 Loyalty. In our Imperium, it is one of the most paramount of all virtues, alongside piety, submission, and a complete lack of any desire to question. It has ever been thus, for the foundations of the Imperium were built upon the backs of those to whom the concept formed the central crux of their efficacy as a martial force. Brotherhood, after all, being just another version of loyalty. Just why the horrors heresy was so tragic, so painful, so utterly destructive a conflict is that, quite beyond the mundane destruction it unleashed, its severed bonds thought unbreakable, and sundered oaths thought inviolate. As the Warmaster and his traitorous kin set the galaxy aflame, so too did they torch the very concept of fidelity, spitting upon their duty to their species in order to pursue petty ambition. We as an Imperium, lost in the age of darkness, the ability to trust. The traitor could be lurking anywhere, you see, whom could one rely upon, if the greatest, brightest star of the Emperor's own sons could fall to such base perfidy? By his actions did the Warmaster call into question the loyalties of those who professed their continued allegiance to the throne of Terra, to the Emperor of mankind. With the subjects of this record, well, it hardly needs to be remarked upon that there are those of us within the deepest, darkest circles of knowledge who, parley to truth unutterable, have questions. Questions that have dogged these warriors since their inception, one might add, for just as the Warmaster hid his treachery behind apparently kingly deeds and seemingly warm smiles, so too did this legion seek obscurity, cultivating quite deliberately a separation from the concept of truth and honesty lest the Imperium see them for what they truly were. Facts and lies, mysteries and untruths, an ever-expanding series of confidences and occlusions piling atop one another, until what remains is an organization so utterly impenetrable that those upon its outside cannot help but ask, why? What have you to hide from us? Are you loyal? Is there fundamentally a difference between loyalty and honesty? Loyalty is the expectation that the truth is being told. On the other hand, loyalty is the display of trust. Honesty states that one must tell the truth, yet loyalty demands trust that truth is being told. Can one conceal the truth and still court loyalty? Are we considered loyal? These questions are for greater philosophy than I, your humble servant, but they must be borne in mind when considering the subjects of this long-awaited record, for they go hand-in-hand with their very existence. Know then that this is the record of the first, the secret annihilators of the master of mankind, his uncrowned princes, the first legion, dark angels. The common appellation of this legion, the first, is not merely a numerical designation. There is a popular, if to one's mind, inexplicable opinion that the legion as a start is were created and raised to force concurrently. This is an untruth. It is likely that this belief spawned from the fact that, yes, certain legions would come to outpace their cousins in recruitment and expansion due to any number of factors. Incredibly stable gene seed of the 13th legion would allow them to vastly supersede the 5th, for example, in neophytes, which coupled with the latter's warfare and deployment preferences ultimately led to the later enumerated legion, the 13th, outsizing the 5th that preceded it. The first, however, were just that. The first legion, the original, the template as laid down by the emperor of mankind during his wars to unify Terra under his banner. Other, however, than this simple fact, almost nothing is known of their origins. The foundation of the legion as a start is one of the secrets of the emperor that remain to this day perpetually shrouded. As one of his most enduring creations, this status is perhaps understandable, although understandably frustrating. Recent revelations about the participation of certain individuals within the Astartes and Primarch project must wait until another record, but what is currently verifiable, these at the first legion was his prototype, a master mold from whence others would be based. Drawn from the gene coding of his firstborn son, they were cast from that most stable of genetic heritage, possessing none of the apparently already extant qualities and curiosities that typified his other scions. Indeed, there appears to have been no attempt to either curate or introduce any. Whereas other legions had from their very inception clearly envisaged roles within the legion as Astartes, such as the revenant ninth legion's ability to breed Astartes from the most mutated of genetic stocks, or the fifteenth legion's arcane pursuits. The first were made to eschew such eccentricities. Despite this, the process of actually arriving at such geno-stability was incredibly long in its gestation. Is estimated by a majority of the chroniclers party to such records of the Imperial household that the Emperor began his work well over a century before the final battles of the Unification Wars. His thunder legions were at this point still the most advanced genetically modified soldiery on the homeworld, and that is unfortunately not saying much. The Thunder Warriors were successful, yes, but incredibly volatile, lacking any sort of real military coherence and discipline, and prone to outbreaks of incredible berserker violence and grand mal-biological events, as their hot-housed enhancements ate them from within. They were blunt and brutal tools for a blunt and brutal age, designed as a stop-gap measure to break and butcher those who opposed unity and permit the Emperor his vital years of research and development. They knew not that they would be superseded, and therein lies their ultimate tragedy. But they did provide the Lord of Lightning with data invaluable to his Astartes projects. Initial intake stock for the yet-to-be-developed First Astartes Legion were drawn from every population centre on the war-ravaged homeworld. For the Astartes ascension process was laborious and painful in those early days, still very much ill understood. The availability of suitable test beds on the genophage and radiation-soaked terra was small to say the least. Through many laborious test batches, subjected to the most rigorous of biological and martial testing, the first handful of stable subjects were finally produced, forming the very first proto-legion at Alpha Stage. But a few hundred souls, all drawn from every loyal and conquered nation on the face of Terra. The warrior sons of Frank and Albia rubbed shoulders with the nomads of the Thulean Basin, the Technobarbarians of the Caucasus Wastes, and the Uralic Foothills, the Berserker tribesmen of Scandia. All were present. One of their first engagements was to be rather early in this stage, during the failed coup of the first provost marshal of the Imperium Uoma Candawire. Candawire sought to prevent what she saw as the Ligio Custodis' unlawful purgation of the Thunderwarriors, claiming it to be a seizure of power that nobody, save the Emperor, had the authority to simply exterminate an entire branch of the Imperial military. The newly cast warriors of the first were set by the Captain General of the Ligio Custodis against their predecessors, with the newest of the Emperor's creations, comporting themselves with a murderous efficiency that exceeded the wildest expectations of those who had worked in the Emperor's gene labs. The last of the Thunderwarriors that had been sheltered by Candawire, and deployed against the Imperial Palace, were utterly annihilated. The Age of the Astartes was ushered in by bolt and blade. All of the bloody knowledge of the Age of Strife was distilled into this newest of legions, the warrior cultures they had been drawn from, possessing the most vital and most deadly of skills honed through millennia of ceaseless conflict. In those earliest of years, the Astartes of the First were encouraged by their handlers within the nascent Imperial regime to shuck their former cultural identities, but not its knowledge base, and embrace the coming Imperial Age as its new paragons. This goes a long way to explain the names, redolent in what scant records of the Unification Wars remain, Heratles, Hengist, Cucullin, Gilgamesh, Appalachians of mythic quality, whose origins may be lost to the ages, but the sounds of which stir the hearts of men. Usually such legendary nom de guerre are reserved for the deed names amongst the legio custodes, but the