 As much as knowledge of their renowned fractiousness may lead one to assume otherwise, the Sixth Legion were, prior to the reunion with Russ, strict adherence to the organizational precepts of the Principia Bellicosa. This was not out of a particular loyalty to that military work of Holy Terra by any means. It was a grim necessity to prevent the sheer disorder of the Legion from utterly overwhelming it during those early years. Discipline was a persistent issue for the Legion to enforce, possible only through the brute force and personal prowess of the officers, who lent on the chain of command the Principia outlined, not out of dedication to the ideal, but out of a desperate need for anything to give the Legion a semblance of structure. Summary, executions were not unknown. The Legion's one departure from the rigors of the Principia during this era was the presence of a specific type of consul, the Obsequiari, as a disciplinary corps. Intended to enforce authority both during and away from battle, the Obsequiari additionally were watchful for instances of extreme deviation from imperial ideals, as well as any attempts made by legionaries to circumvent or outright ignore direct orders. Which, owing to said issues with discipline, were typically quite blunt and direct. In this way they served as both a hybrid disciplinary corps and political officers. But it is no doubt surprising for one's acolytes to hear this, given the fact that disciplinary officers are usually a concept reserved for baseline humanity, not the transhuman demigods of the Legion as a starty. This, however, was mercifully not a period long lived. Liman Russ, the Primarch of the Legion, was the second officially found Primarch after Horus Lupacal, and his swift reunion with the Sixth was a boon to the struggling Legion. The self-destructive and rebellious tendencies of the Sixth were brought to heel by the Primarch and tempered to the influx of the culture of Fenris, as well as the sheer charisma of Russ himself. It was not so much a reform as it was a redirection. The Sixth Legion possessed many of the qualities Russ would have actively sought after, and, indeed, developed upon Fenris himself. The Legion simply needed a leader powerful enough of will to bring it into line. If anything, the Legion's tendencies were simply bolstered, leading to a rapid and market shift away from the combined arms approaches of the Principia in favour of shock infantry echelons prioritised above all else. In this, the hand of Russ and the influence of Fenris is obvious. The clans of that deathworld, lacking the ability to build structures of note, owing to extreme geological instability, perfected a highly mobile form of amphibious ship-borne warfare. Flotillas of sea-craft striking out of the churning oceans to raid enemy tribes for resources, vendettas, or simply as a way of life. The same means of warfare would now be replicated galaxy-wide. The Sixth Legion focused on delivering their astartes into the teeth of the enemy with all possible rapidity. The wolves, as they would become colloquially known, had never been a Legion that heeded casualties. But many of them would die in any one engagement or another was simply the cost of the murder make. To be born in much the same way as bolter shells would be expended. This frankly suicidal disregard for danger was a crucial aspect of how well the Legion functioned as a close assault force. There was little to hold a squad or company of wolves back once they had been ordered to close to engagement range. Never mind what the foe could potentially throw back at them. Exploiting this to the fullest allowed the Legion to bring the full transhuman might of the astartes to where it could be, by their definition, most effective. Overwhelming the foe through sheer ferocity of such an assault. Time allowed for the perfection of this means of warfare, leading to the creation of such unique Legion shock units as the Grey Slayers, which focused on intense short-ranged firefights and the so-called Bloody Claws, formed entirely of newly ascended Legion inductees. Desperate to distinguish themselves upon the battlefield and to court the eye of their Primark and the Legion's senior echelons, claw squads were frequently the first in and last out of the Legion's dedicated close combat formations. They would routinely also post the highest casualty figures. It should not be said that the wolves were complete and utter suicidal, brain-dead idiots. By any means, they were still canny astartes. They would not throw their bodies in the line of fire, simply for the sake of it. And being said, compared to other legions, their threshold for danger was much, much higher. Again, however, this was all merely the correct channeling of the culture of both Legion and Homeworld. Russ knew those new to the Legion, and those less new, would do anything to distinguish themselves. He merely provided a means for them to do so. By the later years of the Great Crusade, the Sixth Legion had