 A beginning is a very delicate time. For chroniclers such as I, this is especially pertinent. There is expectations vested in a beginning, for it is the point we deem most important to the histories we are about to relate. One must make sure that it is vested with an appropriate reverence, for it is, in a very real way, a commencement of a great work. The balances must all be correct. There are subtleties that are inherent in its choosing, for is not the flow of time a constant thing, almost crushing in its inevitable onward march? How can one as humble as I possibly decide at what point in its long, long current relevancy begins? Yet I must, for it is my calling. Ever has it been so, and it is a responsibility I bear with no small amount of both pride and respect. The depths of the throne world from whence I pen my records groan with the accumulated pressure of millennia of history, like the soaring crumbling spires wherein dwell the quadrillions of human lives that live and die every second upon this world. The Stygian depths are piled with the accrued accretions of an antiquity that trickles ever downward, ever downward, like the dust and rubble of constantly repaired hab units. Years are folded unto years, the past compacted and thrust ever down into the lowest librarians and archive stacks, until these decaying shelves can barely hold the weight of that which once was. But like the half-heartedly repaired and ill-maintained world, which they squat in, humanity has long, long ago forgotten its ability to even maintain what is buried here. Many have forgotten that such a place even exists, and to those that remember, such is the power the very concept this knowledge presents, while it is a thing to be guarded jealously. The Imperium of our most blessed god-emperor is a putrefying nightmare thing, a wholesale corruption of what was once good and just about our species, but there are almost none who can remember this. Memory is not a thing to be cherished, it is a burden or worse a danger. Memory distracts one from the blind rush to survive, to hold on to the precipice, which it would seem is all we are capable of doing in this darkest millennium. The night draws ever in, and the enemies that would see us cast down even closer. And yet here I labor, in the catacombs of holy terra, in the forever night of these archival stacks, hunched over a vertigris cogitator older perhaps than many of the records I examine. The task I have been set is monumental, and the being who set it more monumental still. My life has been lived during what has felt like the final minute of humanity's hour in this hateful galaxy, yet now a son of the god-emperor himself has returned to us. He has set about the task of saving this Imperium of ours, and if one's paltry chronicles may aid this in any way, then it is a work I shall happily give my own soul to see done. We must understand our past, lest we risk again the damnation that befell those who came before. To that end, to understand a fall, one must first understand the rise. To understand the tragedy of the Horus heresy, one must first grasp the glory of the great crusade, and the dreams of unity before that, a beginning is a very delicate time. Let this chronicle, and all that may follow, stand as testament to what came before, a flame, however paltry, to cast back the encroaching dark. Know then that this is a record of the early history of terror, as we of the Imperium know it, the throne world, the cradle, the being that sought to unite it, a history of the unification wars. The beginning we set ourselves, for all intents and purposes, is a gestation of the Imperium. If you have accessed one's records upon the dark age of technology, you will know then that the era is the 29th millennium. Terra, once the seat of the greatest stellar empire it had ever commanded, is a toxic radiation-bathed wasteland. We of the 42nd millennium know it as the Ecumenopolis, a city that carpets the entire planetary mass in its rotting bulk, but those many millennia ago life was very different. River's mighty hive stacks still sought the heavens, its dank catacombs still buried deep within its crust, but between them lay only ash-choked deserts and scorched earth, inhabited by nomadic techno-barbarian tribes, rivers hungry to prey upon any that strayed into their domain. The city hives fared little better, many constantly changing hands from one insane despot or demagogue. The collapse of the human empire, during the machine wars of M23 and 24, had severed Terra. From the fruits of her galactic domain, she depended upon for her very survival, as all of the magnificent mechanisms of the dark age of technology crumbled or failed, or worse, rebelled. Desperation had usurped all other human qualities, and the rapidly collapsing polities of the homeworld warred with each other for whatever scant resources they could claim, patally at first, but then apocalyptic, unleashing atomic, toxicological, and biogenic weaponry. Terra's biosphere, a fragile thing after century upon century of climactic change, was annihilated under the inferno of humanity's downfall, scoured of almost all flora and fauna, save for those preserved inside weakening dome cities. Thus began, five thousand years, where the planet tore at itself, five long millennia of ceaseless conflict, between ever more desperate factions, tribes, nations, and warbands. It is not even possible to frame within words, all that we as a species lost during this time. The age of strife, the long dark, old night. This era goes by many a name, but all, or evocative of the rampant devastation and lunatic violence, of our species' darkest epoch. It was a tale, writ across the span of the galaxy, for out in the void the last colonies of humanity fared little better. The warp, the ethereal nothing place, that sea of souls through which all human faster than light travel is achieved, and grown angry and hateful as the machine wars guttered out. The tides and currents of this dimension were agitated by a roiling mass within its hidden depths, a presence humanity knew not of. The effect was that all interstellar travel was completely severed, the void craft of our species reduced to crawling around the incomprehensibly vast galactic volume at sublight speeds. Worse yet, the warp storms that raged under the fabric of reality were agitating the gene long latent within the human species, the one that unlocks our psychic potential, allowing those cursed with it to channel the very energy of the warp into our reality. All across the galaxy, men and women awoke to find themselves with power to literally usurp all natural laws, channeling a force greater than any gun, dominating the minds of others. Worse yet, some were so blasphemously powerful as to tear holes in the fabric of space time from whence the horrific predator creatures of the warp could enter our plane and sup upon mortal lives. As it has done seemingly in Cycle's Eternal, the galaxy burned. The once myriad lights of humanity set within the sea of stars burned brighter than the fires of their damnation before falling silent, guttering out as the grasping tendrils of old night, both figurative and in many ways literal, fell upon their skies. There had once been this belief, our species held, that the passage of time inevitably bent towards a bettering, a progress, that this great arc was bearing humanity ever onwards towards Utopia. Simple was it, and we had need only to remain on course, and betterment would be achieved for all. What petty fools we were. Human and advancement is neither a natural state nor a guarantee of the flow of time. We are not owed progress by the falling grains of sand. The mere fact of the age of strife and all its horrors is proof enough. Humanity has throughout its long span risen to heights and plunged into depth, yawing from glorious zenith to dreadful nadir like a drunkard stumbling or a child's mood swings, with no guiding hand upon the ship's tiller beyond our own moral and technological limits. We have stumbled