 The concept of perfection has ever bedeviled the human mind. To the ancient Greekans, it stood for completeness. With the Romanii, it would define that which has been brought to its own end. The concepts may seem to be opposed, but it does not have to be so. For many, perfection has been a final state of being to aspire to, when one has improved either a thing or the self, to the point where it could no longer be improved. It could be one's art, one's learning, one's athletic skill, one's mastery of the blade. We have, all of us at some point in our lives, endeavored to be better at something than we currently are, to improve upon what we are given for reasons as diverse as we are. Some of us strive to be more. It strives for a completeness the Greek and dramaturgers and philosophers spoke of. It has been a state of existence so many have chased across the vastness of time, yearning for that faultless actuality. There are many within our species that argue it is impossible for humanity to attain perfection, for we, by our very nature, are imperfect, and that perfection is a realm only the divine can inhabit. Others dissent. The subjects of this chronicle chased such a state, striving to embody the flawlessness of humanity in all aspects of being, be it artistic, intellectual, physical, or martial. They held themselves to standards unparalleled, ever reaching for loftier and loftier heights. It would be this ceaseless pathological quest for improvement, this psychotic fixation on a reality unattainable, that would ultimately cast them into the deepest pits of depravity and damnation. No, then, that this is a record of the master of mankind's personally cherished sons, once the exemplars of humanity, now the damned and forever lost. The third legion, emperor's children. The initial recruitment waves for the third legion were drawn from the courtly warriors of the long since pacified European hives on terra, during the closing days of the unification wars. As part of their supplication to the emperor, the nobility of Europa, whose bloodlines were often almost impossibly ancient, offered the finest examples of their youth for service in the armies of unity. Having been humbled by the imperial thunder warriors on numerous occasions, the nobility of the subcontinent desired no such return to conflict and groomed their offspring for imperial service from birth. This was not done exactly voluntarily, at least initially. Accounts spoke of the begrudgment of nobles that were held towards this tithe, seeing their youth as little more than hostages for the golden despot. But as the years went on, cooperation with the imperium was increasingly accepted, and some noble houses became zealous converts to the cause. As the decades passed, legions recruitment ground expanded beyond Europa, as other noble families planet-wide, not wishing to be left in the dust of Terran history, began to to render their sons for Astarty's conversion. During its initial combat operations, the third legion differed markedly from their fellows, but the sheer nature of their deployments, which often saw them fighting closely with the nascent imperial army, often in a leadership capacity. While other Astarty's forces were deployed en masse as dedicated shock troops, the third often led unaugmented human troops, either as individuals or in squads, operating as a sub-regiment command Khandra. While most Astartys would have looked down upon service alongside mortal warriors as belittling to their talents and military role, the third actively took pride in it, perhaps seeing the obvious parallels between it and the battlefield roles of those ancient members of their own noble bloodlines. Pleasing similarities aside, the legion displayed marked skill in the understanding and utilization of the strengths and weaknesses of the bizarre array of regiments under Unity's banner, drawing upon their heritage's long-standing traditions to execute their command roles with admirable efficiency. Numerous campaigns in the closing days of the wars bear their hallmark, if not their name, including the Antarctic clearance by army group Antilles, and the seizure of Nodarin by the bronze host. It was, however, not until the Proximan betrayal that the third legion's name began truly to be uttered with respect and admiration. Proxima, a world astrologically close to Terra, had survived the fires of the Age of Strife with its civilization intact, although it proved no match for the first expeditionary fleets of the Great Crusade. With the Emperor himself present, a great ceremony had been planned to mark Proxima's compliance, and the third legion's 16th cohort was granted the honor of bearing the Palatine Aquila standard of the Master of Mankind, his personal iconography. The ceremony was disastrously revealed to be a trap, an attempt by Proximan insurgents to assassinate the Lord of the Imperium himself. Under torrents of vortex weapon fire, the third legion fought to the last man, alongside the Ligio Custodis, to extract the wounded Emperor from the field, and only by their sacrifice was he able to fight his way back to freedom. Owing to this, the Master of Mankind decreed that, through the blood of their own, the third legion had earned the singular honor amongst his 20 legion as a startys, to bear the Palatine Aquila itself upon their armor and upon their heraldry, while the Aquila, in its variations, denoted both the Imperium and loyalty to the Emperor as its Master, and there was much allegory bound up into its form. For the third, this became a mark of the honor