 An Astartes Legion in full open battle is a truly spectacular and terrifying thing. Thousands of power-armored transhumans moving with a speed, surety and fury that seems almost impossible to have sprung from the bodies of Homo sapiens. A Legion will crush, pulverize and annihilate any foe it may come across under the boots of ten thousand Astartes or the treads of ten thousand tanks. There are, however, times when a deft or touch is needed, when a single knife is much more effective than a hundred cleavers, when a surgical incision can end a war and save millions of lives. Know then that this is a record of the Emperor's silent stalkers, the hunters in the dark, the death that springs from the shadows, the 19th Legion Ravenguard. The first legionaries of the 19th Legion were drawn from the Xeric tribes of the Asiatic dust fields, savage and fiercely independent nomads who had spent centuries resisting the depredations of the neighbouring Indonesian bloc. Ultimately unable to resist the Emperor's thunder legions, the tribes, admired by the Lord of Lightning for both their martial spirit and resourcefulness in a resource-lacking region, ordered them to render their firstborn sons to his gene labs. The nascent 19th Legion these sons were earmarked for soon adopted the culture of their tribal fathers, developing a reputation for a viciousness that bordered upon cruelty when attacking, and a cold watchfulness in victory. They, like their ancestors, believed that no true triumph could be had until the enemy had been utterly subsumed, and this vigilance for rebellion or acidivism would become a defining characteristic of the 19th in those early days. Certainly this attitude is on display in the surviving accounts of the proto-legions first campaigns during the Unification Wars, including the liberation of the Central Asiatic region from the tyrannical Caligan of Ursh. The Legion made its mark immediately, employing rapid and devastating strikes that efficiently and coldly broke the tyrant's hordes into pieces. It is known that the enemy deployed many thrall-psikers and debased psychotech weaponry, from which the Legion was to suffer many casualties. The accounts speak cryptically of a darkness that the veterans of the campaign would bear ever after, and certainly the 19th would see a marked increase in legionaries lost to apparently suicidal charges against enemy formations, and a higher than average proportion of the solitary moritats than their fellow legions. This higher than expected casualty rate was marked in the Legion's prosecution of actions during the solar reclamation. Of their operation on Jupiter's moon Lysithea, which pitted them against Xenos slavers, almost no record exists, but it is known that whatever occurred during the moon scouring did so at the cost of the entirety of Lysithea's human colonists, as well as thousands of Astartes. Xenos of the Jovian range were utterly annihilated, but the majority of the surviving veterans of the engagement were summarily withdrawn from active service by the Emperor's own gene rights, never to return to their Legion. Such an action is unique amongst the history of the Legion as Astartes, but what horrors were either endured or perpetrated by the 19th, none can say, for all has been redacted from Imperial record. Survivors that were not withdrawn fought for the remainder of the Great Crusade with the ancient Jovian rune carved into their armor plate, and after many decades this was only ever seen on the hulls of Legion dreadnoughts, such as the sarcophagus of Shade Captain Voltares, until the bloody true deaths of many of these men at Gate 42, owing to both unification war and solar reclamation losses, and their dark reputation, the 19th proved to be a difficult prospect for the nascent war council in deciding initial crusade assignments. Luckily for the Legion, they had a keen supporter, Horus Lupercal. The first found primarch of the 16th Legion, Lunawolves, Horus was a keen admirer of the utility the 19th presented, for their own skill complemented those of his wolves perfectly. When the 16th launched their trademark overwhelming assaults, the Astartes of the 19th would already be in position, having infiltrated the enemy positions to cut off reinforcements, deny retreats, and cut down those who attempted to flee. Those who did manage to escape were relentlessly hunted and captured, and would be watched closely by the brooding warriors of the 19th until compliance was assured. The Legion was the hidden blade of Lupercal, vigilant and ever ready, plunging into the enemy's back as the Lunawolves tore at their front. Should compliance be acceded to without the need for bloodshed, the blade could be silently and clandestinely withdrawn. With none knowing it had ever been there in the first place. Such was the strategic closeness the 16th and 19th legions shared, that some within the Imperium commented that Horus treated the 19th like a chapter of his own Legion, rather than a genetically and operationally distinct formation in its own right. Certainly, the 19th's small size did it no favors in this regard. While other legions swelled with new offworld recruitment fives, and the Lunawolves themselves grew rapidly with the rich manpower of their new homeworld of Cthonia, the 19th still drew its neophytes from the Xeric tribes of its birth, and as such retained their culture fiercely as other legions changed to match new cultural patterns and