more times than we can even remember, and one means that quite literally, for every time we fall, history and remembrance is one of the first casualties. Knowledge put to the flame in the opening salvos of whatever new dark age we have caused or fallen victim to. Time and time again it has been so. But the age of strife begat one of the darkest eras our species has ever survived through, paltry though our records of times before it may be. Should one's words trend to hyperbole, it is simply because one has little in the way to frame and express the horror of this time. All hell's devils, allegorically and literally, bestowed the world. Civilization crashed into the dirt, progress, science, learning, justice, law, equality, all were thrown upon the pyre in the name of survival, or worse, greed and powerless. For just as it was an era of terrible invasions from without, it was not just at the hand of the xenos or the demonic other that humanity would suffer. Our species has ever been willing to turn upon itself in times of primal, pained desperation. And old night was no exception. Age of strife irritera was a world gone mad, global insanity tearing at the foundations of human civilization with the savagery unimaginable by previous generations even in the depth of their worst nightmares. It was during this time that Cardinal Tang, the ethnic of the Indonesian bloc, committed his genome purges, annihilating swathes of his subservient population for the crimes of inferior breeding against his genetic dogma. Caligan of Ursh carved out a domain to rival all others with his sorcery-fuelled monster generals, marching armies a billion strong across deserts a continent wide, a million banners flying in the atomic winds. Ulam the Red's debased followers conquered a quarter of the globe, but were finally halted by warriors raised by a Nordafric warlord known as Kibuka, said himself to have called lightning from the clouds and granted his warriors a strength of a dozen men. Narthandum, the half-genius, half-mad, corruptor king, unified the Pacific Basin under the banner of the Panpaq Empire. Even these names, now half-remembered idolons of an age of unholy viciousness, are but a few among so many other petty warlords, kings and tyrants, that lived and fought and bellowed and bled and died under the choked sky of our scarred homeworld. Records and chronicles are, understandably, fragmentary. This is both a product of the devastating wars themselves, which meted out untold destruction upon the high cities of the planet, that destroyed so much of the accumulated knowledge of humanity's past, but also of deliberate post-unification sequestering and redactionism. The early Imperium, in its admittedly understandable rush to bury the past and seize the new human age, did much to eradicate the names and lives of those who had wrought such pain upon our world. And one cannot blame them. These trivial despots of age's past are best where we have consigned them, to be forgotten under the weight of brighter and better days, or brighter and better people. It is just that they exist only as a footnote in dusty tomes, notable only for their ignorance in resisting the coming embrace of unity. Regardless, I am a chronicler first, and one must do what one can, even with the most hazy of histories, in order to develop the fullest record one can. Know that this is done not for veneration of these hated names or regimes, far from it. If anything, it is to better understand why they deserve their remembrance as history's villains, and as things righteously scoured from the face of our holy Terra. The map of Terra currently presented upon your screens is the result of years of work on behalf of its creator, to provide a better understanding of the layout of Age of Strife era, polities and states. This is of course as best as they can be discerned, based upon records scoured from surviving archival stacks. It should be considered an estimate at best, albeit one founded in good scholarship. This is additionally an approximation of the status of the planets in the final years of old night, at the end of 5000 years of ceaseless civil strife, across the now blasted and scarred wastes of Terra. As is obvious from the map, the oceans of Terra, once abundant, were simply gone, radiated, vaporised or stolen by resource-mad demagogues. What remains of the deep basins that once held abundant precious water, are vast and sparsely inhabited wastes and deserts. While it may strike a citizen of the present day as simply unthinkable, Terra was once far, far emptier than the city planet it is now. Before the world hive was razed to bury the past, underneath countless tons of rock reed and plastil, the wilderness of old earth was dotted with reaver tribes, techno-barbarian holdouts, and what scant nomad clans could eke out an existence there. Breaking our starting point in the southeasternmost hemisphere, we see the location of the long-dead sub-equatorial maglev clans of Panpochro, plying the edges of the southern Pacific rad wastes. Raids by this clan were frequently mounted upon this region's major power, the state of high Brazil, dominating a plateau that contained some of the last, precious, atmospherically sealed forestry. Industrialized far beyond the capacity of the clans and tribes of the wastelands, it maintained power largely by geographical isolation from the worst conflicts of the era. The outland wastes bordered this realm, once one of the mightiest oceans of old earth, now Ashen. Westwards, the plains of Merica stretched outwards, its hives simile isolated, and known for their extreme wealth in comparison to the rest of the planet. Through coin and intrigue did they keep the worst of the world at bay, although often only just, as tales hint of genocide subjected upon them to prevent their bountiful wealth from being contributed to undesirable recipients. Across the outland dust bowls squat the Nord-Afric conclaves, a region population dense and, owing to this, often horrifically war-torn. To their north, the old region of Europa, a torn mass of scar tissue. This powerful technobarbarian state meted out brutality all around, being seemingly in a constant state of war with both the Nord-Afric conclaves and their neighbours in Frank. Further towards the pole, the most northerly polity is also one of the most powerful upon the planet. Old Albia was a land of ash-choked castrum cities, and a people of old and proud lineage, possessed of a martial temperament that held the pan-pacific hordes of the unspeakable king at bay. Old Albians also retained the secret of rudimentary power armour, cladding their soldiers in this technology and dubbing them iron sides, all of whom were renowned for their durability and ferocity upon the field of battle. Nestled nearby in the grim Thulean ice basin, where the city crawlers of the Thulean tribes, renowned worldwide as perhaps the most resourceful and tenacious survivors, this hell-planet could produce. As we travel easterly, we pass over the snowbound realms of the Nordic, whose people constantly warred in the name of one or other zealous demagogue, spouting whatever religions held sway at whatever particular time. Nearby, the hunter-clans of the Jutriken Bowl, clinging to an existence at the edge of the nanotoxic Pontus euxinus, before our course sees us passing into the ethnarchy of the Caucasus Wastes, whose mutated Eugenist oligarchs ruled a herd of subservient gene-stock chattel people, often captured in raids mounted by their psycher thralls to the southern Achaemenid empire, whose populations had managed to remain one of the most unblemished by the radiation storms and rampant mutation cycles that scourged other techno-barbarian states. The ethnarchy was also known to have fought constantly to keep back the hordes of Ursh, the mightiest and perhaps most numerous state upon terra during this period. Spread over the largest of the former continents, Ursh's strength lay in its sheer numbers, as it was markedly unadvanced technologically, even by the