 It is not for naught that trials of endurance have ever been a hallmark of human societies throughout history. Strength of fortitude is a facet of the human character that has seen the strongest of us brave, the worst that life can spitefully fling in our faces. And it is this very spirit that has seen us leave the cradle of our planetary birth to take to the stars and conquer the galaxy. The void is not a place for the weak, nor are the countless worlds we walk upon. If there is not something predatory or wicked attempting to end our lives, the very environment itself can threaten to suffocate us, poison us, or burn us from existence. Some of us adapt, change our ways, our thinking, our bodies to adapt to this. Some of us go further. Some of us just force their way through, bluntly refusing to submit to the challenges that face them, grinding the challenges or challengers to dust under their boots. Further through the resilience of their bodies, or the unbreakable fortitude of their minds, they overcome that which we cannot. They prove the indomitable nature of our species by virtue of simple acts of pure defiance. As with so many others of their ilk, the subjects of this chronicle once embodied these virtues in the highest order, only to fall in a twisted and damnable symmetry to these self-same qualities. Know then that this is a record of the once unbowed, once unbroken, and now forever bedammed. The fourteenth legion, Death Guard. Recruitment for the fourteenth legion came, as with all earliest Arty's legions, from the recently defeated strife-era polities of Terra. The fourteenth shared its founding region with that of the tenth, but was shaped by it to a much greater degree. From the proud warlords and techno-barbarian holds of old Albia, the legion inducted its first neo-fights. Situated in the northern Atlan reaches of Terra, the plateau-polity had for centuries endured as a bastion of stability in the wastelands of Terra's northern wilderness, both in terms of its political power, cultural endurance, and, perhaps most importantly, genetic constancy. Just prior to the unification wars, it had thrown off the yoke of the pan-Pacific empire of the unspeakable king Northan Doom, and the clan-wilords were ill-disposed to submitting to the rule of this upstart Lord of Lightning that called himself the Emperor. Despite committing the bulk of his thunder-warriors to the Albion campaign, the forces of unity were held at bay by the blunt but undeniably effective Albion soldiers, who took to the field in power-armored suits markedly sturdier than the Mark I armor of the thunder-warriors, and flanked by brutish and savage, steam-belching proto-dreadnoughts. As the losses mounted, and the cost of victory became clear, the Emperor halted his advances and called for a ceasefire, wishing to treat with the warlords who so steadfastly thwarted him. Known for his mercilessness, but also his political shrewdness, the Emperor met with his enemies, despite the express desires of his closest counsellors, and laid before them his grand desires for unity, and a crusade to reclaim the stars. To the surprise of all, including many of their own number, the warlords found themselves swayed by his words, and from that day became zealous supporters of the raptor and lightning banner of unity. However, as with all his newly won allies in those early days, the Emperor, in his wisdom, did not hold them with the sincerest of trust, and the selection of old Albia as a legion recruitment ground had a twofold effect, of ensuring that only the best warriors of terror would become his newer starties, but also that by reaping the cream of Albia's human crop, the Kingdom would never again be capable of rising to challenge his rule. To the nascent fourteenth came a legacy of fortitude in Violet, of soldier-scientists and honored warrior-kings. The legion quickly developed tactics based around those of the iron side-armored soldiers of their forebearers, acting as heavy infantry formations in the most hostile theaters of the homeworld. In defense, their tireless nature became near-legendary, holding ground no matter the cost, while on the offensive were known for grinding enemies into dust under waves of power-armored forms. This self-same panoply came to feature right-handed gauntlets, the color of dried blood, once the symbol of the Pan-Pacific Empire, now reappropriated as the crimson right hand of the Emperor's Justice. As the fires of the unification wars guttered out, and the flames spread outwards to the Imperium's conquest of the Solar System, the fourteenth legion became known for their signature tactic, again a relic of old Albia, for launching offensives at the fall of night, when the shift in lighting conditions confused the enemy's watch, and the encroaching darkness could hide a massive infantry advance. Such was the reputation this garnered that as nightfall