diverged from the Principia at almost every conceivable level, but could, if so pressed by outsiders with the tenacity to do so, point to whatever unique formation they possessed and elaborate upon the nominal Legion role it would fulfill. The Sixth still retained a significant enough quantity of heavy armor and specialized weapons. They were, after all, a front-line formation of the Legion as astartes. That being said, these heavier formations would play consistent second fiddle to the infantry echelons, maintained more out of necessity than any actual integration into the standard line of battle, or utilized in whatever means would support the infantry best. This latter aspect was crucial. It led to many of the Legion's more questionable moments of battlefield improvisation. For instance, the fleet elements of the Legion maintained an appropriate quantity of Seistus assault rams, brutal attack vehicles that more resembled pilotable boarding torpedoes than actual voidcraft. Their sole purpose was to engage in punitive boarding actions against enemy starships. Despite functioning worse than poorly in atmospheric conditions, the Legion did not hesitate to employ them as, essentially, a hybrid drop pod and battering ram should enemy fortification's planet side need to be breached. A tactic openly scorned, but in some cases quietly adopted by other astartes legions. Lacking the fourth Legion iron warrior skills in simply dropping prefabricated fortifications from orbit to establish rapid planetary breach heads, the sixth Legion would frequently utilize its stormbird aircraft to form concentric rings at a landing site, should an orbital drop assault prove unviable for infantry delivery. Not only was the armor of these craft sufficient to ward off small arms fire, the overlapping void shield shell created by their energy barriers was more than sufficient to turn away all but the heaviest weaponry, allowing embarked astartes to make their way to a planet's surface in relative safety. In terms of overall structure, the wolves divided themselves into 13 distinct great companies, named directly for their Fenrisian numerals and by intended order of battle containing 10,000 astartes each. Given, however, the self-reliance of the Legion, the extreme theatres its elements found themselves in and the sheer level of casualties it was willing and almost eager to endure, this number was only ever theoretical. It could be both vastly exceeded or completely undercut depending on the great company in question at any given time. Just as tenuous were the formations within these great companies themselves, a complex and ever shifting web of squads and companies formed on an ad hoc basis and utterly beholden to situational exigencies. One holdover from the sixth Legion of pre-Rus days was the significant reliance on individual authority. The captain, or wolf lord, or yarl, of a particular great company held absolute authority second only to Rus, and from there flowed a tributary system of sub-commanders, variously captains, claw-leaders, or thens, with seemingly no formalized structure beyond either their own personal skills, merits, or standing with their yarls. Actual command authority could be delegated at almost any time to almost any one. It all depended on who the foe was and what skills were required. In other legions, such an informal structure would have been completely untenable, leading to a morass of conflicting viewpoints and combat preferences and an impossibly confused chain of command. It is a credit to the wolves that, as peculiar as their particular system was, it never once seemed to display any of these failings. Indeed, it seemed to excel, providing the Legion a fluidic flexibility that allowed it to adapt to almost any situation it found itself in. The confusion of outsiders was never considered an issue. The impenetrability of the command culture of the wolves was often a point of humor used by the legions of starties and play-japes upon other frustrated imperial elements. As is no doubt obvious, the actual formations, specialization, and predilections of the great companies varied considerably, either as a result of the individual yarl's own dispositions or a particular tradition or both, although there were always exceptions. As with most legions, the first great company, known by the Fenrisian designator An, took as his elite varighear, his oldest and most veteran warriors, as well as containing the vast majority of the legions' tactical dreadnought-equipped starties. Beyond this, the compositions vary wildly. Fife, the fifth great company, would, for instance, take the bulk of the legions' inductee-bloodied cloths, squads, for both training and first-blooding, sending many to other great companies once, as the legion would say, they had grown some tooth. A rather literal phrase, the 26th legion genome practice led to the lengthening of the canine teeth through aging. Tois, the second great company, was known for being the custodians of the