with which they had comported themselves, and a level to continually aspire to as the Crusade marched ever on. While it may seem commonplace to us of today's Imperium, these were altogether different times, and to bear the mark of the Emperor's own sigil was an honor quite literally unheard of by any outside the Imperial household itself, and by one simple declaration would ever mark the third out from their peers. The act came with another honor, the advent of the legion's own name. In keeping with their now special place within the legion as a startys, the third were dubbed the Emperor's Children, and their panoply of war redecorated in a lacquer of rich Imperial purple and gold. So too did their role in the Crusade shift. While they were always maintained as a combat force, the origin and mien of their recruits still almost exclusively drawn from terror nobility made them now well suited to serve as protection details for Imperial diplomatic missions, or even as diplomats themselves, a role aided by the sheer fact they bore the symbol of the Emperor himself upon their breastplates. The character of the evolving legion meant they would carry out any and all orders with an exacting precision far above even the post-human dedication of other a startys, and in doing so became effectively the Emperor's own voice, often carrying Imperial orders on his behalf to far flung elements of the Crusade. There was, however, one great tragedy that would mark the early days of the legion, an event that almost brought doom upon the third in its entirety. It was one that built upon an earlier and, in isolation, not crippling loss. As the great Crusade dusted off from Terra and expanded outwards from the Sol system, the Emperor's first extraplanetary conquest had, naturally, been Terra's one natural satellite, Luna, home of the famed, if degenerate, lunar gene cults. While immediately, and stunningly brutally pacified by the 16th Legion Luna Wolves in one of their most lauded early actions, the lunar cults were brought into compliance due to their genetic craft, as the needs of the Crusade demanded the Emperor expand his Imperium's ability to produce a startys. As the bio-forges of Luna ramped up to full production, shipments of legion gene seed were dispatched from the Emperor's own laboratories within the Imperial Palace to serve as strategic reserves should the need arise. When the shuttle carrying the Third Legion's reserve approached, however, disaster struck. It is not entirely clear whether the loss of the craft was accidental or deliberate. Some postulate the pilot simply lost control or that mechanical failure was to blame, causing the shuttle to crash upon arrival. Others point the blame at recidivist elements within the lunar cults, and the Selenar specifically, questioning the loyalty to the new Imperial regime, the geneticists professed. Whatever the reason, the loss of so much priceless genetic material was a huge blow to the initial expansion of the Third Legion, but not one that was inherently threatening to its very survival. Were it not? For what followed. One solar year after the Legion's triumphant action on Proxima, a single night of horror befell the Legion's only surviving gene seed reserve, this time upon Terra itself. It was discovered to the horror of the Magi Biologist supervising the gene vaults that an unknown and appallingly effective viral blight was tearing through the gene seed of every Astartes Legion. What had taken the Emperor a Terran century to build was being threatened with extinction in a matter of hours, and the Magi sought desperately to check the virus's spread. It defied all treatment, leading to furious binaric speculation as to a possibly artificial, perhaps Xenos origin. The Mechanicum adepts, unable to halt the progress of the blight, informed the Emperor himself, and only through the master of mankind's peerless genius was the virus purged. While each of the Legion's Astartes had been affected, it emerged in the aftermath that the Third Legion's entire gene seed reserve had been reduced to black, toxic sludge. As of this night, an indreadful concert with the earlier reserve loss on Luna, the Third Legion began to die. The nature of Astartes' gene seed allows a fully grown Astartes to replicate genetic data within themselves, as their gene seed matures within their progenoid lands, to be harvested upon their death in battle. However, the very nature of combat makes this process inexact, dangerous, and far from efficient, especially in the early days of the Great Crusade, when demands for mature Astartes were at their highest, as were their combat losses. While other legions had access to stocks of gene seed upon Terra and Luna, the Third now had none. Astartes could only be created from seed harvested upon the battlefield and shipped back to the home system, where the Emperor and his geneticists could only rebuild the reserves at a crawling pace. By simple and terrible mathematics, the Third Legion was doomed to simply expire. It was only a matter of time. But then, everything changed. Upon his vanishing from the Emperor's laboratories, the Primarch Fulgrim's gestation capsule had come to the resource poor mining world known as Kemos, a miserable, unforgiving planet warmed only by a small binary star surrounded by a thick nebula dust cloud, making the world a place of little warmth and perpetual twilight. Kemos had been settled by humanity millennia before, during the Dark Age of Technology. Its role had been a mining world, and it had borne the long dark of the Age of