approached, those regimes, cultists, and holdouts that clung to the rocks on the outer planets would often panic and surrender, rather than face the coming tide of the dusk raiders. The name stuck, and would become the legion's first official cognomen. The legion would typically honor these capitulations, for they were, like their ancestors, men of principle, but would show no mercy should any sign of decease be evinced. Similarly, such terms were only given to human populations. Degenerate mutants and Xenos creatures received no quarter, and were marked only for total annihilation, lest any trace of their presence corrupt the purity of the human race. The dusk raiders moved through the solar system at a steady but unstoppable pace. None that stood against them did so for long, and in their wake no trace of the enemy remained. This same pattern followed them as they embarked upon the crusade's extra-solar expeditions, and often the legion would be the solid, and violent core of any expeditionary fleet. They spent approximately eighty years standard in this stage of their existence, honorably and professionally executing their defined place in the emperor's great work. As other legions were reunited with their primarchs, the fourteenth remained orphaned, soon one of the few that lacked the leadership of their primogenitor. Unlike others, this was no source of bitterness or jealousy, for the dusk raiders took a quiet pride in their status as an orphan legion, knowing that their victory tallies were impressive by any crusade standard, their conduct in these victories perfectly exemplary, and all of this a product of their own self-reliance. When the reunion did occur, however, it was not to be a joyous meeting that it was for other legions, rather a dread shade of what was to come. The fourteenth primarch, scattered from the emperor's gene labs on Terra, had many decades before fallen onto the feral world of Barbarus in segmentum tempestus. An almost unspeakably harsh planet, Barbarus was ever reathed in a poisonous atmosphere that barely allowed for human habitation, and was ruled over by a class of psychor warlords who cultivated the foul talents they had in reanimation and puppeting of human and mutant corpses. The toxic environs of the planet were stratified, but the warlords imbued with their warp-drawn power, dwelling upon the highest of mountain peaks, immune from the choking fumes, while the descendants of the world's original human settlers eeked out a peasant existence in the relatively smog-free valleys, ever fearful of the wrath of the warlords or the predations of their twisted creations. It was the most powerful of these creatures who found the infant primarch upon one of Barbarus's miasma-filled battlefields, screaming and crying as he crawled through the mud and corpses and viscera. Recognizing the uniqueness of a baby that could survive in the atmosphere without mask or rebreather, the overlord of Barbarus took him as his own, naming him Mortarion, the child of death. The child was confined to one of the overlord's many keeps, but was neither permitted nor able to reside in the overlord's personal fortress, for it stood upon the planet's highest peak and beyond the limits of even Mortarion's emperor-crafted superhuman tolerance. Nevertheless, the overlord imparted upon the child all knowledge at his disposal, from stratagems to logistics to the twisted arcane Psyker secrets of Barbarus's warlords. However, the overlord soon grew tired of the child's questioning, which had begun to turn to the nature of the pitiful creatures in the valleys that were so often the prey of the overlord in his dark kin, dismissing his adopted son's inquiries with less and less patience each time. Nor the means to satisfy his curiosity and beginning to suspect his adoptive father, Mortarion broke out of his holdings, killing the guards that opposed him, and found, when he descended through the clouds, that the people of the planet below were more akin to he himself than any he had been raised alongside. Suspicious of the gaunt adolescent that had somehow come alone from the mountains, Mortarion was, as it happened, granted an opportunity to prove his worth, as the village he had encountered was attacked by mutant thralls of a rival warlord. Wielding a harvesting scythe as a deadly weapon, the primark carved through all those who stood before him, before coming face to face with the Psyker thing himself. Laughing, the warlord retreated into the clouds, believing himself to be safe. Only to have his laughter turned to terror, as the primark, enduring the toxic fumes, pursued and butchered him like a steer. Returning with the head of a warlord was an act unprecedented in the history of Barbarus, and the villagers rallied around the youth, who over the coming months imparted onto them the secrets of warmaking he had learned from his time as the overlords