 The work of a historian is one that revolves around a simple maxim of evidence equating to truth. Through the application of diligent study and an exacting mind, verity is rendered from the swirling mass of lies, untruths, and superstitions. Certainty, insofar as it can ever be truly acquired, is as extracted from the mists of what was. In the cases of the subjects of this account, however, the attempts to do just so have driven me to the cusp of inco-hate madness. Never have I encountered such a morass of half-truths, shadowed deception, occluded particulars, and sheer outright lies. A chronicler's work behooves one to examine all relevant sources in the composition of one's work, but by the throne. Not ever have I found myself in such an infernal pit of shifting non-evidence. For every thread of investigation that yields fruit, there are a dozen more that end in abject failure, either proven as complete falsehoods or deliberately contradicting others. But so many of these deceits are deliberate constructions, is beyond doubt, but even mere proof of their manufacture, or from whose stylus they once flowed, is impossible to determine. It is as if one is chasing the coils of a formless, shadowy thing, an oerworm endlessly looping around and through and around and through itself, possessing no beginning and having no end. Never has a legion been more akin to the nature of its icon, that multi-headed serpent of ancient Terran myth. I proceed, although know that it is exacted a toll upon myself. Know then that this is a record of the Harrowers, the multi-faced many, the dreaded Hydra, the 20th legion, Alpha legion. While it is difficult to determine the precise origins of the legionnaires Astartes by conventional means, seeing as they were founded in the fires of the Terran Unification Wars, the 20th was quite literally a product of an atypical level of secrecy on the part of their creator, the Emperor of Mankind, a component of his special tree foil. The 20th were formed alongside the 6th and 18th legions in separation from the remaining 17. The exact reason for this can never be known, for it was the Emperor's own clandestine intention, and he does not give up his secrets easily. It can be at least hypothesized, given the final forms these proto-legions and their primarchs were to take, that they were intended to fulfill very specific purposes. The three were kept veiled from their fellows, operating under exacting modes of secrecy, never having their deployments announced or even committed to official combat records. Their existence was never fully denied, for the deployment of an Astartes force of arms could, by the nature of their warfare, never be fully concealed, but this had the effect of breeding a distrust in those legions that only the 18th, later the Salamanders, would ever fully shake. The 6th, later the Vilca Fenrica, would see their reputation darken over time, deliberately removing themselves from their fellows by a proudly maintained, if deliberately affected, barbarian Mien. But in the case of the 20th, distrust was the very crux around which they would operate. The first mystery of their creation went on to father more and more ambiguities, and all questions raised by fellow Imperials about the legion, its nature, or even its existence, would go at very best, half answered. The great crusade left the homeworld and reclaimed the solar volume. The various legionnaires Astartes began to accumulate significant battle honors to their names, many earning new cognomens to replace their numerical designations, or adapting to new styles of warfare that best suited the physical expressions of their gene seed and genetic enhancements. Of the 20th, no such annals exist. What we can glean can only be surmised, from reports of other Imperial forces, which speak suggestively of targeted strikes, abductions, assassinations and sabotage, conducted by unidentified Astartes units outside of the normal operational chain of command, answering to no one and passing through campaign and war zones with impeccable clearance codes of seemingly incontrovertible origin. The 20th's presence is less confirmed and more inferred, with a very lack of information around them. At this point in history, they are a gap in the records, the missing lines in the ledger. They are discernible only by the shadow cast, or the whole left, making them difficult to look for, yes, but not impossible. The designate alpha appears repeatedly in these archives, but with no strictly discernible point of origin or exact definition. It does, however, seem to have dogged the wake this occluded and seemingly invisible legion left, and is possibly a holdover from the very creation process of an Astartes legion itself. During a legion's creation, each one, since the Primus, or first legion, has been raised to operational active service through what are initially experimental expansion waves. Astartes gene seed is often fickle, and without his primarchs, at this time, lost abroad in the galaxy, to stabilise the process, the Emperor was wary of waste. The gene seed was tested on various genotypes of baseline Terran humans until the most suitable group was found, and upon that time, implantation expanded outwards in concentrically larger waves, featuring larger testbeds of