severely regressed state of the era. To this end, they prayed mercilessly upon the neighbouring Terrawat clans, who, by contrast, were the greatest forge savants of the era, crafting terrible weapons of war in the depths of Mount Narodnaya, to sell to any whose coin was handsomely generous. Further yet to the east, the last of the dominant Hive states squatted, the Indonesian block, who yawed from religious demagoguery to military junta, and finally the vast lands of the Pan-Pacific Empire, who would soon begat one of the most diabolical tyrants the planet would ever see. To provide acolytes with some context as to the wars that raged between these peoples and tribes in states and dictatorships, I shall render unto this record an extract, adapted where needed to account for the linguistic drift in proto-gothic from the chronicles of Ursh. These annals, surviving almost impossibly from Age of Strife era Terra yet to the present day, tell a lurid account of the wars of the techno-barbarian nation against their enemies in the Nord-Afric conclaves. Shang Cal, slaughter general to Calagan of Ursh, the great Philistine tyrant, prosecuted these vicious campaigns to obtain technology, the conclaves possessed that vastly outmatched that of their Eurasian foes. The technagogues of the Hive cities had striven hard to preserve secrets of the long-dead, dark Age of Technology for their own. It appears that to do so, Shang Cal fielded not only the ravenous hordes of Ursh, but the mercenary formations from the principalities that bordered Calagan's territory, with the chronicles referring to his employ of the Tupolev Lancers and the Red Engines. Presumably some form of mechanized cavalry and armor formations given their nomenclature, but given the state of Terra in those years, such names may be allegorical, or fanciful, and we may only guess. The truth of their nature may be far more esoteric. These formations were wielded by Shang Cal to great effect in the eight battles that marked his approach to the conclaves, culminating in the dreadful Battle of Zozer Hive. For nine days and nine nights did the Red Engines despoil the carefully maintained agroponic bays of the outskirts, rendering precious greenery back to deserts before unleashing crude and dirty atomic weaponry indiscriminately into the city's heart. The gardens of Zozer burned in radiation fire, only for their ashes to be trampled by the charge of the Tupolev Lancers at the head of a slavering horde of techno-enhanced berserker troops from the wastelands of Ursh. Yet the tale of the Nordafric does not end there, for the hero-fant masters of the Hive had barricaded themselves within their last readout, resisting the hordes baying at their gates. Shang Cal, frustrated at this resistance, dispatched the Lord Marshal of the Lancers, Anult Kaser, to annihilate the holdout. It is at this point that the Chronicles' begat first mention of what should always be borne in mind during one's examinations of what scraps remain from this time. As Kaser advanced upon the fortress, his Onerio critics had warned of the hero-fant's dreaded magics. From the admittedly archaic language, it can be inferred Kaser possessed Readers of Dreams, or less prosaically, Psyker Humans possessed of foresight powers that allow them to scry the immediate chronological future branchings of localized time. The Psykers warned their Lord of the enemy's own warp-fuelled powers. And just as the Dreamers had foretold, the hero-fants unleashed them as the Urshites drew near. A horde of insectoid creatures, uncountable, sky-blackening, descended upon the invaders. They clogged engine intakes and weapon barrels. They swarmed around the humans, who, though armored, found their every crack exploited as swarms of chitinous bodies pushed in to drown their eyes, mouths, throats. It is said that water boiled, though there was no fire. It is said men turned to stone, or turned to liquid, or still, by reading from the text directly. Where the plaguing insects did not crawl or madness lie, so men did blister and recompose them own selves unto a terrible likeness of demons, such foul pests as the Ifrit and the Degenie that persist in the silent desert places. In such visage, they turned upon their kin and gnawed then upon their bloody bones. It would appear that demonic possession, as we of the modern era are cursed to know it as, was a specter that blighted terror just as it devoured the remainder of the galaxy. When Shankal learned of this defeat and the loss of his best mercenary forces, he flew into a rage, demanding his wrath-singers attend to him. While the text seems to assume the one reading it would understand the concept, all we are left with are frustratingly vague descriptions. It appears their leader, a magister named Mepheo Orde, engaged the hero-fans of Zozer in some sort of remote, likely etheric conflict, with the passage invoking frighteningly readily the debased names of primordial deities, ones I shall not repeat lest they assail the wards of one's own sanctum. For five days this battle of the mind and soul raged. The sky began to tear, until at last it turned a blood red. Snow, thick and hard, fell upon the one scorching desert and out of the blizzard the Urshite forces claimed to hear the voices of the dead cursing the living. It is entirely unclear from the garish language quite how the war ended, but what it does make clear is that it came at the cost of all the wrath-singers of Ursh, save for Orde, and proclaims in triumph that the presence of the hero-fans was extinguished utterly. Their fortress reduced to naught but a crater of rock that had turned to glass under the assault of unnatural and foul energies. This then was the terra of Mid-M-30, a planet of warp-crazed sorcerer kings, slaughter lords, Gino oligarchs, tech blasphemers, and genocide bishops. It was a world of suffering where resources were scant and life cheaper than the fundamental things needed to sustain it. The once verdant cradle was a radiation-soaked ruin of decrepit hunter scavengers clinging to existence against all the hell that could be thrown at them. Gone was progress, justice was dead, hope buried long ago. While one has committed to this record the names of the surviving cities and states, there were more, so many more, that perished in the fires of old night, torn from the pages of history and their very memories ground into dust alongside the bones of their slaughtered people. What remained were merely the obstant or most vicious amongst those who could persist upon this wreck of a world and they, those blessed remainders. It was they who would witness the coming of him, the Lord of Lightning, the Master of Mankind, the Emperor of Humanity. A full biography about the Emperor is a work for another time, should such an account even be possible. What is known of him is that he emerged at some point in the later centuries of M29, or possibly M30, as another warlord upon terror vying for dominance. This is the first time humanity's histories, such as they are, speak of him as a giant of a man, bedecked in armour of gold, possessed of an ability to inspire humanity that seemed to reach beyond simple human charisma. Of who he was, where he was from, to whom he had been born, they and thus we know not. It is likely many did not seek or care to ask, for he only was ever to be addressed as the Emperor, even in those days. All who sought to oppose him, scorned this. It is nothing king, this pretender. There have been many, many throughout history to have claimed such a lofty title, reaching above their station and talents, in a vain effort to impress or cow. Surely the enemies of the Lightning Lord thought he was no different. Yet different he was, impossibly different. He was, in a manner that would soon become obvious, the most powerful Psyche humanity had ever produced. Both in terms of sheer power and the control which he was able to exert over his talents. He set forth to unite the world, in its totality, for the first time in human history, under one man