 We each of us have our parts to play. In the grand stage, the universe has laid before us. For some, the roles come easy, as natural as breathing. For others, they never truly find their marks, stumbling through life's dramas with a disconnection eating away at their souls. Yet for others, the position is one born of a silent revelation, internalized, realized, and played for private amusement or personal vindication. In doing so, however self-aware one may feel, there yet lies a danger in becoming that which you play. As the character, so ardently promulgated before the masses, becomes a skin so comfortable, so form-fitting, that you begin to forget the delineation between yourself and it. If one may venture, it is perhaps an even greater danger in this universe of ours, for if there is one thing to be deen from staring too long and too deeply into its churning tumult, it's that it is seemingly wedded to the drama that narrative bestows. Stories matter. The players within them exude an almost palpable heft upon the currents of history. Should you act the player too long? Well, perhaps the dramaturge with his pen beyond the veil takes notice. The subjects of this record are quixotic to say the least, apparently unchanging yet mercurial all the same, living contradictions set in place to end mysterious pasts occluded characters misunderstood and yet are so fundamental to the course of our history that we simply must do all that we may to comprehend them. Know then, that this is a record of the route, the wolves of rust that stalk the stars, the sixth legion, Vilca Fenrica. The sixth were ever apart as a legion, even in their days of origin, upon terra during the darkest nights of the unification wars. Their founding occurred under veils of secrecy stringent even by the standards of the proto legion as a startys, alongside the 18th legion, later known as the salamanders, and the 20th, later the alpha legion. They formed these three, the so-called tree foil, a triad of legions selected by the emperor for a purpose only he could fathom. Established largely in separation from their fellows, they were generally supposed by those who were even aware of this curious sequestroment, to be being tailored to fulfill specific roles or functions. Although in those earliest of days, it was difficult to establish what these ends could possibly be. Bear in mind, the idea that the emperor meant to retake not only terra and the home system, but the galaxy was not a widely known idea. If the legions of the tree foil ever actually grew into these roles, or if they far outgrew the emperor's secret remits, we will simply never know. The secrets of their foundation died with those the master of mankind had brought into his confidence, rendering him, upon his golden throne, the only being left who could ever have known. What this wrought in practice was a gulf between those legions of the tree foil and those who were not, especially regarding the intake of their initial neophytes. Secrecy begat rumor, as it so often does, and around the tree foil were rumors dark indeed. For the nascent sixth legion, the sheer divergence in location of origin and genotype drew the eyes of those who could see such patterns. The one common thread was that this legion drew deep from the wells of the most barbariously primitive and chronically hyperviolent cultures that yet remained extant upon terra. The tribes, gangs and cultures, all of whom had pledged to the banner of the emperor, had been rendered nominally compliant. However, there remained a significant problem for the extension of the Pax Imperialis to these peoples. Neighboring polities habitually petitioned the master of mankind, that their borders were frequently raided, their infrastructures sacked, and their populations carried off as slaves by barbarian reavers. That the law of the lands pledged to unity must be extended to the protection of all its subjects from these throwbacks to darker ages. Through these tribes, the genitors of the emperor went like a sword, scooping up vast quantities of youths with or without the consent of the tribes themselves. Even this apparently indiscriminate induction held, occluded, an individual by individual system. Aspirants were selected for personal attributes rather than any broader genetic suitability. What this meant, ultimately, is that the Sixth Legion retained absolutely no cultural imprint. They were orphans, drawn from across the globe. They shared none of the social lineage retained by other legions, such as the 10th or 15th. In certain capacities, this deliberately scattershot intake held a lot in common with what was conducted by the 13th Legion, themselves becoming known as the war-born for their habit of recruiting from itinerant refugees of defeated anti-unity regimes. However, quite unlike the 13th, the gene seed of the 6th was utterly unique. Evidence for this is more a result of, well, lack of evidence. As with a lot of treatises upon the foundation of the Legion as Astartes, one is forced to discern truth from its noticeable absence. In this case, early gene seed difficulties can be established from their most telling indicator, not redacted lab reports, but growth. The Sixth Legion's development through the separate phases of Astartes' Legion expansion was far slower than their peers. Even the 20th Legion, which was nominally slower, is known to have been deliberately held at the Alpha induction phase of 1,000 Legionnaires. There is no indication that the Sixth had any artificial stays placed upon their growth, nor even that these were the result of combat losses. The Sixth, as well as the rest of the Treefoil legions, were restricted from frontline combat duties, with battle reports being granted to other, larger, and far stabler legions. This was not simply true for the Unification Wars. The hold on their operational status lasted well into the Solar Reclamation. The conclusion here is a simple one. The Legion possessed far higher than average rates of catastrophic implant rejection. As has been seen in the histories of other legions, this would lead to a sort of negative feedback loop. Legions that distinguished themselves in combat were granted primacy of recruitment intake priorities, which served to make them larger, which served to allow them to participate in larger engagements across more fronts, and so on and so forth. The Seventh, Thirteenth, and Sixteenth legions, for example, had all taken part in the First Pacification of Luna, and in doing so earned the right to utilize that satellite's genetic laboratories in the process. Such boons were denied to the Treefoil legions, left to continue their expansions in deliberate obscurity. This