recruits. The final stage of this was dubbed the alpha induction phase, the first non-experimental implantation of fully stable gene seed, intended to create a proto-legion of minimum fighting strength. There is, however, no recorded evidence of the 20th legion, despite receiving its alpha induction and performing admirably in its first deployments, receiving the full go-ahead for mass implantation and mass recruitment, as all the other legions had done before them. Every single one of their 19 contemporaries underwent rapid expansion and later full-scale deployment, but the 20th were effectively limited, seemingly by the highest rate possible, to between 1,000 and 3,000 Astartes. This does not appear to have been a question of gene seed suitability. The implantation success rates for the 20th legion are amongst the highest of all Astartes forces, possessing none of the persistent problems that dogged the 6th, 3rd, or 9th legions. Why then was the full implantation not rolled out? Three theories persist amongst imperial scholarship, the first being the entirely mundane lack of suitable manpower. Even amongst legions with higher success rates, Astartes ascension is and was a difficult process that not all would survive. The unification wars and the solar reclamation, devastating to the entire volume in their own rights, had bled the home system of manpower, and the 20th, being the last legion created by the emperor, may simply not have had any appropriate ground for recruitment, as all genetic and cultural groups on Terra, and within the Sol system, had been hallmarked for other legions, specifically those such as the 4th with superlative combat records and a proven gene seed stability. Fragments speak of some notable disaster occurring during this time that had undeniably proven the danger and stupidity of recruiting Astartes candidates from potentially genetically tainted sources, but as to its exact nature we will never know, for all records concerning it have been simply destroyed. The second theory posits that there was a suspicion amongst the emperor and his gene rights as to a potential flaw or problem within the gene seed that hampered the push to full expansion. For this humble chronicler, this is the least likely. As a history of this period, especially the dark rumors that persist amongst the fates of the 2nd and 11th legion, is replete with evidence that the emperor was neither unable nor unwilling to ruthlessly eradicate any trace of what creations of his proved to be problematic. The exigencies of the crusade would likely put paid to any concerns he had, as the presence of continued issues within the 6th and 9th gene seeds proved. The third and final theory is that the 20th were deliberately removed from the standard Astartes process to potentially act as a strategic gene seed reserve in case of another disaster similar to that which befell the 3rd legion's gene stocks, or indeed perhaps as a control group for the expansion of the legion as Astartes past the initial 20. Additionally, this theory can be expanded to encompass the idea that the 20th was further subjected to development and conditioning at this stage of their creation that was unique amongst the other legions. Whatever the exact reason, we will likely never know. What we can discern is that by 798 M30, the very first expeditionary fleet's left sol, and the 20th legion effectively disappears from official history. Their presence, however, or at least the impact of it, does not. The Imperium in its early days was plagued with domestic rebellions, petty insurrections, and recidivist holdouts. The great unity of the Emperor was never as total as the iterators would have liked to believe, and there were plenty of defeated enemies who still harbored bitter resentments to the coming of the Lord of Lightning and his armies. The threat of the enemy within remained, even as the forces of the Great Crusade were annihilating the enemy without. There is no greater example of this than the sabotage of the 3rd legion's gene seed reserve, a deliberate and almost certainly internally plotted action that nearly doomed an entire legion of Astartes to simply wither on the vine. It was after this event, in the 4th decade of the Great Crusade, that there was a marked uptick in anomalous and scattered reports of atypical Astartes activity. Far from being the massed deployments and pitched battles that typified legion warfare during this period, these operations were almost all tactical in nature, occurring far from the front lines of the Crusade and uniformly involving, at most, a company of ten squads. But these operatives were Astartes is undoubtable, identified as such by their sheer physical size and prowess, as well as their war gear, but their identity was always concealed. Little to no unit markings were recorded, and when such idents were extant, they were of a pictographic form unknown to the wider Imperium. In many cases, the legionaries wore no powered armor at all, infiltrating under the pretense of being abhumans or gene-bulked uterine stock. Where power armor was called for, it was perennially uncolored. These were false flag operations, where these mysterious Astartes simply bore the colors and livery of another legion, often one that was operating in the similar