and one banner. He spoke of unity, true and final, and of the manifest destiny of our species, as masters not only of our world, but of so much more. Thus began the Unification Wars. The Emperor's initial victories lie unrecorded, or at least impossible to precisely paint upon any timeline. But based upon the eventual location of the Imperial Palace and what we know of the Astartes project, we can infer that his initial base of operations would likely have consisted of somewhere in the mountains of Himalasia. The lofty peaks of Terra's highest range befitted the soon-to-be master of the world, after all, and beyond this provided a highly defensible location from where the campaigns of planetary conquest could be mounted. In winning these victories, we can infer the Emperor's own initial polity, wherever or whatever it may have been, was his primary source of lightly baseline human manpower. But also, were the first stock of his own custodians, genetically enhanced warriors of simply peerless craft and power, were born from. The Ligio Custodes were, however, less a military formation and more akin to the Emperor's body guards and life wards during this time, as the nature of their gene craft, elaborated further upon in a record of mine, is painfully slow. It is quite lightly subjugation of the outlying Urshite clans presented the best source for both initial territorial expansion and manpower for the newly founded hosts of unity, as well as rough and hardy genetic stock for the Emperor's gene labs, which were beginning to produce the very first Thunder Warriors. No history of the unification wards could possibly be complete without acknowledging the incredible role these soldiers played in them, nor indeed their impact upon the future of the Imperium. The Thunder Warriors were not the first genetically enhanced soldiers in human history, far from it. Mankind had millennia previously unlocked the secrets of the human genome, dancing amongst the strands to pick and pluck and alter. The dark age of technology was redolent with casual to extreme genetic enhancements, as gene science eliminated diseases, prolonged life, and crafted human form suited to the extreme environments of the galaxy. During the desolation of old night, however, arts that had become refined were lost forever, and what scraps of learning remained were further debased by reckless and rampant misuse. Gene craft became a wicked thing, the tool of despots, mad men, and amoral flesh-smiths who simply sought to make weapons no matter the cost. Although the Thunder Warriors were indeed the latter, they were the Emperor's first attempt in his unparalleled genius to build an army of Juno troops he and humanity could rely upon, an army that would follow orders instead of simply being gene beasts to unleash upon the enemy, never to be caged or collared again. Terra had had little but monsters for millennia, as the desperation of its flesh-smiths had seen them turn to hideous fusions of warp sorcery and genetic enhancement. The Emperor needed soldiers, not berserkers, and he, by and large, was successful. The Thunder Warriors first organized into twenty regiments of a size not recorded by history, where the first and finest genetically engineered legions humanity had seen. They were stronger, faster than the average man, by an almost inordinate degree, and possessed resistance to the myriad dangers of the Terran environment, be it radiological storms, chem tornadoes, or mendicant nano-plagues. Their creation employed rudimentary drug-induced psychoconditioning to make them more pliable to orders, as well as enhancing the war-like tendencies of the original subjects, as many were plucked from the most brutal, and importantly, genetically stable, slaughter tribes and reaver clans. The Thunder legions, also referred to by their high-gothic cognamen Ligio Cataeus, were a complete paradigm shift in the military history of Terra, and presented a massive sea change for what passed for the geopolitical arena of the blasted wastelands of its surface. To aid their enhanced biology, the Emperor had made early entreaties to the Terrawatt clans. While their initial resistance was fierce, the open arms of the Lord of Lightning rebuked, they could not stand before the armies of unity, and with their capitulation came pledges to arm the same regiments that had driven they and their machines to defeat. Their first contribution was to be the first mark of power armor, made specifically for the frame of the Thunder Warriors, the Mark I Thunder Armor. Rudimentary at best, this armor was nevertheless effective in its brute simplicity, much like they who wore it. While exposed from the rear and providing little in the way of protection for its own subsystems, its advanced ablative nature would provide the Thunder Warriors a much-needed advantage as they took to the field against gene-bulked monstrosities, dark-age weaponry, and the lunatic blood-hunger of the enemies they were about to face. Command structure was rudimentary but rigid, enforced primarily through the brute force and primal leadership skills of each Thunder Legion's supreme commander, known as a Primark. A title I am sure will surprise Acolytes of the modern era. It must be noted that, despite possessing a title redolent with far more meaning and significance than one need elaborate on here, the generals of the Thunder Legions were not genetically tied to their forces, in the same way, in the same way as the far more famous men who bore their name later would be. The gen-hancement of the Thunder Warriors was altogether cruder, and had no such systems built in to their ascension and maintenance. As the years and decades of the wars tempered them, they began to assume unofficial, non-numerical titles, often signifying a role or mienne they had come to specialise in or embody. The fourth of the legio-catages was dubbed the Iron Lords for their skills at siege warfare, for example, and other almost disturbing similarity I am sure students will find rather remarkable. The Thunder Regiments would, in time, come to be aided by the foundation of regiments of baseline humans, many of whom would draw from proud martial traditions of an ethnic group cultural lineage or simply mercenary legacy. Their names ring loud upon the honor rolls, for they were to be the first of the Exertus Imperialis, the Imperial Army. The Scarlet Inferalty Huzars, the Therozion Volteguers, the Green and Silver-Cloaked Quihelic Guard, the Lucifer Blacks, the Cush-Toon-Naganda of Old Ind, the entirely mechanized Cordesh Cavalry, all specialised in one area of warfare or another, for the Emperor in his wisdom knew he could not rely just upon his Thunder Warriors to carry the world alone. The majority of these regiments would be considered roughly human baseline, although they possessed by no means a uniformity upon this front. Many incorporated technological or genetic enhancements into their structures in some way shape or form. The Geno-52 Chilliad, for example, bent the genetic stocks of their intake populations to the maximum allowances manpower demands could accept. The regiments eugenisticians carefully screened candidates, ensuring hardier bulk stock was allocated for front-line lineage batches, while also ensuring any females with a minor psychic talent were marked for introduction to the command and intelligence Uxor role. It was said, although must be noted largely with pride by members of the Chilliad itself, that the rigid genetic monitoring the regiment maintained would serve as the inspiration for the Emperor's future plans. The fires of the master of mankind's ambition were not to be contained, and soon the unification wars had become a truly global conflict, as the hosts of the lightning and raptor banners spread outwards in all directions, bringing the Emperor's words to every one of Terra's petty tyrants. Submit or be annihilated. The kingdoms of Terra would kneel or they would be scoured from the face of the planet. This was the Emperor's promise, and to those who