experiences. The unadorned gray of their original plate was also retained, but it was noted that the legion took to marking their faces with the dust of their home region, leading to the origin of the unofficial Cognum and Pale Nomads. It was rather apt, as their gene seed had the effect of turning their skin almost unnaturally pale, their hair midnight black, and in small numbers, their entire eyes as well. Across the galaxy, he from whence these traits had been derived was coming into his own. Corvus Corax's gestation pod had crashed into a lightless cave on the moon of Lyceus, orbiting the planet Chievar. This world was a technologically advanced planet akin in many ways to the forge worlds of the Mechanicum of Mars, and exploited the mineral wealth of its moon relentlessly. The infant Primarch was discovered by a team of slave miners, sent to the moon to work until their deaths by the technocrats of Chievar below. Taken as a babe in arms, the slaves, who ranged from criminals to political dissidents to simple shift workers who did not meet quotas, hid the boy from the violent overseers, raising him in secret. The Primarch, like his brothers, aged almost supernaturally quickly, leading to a growing faith amongst the slaves that this was a sign that the boy had come to deliver them their freedom. Despite the imprinted knowledge and skills his father had vested in him on his creation, Corax devoured all his newfound family had to teach him. The political opponents of the Chievaran regime, finding themselves in the lightless depths of the moon, imparted upon the boy their ideals of justice, dignity, and rights for all, notions unheard of to the cruel regime that had sentenced them to hard labour. The criminals taught him the wiles of the streets, how to fight, and the shift workers taught him all they knew of the ins and outs of their oppressor's manufactories and forges. Slowly and meticulously, Corax planned the liberation of his people. He led bands of insurrectionists on weapon raids, sabotage operations, and assassinations, and witting the overseers and guards at every turn, bleeding them dry as he built the strength of his rebellion with each passing year. At its apex, Corax unleashed a full-scale assault on the overseers. The uprising, despite the carefully coordinated sabotage that had preceded it, was a bloody one, as many of the criminals sentenced to the moon were murderers and serial killers. Corax made begrudging use of them, liberating these men and women from their bonds on the condition that they never repeat their crimes under his leadership. Lyceus was liberated with almost stunning rapidity, and its losses sent the rulers of Kievar into chaos. Corax set out his demands for full independence to the reeling regime below, along with new measures that must be adopted by the technocrats to bring about a better and more equitable world. The rulers, perhaps inevitably, refused, and began drawing up their plans to conquer their now recalcitrant moon by force. Corax was repaired for this, and had been modifying captured atomic charges for use as crude orbital weapons. The tech guilds had believed this technology safe from the hands of the meager slaves that dwelled upon the moon, and would soon pay for their hubris. There was during these days of dark preparation that a single starship entered Lyceus's orbit, bearing upon it the Emperor of Mankind. It was a reunion unlike many of the others that had preceded it. The master of Mankind arrived alone, spoke with his son for a full night, and then departed. Exactly what passed between them is unknown, but Corax emerged from the meeting with his resolve to defeat the tech guilds, resolutely unbowed. Perhaps the Emperor still bore fresh in his mind the disaster of finding the Primarch and Gron, or perhaps he simply wished to see how Corax fared in the conflict to follow. As the technocrats prepared to launch their counterattack, the insurrectionists on Lyceus fired their weapons into the moon's steep gravity well. Several planetary alignment did the rest, pulling the charges down from orbit to the planet below in a rain of atomic fire, annihilating the greatest of the industrial cities and forcing the tech guilds that remained into immediate capitulation. Despite slaughtering hundreds of thousands, the millions more of the planet's inhabitants survived and were spared from further ruination. Perhaps the lesson the Emperor wished to impart upon his son. In honor of the victory, Corax renamed his moon Deliverance, and was granted command of the 19th Legion by his approving genetic father. At this point in history, the Great Crusade was well over a century old, and many of the other legions long reunited with their sires. The union of Primarch and Legion was, in this case, quite fractious. The 19th, still at this point in meshed with the old culture of the Xeric tribes, had served not only as a knife in the dark, but also as a repressive occupation force, which Corax viewed with no small measure of disgust, to akin as this was to the ways of the slavers he had been raised under the whips of. Much of the Legion's senior staff, Terrans all, were rapidly reassigned, replaced with recruits drawn from the freedom fighters of Deliverance, including Lord Commander Arcus Fell, who had commanded the Legion for over three decades. The Primarch was an exacting master, but was not one to dismiss the merits his new Ravenguard possessed. The methods of