naturally created distance between them and their brethren, but, quixotically, their isolation spared them from the wrath of the first series of Estartic genetic crises, the first of which would almost destroy the Third Legion, laterally the Emperor's Children, and the remainder would severely hamper the development of the legions, the Fifth Star Hunters, and Ninth Blood Angels. In this obscurity, the Sixth Legion would remain until a good decade after the completion of the Reclamation and the first of the extra-solar expeditionary fleets. Of what was conducted in those ten years, be it training, expansion, or military operations unreported, no record remains, not even with the Legion themselves. For all intents and purposes, the Sixth had only been a line item on a ledger, its existence a matter of administrative surety, but nothing more. That would change during the compliance of 1.222, being the 222nd world brought into the Imperium by the hand of the first expeditionary fleet, that of the Emperor himself. Seconded from this fleet was dispatched to the full strength of the Sixth Legion Estartes, even then a mere 3,500 warriors. The world, selected for this Legion, was a technologically advanced, socially stable, and highly industrialized nation world that had weathered the long millennia of the Age of Strife for the Plom, governed by a militarized plutocracy predicated around stable but exponential economic development. Profit motivated to their literal end, the idea of surrendering sovereignty, even economic if not political, to this Emperor of Terra had appalled them, leading to initial Imperial overtures being rejected quite violently. theirs was not a deviancy of anything malignant, nor were they a Xenos race squatting within the domain's mankind was rightfully owed. This was a defiance born of arrogance, tragically common, and as per the Emperor's writ, one that brooked no mercy. For the unfortunate of the planet, theirs was an ill luck to be the testbed for a Legion yet unblooded. The Emperor delegated to the Sixth all operational authority. For this was a test, quite surely, to allow the Legion's first master, Enoch Rathvin, to execute a stunningly rapid multi-vector planetfall upon Masanor Core, the largest vectorum city the world possessed. The drop pods and aircraft of the Legion fell upon the metropolis amidst an entirely indiscriminate orbital bombardment, where other legions would have selected military targets, the Sixth did not care, blanketing marshal and civilian targets alike, with carpets of munitions and torrents of lance fire. Neither indeed was a tactical reserve held. Rathvin landed the Legion's entire strength in just over an hour-terrain standard. Observers aboard the first expeditionary fleet were quick to point out the nominal similarities between this approach and the Speartip Maneuver, favored by the Primarch of the 16th Legion, Horace Lupacow. At that point the only Primarch known to have survived the brood's scattering. Although many others just as readily pointed out that this was not a development upon that tactical model, but a devolvement for reasons that would soon become abundantly clear. Typically the 16th Legion Lunawolves Speartip Tactics selected a single critical point of an enemy, and then assaulted this point with overwhelming force, the reasoning being to utilize the stunning power of the Astartes to bludgeon a foe into stunned submission, severing command and control with one swift strike. It is brutal, and it is bloody, but it is ultimately controlled. Known to overall lead to much less bloodshed, less collateral damage, and less time spent engaging an enemy across multiple fronts. If the 6th Legion had been seeking to emulate their fellows amongst the Lunawolves, they missed one critical aspect. Control. Like a fire, the Legion engulfed the city, spreading out from their drop sites with seemingly reckless abandon. Ident tags noted that the infantry echelons of the 6th rapidly outpaced their own armoured support, diving headlong into the areas of the Factorum City, of which they had little to no intelligence. They paused for nothing, claiming no strategic locales, not even reinforcing or fortifying their initial insertion points. It was not as if this was exactly unsuccessful. The defenders, as if caught by a rampaging circular tidal wave expanding ever outwards, were utterly overwhelmed. Anything that infantry could not overcome was simply bypassed. Bunkers and chokepoints circumnavigated and ignored, left for the armour to clean up in the wake of this ceramite-clad onslaught. What resistance there was being mounted was being done so by a mostly conscript army, poorly trained and minimally equipped, unprepared to fight a major war against even baseline humans, let alone Astartes. Many broke the minute they were engaged. Hastily formed firing lines or barricades demolished in an instant by charging marines, turning almost every encounter into a blood-soaked rout, as a fleeing militia mingled with terrified civilians trying to escape the Legion, and all were cut down in the face of its fury. Ordinarily, if faced with such a situation of clear military superiority, many legions would consolidate their gains, relinquishing forward pressure on a clearly inferior and broken foe, and sparing collateral damage to the infrastructure and civilian population, all of whom were human, all of whom were intended to be reintegrated into the glorious new Imperium of Mankind. Another Legion may have done this. Sixth, faced with a foe soaked in their own blood, only seemed spurred on by the violence, turning the assault into nothing short of a massacre that verged on outright genocide. When Enoch Rathvin did eventually accept the by then numerous and desperate pleas for surrender, Messanochor was an abattoir, depopulated by almost 80% of its pre-contact population. The global surrender followed swiftly, with the remaining economic combines of the planet not wishing to undergo the same slaughter, bringing one 222 into a swift compliance with Imperial standard. Many stratagos within the Principia Imperial, the first expeditionary fleet, alleged that Rathvin had entirely lost command control of his Legion, with his forces on the ground during the slaughter seemingly running amok. And clarification was demanded for the dubbed severe inconsistencies with reports rendered from the Legion to the Divisio Militaris. The Sixth provided none and did not even deign to respond to the requests for these clarifications. All that could be established was that a significant window of time existed between when the first surrender message was logged and when the guns of the Sixth Legion stopped