SECRET REPORT OF THE ALPHA LEGION: ETA-2120.

SUBJECT: STATE OF THE IMPERIUM DURING THE HERESY, 007-015.M31 AND THE GREAT PURIFICATION 015-028.M31.

STATUS UPDATE: CURRENT DATE: 903.M41.

AUTHOR: -REDACTED-

WARNING: Access to this report is restricted to Twentieth Legion personnel of Captain and higher rank. Unauthorized access will result in immediate termination. Such order will apply to any Inquisitor as well, except recognized Conclave leaders, depending on Alpha Legion approval.

For the Emperor.

Almost all of the Imperium remains blissfully ignorant of the great cataclysm that the Cyclopean Heresy was. The Imperial citizens go on with their lives, believing the Chaos Marines are nothing more than an aberration, isolated Marines who fell to damnation or daemons, who take the shape of the Emperor's Angels of Death to mislead and strike fear into the faithful…if they know about their existence at all, such knowledge being grounds for executions by itself according to the most Puritan Inquisitors of the Monodominant faction, such as Jorg Darksaber. Which we of the Alpha Legion, the Hydra, call the Fools.

At best, the galaxy-spanning war we fought ten thousand years ago has passed into the realm of myths and legends. And even then, it is hideously degraded, with major battles confused with each other or forgotten, and even, in some Sectors, isolated by the Imperium for millennia, some Legions exchanged between Loyalists and Traitors. This unfortunately resulted in several friendly fire incidents throughout the millennia. Ironically, it is in the legends, sagas and ancient fairytales of some of the most backward worlds of the Imperium that the Heresy is best represented. In those stories, passed down generation by generation, minor details may be deformed, but the core of the tale is unaltered.

Such as the legends of the Storm God and the Traitor Son, of the feral natives of the stormy Death World Arassuil II, which contain a description of the Battle of Terra that would move a son of Fulgrim to tears, through the Last Stand of Marius Vairosean.

Or the Betrayal of the Sorcerer Son still narrated by the Wise Men of Rhun, descendants of marooned Word Bearer loyalists, which detail the Destruction of Ancalimon in the most perfect way—that is, outside of the Inquisition's archives.

How have these worlds, along with many others, survived the waves of insanity of the Ecclesiarchy, or the ever-watchful eyes of the Inquisitors? Simple. We keep these worlds safe by recruiting our Aspirants from them, as well as many others all across the galaxy, and carefully disseminate the tale of the Heresy among those tribes. Those who pass the Trials are already hardened against the knowledge of a Great Betrayal shattering the future promised by the Emperor to humanity by the tales of their ancestors, and the discovery that a core element of their ancestors' tales, which they had intently listened to as children, really did happen many millennia ago tends to have a reinforcing effect upon the Astartes' mind and soul, rather than a soul-shattering effect some other Legions witnessed in ages past among recruits picked from worlds which were totally ignorant of the Heresy, such as happened under the rule of the Ecclesiarchy.

Only the Inquisitors, along with the Legiones Astartes officers of course are allowed access to the official archives of the Age of Darkness.

But even they do not know everything. More correctly, they should not, for even the full-fledged members of the Inquisition or hundreds-years old Veterans may not have the mental strength required to endure the full truth of the Cyclopean Heresy. We can prove this…for we had to silence those who fell into madness or….worse…..by stumbling upon some truths they were not supposed to know, truths for which they were not ready. Many of these dangerous truths shatter the very fabric of the official tale of the Cyclopean Heresy itself.

Many Inquisitors believe the Heresy was waged by two clear cut sides. The Loyalist Legions, and the Traitor Legions. The Loyalist Forge Worlds against the Dark Mechanicum Hell-Forges. The Loyalist Knight Houses versus the Traitor ones. And so on for all Crusade-era organizations that made up, at the time, the Imperium of Man. Two sides, Light versus Darkness. Order versus Chaos. No compromise possible. No way in between. Those who were not with the Emperor were for Chaos.

We of the Twentieth know differently. We know the real extent of the betrayal…and the shades of grey between black and white.

It went deeper than anyone can realize.

According to our internal Legion records, the only two Legions without any known turncoat elements are the Thousand Sons, the Arch-Traitors, and the Death Guard, the Unbreakable Shield of Humanity. The similarity between the two is deeper than one can expect. Just do not say this to any member of the Fourteenth or the Fifteenth, for he will kill you on the spot in the most painful ways imaginable for daring to say this.

