 If one is to conquer the galaxy, one needs soldiers to do so. The galaxy is, however, a dangerous and deadly place, completely ill-suited to human life. Unsympathetic environments, vicious and predatory Xenos, and horrors from an alternate unreality all oppose humanity's destiny as rulers of the stars. To combat superior threats, one needs superior soldiers. What then is humanity to do but to rise to this? To fight monsters, we must create angels. We take all that we have and all that we know and turn our hands to the creation of living weapons. Not just simple soldiers to fight our wars, but holy avatars of vengeance to smite our enemies utterly. They to whom life is honor and duty is fate, pledging service eternal through the sacrifice of their very humanity upon the altar of obligation. To them lies the burden of our species' salvation. To them falls the necessity of forging our place in this most belligerent of universes. One unbreakable shield against the coming darkness. To that end, our eternal Lord and Saviour, the immortal God-Emperor of mankind, created and bequeathed unto us the Astartis, the perfect transhuman soldier. And into his creation was vested all of his unique genius to better forge the human future. Know then that this is a record of the creation of the Astartis legions, the origins of the finest warriors in history, they who were to be humanity's champions and its destroyers. The Astartis, or by their low gothic name Space Marines, are the genetically enhanced superhuman soldier of the Imperium of mankind. They are quite simply our greatest warriors, the God-Emperor's own avenging angels of death, men who have sacrificed all to become the Paragons of war eternal, forever fighting the wars of humanity's survival against often impossible odds. They were wrought as such, to be all that they are, at the hands of the Emperor himself, at the dawn of the Imperium. Being all of the Emperor's biomantic and genetic genius, they are the product of both human necessity and of human ingenuity. Gifted with genetic enhancements far beyond those available to the common humanity of the Imperium, they are barely even human anymore, or to put it better, they have sacrificed their humanity for the salvation of ours. Through their new physiology they are stronger, faster, more resilient, more disciplined, and more dedicated than any soldier of the Imperium. They are unblemished by the scourges of disease or aging, their bodies resistant to the myriad radiological, toxicological, and chemical dangers our galaxy can throw at them. In our modern era they are organised by chapters, the majority being barely a thousand warriors strong, but it were not always us. In the days of the Great Crusade, those Halcyon years of the Imperium's foundation, they were organised into legions, with tens or hundreds of thousands of Astartes marching under one of originally twenty banners. These legionnaires Astartes represented the most fearsome collection of military force in the history of the galaxy. The capability of these warriors far outstripped a mortal soldier by an almost absurd degree, and organised into legions of this sheer now unimaginable scale, they formed a force that could best any opponent they faced. This was of course the Emperor's intent. He needed armies to reshape an entire galaxy, and that is exactly what he built. As detailed in one's previous record upon early imperial history, the legionnaires Astartes were first created in the terrible crucible of Terra's unification wars. With sidereal time accounted for and based on what surviving records can be reliably confirmed, the best estimate one can determine is that the first founding, as it was laterally to become known, occurred sometime in the late 700s of M-30, anywhere between 750 and 780. The great arc of the centuries-long unification wars, a series of conflicts fought by the Emperor to unite Terra under his rulership, was bending towards imperial victory. That being said, the Terra of this time was a morass of warp-fuelled sorcerer kings, genocide bishops and mutant demagogues. There remained yet regimes upon Terra that could hold the fledgling Imperium at bay, or worse, openly challenged the Emperor's destined hegemony. The wars to this point had been fought by the baseline human regiments of the Emperor's armies, yes, but the brunt had been borne by his first genetically enhanced soldiers, the Thunder Warriors. As organized into 20 separate Thunder legions, they were the first gen-hanced troops of the era, a breed apart in a world where genetic tampering had been for millennia, the field of the lunatic and the depraved. The Thunder Warriors were not without their own issues, though, and as decades and centuries took their toll, they became more and more pronounced. Their gen-hancements were hot-housed and unstable, making them prone to cancers, meta-toxicological events, or cascading organ failures the longer they remained in active service. Additionally, their psychoconditioning, designed to erase memories of their lives before active service, and render them more pliant to authority, was prone to devastating failure, causing incidents where entire companies were subsumed by genocidal bloodlustful berserk states, the victims of which were almost inevitably the civilian populations of Terra itself. They were an imperfect solution, and always had been, but in their design and their application did the Emperor glean valuable knowledge and experience, which he sought to combine with the secrets genetic, technological, and arcane his Terran conquests had rendered unto him thus far. The origin