First Legion are nothing if not exceptions to a lot of rules. By separating the newly formed Astartes from their pasts and directing them towards the coming future, those of the Imperial Research and Development Wing hoped to bury the human past where it rightfully belonged, in addition to removing any potential bulwarks against legion cohesion that such a culturally diverse background potentially represented. Amongst the hosts of Unity, their names, in combination with their habitually, even in those early days, dour character, granted them a reputation that awed, unlike any within the Emperor's armies. The legio custodes did indeed spur such emotions, yet they were only ever by the Emperor's side, and in those days he took to the battlefields less and less. The First Legion and its footprint were far more widespread and more impactful, as they operated in every theatre of Unity, both to bring the war to foes of the Imperium and to hone their already formidable skills, all the better to bring what they had learned back to the Imperial Palace and drill that hard-won knowledge into their cousins from younger, barely-formed legions. Their dual role as frontline combat troops of terrifying ability and as drill masters of absolute sternness, led to the rise of their first unofficial Cognomen, the Uncrowned Princes, or simply the Crowns. All of these factors, from the encouragement of early handlers to take on a deliberately heroic character to their status as sole combat effective legion, to their shepherding of younger Astartes, bred into the First, a fierce pride in their status as First Born, an emotion that would initially serve them admirably, but would, in time, come to faster. That, however, was many, many decades hence. Unity would blood the First, unsurprisingly, to a far greater degree than any of their compatriots within the Legion as Astartes. Serving in every twisted theatre of conflict the wars could throw at them, they, in response, created the First Hosts, a particular facet of the Legion that would go on to become one of its defining operational characteristics. Factively a series of unofficial sub-formations, the Hosts were not part of the traditional chain of command, in fact quite the opposite, operating outside of it entirely. Each host took upon itself the burden of specializing in one or other pattern of warfare, making it their ultimate goal to become masters in whatever discipline they had elected to follow. It is likely that the origins of the Hosts lay in the particular martial stylings of the cultures that the First had been so actively encouraged to divest themselves of, but whereas the retention of these had in other legions informed overall character, the First only cared about what lessons of war may be learned from their forebearers, caring nothing for traditions or superstitions. As the Hosts were not beholden to any one company of the Legion, members of almost all of them could be counted upon as being present during any engagement the Legion was involved in, prepared to provide their deadly expertise to better effect victory. During the Third Siege of Antioch in 603M30, members from nine separate Hosts collaborated across four different companies to bring the walls of that legendary citadel crumbling to the ground. As many as 18 unique Hosts are known to have developed during the Unification Wars, and while the years would eventually see many merging under the auspices of cardinal martial disciplines, they were nevertheless an undeniable factor in the First's stunning successes. The homeworld was a carnal house of old night savagery, a microcosm of the galaxy that the Emperor laid his imperial eyes upon. With the First Legion's blood, the first lessons of modern 30th millennium warfare learned. And learned well. The First were a testbed, not just for biological ascension, but for transhuman warfare in its totality, a formation willing and able to trial, to codify every method of killing and destruction that was available to the then nascent Astartes physiology. The discarding of certain Hosts was not something that harmed the Legion, but the opposite. It fed the First's insatiable appetite for the knowledge of annihilation, and only served to make it even more effective. Initially operating only as small formations to provide tactical level support or rapid deployment forces to other unification armies, the First lived up to their designation and status by being the first true Legion of Astartes, growing to 10,000 in number by 668 M30, a period where their cousins numbered in only the scant hundreds. At the Battle of Samarkand, this Legion was fielded en masse for the first time, against 20,000 genhanced slave troops of the Udog Hal. The ruler, the degenerate king of Akkad, had held the upper Asiatic Basin in his thrall for decades, cruelly subjecting its populations to mad eugenics and twisted geno-science perversions that suited his corrupted and blinkered world view. The Emperor, leading his 10,000 first born, broke the hordes of Akkad within hours, scattering the slave hordes like chaff before his vision. The very first grand master of the first Legion, Hector Thrain, claimed the mad king's head as a trophy for his armor's belt. The records of Akkad's debased sciences were purged utterly. The king's laboratoria torched and his palaces ground to dust. The mass scale effectiveness, proven beyond all doubt, the first recruitment beds were expanded, and processing of neophytes was accelerated. Hector Thrain was granted the title Sinestra of Terror, the left hand of the Lord of Lightning, an incalculable honor for any within the hordes of unification that did not directly belong to the Imperial household. The first's reputation was only going to increase with each victory, taking on a whispered revenance, for had the sons of the Emperor not simply strode forth into hell and left hell broken and shattered by their passage. The complete annihilation of Akkad was to become the first of the Legion's most defining features during unification and the Great Crusade later. Henceforth, their only objective was the most total and supreme eradication of the foe, from existence and from history. From terror to the solar reclamation, the first brought their arts of destruction to the literal worst that Saul's light would fall upon. Xenos creatures ancient beyond reckoning, Cy Arcana that buckled reality itself, rampant machine things from the age of technology now mad with millennia old data corruption. The first were the only formation capable of combating such horrors, and combat them they did, wherever they lurked. To prosecute the atrocities that stained his new realm, the Emperor granted to his firstborn the arsenal of the Imperial Dungeon, proscribed weapon systems and forbidden technology deemed too dangerous for any to use but by sanction of he himself. The first eagerly accepted the gifts of their liege and would never fail to deploy such Arcana when absolutely necessary, leading to the overnight eradication of the twisted cities of Mole and Caden in terrors eastern marshes, and the use of gene-phage munitions on Saturn's moon Enceladus to purse a gestating crave infestation, far from the first time the Legion would encounter that pernicious Xenos breed. The mechano horrors of Fortress 31 in the Thulean Basin and the now unnameable denizens of the fortress moon of Sedna, feared no better, pitting their atrocious forms against the first and ending their pathetic existences as not but dust, not even remembered by the passage of time. Few battle honours were claimed during this period, for the nature of the foes encountered by the first and the precarious political position of the early Imperium meant their existences could never be known to the wider population. There is much about the galaxy that the Emperor has been proven to have kept secret from his flock during these times, and the first were both his secret keepers and his destroyers, those he could call upon to remove the most dangerous of things from the inevitable path he had set mankind upon. The first took pride in this. Should they have not been able to speak about any particular battle, then they could at least take solace in the knowledge that there were many who knew that a foe so unspeakable as to be purged from all imperial record must have been mighty and wicked indeed. Their reputation, previously held as heroes of unity, was to change, accordingly. A darkening of their character in the eyes of the masses, they did nothing to