majority of the legions' dreadnought sarcophagi, a fate if viewed with no small amount of shame and pity by the starties of the legion. Known in some capacities as the Sons of Ymir, a great number of the legions' dreadnoughts were prone to severe mental trauma, as given the suicidal tactics of the wolves, any who had managed to survive an injury that did not kill them, but rendered them unfit for any fate save that of a contemptor orcastopherum sarcophagus, must have suffered most wretchedly. This typically manifested in hyper-violent berserker behavior upon the field of combat. Six legion dreadnoughts were rarely deployed, so much as unleashed. They would only be roused from their cortical slumbers in times of severe need. The Sixth Wood, where possible, used their great companies to give function and structure to its members, that, like the dreadnought interred, required both to persist in maintaining some semblance of importance and worth in their continued existence. Nowhere is this more obvious than in SEP, the Seventh Great Company, which counted amongst its number the vast majority of the legions' destroyer cadres, the so-called Landivan, Venresian for layers of waste. And, of these, many were adherenced to a form of death cult pseudo-worship of Morkai, a quasi-necro-deity of Fenris. They, according to their brethren, were those who had felt the breath of the wolf in their bones, a poetic way of phrasing a peculiarity of six legion genetics, wherein the subject, after enduring a period of heightened aggression and violence, subsides into a dull state, devoid of passions in any capacity, save for those that only open warfare can stir. The wolves, being the wolves, these deaths sworn were organized into specific squads to allow for their mental degradation to remain useful for the legion, serving until their deaths as the most potent extermination cadres the Sixth could deploy. By the outbreak of the Prospero Incident, in 734-004-M31, it was stated that the Sixth Legion committed over two-thirds of its active strength, some 75,000 Astartes, to the censure host. There remained anywhere between 20 and 25,000 wolves abroad across the galaxy, either engaged in missions of vital crusade import, or those that had placed them too far beyond their master's call, as well as a small garrison necessitated for defending Fenris itself. These are, it should be noted, best estimates, inaccurate at the best of times, and they do not reflect the overall fall in the legions' numbers in the latter half of the Great Crusade, as at one point it was roughly verifiable that they contained 130,000 Astartes at their peak. This is reflective of both the nature of the wars the wolves were assigned to, and often lobbied to be assigned to, as well as the sheer relentlessness of their campaigning, conducted at a pace that, to their credit, outstripped many legions far larger than them. By virtue of the nature of these operations, they are to this day almost all sealed under clearance codes of impenetrable security, but one has elaborated upon, where possible, in previous records. The Legion additionally possessed a higher-than-average quantity of frigates assigned battleships in its fleet, primarily intended to provide greater independence of its various elements. The ships were outfitted for long-range operations for potentially years or decades between resupply. The Harafnel, Russ's flagship, was one of the largest of all Gloriana-class battleships, and, unlike her sisters, fully capable of operating both as a heavy battleship for line operations to carry hunter-killer. In terms of equipment, the Legion was, in this way, as distinctive as many others. Many of its members eschewed modern armor marks, such as the Mark IV or Mark VI Astartes plate, in favour of older and more dependable Mark II and Mark III variants, ostensibly the not-broken-in-no-need-of-fixing attitude. In reality, it has perhaps more to do with the Legion's inherent conservative streak, the resistance to anything they perceived as change or outside interference. This extended to armaments and vehicles. The Legion would only employ the most robust of both, those they had spent decades or even centuries campaigning with, and viewed with suspicion many of the newer developments born of Mechanicum advancements or Legion's Astartes combat modifications. The very nature of their campaigning usually made the maintenance of advanced armaments an impossibility, and their insularity meant that they were very rarely approached by either Mechanicum representatives or Divisio Militaris officials seeking a new testbed for some weapon system or vehicle. This, then, was the Legion that was making its way to Prospero, a collection of world killers like no other, tempered by centuries of making war precisely the way they meant to. For the storm that was about to be unleashed upon the world of the Thousand Suns, well, that tale must wait. Until then, Ave Imperator, Gloria, and Excelsis. Thank you very much for watching.