and crux of the success of the Astaris legions lies in the Emperor's Primarch project. Knowing full well that his Thunder Warriors were a means to a brief end, the Emperor had even before their creation been planning to render them ultimately obsolete, for the Lord of Lightning had ambitions at lay far, far beyond the shores of Terra. To the stars lay his ultimate goal, a human hegemony wrought upon the heavens themselves. But the Emperor knew he alone could not conquer the galaxy, despite his power he was but one being. So to that end, deep in his hidden genome laboratories, the Master of Mankind created twenty superhuman beings to be his lieutenants. These Primarchs, entities of powers and skills beyond that of any human, would be second only to the Emperor in the future Imperium's war machine, Demi Deity Generals, to lead the armies of humanity from the van, sons of the greatest of all of us, crafted through his superlative genius that would reshape the human future. They were, in a very literal sense, his sons, for the Primarchs were the product of the Emperor's own genetic coding, sculpted from his DNA by his own hands. Into each he poured aspects of himself, and all of humanity, that he wished to be represented in his new progeny. They would, additionally, function as the genetic progenitors for twenty legions of the Emperor's new Astartes. This genomic template, from which all Astartes augmentations would laterally be derived, is the key to their genetic solidity, and thus inherent to their superiority over all gen-hanced soldiers that came before them. The Thunder Warriors had been drawn from all available genomic stock, from hundreds of isolated Terran populations, many of whom had had to survive their world's radiological storms, and possess the scars of genome scourges deep within their chromosomes. This disparate nature of these intake stocks was, to the Emperor's eyes, part of the instability of the Thunder legions, but even he could not make a genetically stable offshoot of humanity, purely for the purpose of producing soldiers. At least certainly not in the numbers he and his coming crusade would require to complete within the timeframe he had deemed necessary, while the baseline human population could not be altered. The intake process, however, could be, with genetic material being introduced from their primarchs throughout the ascension process. Through the primarchs, Astartes' creation could be streamlined and refined, and most importantly allow for consistent mass production. However, as the project was approaching fruition, disaster struck. As best can be discerned from records rated triple vermillion, the blame lies with the malign entities of the warp, the greater intelligences referring to themselves as the gods of the Dark Pantheon. The Emperor was utterly anathema to their hated nature, and they named him thus as a threat to their ultimate and unknowable goals, seeking to usurp that which they called anathema. They tore open reality and scattered the twenty infant primarchs from Terra to the furthest and darkest reaches of the galaxy, hoping to place them beyond the reach of the master of mankind. It fell to each to come to maturity on his own, isolated from their genetic precursor and without his guidance. This was a setback, catastrophic, yes, but not fatal. The Emperor had what he needed to create his legions, the genetic stock or gene seed of his primarchs, and while he was to be removed from them for the time being, deprived of their use as commanders in the field, he could still utilize the base genocoding of his sons to create the greatest army the galaxy had ever known. From the twenty primarchs, twenty legions were fashioned, each molded by their primogenitor's genetic legacy in ways sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious, in both appearance and psychological character. The ascension process of anastartes begins early in human adolescence, identified as being the period in the human lifespan most receptive to the extreme strains of the genetic augmentation, psychological restructuring and invasive surgical manipulation the process necessitates. The lower the potential rates of rejection, the more chance the aspiring candidate has to proceed on to the next stage. The process is dependent on the natural, biological and hormonal structure of the human male, thus, as it has ever been, only males can be astartes. They remain extant in the chronicles of the great crusade, several examples of adult males being elevated to being astartes, often the result of the hardiness of their planet's human stock, although records often speak prosaically of them being additionally vested with extreme personal fortitude and strength of will. It should be absolutely noted, however, that the individuals that survived adult conversion were in the extreme minority. As the process of an ascension becomes exponentially riskier, the older the subject. Perhaps the oldest serving member of the legionnés astartes, at the time of his elevation, was Core Phaeron, adoptive father to the primarch Lorgar Aurelion, and first captain of the 17th legion, word-bearers. But his was not a full ascension. As given his advanced years, the process was deemed almost certainly fatal. He is, at the time of penning this record, the sole example of an individual who received a partial conversion, achieving near astartes capabilities through the implantation of certain organs and partial genetic and bionic alteration. While the psychological conditioning work of an astartes is undertaken in tandem with the entire process, the surgical enhancements