stymie. The respect they were accorded by the greater Imperium was one that verged on terror. They were oft cast now, lessed as heroes and more as supremely loyal monsters. A better-the-devil-you-know attitude prevailed amongst Imperial military hierarchy for a sense of ill luck followed in the wake of the first legion, to the extent that many of the common soldiery were known to adopt superstitious practices, such as charms or wards, to protect themselves from the curse of the firstborn. Such actions obviously directly contravened the Imperial truth and were ruthlessly suppressed by regimental political officers, when there was at least some merit and reality in the foundations of these rational beliefs. Baseline human forces that fought alongside the first suffered terribly at the hands of the enemies the Astartes were tasked in exterminating, and were often purged in the wake of any actions, lest the nature of the now-defeated foes were made too public to manage. A name, a second cognament to replace their noble, uncrowned prince's title, began to spread amongst the armies of unity. The first were now the Angels of Death. This was not considered an insult by the legion. Quite contrary, they leant into their reputation, deliberately courting it by employing reaper and skull iconography into their heraldry, darkening their already blackened Mark II plate to superlatively grim levels. They wore the whispered dread surrounding them with a fierce pride, seeing themselves as a bulwark between the common human and the terrors of the dark that would rend their minds and flesh asunder. Those they fought alongside were not always content to see it as such, declaring, although often not openly, that the legion was becoming arrogant in their status. The first itself shrugged off these slights, seemingly perfectly content to be the omnipresent threat forever lurking in the long shadows cast by the prominence and widespread fame of other up-and-coming legions. While many of their burgeoning cousins were engaging in the first true trials by combat during the Solar Reclamation, the first had already purged Saul of its tenth artificial satellite, the Xenos Moon of Sedna, and were conducting a decade-long series of vigil and purgation operations in the Oort Cloud and along the edges of the Heliopause. As with their early extermination efforts, none of this was committed to official record, aside from the most oblique references, or heavily redacted combat logs. And once again, the first took pride in this occlusion, for they had spent the decade forming the earliest of the legions' orders. Similar to the hosts, the orders formed the third and most granular layer of the legions' already Byzantine combat and authority structure, each a collection of specialists dedicating themselves to a singular focus, or a singular foe, more precise than the wider scope of the hosts. These orders could count amongst their number, only perhaps a dozen or two astartes, and each was in possession of unique traditions, ciphers, and practices utterly inscrutable to outsiders, even their legion brothers. The knowledge they held, and gained through the blood of their initiates, could and would be disseminated amongst the legion when soever it was needed, rapidly turning the orders into a vital part of the legion's sheer lethality. While the hosts had found themselves collapsing into one another as their functions aligned, the orders only propagated further, with each great and terrible enemy of mankind finding a dedicated task force of the most lethal of the emperor's astartes arrayed against this. The orders further helped evolve the legion, excising the weaknesses, the gaps in knowledge and skill that it had still retained when it had first entered the darkness of the heliopause. They returned, from their lonely sojourn, to no victory parade or great ceremony, but to the satisfaction of the emperor, and the honor of being at the vanguard of the greatest human endeavor in history, the great crusade. Their service was by no means unnoticed by the master of mankind. They were, after all, still his firstborn, his bloody sinestra, and just as he had granted to them the use of the still, mostly forbidden weapon systems humanity yet possessed, so too to them did he gift ships of simply superlative design and provenance. As the first expeditionary fleets mustered in the orbits around Saturn, Terra and Mars, ancient battleships reawakened from the Martian macro-orbital vaults, as well as ships from the Jovian shipyards with keels, fresh and guns gleaming, the first were granted the use of the majority of remaining Terran ships, the cream of the void crop, personal provenance of the emperor as lord of the homeworld. These ships were almost all relics, having survived miraculously through the age of strife, the origins of their keels and their weapon systems lying deep in the dark age of technology itself, their size far belied their destructive potency in all cases, yet even so the first legion's new flotilla counted amongst its number not one but several of the mighty glorianna class battleships. The gift was a reward, yes, but also a simple choice of pragmatism on behalf of the emperor. The first, whatever their occasionally too prideful disposition, had at least well earned this arrogance, proving themselves time and time again as being able to not only bring total destruction to the greatest enemies of humanity, but also doing so bearing its most deadly of weapons. The Angels of Death was a name that still applied to them alone, for they were his grimmest necessity. The expeditionary fleets only possessed scant star charts from the archives of Terra, Mars and the Saturnine Arcologies. They were going into the outer dark blind, grasping along ancient warp routes for destinations that may not even be there, and in that darkness, as the first had ever found, dwelled terrors beyond comprehension. Who but they could be counted when all else had failed to stand resolute against them and ensure that the day was carried for the Imperium? The question is, of course, rhetorical. The first were, as one scholar noted, the fulcrum of the emperor's wrath, and girded with the finest technology and armaments he could provide them with, the Angels of Death set forth, abroad across the stars, to bring his foes, his most total repudiation. These first extra solar expeditionary fleets, engaged in the noble elements of the Crusade, one's acolytes are no doubt aware of. The reunification of Gryphon, the taking of Tentrian, the invasion of Rust, the pacification of Goro, all were mass engagements full of glory, both martial and political. Long-lost colony worlds of Terra and Mars were being discovered and made compliant, some with barely a shot fired, some with none at all, and some only through the great heroism of the Ligionnes Astartes. Knowledge of these triumphs was spread far and wide, and in their shadows. The first legion had set about the grim and silent work they alone could undertake, bringing the great crusade to the vilest nests of monsters the galaxy could muster. Records for almost all of these are utterly sealed, or redacted beyond any comprehension, but those that one has been permitted access to are truly frightening. The Osirine Cluster, the lush and verdant jewel of its local volume, was laid waste to by the first, so that they may destroy an ancient sentient planet killer, a machine of a human empire long lost to the sands of time, left dormant in the ruins, only to be reawakened by the resurgent Imperium. A similar face befell Betelgen, where the Legion purged from existence a hideous Xenos protoplasm, some form of horrid hive intelligence responsible for being the infection that doomed the populations of a dozen worlds to liquefaction into rotting slurry. These were the only ones one can name here, that hundreds, if not thousands, were recorded only by the Legion itself, speaks not only to their dedication to their assigned role, but also to the sheer horror of that which they had made it their mission to bring to heel. The self-same dedication to secrecy, both by their own predilections and by the order of the War Council and the Divisio Militaris, renders their combat record from this period incredibly scant, noticeable in comparison to their fellows and remarked upon by the same at the time. Some, albeit those far removed from any knowledge of the Legion's motives or tactics, wondered why they had only but a few worlds rendered compliant by their hands. It was because