In both cases, at the core there was a god-like veneration for the respective Primarchs, driven by what they did for their Legions.

Magnus the Red saved his Legion from the destabilizing mutative effects of his gene-seed, the so-called Flesh-Change. They owed him their very lives. When he fell to damnation, they could only follow into his steps, following their savior unquestioningly. Magnus prided himself on his Legion Captains being independent. They became so only after he was truly gone, destroyed by the Emperor's mighty power.

Mortarion saved his planet from degenerate, heavily Warp-corrupted xeno overlords who had turned Barbarus into a living hell, where death was the only way of escape one had available…yet none took, for the lords of Barbarus were also proficient in the dark arts of necromancy. Those who killed themselves simply gave their tormentors more raw material with which to work. The people of Barbarus venerate "Death, the Giver of Freedom and Mortarion who is her Herald" even above the Emperor. The Prometheans and the remnants of the Ecclesiarchy object to this heresy, but anyone who does so openly is silenced immediately, either by the Inquisition or by one of our infiltrated Operatives. Were it not for the Death Guard, we would never have been born…or worse, we would have become followers of the Ruinous Powers, their worship the only thing we would have ever known in our lives.

All other Legions suffered internal strife and betrayal. Some more than the others, with varying consequences. Treachery ran both ways. The Ancalimon Atrocity is the most famous example of Loyalists inside Traitor Legions. The Knights-Errant assembled by the Sigillite are another example., although there are less notable examples, all of which helped shape the final course of the Heresy.

We chose to defy our Primarch, whose cursed name shall no longer pass my lips, and to remain loyal.

We, the 22nd Chapter of the Thirteenth Legion, chose to remain in the light. And for that we had to pay with many lives.

When the new leader of the 22nd Chapter, Eleon Iasus, assigned to us by our Primarch, in defiance of the traditions which shaped our Chapter ever since its creation on Terra, asked us to stand with Guilliman against the Emperor, my men's reaction was clear and uncompromising.

They put a bolter shell in the head of the arrogant bastard.

Unfortunately, Iasus was not alone. He had 5000 more Ultramarines with him, assigned to purge us. We had to fight our way through them, as we had done against the damn Orks.

In the end we survived…. barely. Of the ten thousand Legionaries that made up the 22nd Chapter in that moment, only 3000 survived. And that does not count those of our own that had chosen to stand with Guilliman over our Emperor, and that we had to put down as a result.

We set course towards Terra aboard our only Battle Barge left, hoping to warn the Emperor of our Primarch's actions.

But we were too late. When we reached Terra, they already knew. Worse than that, eight other Legions had joined the Traitors, led by Magnus the Red, who sought to topple the Emperor and usher in a "New Kingdom".

We were put in the fortresses of Luna, to be tested for purity, under orders of the Sigillite.

After the stringent tests, our chapter was sent to the frontlines, alongside the Death Guard, where we reinforced the Destroyer Units of the Fourteenth, whose Primarch, Mortarion, is the new Warmaster.

We are exiles.

We are no longer bound by the rules and dictates of the Thirteenth.

We shall show the traitors who we really are. We are the Twenty-Second.

We are Nemesis.

Almost no attention –and thankfully, because very few maintain their sanity after learning of this- is paid to Traitors inside Loyalist Legions.

They are known to the Inquisition as the Vipers. A name which seeks to categorize them in a single group, when really there were thousands. Wearing mismatched armor suits emblazoned with unsanctioned emblems fashioned by their own minds, these Legionnaires spat upon their Legion and their Primarch's ideals and joined Magnus' armies, for many reasons.

There were the Idealists: those who truly believed that the New Kingdom promised and propounded by Magnus was the only way to restart Humanity's True Path to Masters of the Universe, both in the Materium and the Immaterium, and "lead them away from the dead-end that the Imperium represented." The 84th Grand Battalion of the Iron Warriors is an infamous example of this. They proudly fought under the banner of Chaos even during the Siege of Terra, where their leader, Barabas Dantioch, successfully slew an entire battalion of the Death Guard's Sixth Great Battle Company and ascended to Daemon Princedom of Khorne. To this day he leads Blood Crusades against the Imperium…and even beyond, as the countless Ork skulls found on Gorywn can attest.

Unfortunately, even among our number there were such men. Traitors inside the Hydra. We killed most of them during the Heresy, but not all…to our eternal shame. We hunt them still.