resisted the destiny of mankind, he delivered it. There were times, however, that the cost was high. While the demagogues and priests and kings of these realms were not compared to the Lord of Lightning, they were oft still mighty, possessed of either advanced technology hoarded for millennia or wicked sorcerous powers. The mad priest-king Mollalyn Sen, ruler of the Nordic conclaves, pitched his psychic beasts against the might of the Thunder Regiments at the Battle of the Red Frost. Forcing their way through mutated horrors, pilgrim hordes and witch-marked thralls, the Emperor and his golden custodies led the forces of unity to victory, but only at the cost of 7,581 Thunder Warriors. The tyrant Illum the Red was only brought low by the Emperor personally, imprisoned forevermore in the depths of the Himalasia for his crimes against the species. The Albion war-clans resisted resolutely, deploying their power-armored soldiers of such advanced capability that they and their armored war-engines were able to hold even the Thunder Warriors at bay for considerable time. The cost of the campaign became so high that the Emperor presented himself before the Albion lords personally to appeal to their honour and to deliver the promise of unity to them. Their acceptance of these terms was perhaps one of the few times diplomacy was actually to work during the span of the Unification Wars. Would that it had been otherwise, but alas, these were dark and terrible times, and inflicted dark and terrible suffering because of it. The Emperor was not unknown to the Unity hosts during these years. The Emperor's first attempt to rid Eurasia of the stain that was the ethnarchy of the Caucasus wastes resulted in the unprecedented loss of over 20,000 Thunder Warriors and nearly one million troops of the Imperial army and other formations. The Unification Wars were not to be won with the tools the Emperor had begun with. Luckily for humanity, the Emperor had not been idle. In the years surrounding 700 M30, in the depths of the Himalasia, hidden from the eyes of an entire species, the Emperor had conceived his grandest ever feat of genetic engineering. He had not been idle since the creation of his Thunder Warriors, far, far from it. They had provided him with not only the necessary tools to win his first great victories, but also hard data and experience on what would be needed to win the Wars of Unity, and indeed, and delivered onto him the territories, populations, and resources he now needed for his next step. Combining Geno Secrets of the Dark Age of Technology, Biomantic Psychana, and his own Peerless Genius, the Emperor prepared to usher onto the world his own Primarchs, 20 Suns, mapped and grown from his own genetic template to be the generals he would need to carry his Imperium to its hegemony. The details of their creation are either forever lost to us or archived under such privileges as they may simply be considered as good as. But what can be established is that these beings represented an unprecedented fusion of genetic engineering and psychic manipulation, possible only for a being of such unassailable psychic might and control as the Emperor. They were, to be, however, not simply a tendance to him, like his artfully constructed custodians. No. They were to serve as templates and progenitors for entire legions of a wholly new type of genetically enhanced soldier. The Emperor had fought and bled beside his Thunder Warriors, and while he, no doubt, could take pride in their effectiveness, the shortcomings were by this stage in the war quite obvious. The crude nature of their biological enhancements ravaged their human bodies, burning them out and causing complete cellular or organ failure within a few years of their ascension. Worse yet, they were even before this prone to mental instability, their psychoconditioning doing little to stem the damage their boosted adrenal systems, and, indeed, frequent combat against things of purest nightmare, ravaged upon their psychological profiles. They were a means to an end, a stop-gap, and had likely always been conceived of being so. And from all that he had learned from them, and all the secrets and technology and gene craft they had helped him win, the Emperor was building his new breed of warrior. The Astartes, colloquially to be known as the Space Marines. Despite laboring in the utmost iron-clad secrecy in the depths of the world itself, disaster was to strike. While it is completely impossible for one to confirm how, the Primarchs were stolen from their gestation chambers as infants, scattered by warp-born magics to the far corners of the galaxy and completely beyond the Emperor's reach. Quite how this clear act of sabotage to the Lord of Lightning usurped even his prescience, one shudders to contemplate. But perhaps, expectedly, the Emperor took such an apparently mortal loss in his stride, for he had what he ultimately needed, twenty genetic templates of unassailable purity. The Primarchs project had borne fruit, and the Astartes project could flourish thanks to its efforts, and this was escalated into full operating capacity as soon as time would allow. The formation of the Legionnaires Astartes is, by sidereal time, reckoned to have occurred around 780 M30, in the final two decades of the Unification Wars. Though many of the Emperor's foes had been cast low by the Thunder Warriors, there were holdouts that yet resisted Unity's pledge, and they, were the most vicious even-hated terror could muster. While full Legionnaires Astartes' ascension and development will be detailed in a later record, it is important to note here that the Astartes method allowed for a certain element of mass production to be brought into the field of transhuman soldiery. Consider, if you will, the Thunder Warriors as akin to a town blacksmith or gunsmith's creations, while the Astartes were the product of a full line manufacturer. While the legions were given numerical designations that gave the order in which they were founded, it should be noted that all were founded roughly contemporaneously, as the Emperor knew he could spare little in the way of time to test the, at this point, theoretical roles each would fulfill. That being said, the first or primest Legion, later to become the Dark Angels, were the first to provide the template the others would follow, namely the selection of a specific population that would be subjected to experimental implantation of Astartes organs and physiology. Each stage of creation would result in expanded implantation on increasingly larger groups of potential Astartes candidates. The last of these introductory stages was the Alpha induction, which was believed to be the first non-experimental implantation. Essentially, the creation of a proto-legion of Astartes at minimum fighting strength, ready to take to the field in the Emperor's name. Given the time frame in which the Astartes were first to take to the field, and corroborating this with surviving records of their first combat actions, we can presume that the initial creation phases of the legions happened almost stunningly rapidly. The proto-legions were deployed as soon as they were combat ready, often achieving massive victories or breaking a foe of unity that had long resisted even the might of the Old Hundred or the Thunder Legions. The Sa'afric Liberation was spearheaded by the Twelfth Legion, achieving through unprecedented bloodshed a victory that had been feared would have taken many, many more years. The sissy state of Oriach, fanatical in its devotion to the ideal that it alone possessed the divine right of Terran rulership, was annihilated in a single night by the forces of the 17th Legion, to better send a message that religion and superstition had had its day, and that day was now past. The pioneer companies of the 5th Legion disappeared into the wastes of Terras hinterlands, prosecuting mendicant recidivists, uncontained mutant hordes, and relaying intelligence on potential terror clans back to the hosts of the Imperial Army. The witches