for each world that the Legion could claim to have been delivered to unity, ten more lay cold and dead in the void, scoured of the enemies they had once held, a testament to the utter resolution of the first. Their initial crusade engagements had granted them enough experience with the galaxy, in combination with their experience within the sol system to coalesce their doctrines of warfare into one tome, the Principia Bellicosa, that document by which the entirety of the Legion's Astartes was organized. The Principia was not a pure product of the first by any means. Its origins date back thousands of years into deep Terran history, but their contribution to it cannot be denied or understated, as just as in the closing days of unification, the Emperor's firstborn continued to shepherd humanity towards their Legion's ultimate goals, even if the species, even if their fellow Astartes, knew little of it. These were the true Halcyon days of the first Legion, unshackled from Terra and let loose upon the galaxy by the master of mankind, they were at their zenith. No other Legion could ever come close to matching them for size, fleet power, armament capability or sheer lethality. Even as the 16th Legion Lunawolves and 6th Legion Vilca Finrica were reunited with their Primarchs, the first Legion retained its primacy amongst all their fellows, with their Grandmaster holding more influence over all within the Imperium, save for Malkador the Sigilite. No matter the Whisperers who murmured about the occluded nature of their conquests and campaigns, continued to be common knowledge that they were preeminent, the apex of the Astartes, feared absolutely, but respected in kind. Unfortunately, as time and history have so often shown, nothing is permanent, and pride is a fickle thing, ever prone to becoming as brittle as glass should it be held onto for too long. For the first Legion is what happens slowly, but when the disease of hubris took hold, it would not let go, merely accelerate a poisonous vector into the Legion's soul. Inextricably, the first mandate of being the Legion to combat the most powerful of foes began to become twisted into a perverse desire to actively seek out those that would pose a challenge. The simple pragmatism the Legion had been known for was becoming a desire to find those that brandished power as great or greater than they themselves, those that could potentially even defeat them. Threats that they had once deemed in absolute need of their attention were now marked as unworthy of it, left to other legions, or even the Exertus Imperialis, much to the detriment of the latter. Yet even this new escalation did not initially harm the first Legion unduly. Their skills were more than up to the task, which in and of itself proved to only accelerate their downfall. Each new foe previously thought incredibly dangerous they humbled only added to the ever-growing bulwark of arrogance. The Legion was becoming convinced that they had arrived at the pinnacle of warfare, that they embodied all a military formation needed to be to defeat any enemy imaginable. The previously ever-adapting hosts became static, gradually pivoting to a focus on tradition instead of progression. Innovation drawn from battle experience stagnated entirely, as the hosts and orders jealously guarded their own lore, convinced it had become THE vital piece in the ascendancy of the Legion. Successful campaigns and compliances only confirmed the Legion's increasingly staunch biases, and the scant defeats or setbacks they may have suffered were simply, to them, errors, weaknesses that, with the death of those lost, had been rightfully excised, leaving only a stronger Legion in their wake. In terms of timing, this growing insularity could not have happened at a worse period. The first were actively shunning the prurience and pragmatism that had always defined their outlook, and were doing so at a time their cousin Legions were rapidly developing. The Legionnaires of Stardes were now claiming world after world after world in the Emperor's name, a transhuman juggernaut that no enemy could stop, and in doing so, were forming martial traditions and combat stratagems entirely removed from the first's teachings or models. The 12th Legion warhounds were becoming a rival to their brutal efficiency, while the 17th Legion Imperial Heralds and the 18th Legion both had become champions of the common human. The 13th Legion, no longer the warborn but now the ultramarines, had since their recent unification with their Primarch, now come to match the first for sheer size. The 7th Legion Imperial Fists now had a dark age weapon to outgun anything within the first's fleet, thanks to Rogal Dorne, bringing with him from Inuit the mighty battle station Phalanx. To the Angels of Death, the sole tenants of whom had once been their unshakable primacy amongst their fellows. Each new blow to their pride was worse than that of the last. It may not have been visible on the surface of so inscrutable a collection of Astardes, but the impacts were there, leaving hairline cracks in the Legion psyche that would only worsen and drive worsening behavior and decisions. As the other legions began to form coherent identities of their own, either through their reunification with their Primarchs, expression of their gene seed, or simply by the passage of time and their experience with the Great Crusade, the first turned ever inward, placing simulacrums of their old virtues upon pedestals, and regarding any deviations from their now hidebound traditions as both weaknesses and betrayals. In the world of Canis Baelor, a legion now unknowingly desperate to prove themselves encountered a now forgotten Xenos race that repulsed every advance they made. Three distinct assault faces were simply turned back, each suffering losses worse than the last. The legion's slow decay was bearing terrible fruit and they simply could not see it. Unable to accept that they could actually be bested upon the field of battle, Grandmaster Thrain himself, the Sinestra of the Emperor of Mankind, led a fourth assault, only to find himself and his combat echelons utterly surrounded by the far more numerous aliens. It is unclear whether Thrain would come to realize what led him to such a position, but what is known is that Canis Baelor would be his grave, a sacrifice buying time for the retrieval of vast quantities of legion armor and artillery. The planet was laid waste to by suborbital atomics, subjected to a nuclear fire that wiped away the stain of the Xenos, but not the stain upon the legion's honor. The death of Thrain, should, had things been different, prompted soul-searching amongst the legion. The questioning of why, what had clearly been arrogance and pride, had led to such an avoidable loss of life. Instead, perhaps predictably, the immovable legion instead devolved into petty infighting, which each of the hosts present in Thrain's expeditionary fleet, accusing each other of having failed in their duties and having been remiss in the completeness of their lore. This would only spread further, as the question of Thrain's successor overtook the Council of Masters upon Grimariye, the legion's central fiefdom and armaments hub. The masters of the hosts and perceptors of the orders had gathered to debate the succession, but the vitriol of the Canis Baelor debacle had simply overtaken proceedings. None were willing to find fault with themselves, leading to the complex web of loyalties to company, chapter, host, and order, that so many within the legion were beholden to, to devour itself alive. Pace of the legion's advance across the galaxy ground to a halt, as more and more of the first quit their front-line duties to join the debate at Grimariye. Until, finally, an outside authority was forced to step in. Malkador, the Sigillite, the right hand of the Emperor. While history has shown that the Emperor has been more than willing to rebuke and censor legions he has found lacking, that Malkador presented no such harshness in his rebuke, speaks volumes to the respect the first were still accorded, despite their recent difficulties. The Sigillite presented the legion a candidate of his own, and words intended to rouse the war spirit of the first once more. A fortress can be held upright by many pillars, alone they are nothing, but together they are mighty. Yet a fortress must also have a master, or else all its strength is for nothing. Malkador's candidate was Jurian Vendreig, no master of a host or preceptor of an order, but a