theater, but without that legion's knowledge or license. These operations were all marked in their covert nature. No strikes, assassinations, sabotage, kidnapping, and asset recovery, all carried out on worlds already deemed compliant by the War Council, all seldom leaving anything in the way of witnesses to tell about them. Protests by the few Imperial Commanders, or newly installed planetary governors, with the sheer pluck to speak up about covert operations carried out under their jurisdiction, were rebuked or simply ignored. Even Astartes' legion masters, demanding to know why another legion was permitted to impersonate their own, were simply told no such operations were carried out, and that the ghost legion they claimed to have witnessed did not exist, despite the nominal existence of a twentieth Astartes legion being a matter of military record. As other specialized Imperial Intelligence services were created, such as the Securitas in Consensus, the Efficio Assassinorum, and even the Ephoroi Division of the Ligio Custodes, reports of ghost Astartes fell off, but never disappeared entirely. If all of these actions were indeed the twentieth legion, which is as far as this chronicler is concerned, the most likely explanation, then we are presented with the terrifying prospect of a legion that operated in the Imperium's shadow for well over a Terran century with seemingly no oversight whatsoever, creating a vast and penetrating network of intelligence and influence that burrowed into all aspects of the Imperial macro structure. If this is indeed the case, then what caused the actions of the twentieth in this manner to cease? Had their effectiveness simply been superseded by competing security bureaus? But the manpower requirements of the Great Crusade necessitated the formation of another frontline legion force, or was it simply the discovery of their primarch that represented a fundamental shift in how the legion operated? Regardless of the cause, records contained within the stacks of the logistic corpus point to the first open engagement of the twentieth legion as either being a decade before the Farenatus extermination, or appearing as unexpected reinforcements for the first legion dark angels during their catatlysmic participation in the third rang-dan xenocytes. In the case of the latter, a series of fascinating logs recovered from the archives currently being investigated for material surrounding the first has rendered a curious set of factoids surrounding the twentieth legion. A delegation from this unknown Astartes force made itself known to the fleet of the first legion under the direct command of the dark angels-owned primarch, the Lion of Caliban. They sought to parlay regarding the first's ongoing extermination of the rang-dan xenocs, and while a full account of these exterminations of these creatures is to be related in the future, it is common knowledge that the first legion suffered terribly at their hands, having their manpower previously mighty savaged utterly. It is estimated that in at that time the most hard fought campaign in imperial military history, the first legion alone lost 50,000 Astartes to these wicked xenos. As such, the first were, both according with their own nature and the trauma of the war that they had suffered, deeply suspicious of the Astartes force that presented itself as friend. They wore the latest Mark IV power armor, as opposed to the dark angels battle-worn Mark II. Their ship appeared almost fresh out of dry dock. They claimed to be the twentieth legion, but even the Lion did not believe in their existence, formed as it had been until this point out of formless rumors and half-whispered suggestion. Perhaps most fascinatingly of all, the Astartes that represented the force to the Primarch of the Dark Angels did so under a pseudonym I have no doubt will shock one's acolytes, given the timing. The Astartes, called himself Alphaeus. This is notable for even the most exact dates of the legion's emergence presents a discrepancy of around 30 years sidereal, but this is nothing compared to the Pal of Uncertainty that falls upon the nature of their later reunion with their Primarch. All Primarchs are representative of the character of their legions. Alphaeus is no exception, for in him are represented the most maddening of mysteries so typical of the legion that derived their gene seed from him. It is believed that the Primarch himself may have circulated differing versions of his origin and was aided by his own legion in doing so. One of the most popular iterations, at best guess known to have originated with a naval officer present in the Imperial Court of Monterra, placed his discovery as an accident at the hands of the 16th Legion Lunar Worlds. In it, Alphaeus is cast as the leader of a confederation of human worlds encountered by Horus Lupercal's 63rd Expeditionary Fleet. The forces of this alliance, despite being hopelessly outgunned, skillfully baited the fleet of Horus into trap after trap, with ambush after ambush, bleeding the expedition as it advanced painstakingly into the enemy's volume. Even when the Imperials had successfully caught up with the body of the enemy fleet, Alona Sassan managed to board the flagship of Lupercal himself, the vengeful spirit, slaughtering his