The most infamous of them was Varus Hos, the Mad. He was corrupted by a charismatic and utterly insane White Scars Stormseer he was sent to kill. But not any one Stormseer. It was Targutai Yesugei, the Dark Shaman, the one who guided the Khan, and later, Magnus the Red himself in their path to damnation.

He fought side by side with Targutai as his Death Shadow, and foiled dozens of attempts by us to kill the Dark Shaman. In the end, we had to murder an entire world –Ootheca, near the Maelstrom-to kill him. And even this backfired.

For the accursed son of Chogoris successfully harvested the death and despair of the dying world, to give himself daemonhood. We still hunt him, even ten thousand years later, hoping to expunge this secret failure from our honor.

The most devastating case of such Idealism however was the corruption of Artellus Numeon, First Captain of the Salamanders. Corrupted by the sorceries of Magnus the Red himself, he led a full third of the Eighteenth (approximately 25.000 Astartes) into revolt against Vulkan, successfully taking two Sectors close to the Maelstrom, east of the Prosperine Dominion. He however renounced the rule of those Sectors, seeking to fully perfect his power of pyromancy. He and his Astartes became full-fledged members of the Pyrae Cult, which became the largest cult inside the Fifteenth Legion. He fought beside Magnus himself in the Solar War, and took the Jupiter Shipyards during the Siege of Terra, where he slaughtered 440 Emperor's Children, among which Marius Vairosean, Captain of the Third Company. After the Purification, he fled into the Eye of Terror, where his Flame Casters made their base, and from where they have raided the Imperium ever since, staining the honor of the Eighteenth Legion, who swore to burn them from existence for their crimes.

We did what we had to do.

We attacked our Primarch, for he was unshakeable in his loyalty to the Emperor.

We slew those of our brothers who would not see the truth.

The Imperium was a means to lift up Humanity from its existence as sparse barbarians…. but it was ultimately designed as a cage. To shackle those who held a connection to the realm of knowledge and those who could see the truth.

The Emperor was not the Omnissiah.

The true path to knowledge…is the Immaterium.

And I shall follow it, for it is the will of the True Omnissiah, Chaos.

All knowledge is power…and must be used well.

-Shen'ra, Heretekal Techmarine, formerly of the Eighteenth Legion-

Then there were those who chose what many Inquisitors and even Astartes today view as impossible in the time of such a monolithic conflict. A third option between the Emperor and Magnus. Their own. This happened on both sides. They are called Blackshields.

They deserted their Legions, and searched for isolated planets, far from the frontlines of the war, or deemed non-strategic assets, unworthy of consideration by the strategists of the Heresy. These qualities were exactly what made them appealing to the deserters. These lost souls, wracked by grief or ambition, left the war to seek isolated abodes. There they made themselves kings and rulers over the local populations, with countless different titles. Their style of government was equally varied: from the High King of Arzad, formerly of the World Eaters, who ruled as a primus inter pares with twelve other kings, ushering in a golden age for his world, to the Butcher King of Ithaka, formerly of the Imperial Fists, who used the human population of the Oceanic World as his armies against his sworn rival, Eupites of the Iron Warriors and self-styled Bearer of the Aquila.

The dream is ash.

The Imperium is dead. No matter who wins the war, the Imperium for which I gave my blood on countless worlds…is dead.

The Traitors have subverted my Legion, and my Primarch, the one I loved above all, was leading their ranks.

I refused to join this madness. And for this, I had to fight…even those aboard my ship. The fight was hard and it ended when the last Traitors died at my blade.

I was now alone, me and my Indomitus Pattern Terminator Armour.

My Cruiser, too heavily damaged to continue fighting after the last random Warp-jump, crashed on a moon orbiting the third planet in this until-now undiscovered star system.

I was forced to board a Salvation Pod and to land on the planet itself.

The sight was the most beautiful one I had ever seen.

A Super-Terra made of water, an Oceanic World where only one continent stood. Beaches made of true sand, not the synthetic one made by the Mechanicum. Rock mountains undefiled by the touch of man. I never saw anything like this on Cthonia.

The Emperor's Children would call this…perfect.

Soon, I discovered I was not the first one to find this paradise.

A civilization of humans lived on it, reduced to an Iron Age level of civilization on the Official Compliance Civilization Scale. Held in thrall by a local tyrant, descendant of a long dynasty, it was forced to labor for his ambition and his desire to rule more of the planet.

I reached the capital city and challenged the tyrant to a 1 on 1 duel.

He did not last even ten seconds. And I was without my armour.

