two dozen of his closest warriors, and assisted Provost Marshall Candoire in her palace coup in the early 700s of M-30. Ironically, Candoire had been reacting to the possibility that the Costodes themselves had gone rogue with their extermination of the Thunder legions against the words of the Emperor, she supposed, and was attempting to bring justice to an arm of the Imperial military. The coup was ultimately defeated by one of the first deployments of the successors of the Thunder Warriors, the Astartes of the newly incepted First Legion. This Legion would further be utilized by the Imperial Government against other Thunder Warrior bands confirmed alive, as, laterally, with the 12th Legion Warhounds, who put down the so-called Cerberus Insurrection, wherein a group of Thunder Warrior survivors seized a prison asteroid. Being one of the few instances the Imperial Government deigned to record Astartes battling contagious, it is a sharp example of the disparity between the two strands of transhuman, gen-hanced soldierry. The Thunder Warriors aboard Cerberus were recorded for having killed four or five times their number in Astartes before being brought low. No matter the degree of experience, this, along with several other sources, indicates that despite their rebellious and ultimately fatal genetic conditioning, the Thunder Warriors were formidable enough creations to overcome their Astartes successors with apparent ease. This being said, the instances of Thunder Warrior survivors highlighted their true legacy to the Imperium, namely the Legionnaires Astartes. Astartes appear in many respects to be a design iteration upon the Cataegis, not merely an upgraded Thunder Warrior, but a new model whose strengths were built from the information provided by the Cataegis during the Unification Wars. With the trade-off of physical strength and resilience, the Astartes improved on the Thunder Warriors in every capacity. They suffered no inherent genetic instability, becoming functionally immortal. Their psychoconditioning, maiming their memories and personalities with imprinted thought patterns and belief structures made them superlatively naturally loyal, instilling a discipline the Cataegis simply would never have possessed. Their augmentations were many and highly adaptable. They could learn by consuming the brain matter of dead foes or spit an acidic bile that could eat away at metal. The core of their genetic structure was regulated by a cocktail of phagic machines and viral coating that is used to grow and regulate their augmentations and organs, granting a hitherto impossible level of stability to their biology, and most importantly, allowing for mass production. The Astartes were the perfect human weapon. With the templates the gene seed provided, the Imperium only had to expand its production capacity. The legions were scalable, and indeed the progress across Terra after their initial deployment proved. This scale could rise with the resources the Imperium commanded. Indeed all that was ultimately required for the Imperium to shuck the bounds of Terra and collect the manpower needed to move to the outer system was the facilities of the Lunar Gene cults, brought to heel in 702 M30. As one touched upon earlier, a weapon should lie within the bounds of efficacy, reliability, and cost. For the Imperium, the Astartes were just that. They were not without their faults, of course, but lying upon this axis they were considered the finest tools of conquest the Emperor had ever created. They were, however, removed from the humanity they fight on behalf of. If any Acolyte has ever had the blessing or curse to have interacted with one of the Astartes, this much will be immediately obvious. They see us baseline creatures as curiosities, understanding us in the detached fashion of one who has only learned about a thing from reading or hearing about it. They are unable to understand us. The majority simply will never bother to attempt to. The custodies are even further removed, unable to view the world through anything other than the prism of their own responsibilities. The protection of his Imperial Majesty underpins their very existence at a level fundamental. Everything that is, is simply to be navigated with that duty in mind. The testimony of Valdor records, from an interaction with the Primarch Oshotan, a remarkably different state of being for the Cretaceous. The Captain General is firm in his belief that the Thunder Warriors were inherently unstable owing to their genetic enhancements. Certainly this is verified by numerous other sorcerers, and their ability to degenerate into mindless bloodlust has already been discussed. But during the Battle of the Red Frost, when the two came upon one another, the Thunder Warrior at the height of his battlelust, yet still coherent and in command of his facilities. Oshotan remarked that this feeling is one that Valdor will never be capable of, and he was to be pitied for it. For all of Oshotan's barbarism, for all the violence and terror of those who he led, for all that they spent their brief lives barely clinging to sanity they were, ultimately, far more human than any that succeeded them. Candles burning briefly but brightly, and torching the world they inhabited as they did. They set standards for those that followed. They taught the Imperium lessons through their butchery and savagery, lessons it had professed to have learned from, and yet ones which history had shown were simply not. They were not good people, nor were they misbegotten innocents. But their essential humanity, is that worth marking? A larger question than one feels one has the capacity for. I shall leave it in your hands. Ave Imperator, Gloria in Excelsis Terra. This video and this channel were made possible thanks to the very kind donations and support from my Patreon subscribers. If you'd like to help support the channel, head on over to patreon.com slash Oculus Imperial. If you'd like to receive more updates about the channel and any future videos, you can contact me or follow me on Twitter at Oculus Imperial. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.