firing. Whatever the suspicions of their conduct, the Sixth Legion appeared to have passed the Emperor's test sufficiently enough for the Master of Mankind to grant them their own fleet. Expeditionary 115, nominally under the purview of the first, but as befitting an Astartes Legion in full possession of operational discretion. Under this flag, the Legion would spend the next dozen or so years of its existence. Its status finally raised to frontline combat efficacy. The numbers steadily grew over this period, expanding from the 3,500 present at 1,222, to just under 5,000 by the Battle of Hintal, and 7,500 as they began the Rel-Vos landing incursions. This, of course, still made them one of the smallest Astartes legions in service, with the Lunar Wolves and First Legion Dark Angels having three and four times the amount of Astartes, respectively. Consequently, the Sixth would typically serve as auxiliary support for other legions, engaging in its own operations only when suitability allowed or when significant amounts of Exertus Imperialis guardsmen regiments were at their disposal. In this latter capacity, they began to develop a dark reputation. While other legions developed martial traditions that became reflected in their armorial colors and designs, the Sixth utilized little beyond the bluntly effective squad markings as laid out by the Principia Bellicosa, save for their willingness to display the twin blade of flame insignia, the Sanghauta, when serving alongside baseline human formations. This symbol typically utilized by discipline masters and political officers every Exertus Regiment possessed was one whose meaning was clear. The Astartes held within their hands the power of your life and death, little human. It was one that the Sixth were disturbingly eager to utilize, seemingly allowing any member of the Legion the right to summarily execute any guardsmen they deemed to be failing in comportment of their duty or indeed any who appear to show an insufficiency of martial character. Word of this was quick to spread and the announcement that a regiment would be serving alongside the Sixth Legion was greeted now with dread and fear as opposed to delight and resolve. At the Legion cared they gave no indication, reacting no more to their growing infamy in the eyes of the common guardsmen alongside the Fourth Legion Corpse Grinders and 10th Legion Stormwalkers with as much indifference as they reacted to anything. Their brutality was becoming evident in their choice of operations with Rathvin steering his Legion towards the most dangerous and bloody of all available fronts. Hunter Killer and suppression operations were readily volunteered for fitting the pattern established at 1.222 a savage and furious initial assault that caused as much damage and loss of life to force a foe into an immediate surrender. They had an undeniably high success rate in this field and the Astartes legions that employed them as auxiliaries had no poor words to say about their competence, only reservations about their conduct. The Legion was unsurprisingly developing a very mixed reputation. Their track record spoke for itself and 2.222 did the seemingly genuine fear that the common soldier held for them. The detractors spoke of them as being little better than beasts and butchers, a dog to unleash upon the foe and one who could be barely forced back into its collar when needed. It's not as if there weren't others within the vaunted legions whose reputations were worse. Many shunned the terror tactics of the 8th Legion Nightlords, disparaged the 4th Legion's wanton wastes of its own and other regiments' manpower and worried about the berserker fury exhibited by the 12th Legion warhounds. But while many have drawn comparators to the latter Legion in particular, the reality was far from the truth. The 12th, later the world eaters of Angron, were at this time in the Crusade a Legion that, while known for falling to bloodthirsty acts of violence like almost no other, were nevertheless retaining a martial character, Meritocritas, tempering their bloodthirst with discipline and never backing down from a foe that had presented itself. The 6th, however, was accused by some of being little more than a rabble held barely in check and only then through the brutality of its own officer cadre rather than any real respect for the chain of command. Violence within the Legion's ranks was very common and at a level that led to frequent deaths. The 6th was notable for being one of the few legions to ever need the presence of dedicated disciplinary officers and at a percentage to serving Astartes that vastly eclipsed that of their fellows. The consul, Obsequiari, was unique rank in the Legion at this point in history and one charged with simply beating the Astartes of it into submission if they refused to comply with orders. Summary executions for disobedience were almost unheard of amongst other legions. With the 6th, it was an occurrence every single campaign. Finally, and most cuttingly, there existed the undeniable truth of the Legion observable in every single battle they fought. They were never more eager, never more bloodthirsty or more brutal than when the foe had already been broken. Above all things, they reveled in letting the blood of those already helpless. From this was born the Legion's first informal and honestly quite insulting cognamen, the Rout. Both a collective noun for a group of carrion canids on Strife Irretera and an obvious verb for an uncontrolled terrified retreat, it fit the Legion all too well. Just like the dogs it conjured images of, to many the 6th seemed only brave when the nearly dead enemy had turned their backs. At least the warhounds faced their foes head on, the detractors said. At least they possessed a gladiatorial honour. A cruel jade of history, given the paths the two legions would ultimately take but for the 6th, their path was already on the cusp of diverging. Due to the vagaries of myth, propaganda and the legions infuriating reliance on Saga over sound record keeping, very little about the discovery of Leeman Russ, Primarch's son of the Emperor, can be independently verified. What we do know is that he was the second son of the Master of Mankind to appear openly at his side, shortly before the discovery of Ferris Manus on Medusa several years later. Of course, this order is in and of itself upset by possible revelations about Horus's discovery or the indeed presence of alfarious Omegon upon Terra since the Unification Wars. Regardless, Russ had been found upon the death world of Fenris, which, like Manus's Medusa, was a common element among dark age of technology star charts to which the Imperium had access. As