must occur in a distinct order, which I will present forth as follows. The first enhancement is the second heart, a simple one, but incredibly vital for the improvements in cardiovascular performance it grants. Without this, it is reasonable to presuppose that none of the following organs would be able to achieve the necessary supply of oxygenated blood. The second is the osmogila, an organ that secretes hormones to boost the size, structure, and density of the skeleton. An example of its specific effect is the fusion after two years of the subject's ribcage into a highly resistant bone plate. The biscopea comes next, increasing muscular growth and density. The hemastomone follows. Both increases the ability of the blood to carry oxygen and monitors the stability of the previous two implants. Laramans organ distributes laramans cells into the blood stream in the event of an open wound, causing the production of near-instantaneous scar tissue. The sixth implant is the catalepsy node. This allows the subject to cycle what areas of the brain are functionally asleep, reducing the need for full sleep to a minimum. The startys is widely renowned to need only approximately two hours of sleep per day to maintain peak efficiency, and utilizing this node allows the startys to remain awake for potentially months on end before the toxicological buildup of hormones within the brain becomes too dangerous. The successful implant of the catalepsy node marks the beginning of full hypnotic psychoconditioning. The preamnur follows. Functionally, it is a decontamination organ for foodstuffs entering the stomach. It allows the subject to consume poisonous or dangerous food, essentially without harm. The almofagia absorbs and processes memetic information from ingested genetic material. To put it more prosaically, it allows the subject to learn simply by eating. Memories, experiences, and other information are processed through the ingestion of meat, flesh, and other organs. Number nine, the multilung, allows the startys to breathe toxic atmospheres. Number 10, the oculob, from its enhancement of the optic nerves. And number 11, Lyman's ear, renders the subject immune to vertigo or dizziness, as well as enhancing oral capabilities and sensitivities. Following all of these, the susan membrane is a cerebral implantation, allowing the subject to activate it on demand, inducing a state of suspended animation. This allows the body to shut down in the event of extreme trauma or wounds, essentially placing the subject beyond the reach of both pain and potential psychological trauma. It must be noted, however, that this 12th organ requires subsequent chemical and mental training in order to utilize to its full extent. Number 13, the melanochromic organ monitors atmospheric radiation levels and can adjust the level of melanin in the skin to compensate, should levels be deemed dangerous. The ulitic kidney dramatically enhances the rate of blood detoxification, working in tandem with other organs such as the multilung to further prevent any poisons from entering the system. Number 15, the neurodlotus, allows the subject to detect poisons or toxins in food simply by taste. These poisons and toxins having been rendered essentially moot by all of the previous organs. Number 16, the mucrenoid, allows the voluntary secretion of a skin-coating substance to protect against extremes of temperature. There have been accounts of Astartes surviving even contact with the cold of the void for short periods of time through utilization of this organ. Betcher's gland is in actuality a pair of glands which allows the subject to spit or salivate a corrosive liquid. Number 18, the progenoids. These are perhaps the most vital of all Astartes enhancements, as the progenoid is a gland which absorbs genetic information from the subject's body through the blood and adrenal system. Matureing it into active gene seed, which once extracted, can be used in the development of organs for later generations of legion soldiers. Finally, number 19, the black carapace, is a subdermal armor that forms plates over bones and vital organs. In addition to the protection it affords, it also provides a neural web for the Astartes to directly link to their power armor, effectively turning the powered armor into a second skin, giving the subject extreme freedom of movement and response times that could not be achieved without it. An Astartes that is created from this process loses a large part of his humanity, as we would understand it. The psychological conditioning strips them of memories of their childhood in order to unmoor them from Kith and Kin and divest the subject of potential emotional attachments these would create, as well as additionally, excising in each childhood trauma the subject may have suffered. Implanted in its stead is a natural deference to authority, and in many cases a disinterest in the petty emotional concerns of baseline humans. All potential romantic desire is also purged, as, given the nature of Astartes creation, the need and drive to reproduce is seen as completely unnecessary, and was duly excised from the Astartes' consideration. They do, however, gain vastly enhanced strength, speed and reflexes, and possess abilities utterly beyond that of even the finest mortal soldier, able to learn combat abilities from the consumption of dead foes, spit poison in the face of their enemies, or literally chew their way from confinement. They need less than two hours of sleep per 24, fighting, potentially, for months on end before they need to rest. The cellular decay from the aging process is entirely