warred. He recruited only the most resilient of men of the villages and the valleys, creating small units to be trained by him personally. As the years went on and victory after victory was earned by Mortarion's warrior bands, the primark gathered all of the blacksmiths, craftsmen and artificers he could find to forge special suits of armour that would protect his men from the poisonous fogs. With his new deathguard by his side, Mortarion went on the offensive, attacking the warlords in their own fortresses. Each victory brought to the villagers more technologies, previously guarded jealously by the tyrants, now being used to topple them. Eventually, only one peak was denied to him. That belonging to the last hold of his adoptive father, the overlord himself. Returning to his village after one such victory, Mortarion was surprised and angered to find his people talking not of the last of the tyrants, no doubt, and his imminent defeat, but of a golden stranger. Ushered quickly into his presence, Mortarion was confronted for the first time by his true father, the Emperor of mankind, finally arrived on Barbarus' shores. What occurred subsequently is unclear, and the accounts of it apocryphal, surviving only in accounts told by Astartes who were formally subjects of Mortarion on Barbarus. They claim the Emperor had offered to aid the people of Barbarus in overthrowing the overlord, but the proud primark, already on the verge of total victory, spurned his offer, declaring he needed no such help. So the Emperor wagered that if Mortarion could defeat the overlord, he would depart, never to return. But if the primark was defeated, Mortarion would submit to joining him in his great crusade. Coldly furious at the stranger's audacity, Mortarion swore to take the fortress unaided. Climbing the peak, rage fuelling his aching, pained limbs, the primark's very armor began to rot off his skin, which in turn began to blister and boil in the corrosive environment. He made it to the gate of the overlord's citadel, before collapsing, screaming his challenge, even as his vocal cords themselves began to disintegrate. Mortarion remained conscious long enough to see the overlord emerge to claim the head of his wayward ward, before the Emperor swept onto the field in a rain of golden light to rescue him. Not much is known of the aftermath. It can be inferred that Mortarion departed the planet with his true father, although whether he was compelled to out of a need to honour their purported bargain, or whether the Emperor himself had to spirit him away for the sake of treating the damage wrought by the primark's climb, no one can say. What is known is that the primark spent little time with his father, and that his rescue had not won the Emperor any love in his gaunt son's hearts. Merely blame for cheating him out of his prize. The Emperor presented to Mortarion the scythe once born by the overlord himself, which the primark accepted without comment, before placing him in immediate command of the fourteenth legion as a startis, which had been wrought from his own gene seed. Appearing before his sons robed and armed, the primark, now the very image of the sepulchral reaper, bade them thus. You are my unbroken blades. You are the Death Guard. By your hand shall justice be delivered, and doom shall stalk a thousand worlds. The decree was a simple one, and the legion's cognamen changed from then to honour the primark's closest barbarian warriors. The dusk-graders were no more, and the Death Guard were born. The primark had little in the way of military reforms to place upon his new legion, for his intentions were in the ideological realm. Liberate or annihilate. A cold being of little emotion, and much collar. The Death Lord held at his core the unshakable conviction that mankind must be liberated from the oppression of tyrants. His experiences on barbarus had engendered within him a bitter and pathological hatred for the cruel rule of the dictator, and he was willing to shoulder whatever burden and endure whatever privations were necessary to see a human future free of subjugation be realised. There was to be no mercy, no limits, no restraint, and no quarter when it came to achieving this goal. As was customary, barbarus was rendered to the 14th legion as a recruitment fife, although given the planet's atmosphere, the War Council expressed concern for the genetic stability of its inhabitants. Mortarian was heedless of any and all criticisms, for barbarus was the planet he had paid for with his own blood and the blood of his own people. His purely human Death Guard, who had fought with him, offered themselves up for immediate astarties conversion. Heedless of the high risk it placed on many of the older members. Those who were deemed entirely too old became members of a dark aristocracy in the new imperial regime. Mortal vassals to the Death Guard, and those in charge of