with Manus and Horus, there existed suspicions amongst chroniclers of all eras that the relatively common knowledge of Cthonia, Fenris and Medusa, as well as their proximity to stable warp corridors, meant that the Emperor had known full well where several of his sons had been relegated to and, should he have wished, could have made all speed for one or all of them, refraining from doing so only to allow the worlds to shape those sons of his that they were now home to. It cannot be said with any certainty whether this is true. For the master of mankind is ever an inscrutable god, nor indeed if any informal imperial observations had been conducted of Fenris prior to its contact. By one's approximation, the records of the rogue traders of the era would have to be examined in full to conclude this, or even the forward elements of the 5th Legion's far roving fleets, but regardless, it is verifiable that Fenris was known, and Fenris was feared. One such lateral assessment of the world was conducted by Lord Ephraeta Hood in his Principia Cartagraphica Dominus Imperia for presentation to the wider imperial court. In its preface, Hood noted that the world should not be, being in possession of an orbit so ludicrously elliptical, that the presence of life upon its surface should not have passed the evolution of anything other than the most basic of lifeforms. While discourse upon this most intensely curious of planets must simply wait for a record in and of itself, let it be said here that Fenris was a world that earned through its predatory megafauna and stunning geological violence the title of Death World with absolute surety. On this world did the infant Primarch make planetfall, and against all odds survived, grew, and thrived, outlasting what must have been a violent infancy indeed to rise amongst the primal warrior culture of the planet's human population, eventually becoming the battle king of the Russe tribe. Despite the total lack of advanced technology aboard the planet, Leeman of the Russe had apparently little to no trouble adjusting to life at the emperor's side. The scale, scope, and complexity of the Imperium appeared to bother him not. The Wolf King was noted to have simply accepted this broadening of his world as the new way of things. There is little in either Imperial record or Fenrisian saga to indicate that Russe's time at his father's or brother Horus's sides were anything other than brief. In short order, the Wolf King had departed such Imperial company to rendezvous with his legion at the head of several hundred Fenris-born Astartes, who, despite their often advanced ages, had somehow survived Astartes ascension procedures. The sagas speak of many more who had died in the attempt, willingly rendering themselves to the surprised genitors of the emperor for the process. Apparently out of little more than ironclad loyalty for the Yarl of Yarls, Russe himself, many had died within the attempt, although at a far lower rate than expected. Their biologians posited that this was the result of two factors hitherto unseen in 6th Legion Astartes implantation protocols. The first of these was, of course, the stabilization effect that Russe's own genetic material was having upon the rancorous 6th Legion Geno stock. To the extent it appeared to mitigate all the previously documented issues and incompatibilities. The second was the Fenrisians themselves, who by all measurable standards were some of the hardiest baseline, apparently non-mutated humans the Imperium had ever encountered. Indeed, examination of their genetic sequencing revealed several inconsistencies and curiosities that, when flagged by the gene rights, were immediately placed under extreme security clearances by agents from within the Imperial household itself. These men were to become the first of Russe's Varigir, sometimes rendered in either chronicles as Varangii or the literal translation of Wolfgard. It was a common thing for Primarchs to select their nearest and most trusted warriors or confidants upon reunification with the emperor to serve in such a role. It is likely that their father encouraged such a thing, where possible, as it would ease the culture shock of introducing a Primarch into a Legion, not least as well the world that was to become its new home. For Russe, the Varigir were a somewhat different take upon this. For the most part, this similar instance in other legions had been a mutual arrangement, a Legion of mostly Terran-born Astartes seeking to learn all they could of their new gene sire and his world, and that world's first Astartes, being eager to teach, educate and mould the Legion they now served within. The Varigir, well, they were intended to be the fist of Russe. He valued them more than he ever would Astartes-born simply of his genetic line. These Terrans had never fought beside him, nor spilled blood in his name, nor shared a hearth with him. He had read the entirety of their service history and it mattered not one iota. What were words upon paper, upon a data-slace, to a man of action and feats? The Sixth had neither proven themselves nor earned the Wolf King's respect, and were, by reputation, anyway, a very ill-tempered lot. If they were only to care for the commands of those who beat them into submission, well, the Wolf King would do so, and had kindred by his side to accomplish such a task. The reunion of Primarch and Legion was a tense, but initially relatively smooth affair. Commander Rathven surrendered the command to Russe without challenge. Not exactly willingly, it must be said, as the master of the Legion was a proud man, and clearly not expecting to relinquish his position so early in the Legion's operational history. Nevertheless, the Legion was one that respected nothing's safe personal strength, and Russe was, of course, a being that surpassed all of his sons in that respect by orders of magnitude. It did, of course, help matters that the barbarian aspect of their new liege was familiar to the Astartes of the Sixth, given their own backgrounds, and Russe's undeniable personal charisma helped ease the transition. The Varragir were sown throughout the Legion's various companies, proving to be ultimately the locus for the discontent the Sixth felt for this new order. While all would happily submit to any single combat challenge that the rest of Terrans would now wish to issue, Russe aspired the acrimony as it built. Let it never be said that the Wolf King was not canny, for he immediately selected a combat theater for his Legion to embark towards, that they may blood themselves together as one against an enemy worthy of them. Dubbing his new Legion the wolves that stalk the stars in honor of his warrior