Strife through enforced, exacting austerity. The resources of the planet, strained even during those thousands of years, were reaching their limit. The people were barely producing enough food to feed themselves. The entirety of the Kemosian people toiled every hour of every day, maintaining the vapor mines and synthesizers, struggling to meet quotas they knew were simply to fill their bellies with the most meagre of nutritional scraps. Recreation was unknown, a frivolous thing sacrificed upon the altar of necessary survival. As a simple mining colony, the loss of the great human stellar rel millennia before had condemned the planet to a slow and painful starvation. Fulgrim's capsule was discovered by the caretakers, the planetary regime's police force, who'd observed the fiery trail the pod tore across the sky from the fortress factory of Calax. Recovering the infant, they were so stunned by his angelic beauty, they begged the executives of Calax to spare his life, as orphans of Kemos were quickly put to death and recycled, deemed an undue strain upon planetary resources. The executives relented, charging one of the caretakers who had discovered him to take Fulgrim as his ward. The child's growth, like all of his brothers, was rapid and his effect upon his adopted home profound. As soon as he was able to wield mining tools he took to the mines, a child amongst adults, outperforming all those alongside him with seeming ease. With his quotas easily filled, Fulgrim turned his mind to the workings of Kemos' technology. Improving all the systems of Calax incrementally, until, at age 15, he had become one of the executives himself, and the fortress factory's output had skyrocketed. Not in these days a jealous being, Fulgrim dispatched emissaries to the remaining commotion holdouts, seeing solidarity and adversity as the only solution to the world's ills. His men brought with him all the knowledge Calax could now offer, asking only in return an exchange of data to better help those across the entire world. Long thought lost mining settlements were rediscovered, repaired, and reopened. The slow death of the world was arrested and, for the first time in centuries, Kemos began to produce a surplus. Fulgrim, now universally acknowledged as the planet's ruler, fostered the return of things long thought lost, leisure, art, and culture. Music now began to echo through the rusted hallways of the mining cities. Galleries were opened to display paintings and works of sculpture. Fulgrim himself penned some of the first dramatic theater to be put before the public in millennia. It was not long after this ascendancy that light plied the skies of Kemos for the first time since Fulgrim's arrival. To the shock of the citizens of Calax, a flight of stormbird dropships in stunning purple bearing the golden emblem of an ancient avian landed before the fortress factory. Fulgrim himself, deep genetic memories stirred by the site, met with the head of the city's caretakers in an emergency meeting. Emerging at the end of an honor guard of Third Legion Astartes was the Emperor himself, come to reunite his lost son with his Legion. Fulgrim needed no bidding, no compulsion. He immediately dropped to his knees before his father. Travelling with his gene sire to Terra, Fulgrim was presented to his own assembled sons. It was, however, a Legion in name only. Barely 200 of the Third Legion remained, standing unbroken but so terribly diminished before their Primarch. Undeterred, Fulgrim reaffirmed what his sons always knew they were, that despite their tragedies they remained the Emperor's chosen, his heralds, his warriors, his children. It was this latter title that, as is well known, would remain. The Third Legion were ever the Emperor's children. Fulgrim, despite being eager to begin active military service, was nonetheless pragmatic, knowing that only his own genetic stock would be used to rebuild his Legion. He also was aware that 200 warriors was barely an efficacious force in its own right, Astartes or not. Seeing the need to nurture the Emperor's children's recovery while still utilizing them and their newfound Primarch, the Emperor requested that the Primarch Horus Lupercal mentor his brother Fulgrim. Over a standard Terran decade, the Third Legion and 16th Legion Lunawolves fought at each other's side, and the bonds forged in battle between the two Primarchs, contradictory though they may have been in nature and demeanor, became unbreakable. Indeed, as unalike as their respective Primarchs were in character, but both equal in skill, both legions complimented each other to a perfect degree. While the 16th were brutally direct, the Third were subtle in life. By the time the Emperor's children had replenished their numbers to an acceptable degree, the bonds they had forged with the Lunawolves had become nigh unbreakable, even in the face of direst, darkest treachery, as would be demonstrated in the darker years to come. Over the course of this time with the 16th, Fulgrim, through his exposure to the works of the Imperium, and in keeping with his own personality and that of his Legion, began to become ever more possessed with the desire to embody the perfection he felt the Emperor's honor of his Legion demanded. While initially taking the form of wishing to embody the best that humanity could offer to become shining Paragon's worthy of the Palatine Aquila, over time this striving for perfection became unto an obsession for the Fianetian, as the Primarch came to be known. The Third Legion pursued all things with a total commitment and