winnowing out the weakest of potential recruits, so only the strongest and hardiest of barbarians were rendered to the legion as neo-fights. While the planet could not claim to be especially populace, its somewhat small potential base was offset by the phenomenal physical fortitude the environment had bred into the humans who lived there, and the Death Guard saw a markedly low rate of rejection amongst barbarus inductees. In the decades after this reunion, the ethos of barbarus and the primarch spread outwards amongst the legion. Ever an inexorable tide, the fourteenth came to embody the image of the tireless, grinding steamroller of men ever more. Unlike some of their fellow legions, they left no garrisons, manned no fortresses, built no cities. The Death Guard existed only to kill, to destroy, to tear down. Once this had been accomplished, and the foe annihilated in their totality, the legion would move on. Better to leave the work of the Reclamation to the Exertus Imperialis or the Mechanicum, for the enemies of mankind were many, and mortarian ever eager to meet out to the Emperor's justice upon them. The legion built upon their initial successes, to forge its astartes into the perfect infantrymen. Their primarch demanded endurance, so the Death Guard became as steadfast and self-reliant as it was possible for them to be. Everything about their prosecution of war spoke to the primacy placed upon hardiness and durability. The arms and armor was of the most basic pattern and standard issues, easily maintained, easily resupplied. Their tactics on the field were blunt, eschewing complex stratagems and support formations in favor of taking ground, holding it at all costs, and from there, grinding away at the foe under waves of astartes infantry formations. Other primarchs decried their brother's lack of imagination, while mortarian simply pointed towards his legion's honor roll, sure of his own successes and his legion's successes in forging remarkable patterns of use for their innate talents. The inherent toughness ingrained in them through their primarch's gene seed was specifically cultivated through the Death Lord's imposed regimen of toxic conditioning and hazardous environment drills. As such, the 14th Legion were able to prosecute campaigns in atmospheres and conditioned, deemed too toxic even for astartes physiology, and would routinely find themselves called upon to exterminate Xenos and mutant infestations in the worst conditions imaginable. They did so with no small amount of pride, becoming ever more enamored with their own fortitude. In keeping with mortarian's credo of no quarter given and their own formidable physical resilience, the Legion began to employ a substantial quantity of radiological, alchemical, and phosphax munitions in their man-portable weaponry, including proscribed viral weaponry, deemed too dangerous for routine use. As the decades wore on, an increasing gulf between the remaining Terrans of the Legion and those of Barbarus began to grow. The Terrans, in some cases almost 200 years old, grew increasingly ill at ease with what they saw as dishonorable conduct amongst their brothers, holding to the old ideals of the dustgraders and of old Albia before that. Their distaste at the Death Guard's methods only grew with each annihilated population, each exterminated world, each virus and radiation-soaked wasteland that the Legion left in its wake. Gone for them was the worthy conduct of the dustgraders, for no longer would the 14th offer quarter to human enemies, merely eradication if any shred of resistance was shown. Whereas before, the Legion would have honored the surrender of an enemy army. Now, the majority of its forces only saw the armies of a tyrant offered up for an easier slaughter. The Death Lord, ever loyal to the ways of his adopted planet, cared not for the objections his Terran commanders raised, and would routinely shun them in place of the opinions of officers from Barbarus. The Terran contingents of the Legion were consistently deployed to the worst and most bitter campaigns the Death Guard were called to fight in, but this, while winnowing their numbers, simply bred into them a further fortitude, ironically enough exactly in the way Barbarus itself did to its own scions. The Terran contingent remained at the Legion's core, stubbornly refusing to be extinguished. This, then, was the Legion that would answer the summons of the Warmaster to the muster at the Istvan system. A grim collection of blunt astartes, utterly uncompromising in their methods and ideology, led by a sepulchral and bitter Primarch, with an intractably recalcitrant Terran element in their old core. Wood that fate had been different, and the honourable ideals of old not been crushed under the seemingly inexorable tide of Mortarian's ugly philosophy. What a different galaxy that may have created. Ave Imperator. Gloria in Excelsis Terra.