kinband of old, the Wolves of Fenris. Russe's target for this newly wrought pack was selected by both himself and Horus, the brothers seeing the absolute value in such a test of the Sixth Legion's metal. It was known, thanks to reports from forward operating scouts of the Crusade, as the Wheel of Fire. A sector in a rapidly expanding eastern galactic front, it was a tumultuous volume indeed, wracked by storm systems both immaterial and gaseous, and packed with star systems whose transit paths were considerably erratic due to local gravitational anomalies. Consequently, it was a haven for the worst the galaxy could master, including well over a dozen Xenos infested worlds and systems, many of these held by the wicked green skins, as well as hundreds of drifting space hulks and pirate occupied planetoids and void stations. Worlds suitable for human habitation were low. This was not to be a colonial drive, but a purgation operation. Necessary to allow for forward Crusade drives to be made without the worry of alien reavers plunging out of the sector with supply lines and sparsely defended border worlds. The campaign's initial cost estimates, both in material and human lives, were painful. To Russ, and indeed Horus, it represented an impeccable opportunity. The Sixth Legion fleet made full wake for the cluster, reinforced by new strike cruisers fresh from the shipyards of Mars and the Jovian range, but shorn of any exertus imperialis were Mechanicum Tagmata auxiliaries by explicit order of Russ himself. This would be for the wolves to win alone, with neary ethral, as Russ called them, or machine to aid them. The initial plan of attack resolved itself into a series of punishingly brutal assaults on the volumes outlying worlds. The Wolf King saw no reason to muster his forces to form some grand front, reasoning that the Greenskins would only relish the chance to gather for a set piece battle that they had recorded time and time again as explicitly desiring. The maneuvers mirrored the way war was, as beloved by the Fenrisians. Raids conducted from storm-tossed longships that would bloody the foe as quickly as possible, before withdrawing into the violent seas. In practical terms, it would serve the Sixth Legion incredibly well in the early days of the campaign. True to Russ's estimate, the Greenskins were scattered, terrified, and hampered by the sudden attacks of the human invaders, mitigating their extensive numerical advantage, and providing the Legion with even more targets to isolate and annihilate. As dozens of smaller hunter-killer flotillas of wolves hunted to and fro across the volume, the largest flotilla, led by Russ personally, powered towards what Intelligence Analyticae had determined to be the central hub of the Greenskins, likely housing its War Boss, a tangled conglomerate of a dozen space-hulks that formed a ram-shackle artificial planetoid, complete with its own shipyards. The battle was not the clinical spear-tip assault of the Legion of Horus, it was a slaughter. A wholesale ransacking of a Xenos holdfast that struck as a lightning bolt and behaved as an apex predator amongst livestock. The campaign would last five years, Terran Standard, and never once did Russ relinquish his tempo. The furious pace of attacks, the savagery of the combat, the sheer speed the Legion moved from engagement to engagement never abated. It is likely that it could never have been accomplished by any other than the Legion as a start is, and this clearly was Russ' intention, to engage in an extermination that only he, only his Legion could manage, a war without quarter to define them anew. It came with a punishingly high cost. Approximately 33% of the Legion fell to death in the Wheel of Fire, including Enoch Rathvin, the former Legion Master, dying while leading a suicidal charge on Zayat. It was, however, estimated that for each of startes that had perished, perhaps as many as a thousand greenskins had been slaughtered, and total victory was, of course, achieved. The Wheel of Fire was left a graveyard, not a single Xenos alive within its volume. The sixth Legion had truly been reforged, just as its Primarch had intended. Subsequent to the Legion's blooding, Russ ordered a withdrawal in full to Fenris. The Wheel of Fire had not only been marked by combat, but a cultural shift too. The Varigir of Russ and the Wolf King himself had used their time well, instilling within their Terran-born brethren the language, cultural moors, and spiritual taxonomy of the death world of their Yarl. It was not, per se, a challenging shift, nor one even far removed from what culture that remained amongst the Terrans of the Legion. All had been raised from a diverse series of barbarian tribes, indeed many within Terras frigid northern and southern wastes, and while rich in certain aspects, Fenrisian culture has ever been... blood. A facet of being born on a world that demanded more than any humans could possibly give. Making it a technically easy but no doubt absolutely brutal new life to adopt too. The mere 15,000 estartes that the Legion retained after the conclusion of the Wheel of Fire campaign would be the bed from which Russ now began an aggressive expansion drive. Central to this was a great citadel constructed on Fenris during the Legion's time on campaign. The Fang, fortress of the Sixth Legion, and one of the mightiest and most advanced constructions a great crusade had yet attempted at this point in history. Fully utilizing his position within the Imperium, Russ had demanded a fortress that would allow his Legion to be fully self-sufficient, needing no aid from Terra or Sol. This extended to not only arms and armaments, as the citadel was believed to possess within it an extensive network of Mechanicum subforges, but also gene stocks. Russ desired the sum total of his Legion hereafter to be raised from Fenris alone, and for the world to have the capability of providing for this. These demands, strictly speaking, were extortionate, a massive commitment of resources at a time the Imperium was still technically fledgling, but the Emperor ceded with no argument. Quite to the contrary, the Master of Mankind provided his full support to the project, a clear indication of his approval of Russ' self-sufficiency aims. In this, the Fang was a first. It was not until the great crusade's 2nd century that similar edifices were raised on the homeworlds of other legions, at which point the sheer scale of the Imperium had rendered them an absolute necessity. The technology, logistics, all were in place for the Legion's expansion as soon as it arrived. All it needed now were candidates, and the planet would yield a bountiful harvest indeed. The sheer lethality