single-mindedness. They would never accept that their skills could be exceeded, and, when this was demonstrated otherwise, would apply themselves to mastery of said skill with utter focus, allowing the desire for perfection to consume them completely until their goal was achieved. This obsession extended beyond military concerns into all aspects of human existence. The Third Primarch himself was said to have been a being of stunning beauty, on par with the beatific splendor of his angelic brother Sanguinius of the Ninth Legion Blood Angels. Those of Fulgrim's Legion sought to emulate their Primarch in all things, commissioning or crafting only the finest decorations on their power armor and weapons. Aesthetic affectations, such as lacquered paintings and fine fur cloaks, were common amongst those of the Third, from line astarties up to the Legion's elite Phoenix Guard Terminator squads, again seeking to emulate the fashion of their gene sire. As the Crusade progressed, the obsessions of the Third slowly transformed from what could be seen as admirable efforts itself improvement and development into something cancerous, warped. Ultimately, the import the Legion placed upon the skills of others led them to believe that the only true way to measure personal achievement was by comparing oneself against another. Personal pride was no longer enough for many within the Third. One's virtues could only be seen as superior if they exceeded those of everyone else. Accolades won by cousins from other legions became personal slights, insults against those of the Third. Relentless need for validation bred twisted jealousies and worse, disdain for those they believed they excelled. No victory, no achievement, no artistic expression could be enough for them. All that had come before was base competence, another metric for them to measure themselves by. Exactly when the Emperor's children fell to the malign influences of the arch enemy is unclear. Like their fellow damnable kin, it is likely that the process was simply a usurpation of their already degenerating character. For, as the ancient Terran Maxim states, pride cometh before the fall and there were none more prideful than the Phoenician and his sons. There are numerous and fragmentary records that, when combined, speak to the dark truth of the matter. The cleansing of the reptilian lair by the Third Legion, the matter of no small amount of pride for them, is one such example. The ocean worlds of the Lahrensteller volume were rich prizes for the crusade and the Emperor's children saw the technologically advanced Xenos as a credible adversary to test their metal upon. For the War Council had deemed their extermination a high-risk venture best avoided in light of the Imperium's previous losses during the Rangdan Xenosides. Fulgrim would not countenance such a thing, both in terms of permitting the continued existence of Xenos within the Imperium's borders, nor the implied slight that his legion could be bested upon the field of battle. A full account of the campaign will be detailed in a later record, but it should be noted that here in the aftermath of the Purge, Fulgrim emerged from the Lahren homeworld in possession of a sword of clearly Xenos provenance, a weapon which he seemed to favor consistently from that point until the Istvan atrocity, while each of the Emperor's sons were permitted certain eccentricities by virtue of their position. This was marked in that not only was the Phoenician wielding a Xenos weapon, but he did so in favor of the mighty weapon Fireblade, crafted by the hand of none other than Ferris Manus, Primark of the Tenth Legion Iron Hands and Fulgrim's closest brother beyond Horus Lupercal. In light of what has since transpired, it is all but certain given the degenerate serpentine nature of the lair, and material recovered from their worlds by Mechanicum Xenobiologists that these aliens were corrupted subjects of the powers of the warp, and the weapon, born by one of the Emperor's own sons, was in fact infused with the essence of one of those warp creatures themselves. It would appear, at this point, that the fate of the Third Legion was all but sealed, as in seemingly all cases in those years of the Great Heresy, a Primark's face is inextricably linked to those of their gene coding. Other factors are likely significant in this regard, such as the closeness the Emperor's children shared with the now renamed Sons of Horus, allowing for the propagation of that Legion's perfidious warrior lodges within the body of the Third. Certainly, Horus Lupercal was quick to leverage his closeness with Fulgrim in order to sway the already corrupted Phoenician to his side, pitting him against his brother Ferris in doing so. Alas, a full account of all this must wait until a later date. Suffice it to say, as the days of the Great Betrayal grew closer, the Emperor's children began to spiral ever downwards. Their worst excesses of pride and hubris writ large upon their perfect purple armor, their sins barely hidden and striving to emerge. Once they were Paragons, soon they would be antithetical, the very antonym of all that had been good and righteous in humanity. Until such a time, as I am bidden to commit the full atrocity of their fall to Imperial record, Ave Imperator, Gloria in Excelsis Terra. This video and this channel are made possible through the incredibly kind contributions of my Patreon subscribers. If you'd like to help support the channel, head on over to patreon.com forward slash oculus imperia. 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