way to Horus' very command deus. It was at this point that Horus, facing the assassin, let out a mighty laugh, recognizing that the Primarch was one of his own brothers, the very last one to be found. The account has several issues. Alphaeus has always denied it, and while there are indeed several human worlds brought into compliance by Horus in the volume suggested by the story, none are recorded to have shown the unified defiance told of, and many of them were rendered compliant by legions other than the 16th. It is likely that this account is a lie. Another origin, torn from the minds of a 20th legion centurion by the Ephoroi of the Custodes, claims the Primarch fell to a dead world in the Mandragoran stars, where he grew to adulthood utterly alone in the ruins of a long dead city. Long years passed before a raider party of human mutant Corsairs came upon the city looking for plunder only to find the Primarch. Alphaeus killed them all and commandeered the ship for his very own, eventually finding his way to imperial space. It is likely this account is a lie. Yet another, contained within the prescribed and memetically corrosive text known as the transit of the human soul through strife, or simply the Codex Hydra, says that the infant Primarch was found upon the thriving technocracy of Bar-Savor, only for the planet two months later, fall to an invasion of the worm-like Xenos Sloch, who, unable to consume the being they found, kept him as a plaything to torture and experiment on. Only the intervention of the Emperor himself saved his son from broken madness, and Alphaeus would spend many, many years at his father's side. As a master of mankind sought to undo the psychological trauma his creation had endured at the hands of his captors. Bizarrely, this damnable text speaks of another origin, stating that Alphaeus, or quixotically a part of him, remained on Terra, having been spared the fate that befell his scattered brothers. Raised in utter secrecy, Alphaeus, or the part of him, was the Emperor's greatest and most clandestine weapon, held as a hidden blade only to be revealed scant moments before a desired enemy's death. These accounts are likely lies. Hidden within these diverse origin tales is likely some kernels of truth. The latter, especially concerning the duality of the Primarch's being, is of a special note given what records speak of as revelations about Alphaeus that they shall have to simply wait upon the time of another record. Perhaps it is possible that the reunion of the Primarch with the Imperium is a mixture of elements of all. Perhaps his name is even unimportant, as the account of the first Legion during the Rangdan Xenocides, far, far prior to Alphaeus' emergence, show the 20th were invoking this name as a title or pseudonym, a device to hide identity, and present nothing but uniformity and unity. All that can be certain is that he, his Legion, and perhaps the Emperor himself, wished none to know the truth. When a 20th Primarch did emerge onto the battlefields of the Great Crusade, he did so seemingly out of nowhere, and at the head of a now fully revealed Legion, sporting their new Cognomen, the Alpha Legion. Even their name is a perverse jest, as despite their existence as the final numerical Astartes Legion, the meaning of their designate is first or beginning. In its early heraldry, the Alpha Legion would combine the Alpha Dlyph from the long-dead Hellenic script with its opposite, the Omega, creating the Eternus symbol, replete with implied meanings of continuity, union, and indestructibility. As the years of the Crusade wore on, the Alpha Legion elements were more commonly observed to bear the imagery of the Hydra, an ancient Hellenic serpent of Terran myth, fabled for growing more heads as each one is cut off. Just as the circumstances surrounding the discovery of its Primarch are mysterious, so too are the conditions of just how the Alpha Legion achieved combat strength. The logistical corpus was stunned to find a fully equipped Legion of tens of thousands of Astartes, and hundreds of Starships appearing as if from nowhere. Despite rigorous, if hushed investigations, none within the corpus were able to confirm how this discrepancy had occurred. What they discovered instead was perhaps more frightening, that they were unable to confirm even the most basic details of the 20th Legion. Where their initial and current recruitment spheres were located was utterly unknown. Their livery was impossible to confirm, and no one had even the slightest idea what its current operating strength was. Even its name was under doubt, as alongside the Alpha Legion, the 20th referred to themselves by over a hundred separate designates, including the Unbroken Chain and the Harrowing, to name but a couple. This almost psychotic dedication to occlusion was a hallmark of the Legion from the top down, as even individual Astartes in the field continued to refer to themselves as Alphaeus, an affectation that, combined with the degrees to which the Alpha Legion Astartes physically resembled each other, was frustrating at best, and infuriating at worst to those Imperial forces they served alongside. The 20th never stated their reasons for doing this, and would simply respond cryptically that individuality was of no concern, that