simple line captain of the Eighth Company of the Fourteenth Chapter. His origin was Terran, and while his combat record was sterling, he was yet uninitiated into the mysteries of either host or order, and thus outside the squabbles of hierarchy, and unbeholden to any one doctrine. Deeming that the legion was in need of a warrior, not a master, Malkador's suggestion was one presented as advisory, yet all within the first knew it came with the gaze of the emperor himself upon it, and that such a suggestion could only be followed. The masters of the legion acceded to the Sigillite's wisdom, granting to Vendreig command of the first. The newly minted grandmaster faced quite a challenge, to unify, and to give renewed purpose to a legion entirely in the Daldrums. His first actions were entirely in line with his service record. Having focused on straightforward combat rather than arcana, he sought to turn the legion's vision outwards, and to place them once more at the four of the great crusade where they belonged. The challenge was called for, one worthy of the legion, yes, but not one chosen only for the possibility of defeat. Vendreig needed a foe that he could forge his legion anew with, but not one that could lead them back into old habits that had damned them upon Canis Baelor. Timing was, for good or for ill, upon his side. For the 105th pioneer company of the fifth legion star hunters, running ahead of the main expeditionary fleets, had marked for the highest of imperial clearances one such enemy. A terror known only to history as the Rangda. One should note at this point that this is a record of the history of the first legion, and not of the three Rangdan wars, laterally known as the Xenocides. One has already prepared a discourse upon the nature of the Rangda, which you are welcome to produce, but further discourse upon them must wait until another time. I should additionally caution eager acolytes. The unsealing of the records pertaining to the first legion that have allowed me to craft this particular chronicle do not, unfortunately, shed much in the way of anything upon the species itself, for reasons that should be clear now given how the first legion operated up until this point in their history. I am disappointed, yes, for the Xenocides remain to this day one of the crusades' greatest mysteries. But there perennially exists yet more records that may exist upon the subject, sealed by the first, lost to history, but not to existence. Suffice it to say, first encountered by the fifth legion, it was initially thought that the Rangda were a powerful but isolated species, content to remain in only one system, Edvex Mors. Despite their phenomenally powerful technology, including not only vast mechanotentical war barks, but a whole artificial war moon, the first legion smashed in system with annihilation in their hearts. This first Xenocide was the shortest, lasting a mere four months standard, but such was the power of these hideous aliens that five thousand of the first had been killed, and a not insignificant amount of their oldest ships rendered inoperable or destroyed. That being said, the Xenocide was exactly the blooding the legion required, and Grandmaster Vendreg's play for unity had been accomplished. While the nature of the Xenas themselves were not made public, it was widely known that the first legion had triumphed against an extraordinarily powerful foe, and that the banner of the Imperium now flew above their ashes. Cannelly, Vendreg had prior to the Xenocide invited a select group of Remembrancers and Chroniclers to join the legion, the first for so utterly secretive a group of Astartes. The works of these civilians spun out of the horrors and glories of the Advoc's Moor campaign, but disseminated and spread rapidly through both civilian and military channels. All would now know the glory of the first, and their utter ruthlessness besides. It should have worked, and, had it been an earlier decade, it likely would have, but the Great Crusade had changed, and the Imperium with it. The first, in their arrogance, believed that their victory in the Xenocide had been unprecedented. It was not. Almost every other legion had, by that point, earned accolades in grand feats of military heroism that were so widely renowned as to be almost legendary. As stunning as their victory had been, the first found it simply joining the sway of stunning crusade achievements, not receiving nearly as much acclaim or even attention as they had expected. It prompted a sad return to bad habits, a regression to the behaviour that had led to the death of the first Grandmaster. Vendreig, unwilling to see the first become a footnote to history, eclipsed by Younger and, in his view, unworthier legions. Obsessively sought theatres of war where his legion could win great, and more importantly, visible honours. A series of campaigns followed, with the first scattered throughout the galaxy, chasing rumours and reports of monstrous enemies and impossible odds. Each they delivered, only to find it was nothing more than what was, at that point, expected of all legions, even the youngest. Growing ever more reckless, Vendreig and his commanders laid their sights on what they now considered to be a true test of their mettle. Upon the fortress world of Carcassarne, the Thirteenth Legion, led by their Primarch, Ribute Gulliman, were attempting to bring a continent-sized citadel to compliance, yet it resisted their every attempt to do so. With the siege specialists of the Fourth Legion Iron Warriors and Seventh Legion Imperial Fists nowhere near, the first offered their aid to Gilliman, having hosts dedicated to just such warfare, which the Primarch gladly accepted. Gilliman expected the first to follow his carefully planned stratagems, expanded now to incorporate the honored Legion and its capabilities. They did not. They squared up against the city-sized main gatehouse of the fortress, ten thousand strong and simply charged. The slaughter and destruction that followed was beyond anything the powerless ultramarines had ever seen, and as the First Legion forced a breach in the walls at the cost of hundreds of their startys, Gilliman relented, his hand forced, and followed with his own Legion elements. The First rapidly outpaced the Thirteenth, as the latter methodically captured and secured each bastion and premarked objective, while the Angels of Death cared only for the slaughter. The seizure of the final keep was Vendreig's honor to achieve, but in doing so he paid the price for his hubris, just as his predecessor had. A hidden atomic weapon, the ultimate failsafe for the rulers of Carcassonne, detonated, burying Vendreig and his innermost circles in millions of tons of rubble and metal. The Lord of Ultramar quit the battlefield with none of the usual respects accorded to fellow legions. There were no words of comfort for them in the passing of their grandmaster, no honors for their fallen brothers, no praise for their skill or their courage. There was only a tersely worded rebuke, that the vain glorious First had proven their strength, but not their wisdom. Perhaps any other situation this alone would have been the grandest of insults to the First, but one supposes it ran even deeper than the admonition of the Primark. The Ultramarines saw them as equals. They, the First Born, the Deliverers of Terra and Sol, the First Children of Unity, the Scourge of Foes, literally unspeakable. They were now considered by those they had trained and raised to be no different. Another legion, another numeral, simply another piece in the Emperor's grand design, just like everyone else. Carcassan was stricken from their records, only remembered now thanks to the diligent chronicles of the Ultramarines. In the wake of Vendreig's death, the legion was rudderless once more, with the Council of Masters once again claiming power, this time splitting the legion across all fronts, desperate it seems, to seek personal redemption for yet another failure. The triumphs of this era were all bittersweet, for too often did they come with an unconscionable cost of both life and material. The legion was still the First Born, able to conquer all that came before them, but once more, their reasons for doing so were anything but pure. They fought not for the Emperor, the Crusade, not for the Imperium or Humanity, but for pride and self-interest, flagulating themselves with bloody theatres of war and perilous casualties. The Great Crusade was reaching its midpoint, the legions firmly