of Fenris bred those naturally suited for combat. If a Fenrisian could not navigate the planets constantly shifting land masses or ice fields, could not aid their tribe in defending against one of its many predatory megafauna, or lend their axe to a blood raid on the holds of their enemies, they would simply perish and early. This life, brief, violent, and taxing was considered by Russ the ideal crucible for Legion recruits. There would be no civilizing of these tribes, no grand imperial expedition of uplifting, no mechanicom-geo-former machines set to stabilizing the planet's insane tectonics. The deathworld would remain precisely as it was, while the better the Primarch said for the breeding of the kind of men that the galaxy needed. As to the question of population base, around this rumors have swirled and still do so 10,000 years later. Many Administratum officials have raised the sheer impossibility of a world as unremittingly deadly as Fenris, even permitting a continued population of a size large enough to perpetuate itself, let alone render enough young men to an Astartes Legion for ascension protocols. There was never an official census taken, there never has been. The world has ever and always been under the sole purview of the Sixth Legion, and they have never suffered outsiders kindly. Naturally, such obfuscation will breed suspicion. Many an allegation of forced population transplant has been alleged, especially in contemporary records. Rogue Trader and Divisio Militaris, chronicles that speak of feral worlds across the imperial space, subjected to forced transportation. Entire planets depopulated, to have their populations brought to Fenris against their will, crudely psychoconditioned in transit, and then simply let loose to fend for themselves. As we have never understood the truest extent of Fenris' population, we have no way of confirming this. But such acts, while monstrous, were perfectly within the ability and authority of a Primarch to commit, especially one such as Russ, whose personal convictions surrounding how his new Legion should be forged were ironclad to say the least. That being said, it is true that the presence of the Primarch had radically stabilized the previously extant gene seed issues that the Sixth Legion had faced, specifically thanks to the introduction of a unique quirk of their genome lineage, known forever after in Imperial Canon as the Canis Helix. All the Stardes legions have possessed genetic deviations from what is considered the baseline for their breed, and all of these are usually specifically born of the Primarchs. This in some legions was merely cosmetic. The skin of the Nineteenth Legion raven guard was typically incredibly pale white, while their hair blackened. In others, it was more radical, such as the alleged sanguinary thirst of the Ninth Legion blood angels. With the Sixth Legion, the deviation was noted as taking a form of a unique genetic code readily identifiable to Imperial genitors, earning the name Canis Helix. It offers the Astardes of the Sixth Legion vastly enhanced sensory perception beyond even Astardes' norm, as well as elevated reaction times. Outwardly, it physically presents, in the lengthening of the canine teeth, something that continues during the Astardes' lifespan, as well as an overall more animalistic appearance. Psychologically, genitors have alleged that it is also the source of the Legion's unnaturally fierce aggression, as even the mentally maimed standards of the Astardes, the violence of the Sixth, was noteworthy. Pointing to the aforementioned enhanced senses as potentially overloading the stimulus centers of the brain at the height of combat, causing a frenzied berserk state. It is likely for this reason that the Legion remained so worryingly uncontrollable during its earlier years. The Canis Helix has a notably exponential curve to its effects as in Astardes' ages, the lengthening of the fangs and hair accompanied by a sharp rise in total psychotic breaks. Russ' presence balanced this, as did his overall tempering of the Legion's command authority. Shackling the character of the Legion to the discipline of Fenrisian culture and his own charisma and his own genetic base, the Primarch solved these issues of the gene seed almost overnight, with one exception. Instances of full-blown genetic crises, though rare, yet persisted and remained ill-understood, owing to the tendency of the Legion to simply hide those afflicted from the gaze of outsiders. Even members of their own serf-thrall caste. The so-called Curse of the Wolfen occurred when a Legionary's Canis Helix simply went into grand mal-overdrive, stimulating its effects to an inordinate degree. Victims would mutate rapidly, their bodies turning them into horrific Lupine monstrosities devoid of reason. In this way, paradoxically, the fate of these men mirrors that of the genetic crises suffered by the 15th Legion's 1,000 sons with their flesh change, although admittedly at far lower rates. It is likely because of this rate of instance, coupled with the 6th Legion's hard-maintained insularity, that it was rarer for word of this to reach outside ears even when compared to the knowledge of the flesh change. But the fact remains that this curious bit of symmetry between two eternal rivals would only bear more relevance later in history. The expansion that Russ drove his Legion onward through was rapid and quite successful. Fenrisian candidates were many and hardy, and the Legion glutted itself upon the youth of its new home with abandon. It was a good thing, too, for the Imperium was solely pressed for Astartes, and in need of the services of the wolves who stalk the stars. Despite the finding of new Primarchs, including Ferris Manus, Fulgrim, and most recently, Rogel Dorn, the expanding volume of Imperial space had opened up numerous fronts in need of Astartes' aid. Curiously, this period of the Legion's history is one that goes more unremarked than any other. One supposes that given the lurid origins and tragic calamities that marked the beginning and end of their time in the Great Crusade, respectively, the relative normality of the Middlegears may seem like less engaging material. It is, nevertheless, marked by a string of highly commendable victories, proving to all concerned that Russ was no mere barbarian king, but a general of sterling quality. If unorthodox methods. Following the trend they had established in the Wheel of Fire campaign, the Legion invariably undertook pergation operations targeting Xenos species, annihilating numerous green-skinned empires, Yldori craft worlds, Ptarelae holdfasts, and Sahardwien nests. During the destruction of Nova Borrelia, the Legion's