of the Himalasian wind callers were finally purged from the seat of the world by the 7th Legion, while the Stygian under hives of the Terran sink cities saw the 8th Legion stalking their shadows, purging whatever criminals had decided to go to ground, as unity's light purged them from the surface. Terra itself was, however, not the only theatre for the legions. Near orbital space contained several ancient but still occupied orbital plates, akin to slabs of cities cast into the void. These two were to be reclaimed and with stunning rapidity, yet would serve the Emperor's legions for an altogether different purpose, the pacification of Luna. Terra's sole natural satellite was the first extra-planetary colony of humanity, a gateway to the Sol system and the deep void beyond, and in this age of darkness, the sole realm of the Lunar Gene cults of the Selenar. Long isolated in their sealed Habdomes, the cultists had, over millennia, turned flesh-craft into a debased religion, structuring their orbital society around cloning and genetic enhancement. They stubbornly had refused all in treaties the Emperor had made towards them, knowing full well that the Lord of Lightling's ambitions extended to the control of Luna as well as Terra. From the seizure of all the knowledge and technology, thousands of years had seen the Selenar sole masters of. What they were not prepared for, however, was the arrival of the Legiones Astartes. As the 7th and 13th legions mounted a frontal assault on the Lunar Defense Grid, the 16th, in a tactic that would later come to define them, led a spear-tipped strike force comprised of their entire force of arms, cutting power to their craft's engines far beyond enemy sensorium range and drifting silently towards the surface as their fellow legions continued their attack. The Selenar, for all their gen-hanced intellects and biological weapon forms, were only able to withstand the 16th's brutal shock assault for six hours before final capitulation was signalled. Despite their undeniable efficiency, it was not always stunning victory that met the legions. During the terrible assault on the Tempest Galleries, the 18th Legion, one of the most numerous already, was tasked with breaking the ethnarchy of the Caucasus, who had been responsible for inflicting almost crippling defeats upon the Emperor's armies for so many years. Leading a subterranean operation made possible by their advanced physiology, the 20,000 warriors of the Legion fought through anti-chambers older than many Terran hives, meeting with ferocious resistance from even older thinking machine sentries caged in by the ethnarchy. These automata reaped a horrific toll upon the legionaries they fought, but eventually the 18th carried the day, collapsing the power fields that had shielded the ethnarchy for so many decades and allowing the hosts of unity to sweep in and purge the Caucasus' hives. It came at a dreadful cost, with less than a thousand startys of the 18th Legion remaining. By this period in the Unification Wars, earliest records show that the cohesion run amongst the civilian and planetary government, not ignored by the Emperor by any means, was beginning to strengthen. The Imperial Palace, the gigantic continent fortress, was raising from the peaks of the Himalasia. From the Tower of the Hegemon, any who wished could watch the walls take shape, the dome of the Senatorum Imperialis form, and countless atmospheric processors render the once choked region habitable once more. The first four High Lords were appointed by the Lord of Lightning, the Lord Militant Commander of the Imperial Armies, the Chancellor of the Estate Imperium, the Provost Marshal of the Divisio Arbites, and the Master of the Administratum. The latter two were instrumental in the projection of Imperial civilian power during this period, as the Arbites peacekeepers were a sorely needed police force for a planet that had seen naught but lawlessness for millennia, and the Administratum, the bureaucrats responsible for keeping the armies of unity supplied, fed, and marching. Together, the four High Lords formed the top of a system of government at the civilian level, subservient to the Emperor's military regime, yes, but crucial for its continuing survival and future expansion. There was, however, no credence given to the idea of ever implementing the ancient system of a democratic mandate, as the Imperial Hierarchy deemed the humanity of this time in far too much peril for the masses to be granted the means to dictate their own course. It was an autocracy, and ever more would be. Power devolved downwards from this Council of Terra to the Lord's civilian, regional governors assuming responsibility for swathes of Terra, and below them, provincial Magisters temporal, commanding provinces roughly drawn up and equating to former Terran polities by virtue of ease of power transfer, if nothing else. The system was imperfect, being essentially an experiment at a world government on a planet that barely remembered the concept. This apparatus was nominally in charge of enforcing the Lex Imperialis, the first codified Imperial legal and judicial system, but still leaned heavily on the military of the Empire for assistance, where even the heavily armed, but now ill-experienced, Divisio Arbitaz could not bring lawbreakers to heel. The High Lords themselves were, in some ways, quite contrary to the Emperor's own wishes, chafing under the supreme authority the regime was ever ready to exercise. The Lord Chancellor, as Master of Coin, constantly despaired at the material cost of, say, constructing the Imperial Palace, while the first provost Marshall openly aired her discontent that the Master of Mankind had chosen, for his personal sigil, the Raptor and Lightning Bolt standard. By her words, eagles seek only to feather their own eerie, and storms do not but destroy. The breaking of the ethnarchy had marked one of the last outright apocalyptic engagements of the Unification Wars, where once battles had spread the length and breadth of continents, their aftermaths clogging the ocean trenches with mountains of dead, resistance now crumbled as the last enemies were shattered. The Astartes granted to the Emperor a quantum leap in terms of time commitment alone, as they broke the backs of enemies long thorn in the Lord of Lightning's side. Caligan of Ursh, despot of the great Technobarbarian hordes, was slain. The despotic cardinal tang of the Indonesian bloc, whose warped quest for genetic purity and ushered in a reign of bloody pogroms, death camps and genocides, was captured and thrown into the Imperial Penal Colony of Nusa Cambagan, where his identity was quickly discovered and his body torn limb from limb by his fellow inmates. Finally, the last holes of North Andoom, tyrant of the Pan-Pacific Empire, surrendered or were annihilated, and the tyrant himself executed in the shattered ruins of his realm. Legend tells that the Captain General of the Ligio Custodis, Constantine Valdor, had personally ordered the half-mad half-genius put to death, for his survival was deemed too dangerous a threat to the rule of Imperial law over Terra. History is unsure of the final engagement of the wars, as records from this period appear deliberately tampered with, for reasons to be elucidated upon later. The massacre at Gaudere in Frank is a candidate, as this incident was precipitated by a religious uprising aimed at denying the Emperor the expansion of his secular Imperial truth ideology. The Thunder legions were sent in to crush it, 5,000 in number, annihilating 50,000 rebels in turn, demonstrating that there was room for neither recidivism nor religion in the Emperor's brave new world. Another possibility, and in Assemble Chronicler's opinion perhaps the most valid, is the final siege of the Kingdom of Uratu, and the battle of Mount Ararat. Final Imperial histories, penned by contemporary historians and later embellished by the iterators of the Great Crusade. Speak of this conflict as having seen the Thunder Warrior, Arach Tyrannus, leading