established and prospering like never before, but the First were on a clear downward trajectory, spiralling in on themselves and seemingly incapable of arresting it. The Principia Bellicosa and all the lessons they had imparted on their younger cousins were outdated, surpassed entirely by the experience the legion as a startes had earned during the Crusade. Each had become its own unique formation, alive with its own traditions and predilections, and had known further need of the First's doctrines. The Imperial Fists outstripped the host of iron in siege warfare, the White Scars could outrun the host of the Raven in mechanized operations, the 20th Legion operated in greater seclusion than the host of fire ever could, and the 13th and 17th could field more startes in mass engagements than the host of the Storm. The warfare of the First still honed the skills of their warriors and still demanded an ever important application of the skills of the hosts and the knowledge of the orders, but they had become a brittle thing, their campaigns having taken on a frankly suicidal error. Their religion heedless of cost, each new compliance or extermination costing them more men in machines than the last. They were squandering everything they ever had on senseless, vain glorious assaults, proving the words of Gilliman more correct with each passing year. They appeared to their once admiring cousins as little better than reckless. Their primacy was gone, their reputation shattered, their once famed coherency and pragmatism superseded by a narcissistic self-destructive streak that was consuming them entirely. The Sigillite was not there to intercede on their behalf. Another, however, would be. To the small forested world of Caliban, in the shadow of the great Lidlis Eye, the emperor had summoned a detachment of the First Legion. None precisely knew why, but also none could ever ignore the summons from the master of mankind. Imagine then the shock of these 500 startes when upon landing in the courtyard of that world's mightiest stone fortress, they were to undergo total genetic shock. Before them stood a figure unlike any other, almost as tall as the emperor himself, clad in primitive but expertly wrought armor, his blonde beard cropped short and his equally blonde mane of hair flowing to his shoulders. He named himself Lion L. Johnson. His men, nightly warriors all, named him simply Lion. The emperor named him Son. This was the first primarch found at last and at his son's knee-deer. The Lion had fallen to the world of Caliban and had been raised by its forests. A patient hunter who went on to become the greatest night champion that world had ever known. The full account of his life, or at least what can be accurately established of it, must wait for another time, but suffice it to say he was quite unlike any other, even amongst his brothers. Forests of his home worlds were the layers of monsters, beasts of power unlike any other fauna in the galaxy. At some records label them as chimeric creations of the dark age of technology, while others see them as a product of a taint unspeakable. He's noteworthy enough for inclusion here, which should be borne in mind right now, only for the importance that they would play in the first primarch's development. The forest and the great beasts crafted the Lion into a weapon. A patient hunter who could best the worst his world could muster. Like father were his sons, the similarities impossible to ignore, writ large upon the legions history. Gene seed expression is a quixotic thing, and while the first in their primarch possessed little in the way of eccentricities, the legion had inherited their sire's lethality utterly, and in this he recognized in them. He would soon meet with the council of masters on Grimarie, and what he would find was curious indeed. The reunification of primarch with the legion is unique to each of both, and has run the gamut throughout history from absolute joy to terse acceptance to sheer bloody murder. The masters of the first were filled upon hearing news of their gene sire's rediscovery, with both pride that such a momentous day had finally arrived, and shame as the veil of their recent past was finally lifted from their eyes, and they beheld the battered ruined legion that was the product of their years of vain glory. In them the trust of their absent father had been placed, but they now realized that they had squandered that along with everything else. As the lion was brought to terra by the emperor to be formally inducted into his role, and taught all that he could of 30th millennium warfare, the masters and perceptors and praetors of the first redoubled their efforts to conclude their campaigns and make for the muster at Grimarie, where all knew the fate and future of the first legion would be decided. The angels of death were a legion in need of renewal, both of purpose and of structure, and this the lion sought to grant his sons with his first acts, melding the traditions of the legion and of terra with those of caliban. Prior to the muster at Grimarie, the lion had led his band of legionaries across the galaxy to reunite with the scattered elements of the first, making full wake to their ancestral fife. Thanks to the work of the Mechanicum Magi from the isolationist forge of Zana, who had attached themselves to the newfound primarch in the hopes of seeking favor with this newest son of the emperor, the task of warp travel, almost unaccomplishable, was pulled off, allowing the lion to reunite the vast majority of his legion, some 100,000 warriors. Each received their legion with a reserved solemnity, a far cry from the raucous celebrations of their cousins in other legions. Be it a facet of the dower firsts often somber character, or a reflection of the shame at the disarray their gene sire found the legion in, we will never know. But the result was ever the same. The lion accepted all, and offered each commander of each fleet the opportunity to duel him personally, so that honor may be satisfied and that he may get the measure of them. This he extended to all within his legion, this calibanite tradition intended to ensure solidity of leadership, and many were the legionaries eager to test their metal against this hunter from the forests. It was a simple thing, but one that won the lion much favor, amongst the still pragmatic warriors of the angels of death, and ensured none could ever brook his right to lead them. Within a scant few years, the muster was complete, and the lion presented himself to the perceptors and masters of the hosts and the orders at the legion on Grimariye. The lion presented himself to the perceptors of the orders and the masters of the hosts at Grimariye, and received through the defeat of each in personal combat the titles of grand master of the first legion, master of the hosts, and high preceptor of the orders militant, the first individual in legion history to become the true fulcrum around which all of the first would revolve. The hosts were the first, with the most notable of changes being written amongst them. With the directness that has now become renowned, the lion merged many, creating the six wings of the hexagramaton, a fusion of old legion practices with those of caliban, storm wing, death wing, raven wing, iron wing, fire wing, and dread wing, choosing personally new masters that would inherit these formations. Many orders militant, their inner workings now exposed to the lion, were found wanting, or their particular skill and lore found to be better applied elsewhere within the orders, now beginning to resemble their calibanite nightly equivalents. The changes were sweeping, but also in many ways in keeping with the legion that had in the past always been willing to make sweeping changes, if improvements to their efficacy could by their doing be affected. While the lion's popularity with his warriors only increased, there were some within the legion who began to harbor suspicions regarding the abrupt end so many centuries old traditions of the first were being ingloriously given. As these reforms weren't away, the first legion recruits from caliban were raised to full combat status, including many of the lion's own inner circle who had elected to undergo the painful and unreliable late life astartes ascension surgeries. While many had not survived these trials, those that did found their stoic primarch grateful for such ardent loyalty, and were granted positions of influence within the legion according to their skills. All were required