victory rendered unto the Imperium a standard template construct pattern for an ancient line of battle tank, laterally named in honour of the Primarch by the Grateful Mechanicum, to serve as the Leeman Russ armoured vehicle in the armies of the Imperium forevermore. It was during this time, too, with so much more of the Legion abroad across the stars, the wolf emblem of Russ' tribe, now emblazoned upon their thundercloud grey armour, led to the rise of the popular moniker for the Legion, the Space Wolves. As crude as it may be, it's stuck, with the common soldiery of the Imperium finding it a more fitting if, of course, reduced version of the more poetic styling of Russ himself. It should be pointed out that at no instance was this cognomant logged with the Divisio Militaris as official in any capacity. The Legion never claimed it, and never displayed any interest in doing so. At the astarties of the Legion been pressed, they would have simply named themselves the Vilca Fenrica, wolves of Fenris in their tongue, or the rout, having without much protest accepted the slur against them as their own name. Common Fenricians were known, also, to refer to the Legion as the Sky Warriors of Russ, or simply the Russ, as it is unsure if there was common agreement amongst the tribes if the Legion were of Russ or he of them. Informality is often a trait ascribed to the wolves, and in their naming conventions we have the most sterling example. They did not even care what others named them. They knew themselves, and apparently that was all that mattered. The turning point for the Legion's future came in the 860s of M-30. When, in breaching new regions in the Galactic North, the Imperium encountered what would come to be its most dire threat yet. The Rangda. Your humble servant has made much record of this terrible conflict in previous records, which I would encourage you to parse when time permits. But suffice to say that the invasion of this advanced, vicious, and seemingly unstoppable Xenophore represented an existential threat to the Imperium and the Great Crusade both. Thought exterminated in Humanity's first encounter with the species in 839 M-30, the ensuing invasion of the Emperor's realms saw the loss of entire expeditionary fleets before the Imperium could rally, committing to a decades-long conflict that saw the loss of millions of Exertus troops, whole Titan legios and Imperial night households, and the majority of several space marine legions, including most notably the first Legion Dark Angels. Dates and facts regarding this period in history are deeply contradictory at best. But it is known that the Wolves of Russ played a significant role in the latter half of the second Xenocide and as central combatants in the third. Thought occluded, it is known from what fragments remain that this final purgation was nothing less than a wholesale extermination of every trace of Rangdan genetic material from the galaxy. An exhaustive biopal grum fit for the two legions the Emperor trusted above all others to annihilate the foe in their totality. The balance of power amongst the Legionnaires Astartes shifted dramatically in the aftermath of the Xenocides. The Dark Angels had lost their numerical primacy amongst the Legionnaires, sorely diminished by the catastrophic losses inflicted upon them thanks to the Rangda. They were now eclipsed in size by the 13th Legion and the 16th. Horus, the Primarch of the latter, had been occupied pushing Crusade frontlines into the Galactic West, and emerged from this darkest chapter of Imperial history yet ascendant, a paragon of the ideals of the Great Crusade as it processed the trauma of its near obliteration. The following years were marked with public and military opinion deeply favouring him and the legions who, like the 16th, had managed to emerge from the Xenocides relatively unscathed, and were thus becoming more and more common sites across the Imperium. Iterators and propagandists were quick to promulgate such messaging, leaving the Wolves of Russ and indeed the Angels of the Lion in the Dollrooms. The heavily redacted nature of just what had taken place and what these legions had done during the final Xenocide lent them a dark air. They were destroyers and executioners. For us, the warrior king trappings he had appeared in prior to the campaign gave way in the public image to that of a blood-soaked berserker, a predator from the dark kept in check only by the Emperor's own virtues. The second century of the Great Crusade arrived with the Wolves, never ones to care for the thoughts of others, operating as they willed, dogged by either wary suspicion or outright fear. Their progress across the galaxy was fundamentally idiosyncratic. Divisio Militaris, Lord Commanders, knew well to petition their aid, but never demand it. It is well known that these space wolves obeyed only the word of Russ and Russ heeded only the word of the Emperor. This extended to the remaining Primarchs and the legions, relationships with which varied wildly. For the Dark Angels, they maintained a rivalry that could be considered friendly to hostile depending on the period of history one is referring to, with Russ and the Lion being so different in character as to occupy two elemental poles, despite the broad similarities and military roles their legions shared. From the perspective of his brothers, Russ was a distant sibling, admired and respected by some, an annoyance for others, outright loathing for at least one, but none could ever have claimed to be close to the Wolf King, not in the same form that kinship had developed between some of the kindred, such as Fulgrim and Ferris Manus. This would only deepen as more Primarchs were found, more relationships enriched and more worlds conquered. The Wolves simply did as the Emperor bade. Should this mean fighting alongside either other Astartes or Imperial or Mechanic and Forces, they would gladly do so, but in no way would this lead to a restraining of their fundamental characters or presentation. They broked no diplomacy, favouring only directness and honesty and professing to despise all else. To those unwilling to make the time to discover more of them, this brutish and barbarian Mien was all they ever saw. The animal pelts, the unkempt appearances, the tribal fetishistic tokens, the guttural impenetrable language. To the credit of the masses, the Wolves did appear for all the world to be uncivilized throwbacks to the age of strife or some older epoch still, and, much to the ranker of their Astartes cousins, delighted in the discomfort they would perennially cause. To the credit of the Wolves, they were phenomenally loyal, incredibly effective and in possession