The loyal soldiers of the tyrant attacked me, but the long contained resentment of the populace aided me. The revolution was swifter than a Speartip assault led by my former Legion.

Now, I am King of the polity the people of this world call the Kingdom of Harsu.

I shall rule the people of the world as justly as I can, and through it, keep the Great Crusade, and the Imperial Truth alive, even if only on this world. And to anyone who would threaten this world, know this…. I shall forever fight for it.

Traitors, you are warned.

-From an ancient stone monument in the ancient city of Harsu, attributed to the venerated sovereign Araghast the Long-Lived, King of Harsu, ruler of the world of Harsu, a Civilized World in the Halo Stars. Recovered by the Imperium, and simultaneously declared a Recruiting World by the Alpha Legion in M38.

Some Loyalists did not do this willingly, just to escape the war. Often, they were survivors of infamous betrayals and great battles, who found themselves marooned on those planets due to the fickleness of gravity, which pulled in their Salvation Pods, or found themselves on a frontline, in a Sector whose command structure had been decapitated by Traitors. In a last-ditch attempt to reorganize the Loyalist forces, who had received no more word from Terra those Marines created Loyalist states, loyal to the Imperial Truth, which would give a stable structure to these forces and give them a fighting chance until the Purification.

This extended also to the Mechanicum worlds, many of which were bound by feudal ties to one Legion or another.

Below, one such example is reported.

-Cyclothrathe Forge World. Personal log of Asnada Wueyalvac.

Date: 006.032.M31-

Vexation!

A single Primarch revolting against the Imperium would have been…unfortunate, but not entirely unexpected. The calculations made by my internal cogitators estimated a median chance of 10.22% of this event happening, ranging from the 73% of Angron to the 0.0001% of Mortarion.

But according to the reports supplied from the Spy Ships operating across the galaxy, it seems that many are revolting at the same time. The reports indicate a number of nine, with a possible maximum of eleven or twelve, due to conflicting rumours.

Unsettling. The probability of this event goes down to 10^-22 %.

And yet, this near-impossible scenario has become reality.

A civil war within the Imperium has begun. And it will directly affect our world. The Dark Angels, led by their Primarch, have taken Port Maw and most of its fleet intact.

With its heavy units intact, and summed to the already-strong 4th Expeditionary Fleet led by the Lion himself, and factoring in all other Expeditionary Fleets known to have Dark Angels commanding officers, the entire Segmentum Obscurus is predicted to fall at an alarmingly fast rate, bar any …. unexpected and unpredictable factors.

Well, Cyclothrathe, born out of the destruction of the xeno empire known as the Mitu Conglomerate, will not go quietly in the dark or bend the knee.

Today, the ruling Synod of Archmagi has ordered the execution of Yelav Draykavac, for treason against our world. I, Asnada Wuelyalvac, his successor at the command of the Cyclothrathine Taghmata, executed the sentence. Which, in my opinion, had been long overdue.

So now I am here, leader of the Cyclothrathine Taghmata, which endured the first change in command in decades, right in the middle of a civil war, with the Agathean Domain led by its old Marshal, Ireton MaSade, requesting our armies' help against the Dark Angels and their lackeys sent from the techno-sorcerers of M'Pandex.

Whose side we will pick?

The choice, for us, is automatic of course.

We will side with anyone the Death Guard orders us to side with, as we did years ago. And since, according to our reports, the Death Guard stands with the Imperial Throne, we shall follow them.

For we have a heavy debt to repay to the Lord of Death.

When this Forge World was established, in the final days of the Mitu War, from the wreckage of the ancient Mechanicum War-Barque Cyclopean Mind, our ancestors were left stranded on a truly inhospitable world, among scores of dead ones…but littered with the powerful technology left behind by the Mitu. The pseudo-actinaric xenos had established an empire whose dominion on humans was comparatively light compared to those experienced by others. Subject worlds were largely left to their own devices, only being asked to tithe a quota of its manpower in exchange for protection by the Mitu Armies, and to give up all FTL capabilities and Warp-drive tech.

There was one law however which the xenos harshly enforced on conquered worlds. They had to give up all psykers to the Mitu authorities. Hiding a psyker was a crime punished through immediate execution.

After the end of the war and the supposed final extinction of the Mitu, we tried to reverse-engineer their technology, trying to puzzle out their scientifical achievements. We also wanted to find out why they feared psykers so much, why they feared their powers.