halted, which, in combination with their enhanced defences against poisons and toxins, renders the Astartes functionally immortal. There has never been, in the 10,000 year history of our Imperium, a recorded instance of an Astartes dying of old age. They either survive, or lives of eternal war claim them long before this. It is widely believed, although the source remains unclear, that the first space marines were drawn from the members of the Emperor's own household, and the most loyal soldiers from the early regiments of the Imperial Army. It is doubtless many volunteered, but it is just as doubtless many were selected, based on heavily scrutinized genetic testing and examination, as only those with the least degradation from the human baseline would be accepted into the earliest induction waves. In this, too, were the skills of the Terran humanity important, as to maintain both culture and lineage, many regiments and forces of arms that comprised the first 100 regiments of the Imperial Army, practiced such techniques and traditions, amongst them the famed Geno-52 Chilliad. The decision, or lack thereof, of the subjects to enter Astartes service mattered not. For such was the psychosomatic reconditioning and Astartes would undergo, that their lives before their transhuman ascension would become the dull blur of ill-formed memory haze. This was a deeply important facet of early legion recruitment, as they were not restricted from where or who they could recruit, something of a boon given the ribbon and degraded state of human communities upon the homeworld. This is not to say that certain groups of humans were not utilized, where their skills or cultural background were deemed especially suitable to certain legions. A good example of this would be the Xeric Dust Bowl tribes recruited for the harsh warriors of the 19th legion. But it remains that whether willing or not, a man could be turned from a simple techno-barbarian or hive-surf into a tool of the imperial will. Indeed, the early 13th legion made full use of this, and as a quirk of their own gene seed, made their fully formed Astartes especially compliant. The 13th's very recruitment became a tool of imperial pacification, for potentially troublesome Terran populations could be bulk in took. Their dangerous warrior sons transformed into obedient soldiers for the imperial regime. Terra and its history and culture was a foundation upon which the legions were built and informed a lot of the early character of all. All were, at this point in history, largely uniform in disposition and character, divided only by their legions' numerical designations and, occasionally, roles in the imperial war machine. As all being said, certain legions possessed minor to moderate physical or mental genetic discrepancies. A result of a particular dominant gene strain or other from their primarch's genetic code. And these would become only more pronounced as the years passed. These early days were from whence many of the foundational patterns of Astartes' recruitment and ascension were developed and lessons learned. Records speak of some unspeakable disaster, educating the imperium in the dangers of recruiting from potentially tainted genetic sources. And while seemingly all mention of the nature of this incident has been thoroughly redacted from all imperial archives, it would go a long way as to explaining why genetic stability was of such primacy, even as the legion as Astartes began their process of reclaiming the worlds within the Sol system. Only one of their number would ever recruit from mutated human populations. The ninth legion, for a quirk in their gene seed, allowed for the ascension of even the most debased and mutated human, although the risks of rejection in this case were astronomically high. Elsewhere, the emperor's geneticists attempted to solve the issue of stable gene seed production. While the great crusade was yet in its infancy, simple mathematics elaborated upon by genitor biologicans predicted that even with the reclaimed gene cult laboratories and facilities upon Terra's moon Luna, gene seed output would fall short, and more worryingly still, degrade in quality as it struggled to meet demand. A Congress of Gene Rights under the Master of Mankind's personal supervision posited a solution that would eventually become known as Grebia's theorem, which demonstrated that the utility of the Primark's genetic code now lay in stabilizing and expanding gene seed stocks. With what was hoped would be minimal deviation. They were not available, these Primarks, to personally supply all the relevant material, but their coding could nevertheless provide a newer and accelerated gene culturing technique. Through this, and with the aid of the flesh craft secrets of the lunar cults, the full might of humanity's genetic engineering technologies were put into effect, reducing the processing time required to create a war-worthy legionnaires Astartes member to a single Terran year. Whispers have, darkly, posited that the utilization of Grebia's theorem and its relentless application sowed the seeds of the dread events to come. For those that speak of such things say that the accelerated ascension and forceful psycho indoctrination left an indelible scar upon the genetic coding of certain Astartes that were produced by it, which multiplied exponentially as these Astartes went on to produce gene seed of their own. All the while, as these people write, inculcating in the hearts of certain legions, disturbing flaws, would not reveal themselves until much later. As a great crusade expanded beyond the bounds of Saul and