of a culture that, for all its roughness, was no less rich than that of Baal, Caliban, or McCrag. Their sagas, for all that they were never written down, only ever spoken, carried a deep tradition of storytelling and are surprisingly complex in their memetic depth and contextual allegories. Cultures need not be refined to be valuable, nor modern to be of import to the human whole. The Wolves may have been barbarians, as we consider them, but they were not dullards. They were as intelligent and keen as any Astartes legion. They were simply just very, very different. That all being said, the respect they demanded for their own culture, or at the very least the standards they set for those who desired to know more of them, they would never extend to the culture or practices of anyone else they encountered. To the order of Remembrancers, they were an object of deepest frustration, and the disdainment was entirely mutual. Russ is famed for having said that it would have been better to arm the chroniclers and record keepers of the Imperium than listen to their works, and his legion in kind developed a dire reputation amongst the order for being liars. As they would freely spin, falsehoods are aggrandized tales when pressed in a display of contempt for the concept of non-Fenrician remembrances. The second century of the Great Crusade, particularly the years in which the Remembrancer order was commonplace, sees the sixth legion mentioned little, rarely claimed infrequently extolled. Sadly, this is merely one of the reasons we have lost so much of their history. For during this time, the wolves were quite frequently utilized by the Imperial household and the Divisio Militaris for the conducting of operations that required the utmost secrecy, and it is only through scraps born of sources diverse that anything at all can be deemed. For example, through the inscriptions on base relief's inset into the Ninth Legion's fortress monastery on Baal, we know that alongside the Blood Angels, the wolves were responsible for the calling of a Stage 4 enslaver outbreak on Poseidonus Secundus, one of only three occasions in Imperial history where such an incursion has been thrown back by anything other than exterminatus. Many, many more operations like this likely occurred, and some, if it can be believed, were conducted against fellow elements of the Legionnaires Astartes. The Gehenna Scouring, perhaps better known as the Night of the Wolf, is an incident almost entirely redacted from Imperial history, and certainly one whose existence was never even close to being made publicly known. Subsequent to the planetary genocide of Gehenna by the 12th Legion World Eaters, Russ and his Legion were dispatched to communicate the Emperor's displeasure to the Eaters of Worlds and their Primarch, and Gron, of both their conduct and the 12th Sun's insistence on the implantation of the cybernetic Butcher's Nails devices into the crania of his Suns. If needs be, the wolves were to bring the Legion into lime. The implications of such an order were clear, even if their direct import was left entirely unsaid. The resulting standoff came to blows, the first time ever in recorded history that Astartes had fought Astartes, albeit with rumors abounding that this was not the first time that the wolves had done so. Angron and Russ dueled, barbarian against Butcher, and though Angron physically bested his brother, Russ's Varragir had entirely surrounded the 12th Primarch, forcing his capitulation. The wolves record that Russ had deliberately held back his full combat prowess in order to bait Angron into losing all control, but despite this, the incident nevertheless resulted in a far higher body count for the Vilca Fenrica than for the World Eaters. The Legion's detachment from the Imperium, and their role within its military macro structure, quixotically meant that they suffered little in the way of impact from any of the ructions or reforms that occurred in the final years of the Great Crusade. Political turmoil or machinations entirely passed them by. They ignored the chaplaincy edict promulgated by Lorgar of the 17th Legion. The appointment of Horace Lupercal as Warmaster drew scoffs from Russ, but no real enmity. The Librarian project was laughable to the wolves. They viewed their traditions of Fenrician Saikana, preserved in the Legion through the so-called wolf priests, as an entirely separate thing from the dabblings in what they called the sorcery and maleficarum of Magnus the Red, Sanguinius and the Khan, as those three Primarchs attempted to standardize its use. It has been pointed out by many, not least the writings of Senior Departmental Immunitorum General Ilya Ravallion, Attache II, the 5th Legion Primarch, and his white scars, that the similarities between Fenrician wolf priests and Chogorian Stormseers could have led to a common understanding between the two legions and their Primarchs. And yet the wolves and Russ rebuked the scars offer of collaboration at simply every turn. Whatever the arrogant attitude of the wolves towards imperial reforms, it nevertheless managed to protect them from the vectors of corruption that the war master sought to introduce prior to his defection. The chaplaincy edict had no chance to introduce memetic corrosion into the Legion's soul, nor indeed did the warrior lodges of the Sons of Horus model gain any ground within as close-knit a culture as that of the wolves. There is no evidence that an initiative was even attempted. The Legion's famously unshakable loyalty was almost certainly the reason that, subsequent to his elevation to war master, Horus kept them at the proverbial arms length, dealing where possible with other legions and Primarchs with whom he shared bonds of confidence. It is also certainly that when the Emperor selected Leman Russ to command the censure host that would be dispatched to Prospero to arrest Magnus the Red, that Horus saw an opportunity unrivaled in Providence to remove from the equation a potentially dire threat to his upcoming treachery. This was one of the event's greatest tragedies. The Legion's loyalty was its damnation, their self-imposed isolation was their undoing and their famously unshakable confidence, their destruction. For all the keenness of their instincts and the sterling impeccability of their service record, they had not the ken to see the strings by which they now danced. Until such a time as one can render this most dreadful tale into record of a Imperator. Gloria in Excelsis Terra. If you'd like to receive more updates about the channel and any future videos, you can contact me or follow me on Twitter at OculusImperia. Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.