to earn them, the lion being the most meritocritous of his brothers by a large degree, but this nevertheless did not shield the oldest and most veteran of the first, Terrans all, from feeling less than pleased with this influx. As you may be able to guess, there was a wing forming in the legion, quite outside those of the hexgrammaton, and coalescing around a cadre of legion veterans who were finding themselves ultimately unwilling to discard the past and pivot to the future, to whom the lion's reforms and appointments ran roughshod over traditions that had driven the first to their apex. Their doubt would linger, forming a silent but present minority amongst the broader sways of the legion who felt precisely the opposite, for whom the reunification with the lion was a gift that had banished the disquiet within the soul of the first, which had persisted for many years. He had broken them of narcissistic conducts through a new found purity and purpose. There was little doubt the lion was completely aware of the obstinate elements within his new legion, but chose to make no public move against them, trusting instead that once the legion had set forth in crusade once more, any fears these veterans possessed would be banished, and once they did so, they would be doing so under a new name. The first legion of old was now, and would be forever more the Dark Angels. The first action of this reborn legion was one of perhaps the most symbolic they would ever undertake, especially for a legion so avowedly unconcerned with such things. The world of Carcazarn, that fortress that had buried their former grand master, which remained a stricken laurel of shame in their record of conquest, had found its 13th legion garrison besieged, a biogenic weapon recently unearthed ravaging the population and mutating them into slavering ghouls. None of the besieged ultramarines could ever have expected the first legion to return, nor that there were even any crusade forces within reinforcement range. Imagine then their surprise, and the gloria and a class flagship of the legion, the invincible reason, broke from the warp at the head of 10,000 Dark Angels warriors. The lord of the first made swift work of the foe, scouring them from existence, be it by his sword, or the plasma weaponry of the dreadwing. The relieved ultramarines made entreaties to the legion, perhaps expecting to receive a prideful statement of honor renewed, as they would have done with fulgrim's third, or a chastisement of the failure as akin to the caloric temperament of ferris manus's iron tenth. They received naught, for the lion, and now, by extension, his Dark Angels, cared naught for them. The enemy had been exterminated, their duty was done. A statement had been made to those with the ken to perceive it. The lion and his legion now existed for one purpose alone, the prideless destruction of the imperium's enemies. By a twist of the strands of fate, an enemy of the imperium would present itself for the Dark Angels, and one that would test them like no other. In 862 M30, from the unknown marches of the galactic north, the rangda, that threat of decades past long thought buried, emerged, and in numbers, the defied comprehension. Karkazaran was a prelude, the orchestral tuning of the lion's legion. This second xenocide was their symphony, the crucible in which the son of the forest in particular would forge his legendary status. The rangda fleets dwarfed all possible imperial expectations of an enemy from this region, tens of thousands of wicked mechanotentical ships and dozens of their artificial war moons, all just as lethal as the one the angels had destroyed at such a high cost. Entire sectors were utterly overrun, their human colonists neuro-shackled to Xenos will. Only by the heroic sacrifices of the expeditionary fleets, comprising elements of the fifth legion's star hunters and the grim pale warriors of the 19th legion was catastrophe averted. Their combined detachments rallying around the forge of Zana and resisting the predations of the rangda for eight bloody months of siege, until finally imperial forces, led by the dark angels and the 14th legion deathguard, arrived in relief. 5000 of the angels alone, their entire death toll in the first xenocide would be lost in the one breaking of the siege of Zana. And this toll would only rise as two decades of bitter, horrible war ensued, both to exterminate the rangda and reclaim the worlds and populations they had so brutally seized. Morkar, Vorksag, Moro, the names of these battles remain but not their details. The nature of the rangda, as noted, has been deeply and thoroughly suppressed. It is perhaps understandable that the Imperium, at this time, would not countenance the public knowledge of just how closely it had teetered on the brink of utter ruin. But it is nonetheless frustrating to one such as myself, eager as I, and no doubt you, are in discovering the nature of the heroic deeds the angels no doubt wrought through their pregation of the foe. The second xenocide was to end by 882 M30, with the ultimate price of hundreds of millions of exerptus imperialis servicemen dead. An inestible amount of the navus imperialis, cold in the void, 19 previously inhabitable systems and sectors turned to ash, and the dark angels having been reduced to just over 10% of their original number that they had possessed a century ago. The third rangdan campaign, the first that was to truly bear the term xenocide, was to follow, but in truth it was not a true war. It was extinction, plain and simple, wrought by the lion and his dark angels, alongside the primarch, Leman Russ and his fifth legion, those two sons of the emperor, so oft at each other's throats, but so ultimately alike in character. The twin legions unleashed the ferocity and fury upon the retreating rangda, and in the deep dark of the galactic north, now cordoned off from crusade forces, they set about their work. Biophagic weaponry, viral scourges, nanotechness bombs, even technology that removed physical information from the quantum strata of reality, was deployed to erase all trace of the xenos. It was in the final days of the second war, and the darkest operations of the third, that the majority of the Terran veteran core of the dark angels was to perish. It is possible that these legionaries had simply elected to prove themselves to their new liege, under the painful knowledge that their previous destruction of the rangda had not been as total as they had believed, but it is also possible that in the fires of the most dire conflict the imperium had ever faced, the lion had coldly sacrificed those warriors, excising a potential weakness within his legion, and putting paid to any potential disloyalty. You would not be the only one of his brothers to have done so, but the truth, as with a lot of things concerning this dark chapter of both imperial and legion history, will never be fully known to us. What is known is that, as the legion set about the bleak work of the third xenoside, recruitment from caliban accelerated, and the legion eschewed induction from any of its other scant fiefs, even ancient cremarier. The new calibanite astartes, inducted since birth into the mysteries of the nightly order of their homeworld, would shape the legion into one that more closely resembled the lion's will than it ever had. Unburdened, they were, at the pride that had dogged the old angels for so long. The conclusion of the third xenoside is a date unmarked in either legion records or imperial ones, but it is, by later legion deployments, wherever they may have been marked by less secretive ones, estimated to have taken only a single standard year. The extermination complete, their enemy extinguished, the lion and the legion simply moved on, as unconcerned as their finresian brethren with the pomp and circumstance that would ordinarily mark the successful conclusion of a campaign. The dark angels divided once more, a combined strength depleted as it was, no longer needed. Fresh recruits arrived daily from caliban, and the lion saw no reason to halt either the first or his crusade's work. While they yet remained an operational fighting force, they were still one of the most dangerous in the imperium. Previously disbanded expeditionary fleets were reformed, fresh auxilia regiments and mechanicum tagmata, majorly from Zana, were oath sworn, and the dark angels took once more to the dark reaches of the void, to ply their signature talents where they would be needed most. For the lion, his