the last remaining soldiers of the Emperor's firstborn up the blood-soaked slopes, fighting tooth and nail against an enemy whose nature, and indeed purpose, goes unrecorded. One hundred titles had Tyrannus, most glorious and renowned of the Thunder legions. The Butcher of Scandia, the Victor of Gaudere, the Last Rider, the Throne Slayer. He was a legend in Barak-powered armour, a veteran of a thousand battlefields, and it was he who planted the raptor and lightning bolt banner of unity upon the mountain's peak, toppling the last and final foe of the Master of Mankind, and ushering in, with the blood of him and his kin, the Age of the Imperium. A pleasant lie, that. I do not mean to cast aspersions upon the work of historians past, or at least not all of them. They may have simply had a truth dictated to them by men in such a position to do so, as has sadly always been the way of things. I do not mean to cast aspersions upon the work of imperial iterators, or at least not some of them. They were a unique hybrid of chaplain, mendicant ideologue, and outright propagandist, and they had their role in our great history, as much as any of the rest of us. The truth of the matter, such as it is, has only emerged through access of the Logos Historic Avertia to macro-archives once completely sequestered. It would appear, from records oft contradictory but all dreadful in import, that the Thunderwarriors did indeed take Mount Ararat for the banners of unity. And it additionally appears that the majority of those that continued to survive their rapidly decaying physical condition were gathered for that explicit purpose. And it is likely it would have been seen as the greatest of honors to them, they as the original children of unity, the first hosts of the Lightning Lord, to place the capstone upon the wars that had claimed uncountable numbers of their brethren, and to carry humanity forth into an era that they had bled for for so long. Their progenitor, however, had darker purposes in mind. With his new Lijunez Astartes performing admirably and accomplishing feats the Thunderwarriors never had nor could. The Emperor had, in secret, ruled that their time had passed, and these tools had outlived their usefulness. Eric Taranis and his brethren fell not to the foe, but to those they had thought kin, both of purpose and of family. The Lijuokastotis, and unnamed elements of the Lijunez Astartes, called the Thunderwarriors, working in transhuman blood at the end of an era and the violent, horrific, glorious birth of another. Across Terra, preplanned assaults on the last of the Thunder Lijuns repeated this pattern, with the warriors of a war that was now guttering out, dying within sight of all they had striven for. It was, however, not a clean wipe of the slate, and it did, in fact, by records recently uncovered, precipitate a grand political crisis in the nascent imperial government. The first High Lord, to bear the title Provost-Marshall of the Divisio Arbates, Uwoma Kandewire, was simply appalled by what she saw as nothing short of a power grab by the Lijuokastotis. She and her colleagues in the other High Lordships declared that Captain General Valdor, known by the Senatorum to be the Emperor's executioner's axe, enjoying this dark period, was personally attempting to usurp the rule of the still-fresh Lex Imperialis by exterminating, seemingly at his own behest, an entire branch of the Imperial military. She was, perhaps understandably, terrified at what she saw as the specter of the age of strife risen anew, of a dictator bloodily seizing the reins of power through a genocide, as had happened time and time and time again. Kandewire, unaware that the order was from the Imperial household itself, as the Emperor was abroad on campaign, utilized her formidable political power to provide sanctuary for the last remnants of the Thunder legions, under, at this point, nominal command of their last Primarch, Ushotan. She bade them do nothing short of march upon the Imperial palace itself, to bring the seemingly uncontrollable custodian to heel. Whether or not this was ever aimed to have been effective is somewhat moot. The conversation was, predictably, disastrous. However noble or deptlessly misguided Kandewire's intentions were, however much she believed such a show of force may have shamed Valdor into submission. The Captain General was completely unwilling to brook any disagreement, and set ten thousand astartes, freshly created from the Emperor's gene-labs, upon the besieging Thunder Warriors. None survived. The culling of the Thunder Warriors is an act that many, including the Emperor himself, appear to have gone to great lengths to purge from the pages of history. It is, from this admittedly far-gone vantage point, understandable. It would have been a dire blow to the authority of the newly minted Lord of Terra, for it to have been known he played so callously with the lives of his subjects, especially at such a crucial time in history. No doubt there were fears amongst Imperial circles he would appear too many, as another mad Terran autocrat, instead of the role of the soul and true savior of the species. While it is easy to look upon such an act as the brutal genocide of a tyrant, it must be examined within not only context, but also extant evidence to gain a full perspective. There are numerous passages detailing incidents involving mentally unstable Thunder Warriors, succumbing to almost berserker-like states mid-battle, refusing orders or discipline in doing so, and creating issues for Imperial forces. Constantin Valdor's own journals speak of his disgust at their butchery, noting an instance where an extermination of a kingdom's soldiery expanded outwards to complete genocide of the civilian population. Their biology was similarly unstable, as their genhanced physiques were the product of a template forged in cruder times and with cruder technology. Hot-housed flesh-craft and essentially indiscriminate recruitment from techno-barbarian populations were two aspects of Imperial genetically enhanced soldiery, the Astartes very much addressed. There is, indeed, a laterally occurring example that definitely illustrates the threat they may have represented to the Imperium, if gone unaddressed. Several years after unification, the 12th Legion Warhounds were dispatched under orders of the Emperor himself to quell an uprising that had taken place on a solar asteroid prison colony known as Cerberus. Much to the surprise and horror of Imperial command, the insurrection was being carried out by a group calling themselves the Date Tar, all of whom were in fact Thunder Warriors. Though ravaged by biological and physical degeneration, they had seized the asteroid and were now its sole rulers. Their annihilation came at an absurdly high cost, with each of the Date Tar claiming the lives of four to five Legionaries. This is the only recorded incidence, beyond the palace engagement, of Astartes directly combating Thunder Warriors from a position of equal footing, and it quite viscerally highlights the credible danger a full-blown insurrection of dangerously unstable Imperial soldiery would have represented. The Thunder legions were fundamentally unreliable, despite the tales that may be told of their heroism, loyalty, and bravery. What does not mean to do them insult or injustice with these words? Indeed, the stories told of Eric Taranis are noble, even alongside the greatest heroes of the earliest Imperium. But they were monsters created to fight monsters, soldiers of terrible brutality for an age of terrible brutality, that they managed in many cases to rise above such violence and strove to embody the truest ideals of unity even to the end should not be forgotten, and to one's mind should absolutely be how history remembers them. The last of the dictators were toppled, the last of the witch clans were plunged, the last mutant hordes were put to flame, the last rampant thinking machines demolish for scrap, and the stones of the last church ground to dust. The armies