the casualties amongst the first extra-solar expeditionary fleets began to mount, new human stock was folded into legion recruitment apparatuses. While these new initiates brought with them the cultural histories of worlds only recently reunited with greater humanity, Terrans would remain as the foremost members of each legion, until in every case, that legions reuniting with its primarch. These beings, in their separation from the emperor, had almost all developed to be rulers of their new home worlds and had in turn, been shaped by these worlds. When such a reunion occurred, the reconquered or newly sworn planet or planets, the primarch claimed as their dominion, were rendered onto their legion as a fife from where the legion would draw the bulk of its manpower requirements. Such reunifications brought about dramatic changes in not only legion culture and iconography, but in some cases, tactics, organization, structure, and even language. Traditions of these new fiefdoms brought in not only by the thousands of new recruits, but the primarchs as well, profoundly altered the Terran-based armies, diluting or replacing strictures adhered to since the unification wars. In the cases of the fourth legion iron warriors, seventh legion imperial fists, and 13th legion ultramarines, these changes were fairly marginal, but in the cases of, say, the fifth legion white scars and sixth legion space wolves, nothing of their early crusade structure or culture survived contact with the primarch. Whereas the legions that fought for solar reconquest were united in a brotherhood formed of a shared homeworld and a cohesive singular ideology, by the middle of the great crusade second century, each of the surviving 18 legions were as different from each other as night is today. Fueling rivalries and occasionally prompting deep feuds. Well, these early seeds of discord would undoubtedly play their role in later catatlysms. It cannot be denied that the changes wrought upon the legions during this period created fighting forces uniquely suited in their own forms to every enemy and every theater of war in the galaxy. Legion structure was initially organized much like the thunder legions had been, faced upon patterns laid down by the ancient Roma work of the Principia Bellicosa, as well as fragments of what remained of Crom's new work. The emperor was to add, as he often did, his own genius to the works, as the fundamentals needed to be reworked somewhat to account for the range of abilities the transhumanist artis represented. Keeping with the Principia, the chain of command a legion possessed was unpretentious and almost blunt. Serving under a meritocracy from the beginning, legion officers led their Astartes from the front lines, ensuring not only that their war-faring talents were best utilized in the most direct way possible, but that the soldiers under their command would have examples of exemplary war-making and leadership. By the strictest adherence to the Principia, legion structure would flow from a command echelon to the chapter comprised of roughly 1,000 legionaries. From there to the battalion, nominally containing five companies of 100 legionaries each, as well as attendance specialist units and support cadres. As the crusade went on, operational strictures would often force changes, whether due to a surplus or dearth of new recruits, or simply unforeseen external demands placed upon legion command that necessitated the reorganization of who commanded whom. This would change further when the legion encountered its primarch, the cultural development of each grew more and more pronounced. By the end of the second century of the great crusade, chapters were referred to in some legions as millennials, harrows, or great companies, while battalions could be regiments or cohorts. Some legions would vastly exceed the prescribed 10 chapters, and many others would have chapters composed of more battalions than the regular five. Idiosyncrasies penetrated every level of the command structure, too. Each legion had its own titles for its officers, for example. The Lord Commander of a chapter may as well be a chapter master, as in the case of the 13th legion, or a con, as in the case of the fifth. A battalion's Lieutenant Commander may have been a legate or a shadow captain, and their subordinate company captain may have been a centurion or a wolf lord. The Principia Bellicosa were guidelines, not imperial law, and the deviations from them were initially tolerated by the war council, only to later be welcomed wholly in the name of the results they produced. Within the great crusade is contained countless tales and records of the conduct of the legion as a startys, far, far too many for a simple chronicler such as myself to relate in one sitting. Should you wish to learn more, dearest acolyte, apply your curiosity diligently to the further relatedings of the history of the various legions appended to this record and contained elsewhere within this macro archive. For now, one shall simply say that this era, the time of heroism previously unknown, of deeds mighty and victories eternal, was but finite. The legions would be reunited with their primarchs and be shaped by them. Centuries would pass, history would accumulate, and the weight of deeds and characters grow heavier and more profound with each passing year. Indelibly, the fate of the legion as a startys would come to define that of the Imperium and would do so in ways greater and more terrible than any of the era could possibly have imagined. Alas, a tale for another time. 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