Our efforts were largely unsuccessful …until we discovered a last colony of the Mitu, which had escaped purging at the hands of the Dark Angels and the Imperial Fists. It was a sprawling hive-city, extending on the abyssal plains of a planetary ocean. Built on a planet which we designated Balas Prime, the only planet orbiting its star, it was a marvelous city…. for one built by xenos who had not seen and understood the Machine God's greatness.

Normally, we would have dealt with it through extermination, as standard procedure required. However, our research teams were hitting a wall on finding out Mitu technologies. This was our last chance.

We chose to temporarily spare them and captured one Mitu scientist from the xeno world-city. Through…physical persuasion, we discovered why they feared human psykers so much, despite the Mitu being psychic beings themselves.

According to the alien's testimony, his species had achieved psychic potential many millennia before, and had suffered much damage in what they called the Third Age of Discovery, but due to the constant policing presence of the Eldar Empire, which did not tolerate powerful xeno species so close to their own borders, their species could not expand beyond its core regions. Only with the Fall of the Eldar Empire, they could finally build their mighty Conglomerate, spanning entire Sectors at its zenith.

After researching human test subjects from conquered worlds, they came to the conclusion that human psykers were coming into existence too early for our species' evolution, and this risked turning psykers into uncontrollable weapons of mass destruction, bringing once more upon the Mitu the attention of the "entities beyond the Veil". And so, they instituted the ban on human psykers, to keep them from becoming too dangerous and also to monitor the development of our species.

While we could not understand what the alien was saying about the "entities beyond the Veil", the Mitu beliefs about our psychic development resonated deeply with the historical records on the Age of Strife. Psykers becoming rulers of worlds through their powers or bringing about catastrophic events which doomed entire planets.

The xeno also stated that the aliens, in fear of an Eldar invasion, they had built and stockpiled vaults of contra-psyker weapons, hidden in their former worlds. The locations however were unknown even to them, for they were kept at the highest level of the Conglomerate rulers, which the Dark Angels had executed to a man.

The xeno asked us, in exchange for the information, to spare Balas Prime. He had lost all the arrogance the local humans had attributed to his species. All he wanted was a world where their culture could be preserved.

"We are the last of our species. We are beaten, for you have clearly proved your superiority in war. All we ask is a world where to live in peace." (automated translation transcript)

Despite our unshakeable beliefs in Mankind's superiority, we were reluctant to destroy the last members of the xeno race which held dominion over the region. They could be mined for knowledge. And knowledge was power.

One does not throw away a weapon because of its non-human origin.

Our World thus committed a disobedience of the highest order against Imperial Law.

We let the Last of the Mitu live.

We classified Balas Prime with the highest order of clearance available and erased the location from our navigational cogitators, and executed the troublesome Navigator who threatened to reveal this illegal act to the authorities of Terra. His death was recorded in the archives as "death from accidental explosion caused by a faulty Promethium conduit".

Using knowledge obtained through trade with xenos (another grave crime under Imperial Law) we cracked the Mitu technology, and finally discovered one of the Contra-Psyker Vaults on a former core-world of the Mitu Conglomerate, now a dead world after repeated Cyclonic Torpedoes usage. The vault itself had survived relatively intact…proving the abilities of the xenos.

We successfully reverse-engineered the contra-psyker weapons and turned them to the service of the Forge World Taghmata. New materials with which to build starships, harder than even adamantium. Hand-held radiological weapons which made the Mars Pattern ones look like crudely made toys. Finally, in 974.M30, we made a live-fire test against a known psychic race, the Boslics. The weapons proved successful beyond any estimate. The Boslics were completely annihilated by our Experimental Formations.

After some years, in 993.M30, the Martian Mechanicum found out what we had achieved. Rather inefficient. We expected to be discovered much earlier. And they were not pleased we had not deigned to share the weapons with Holy Mars.

They sent a Mechanicum Punishment Fleet to both destroy the Mitu survivors and sequester the weapons we had developed. We would not give them up, however. They were our weapons, found through our efforts, developed by our minds. Mars had no right to them.

War seemed inevitable. And we knew Terra would side with Mars, and doom us to death or, at the very least, reduction in productive capabilities. A fate which we planned to defy to the last.

Then an unexpected factor unbalanced the equations which, until then, indicated this fate to be mathematically certain.

The Death Guard. Their Primarch Mortarion had received word on our contra-psyker weapon research, and decided that Mars could not be trusted with said weapons. For reasons which still defy our internal cogitators, he intervened…and stopped the Mechanicum Fleet.