of the Emperor covered every corner of the globe and extended beyond to the orbital plates and the silvery sphere of Luna. Terra was, for the first time in uncountable millennia, together under one banner. The raptor and lightning bolt flew from every pennant. The unification wars were over, and the Emperor was lord and master over the birth world of the human race. There was, naturally, the specter of recidivism, or of populations and regimes pledged loyal, attempting to seize the chance to turn their backs upon their oaths. Measures were taken, and organizations enshrined in order to consolidate the power of the Imperial household. The Imperial military was strengthened through the merging of various unification wars' era command systems under the umbrella of the Divisio Militaris, under the direct purview of the Emperor's own war council, itself an assembly of the highest commanders of the Ligio Custodis, Exertus Imperialis, and Ligionesistatis. The Custodis, ever the watchful eyes of the Emperor, expanded their secret intelligence network through their Ephoroi division. While lurking in the shadows, the newly founded officio assassinorum, a collection of the most vicious and effective assassin clades on Terra, were poised to deliver final imperial justice to any who required the ultimate reprimand. Military occupation of much of the globe was still a necessity, but where the recalcitrants of certain populations let them spit in the faces of the Arbites, it was soon assayed by the Astartes, although not through direct policing, it should be noted. Identification of specific populations deemed at risk of insurrection allowed Ligion recruitment to levy them for sources of manpower, both strengthening the Ligions and bleeding these populations of the young males they would have traditionally fielded against their enemies. The Third Ligion, for example, took almost exclusively for its body new fights from the Scions of Terra's aristocratic bloodlines, while the 13th First Cognomen, the war-born, was rather literal, owing to its practice of recruiting from the most warlike and independent Technobarbarian clans. These populations, not brought to heel but forced to surrender by near annihilation, were deemed especially dangerous by the Vizio Militaris, especially now that there were so many who were reduced to inhabiting refugee camps, orphaned populations bitter from defeat. From such groups as the Pan-Pakro Maglev clans and the families of the mid-Afric oligarchy, the 13th eagerly recruited. While for other Ligions such diverse cultural and genetic backgrounds would have been presented as an almost unthinkable risk to stability of intake, a peculiar quirk in the 13th gene seed saw those implanted displaying notable trends towards formations of hierarchies, military cohesion and deference to authority figures. By its rigorous application, the rest of and potentially treacherous were quelled, brought by genetic machination into the imperial fold as, ironically enough, its most disciplined and finest soldiers. It has been noted that owing to the fact the 13th Ligion apparently saw no frontline combat during unification, save for the pacification of Luna. Such recruitment was likely to have been a deliberate weapon to subdue these populations in an admittedly highly efficient manner, with some going so far as to dub the practice the final weapon of unity. It should not, however, be understated the degree to which the unification wars succeeded in their purpose. Unity was quite literal. And in all aspects, not just militarily and geopolitically, but ideologically, Terra had been scourged for millennia by those who wished only to plunder the homeworld for their own gain. Now, at its summit, there dwelled a being whose aspirations were grander to an immeasurable degree. While it was obviously not to be discounted that the emperor was a psycho without equal, and that his peerless power no doubt contributed to his victory. It must also be understood that it was a victory as much for the promise that unity brought. When the emperor had spoken of his dream, he had done so with an unshakable conviction of one who knew the manifest destiny of our species lay not on this rock, and that to bind all under his banner of the common good of humanity unified was the grandest of all possible goals, but also one achievable if men were to simply believe it could be so. His imperial truth, the atheistic philosophy that underpinned his imperium and deserves a record of its own, had been a sorely needed antidote for the Terran populations suffering under the yoke of greedy men masquerading as prophets of a blessed word, for those who saw the suffering of humanity as some divine punishment rather than the fault of the mundane, and even went so far as to assay the terrors of a world that had been scarred so deeply by the foul pollution of rampant psychic abuse. In the Imperium, there were no gods, no demons, no heaven, no hell. Not, save for what the science of humanity had devised explanations for. Beyond that, there was simply that which we could not yet comprehend, but, promise the truth, such understanding simply had to be sought, denying superstition as we went, and it would eventually be achieved. We could peek behind the stars and comprehend their workings as rational, not the hand of some fiery angel or skyfather. It came at a cost, as fanes containing priceless art, knowledge and culture were put to the torch lest the stain of such fantasies be let corrupt, but it was ultimately unifying beyond what humanity of any previous generations could have conceived of. The Unification Wars were a foundational conflict in many ways, an era of horrific violence and apocalyptic warfare that was, in the grand historical scope, ultimately completely necessary for the achievement of what was to come. While the pragmatic price is in retrospect easy to rationalize, it is ill-becoming to forget the countless myriad of tragedy and horror that they caused, from the smallest to the grandest, for they were very much a part of the fabric of the now, as any grand victory parade, memorial monuments or even stellar empire. The Imperium was built upon the bone dust of a billion human dead. Many rightly consigned to their fates, but many others there for no reason other than that war is a conflagration that consumes all without recourse. Unity had a bill and the cost was beyond imagining, but oh, what it would usher in. The Unification Wars were over and terror was one. It was a feat that had once been a lunatic's dream, now made real. But the Emperor had goals loftier still and they stretched beyond the sky, beyond the light of our sun, out, ever out into the stars themselves. To achieve this, he would need to undertake the greatest logistical, political and military endeavor ever attempted in the history of humanity. Though it may be deemed the grandest of heresies, one wishes to close this record with words attributed to the last tyrant of the Pan-Pacific Empire Northan Doom, the half-mad, half-genius dictator now dead and buried with the rest of Old Knight's despots. It is perhaps grotesquely apt, and we consider all that would come to pass as the days of history marched on and the shadow of the war master fell upon the Imperium. His words are as follows. The wisdom of our times is thus, we know only that we are ignorant. Ignorant of what we have lost? Ignorant of why we fell from the light? Ignorant of what awaits us now among the stars? But what will shedding this cloak of ignorance cost us, I wonder? Upon finding the truth, will we ascend to Olympian heights of glory or flee back in terror into the shadowed oblivion of a new dark age? Until such a time as one may provide elucidation upon subjects diverse. This has been the chronicle of the Oculus of the Imperium. Ave Imperator. Gloria. In Excelsis Terra. You can keep up to date with Channel News if you follow me on Twitter at ButstuffKaiju. Nope, not changing that name anytime soon. 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