next target would lie upon the world of Sourash. Calls for his aid, having been recently called for by the Khan of the now fifth legion white scars recently reunified, the lion responded promptly. The warhawk, though relatively new to the brotherhood of Primarchs, had nevertheless developed as close a relationship with the lion as any of his brothers could, appreciating his quiet honor and omnipresent pragmatism. Sourash, a recently compliant world, had, under the Khan's recent visit, appeared rancorous, resisting the tithe officers of terror and straining against the imposition of the imperial truth. The lion's arrival, for reasons ascribed to aspirations of independence, precipitated a shift into open rebellion. The Souroshi even attempted a direct assassination upon the lion's personage, by means of an atomic charge somehow smuggled aboard his flagship, the invincible reason. While their plans ultimately came to naught, and their rebellion was swiftly crushed, they would unknowingly deal a wound to the legion unlike any other, and one that would not see its ultimate toll paid for many decades to come. In the wake of the Souroshi rebellion, many within the legion began to question exactly how the rebels had managed to bring a nucleonic device aboard the invincible reason. The ship was perhaps the most secure of any flagship of any legion, as it was well known that none served aboard but for the knowledge and explicit grace of the lion himself. While it was never stated outright, for the legion was never forthcoming about any such matters, treachery was suspected, as it was something of an open secret that despite the losses of the Xenocides, there yet remained some who may question the lion's leadership. The Primarch would act decisively, although he would not justify his actions, for he never once had nor ever would. Luther, second in command of the legion, the lion's friend of old, his surrogate father, the one who had found him in the depths of the forest and raised him, was now to lead a combined Terran and Calibanite force, back to Caliban itself, to oversee legion recruitment and training. Quite under what metrics these warriors were chosen is something known only to the lion himself. This is a start he's departed the fleet with no fanfare, not in exile, but also not in honor. It is a decision that bears all the hallmarks of the Firstborn's way, cold, clinical, entirely practical, and focused on one thing above all, the continued excellence of his legion and the excision of all potential barriers to that excellence. This was to be the maximum of the legion for the remainder of the great crusade, perhaps even more so than it had ever been. The Dark Angels were not well liked, they made no friends amongst their brethren, and the lion few amongst his brothers. They had the respect of all, yes, but not their love, a status they were apparently absolutely satisfied with. They remained the legion that could be called upon to enact what others could not, to be the Emperor's final sanction. And it is there, in later crusade records, or at least those that were permitted to be kept, that they may be found. The Dark Angels shunned the politics of the Imperium, never once appearing at victory parades or grand celebrations, and the lion likewise shunned the feuding of his kin, speaking to them rarely and avoiding pivotal galactic conclaves, such as the Olynore Triumph or the Council of Nikea, all in favor of the destruction of the next foe. He raised no citadels, fostered no colonies, built no civilizations. He and his angels merely destroyed and moved on. While the triumph that invested his brother Horus as Warmaster marked a new epoch in the history of the galaxy, the lion was elsewhere, exterminating a resurgent crave infestation. The Imperium almost began to forget about the Dark Angels, aware of their existence, but not their deeds, for the first would never disclose them. The Primarks began to simply avoid their brother, unwilling to spend the time and effort necessary to seek out the reclusive firstborn in whatever dark corner of the galaxy he may be in. Again, neither Legion nor Lion was to care, for in those places of the universe, they preferred to dwell, doing what their brethren simply could not. In the closing days of the Great Crusade, the Legion was once again divided, but far from weak. Its fleets were scattered across the entirety of the galaxy, but primarily located in the depths of Ultima Segmentum bordering the galaxy's edge, in those reaches where the Astronomican was dim and the enemies of mankind squatted in their dark caverns. As it always had been, the Legion's quantity far belied their quality, their capabilities far exceeding the simple number of Astartes they could field. Lion had forged a fighting force for one purpose only, and in this he had eminently succeeded. Primark's own legend was a curious thing by this point. His reputation was as a general without peer, exceeding that even of the newly invested Warmaster. His victory tally was only exceeded by Horace Lupercal because of how many of his own years he had spent exterminating the Rangda, and how many worlds had been burned in the void instead of put to the pages of history. It was widely known that none could best him, and was off to the topic of theoretical debate amongst the Legionnaires Astartes, that should it come to an unimaginable, obviously, war between their gene-sires, that who, amongst the Emperor's sons, could take the line of Calaban, either upon the field of battle or in the arena. Primark obviously cared not for the concerns of others, being as inwardly focused as he was, but that did not stop his repute from being ardently speculated upon. As a figure he was mysterious, this firstborn son, scant better understood by the masses, or even his own family, than his numerical antipody, Alphaeus Omegaon. He was secretive and reclusive, and his sons shared this, revealing nothing about anything they did not explicitly wish to be known. It is perhaps for this reason, that the Lion and the Dark Angels have, in the histories, appeared and been characterised by chroniclers Galore, so inconsistently. Alphaeus' 20th Legion lacked the compelling numerical appellation of the first, and deliberately courted a far more confusing character. The nightly aspects of the Angels, combined with a combat record in presence longer than any other Legion, invariably drew eyes and conjecture. But the first were ultimately a bulwark against all of that. Unlike their cousins in the 20th, they had no longer anything to prove, to the Imperium, to the Legions, to their Primark, or to themselves. They were the perfect weapon of war, ruled by a veritable God of battle, who was likely for this reason that the eyes of the Warmaster scrutinised them so deeply. To Horace Lupercal, and his soon-to-be traitorous kin, there were perhaps none more dangerous than the Dark Angels. The corrupt of warrior lodges of the Word-bearers that had slowly injected the Warmaster's poison into so many other legions had utterly failed to find any purchase within the first, so steeped as it was in traditions of brotherhood and secret societies already. The Dark Angels and their Primark were utterly unknowable to Horace, and this likely concerned him deeply. In drawing up his dark plans, the Warmaster had to account for all possible loyalist forces, and for the first, their loyalty to the Imperium and the Emperor was without question. The Blood Angels and the White Scars, mighty formations in their own right, Lupercal would seek to turn to his own use. The 13th Legion Ultramarines would be savaged at Calth. The mendicant Vilca Finrica could be outmaneuvered and baited with comparative ease. The 7th were isolated upon Terra, as the Emperor's Praetorians no use to anyone. Three more legions he sought to trap. The first, they could only be isolated, sent far from where they could do harm to his plans, for Horace Lupercal, despite all his reach and influence, could only delay his older brother. Yet even the Warmaster was unaware of what was transpiring upon Caliban, and this, as with so many aspects of the Great Heresy, would not unfold in a way that any could have anticipated. Until such a time, as I may commit the further histories of this first Legion to record, until such a time as the watchful eyes of their chapter may look elsewhere, Ave Imperator Gloria in Excelsis Terra Otherwise, please like, subscribe, comment, let me know your feedback, and as ever, thank you very much for watching.