He declared he had purged the Mitu survivors himself, and had ordered Cyclothrathe to load up all weapons on an old Cruiser for delivery to Mars.

The Cruiser, on its course to the Martian fleet, suffered a reactor containment failure and exploded. Post-event surveys declared the event an accident.

Thus denied, the Martian fleet angrily returned home. The next Synod of the Martian Priesthood saw our world censured for illegal usage of xeno weaponry. Due to the weapons' destruction, we only suffered a 23% increase in the raw materials tithe to Mars for twenty years.

But The Lord of Death had deceived them.

The old Cruiser was empty. The planet which he had declared to be Balas Prime was a long-dead world, purged due to a runaway Hrud infestation. All weapons were still safe on Cyclothrathe. In exchange for his help, we agreed to become vassals to the Death Guard, and to give our weapons only to the Fourteenth Legion, for usage against psychic foes.

I sometimes wonder whether Mortarion had foreseen what was going to happen. Magnus' reaction at the ruling of Nikaea, his rebellion… Why was it not foreseen and countered accordingly by the Omnissiah, but only by his son, who had always warned about psykers and about the Thousand Sons's unrestricted search for knowledge, only to be named as paranoid and backward by many Imperials?

Probably, we will never know…

No matter. All that matters is the present war.

And Cyclothrathe will follow the Death Guard to the end.

No matter where this leads us. For we have a debt.

And it must be repaid.

Finally there were those who returned from long wars in far-flung sectors , and found themselves beset by Traitors, many times by those within their own Legion. Those who survived such betrayals either attempted to link up with other Loyalists or simply escaped what was to them a senseless war, creating petty kingdoms within which the ideals of the Great Crusade could live on, isolated from the madness which had claimed the wider galaxy.

Those who did not find such a planet or had darker plans in mind became pirates and despoilers, pillaging anyone and anything on their path, be they Loyalists or Traitors The descendants of these pirate warbands and their offshoots plague the Imperium to this day, and forces our Legion to devote significant resources to deal with the ever-present threat.

The most dangerous of all, though, were the Chymeriae: Secret projects attempting to create hybrid gene-seed Astartes or even more powerful Space Marines. Such projects involved the utilization of Loyalist Astartes prisoners as test subjects. Supervised by the Pavoni Cult of the Thousand Sons and the most insane of the Traitor Apothecaries, such experiments were as varied as their foul minds could conceive. Many valiant warriors died due to faulty experimental procedures or due to uncontrollable Warp energies. The unfortunate ones, however…. were the successful examples.

Driven to fight against what they believed, through sophisticated mind control mechanisms, by their creators, they went on to worship Khorne, becoming ideal Khorneate Berzerkers…or simply insane, becoming a risk to any and all living being.

Some rumours claim that some members of the Pavoni succeeded in creating an Ultra-Astartes gene-seed, capable of generating invincible warriors, capable of matching entire Companies of Astartes, but these rumours cannot be proven. Still, these rumours cannot be discounted, for the Traitors have had ten thousand years to correct their mistakes.

The betrayal extended way beyond the Legiones Astartes, to touch all organizations of the Imperium of the time.

Think about the Knight World of Alaric Prime, where House Degallio, using a vault full of undeclared archaeotech, created a planetary empire, totally independent from anyone but themselves, then built up a Subsector-spanning empire before coming into collision with the House Hawkshroud, which remained loyal to the Imperium. In the end, House Degallio swore itself to Sanguinius, becoming House Arcanus, completely devoted to the Changer of Ways. House Hawkshroud was only saved by the Siege of Terra, and even then it had lost 84% of its strength, requiring centuries to return to optimal strength.

Even some Forge Worlds, such as Beshic V, tried to choose neutrality, but often it did not last. Forge Worlds were the main centres of manufacture and technology in the Imperium. Thus they were coveted by all sides, whether they be Loyalist, Traitor, or unaligned. Their side was often chosen for them through weapons fire.

This is the truth. The Heresy did not see, as often believed, an Imperium shattered in two monolithic sides, fighting to either keep the Emperor on the throne or to usher in the eternal rule of Magnus the Red.

It saw the Imperium shattered in countless shards, each one fighting the others, for the Loyalist or Traitor cause, or their own.

It was madness. A war that ushered in the Imperium as we know it.

Now you know why the Imperium is what it is.

END FILE. WE ARE THE HYDRA.

WE ARE THE ONE AND THE MANY.