war they had been known for, from infiltration to insurgencies, fit well with his own predilections. Mowning them further, the Ravenguard became the Imperium's foremost experts in rapid strike operations, with their covert skills second only to those employed by the 20th Legion, Alpha Legion. In fact, it was this reliance upon asymmetrical warfare, and the often necessary prosecution of war in a more conventional manner, that led to one of the greatest setbacks in the 19th Legion's history, just a few short years before the East Van atrocity. Shortly after Horace Lupercal's ascension to the title of Warmaster, and his assumption of command of all Imperial forces, he summoned the Ravenguard to fight alongside several other legions under his direct authority in the retaking of the Outcome Sothos Cluster. Having been brought into compliance almost 200 Cedereal before, its people had inexplicably fallen to what appeared to be a mass psychosis, rejecting the authority of Terra, and rising in open rebellion to the Imperium. Initial exploratory expeditions revealed this to be something altogether more horrid, a Xenos infestation of parasites that matured behind the human eye to take over their host and form a more grotesque gestalt intelligence. These consciousnesses dubbed themselves the unsighted kings, and turned the unwilling, but now hopelessly lost humans of the Cluster, against their Imperial masters, in orgies of bloodshed. Horace's intention was to cripple the main Xenos intelligences in lightning strikes, intended to preserve the advanced and developed infrastructure of the Cluster as much as possible, to allow for easy Imperial recolonization. Humans have additionally posited that a quick and decisive victory would elevate Horace in the eyes of his brothers, new as he was to the office he now held. The outer worlds of the Cluster fell swiftly to the combined forces of the 16th Legion Luna Wolves, 6th Legion Space Wolves, 4th Legion Iron Warriors, and the Raven Guard itself, with the unsighted kings driven back behind the fortified Citadel within the central system. In his strategium aboard the vengeful spirit, Horace called his brothers to a council, assigning Korax and his Raven Guard to a direct assault on Designate Gate 42. Korax protested that this was a huge waste of his resources, as a frontal assault ran counter to every aspect of Raven Guard doctrine. He proposed to lure the enemy out with a series of fonts and raids, bleeding their forces before the remaining three legions moved in for an attack, but was laughed down by his brother Perto Abo of the Iron Warriors as a coward seeking to avoid conflict. Only the intervention of 6th Legion Primarch Leeman Russ prevented Korax from striking the Iron Lord for this insult. Horace, despite chiding the master of the 4th for his tone, remained firm on his orders, as the strategy of the Raven Lord would require weeks, Luprachal did not deem the campaign had to spare. Forced to accede to authority, Korax assigned the bulk of the legions remaining Terrans to the Vanguard, knowing that the still strong Xeric clan temperament was more suited to this role. Furthermore, these echelons had voiced strong support for both the Warmaster and his plan, to the extent that Discord ruled the Raven Guard's command cadres and accusations of disloyalty to the Primarch were being thrown down by Astartes from deliverance. The assault that followed was even bloodier than the Raven Lord could have anticipated. With the companies of his Legion being decimated as they attempted to take a breach in the walls, Korax himself committed to the field, rallying the almost shattered Raven Guard and pushing into the fortress personally. The tally of victory was grim. To Horace fell the honour of slaying the unsighted kings themselves, but millions upon millions of host bodies had been killed in the process, and amongst the fallen, tens of thousands of 19th Legion Astartes, the majority of them Terran. 842 is remembered as a stain upon the Legion's history. Eclipsed, only by the massacre that would follow, scant years later. The Raven Guard were, on account of their substantial losses, rendered the smallest of the Legion Astartes, and Korax refused to fight alongside Horace from that point onwards, forcibly ending the close relationship the 16th and 19th legions had held for almost 200 years. With this all being said, the Raven Lord had also inadvertently saved his Legion from yet more harm. The Terran members of the Legion, most of whom now lay dead upon the killing fields of Gate 42, were almost all inducted into warrior lodges that had become common in Legion's friendly to the now renamed Sons of Horace. Prophidious secret societies masquerading as a group of brothers, the lodges proved to be in many cases the attack vector for the Warmaster's treacherous ideals into the hearts of many legions, even those that were steadfastly loyal, such as the 5th Legion White Scars. In the aftermath of the Ist Vanitrocity, the lodges sometimes rose in outright insurrection, cancerous traitor bodies in the midst of loyal legions, and through the slaughter of his Legion's Terrans, Korax avoided this potentially disastrous outcome. Whether the Raven Lord had knowingly consolidated his power by sending the Xeriks to their deaths can never be known, but this particular stroke of luck cannot pass unremarked upon, given the dark and terrible days that were to follow in the years to come.