each Astartes was simply one of many. Whatever the reason, it was but one of the many tools the Legion employed to hide its true numbers, and with great success, such obvious attitudes towards deception were known to have been at least tolerated by the Emperor, and later the Warmaster Horace Lupercal. For while the Legion was often maddening to serve alongside, their effectiveness was obvious. The Alpha Legion developed a reputation unmatched amongst the Legion as Astartes for the use of surveillance, subversion, and sabotage in its tactical preparation. While the 19th Legion Ravenguard was noted to possess similar skills, the 20th stood in stark contrast to their brothers. The sons of the Ravenlord employed such methods for the sake of efficiency and the limitation of collateral damage and civilian casualties. The Alpha Legion, conversely, appeared to revel in the confusion and panic they sowed. As more and more of their military infrastructure failed, as confusion and fear spread through them, the enemy would reach a sort of fever pitch of terror, and it was at this zenith the coils of the Alpha Legion would fully unfurl. Some spoke of this final attack, referred to by the 20th as the Harrowing, as being more akin to base murder than war. Always striking from a position of overwhelming superiority, the victory for the Legion was assured, just as catastrophe was for the enemy. No quarter, no mercy, no respite was given, only annihilation. Alfarius and his sons had a short history, at least operating in the open and under their true names. But their record of victories was enviable, and proportional to their fellow legions, and considering the time periods each operated in, the highest conquest tallies of all the Legion as a starties. However, their methods won them no friends. Many of their brothers saw the last Primarch's methods of war-making as needlessly cruel and complex. The sires of the 13th Legion Ultramarines and 14th Legion Deathguard, Rebut Gulliman and Mortarion, openly decried Alfarius on numerous occasions in the aftermath of Eleanor, for what they saw as pointless wastes of time and imperial resources in campaigns where more direct strategies would have served just as effectively. The 15th Legion Thousand Sons attempted wherever possible to shun the 20th, although no direct reason for this has ever come to light. Rogaldorn, the taciturn Primarch of the 7th Legion Imperial Fists, was open about his distaste for his Serpentine brother, calling him an honourless assassin not fit to bear the Emperor's mark. The acrimony was such that the two almost came to blows after the defeat of the world prince, where Doran's rebukes to Alfarius and his senior commanders would see the two cease contact until the terrible events of the Solar War. Even the haunted Conrad Curse, Dark Lord of the 8th Legion Night Lords, accused the Legion of hiding its true sins behind a veil of lies. This all being said, while the last Primarch counted no true friends amongst his brothers, there were those who could at least appreciate his efficacy. The Alpha Legion successfully campaigned numerous times alongside the first Legion Dark Angels and 10th Legion Ironhands, with the Primarch of the latter, Ferris Manus, bluntly stating that even though they were impossible to pin down, the 20th completed their assigned roles with an admirable attention to detail. As Warmaster, Horace Lupercow was ever eager to employ the 20th, seeing them as a truly unique weapon in the arsenal of his new role, increasingly to give the Alpha Legion free reign to operate independently, which would, in fact, seem to coincide with the rapid expansion of numbers within the Legion. While it is, as with all things regarding the 20th, impossible to judge their exact disposition, a large numerical proliferation can be inferred from their sudden appearance at the head of or representing the cores of numerous post-Ulanor expeditionary fleets and rogue trader militant flotillas. Accounts from these fleets speak prosaically of a growing darkness within the Legion's soul. For as years passed and the criticisms of their fellows rang louder, the 20th appeared to take campaigns for the challenge they offered more than anything else and were often observed to bring an enemy civilization to ash and ruin. Any simple change in leadership would have affected an Imperial compliance just as easily. If this was due to martial pride, the snubbing they received from their fellows or some darker pathological flaw inherent to the Legion's gene seed, we shall never know. We can merely decry that we did not see the Legion for what they were sooner, a formless, coiling thing that was ultimately impossible to trust, control, or track, and one who would sink their poisoned fangs into hundreds upon hundreds of loyal systems at the behest of their dark master. Until such a time, as I may elucidate further, Ave Imperator, Gloria, and Excelsis Terra. You can keep up to date with Channel News, if you follow me on Twitter, at ButstuffKaiju. Nope, not changing that name any time soon. And new this month, if you'd like to support the channel with some merchandise, my very first t-shirts are up for sale on teespring.com. Join the channel on Discord as well, a link to all of this will be in the description below.