The Roboutian Heresy

by Zahariel

Inspired by the great Dornian Heresy of Aurelius Rex, here is an alternate timeline to the Warhammer 40000 universe, where Guilliman turned traitor instead of Horus, and led half the Legions in rebellion against the Emperor. The Index Astartes are done for all Legions. Now, the Times of Ending have begun ... Also has a TV Tropes page now !

18. Index Astartes : Raven Guard

I do not own the Warhammer 40000 universe nor any of its characters. They belong to Games Workshop.

Inspired by the Dornian Heresy, by Aurelius Rex.

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WARNING : Agents of the Inquisition, beware. This document contains a depiction of what might be the vilest of all the Traitor Legions. If your heart is not strong enough to withstand its horror, you might be soul-scarred and marked for termination by your superiors. Only consult this dismal text if your faith in the Emperor is strong and your soul pure in His eyes.
You have been warned.

Index Astartes – Raven Guard : Purebloods and Abominations

No Legion has fallen farther from light than the Raven Guard. They have turned their souls over to the foulest powers that dwell in the Warp, embracing horrors that even the other demented followers of the Dark Gods beware. By corrupting their own bloodline, the sons of the Ravenlord have gained great power, their ranks swelled beyond those of any other Traitor or Loyal Legion. But this profusion of transhuman flesh has come at a terrible cost, one that was no less terrible for all that it was long in coming. For Corax' gene-line has become a Legion of horrors from Mankind's darkest nightmares, rendered into twisted flesh and demented minds, haunted by the abominable entities that now own their souls. Now the few remaining pure-blooded warriors of the dread Nineteenth lord over their mutated brethren, while their Daemon Primarch dwells in his shadow-shrouded domain, brooding over old, festering hatreds and drinking in the agonized screams of his ancient tormentors. Predator or slave, the Raven Guards hold true to the command of their distant father : to make others suffer, or to suffer yourself ...

Origins : From the Depths of Cruelty

Knowledge is power, and some knowledge is too dangerous to be allowed to spread. These truths are the foundation of the Inquisition, an organization dedicated to keeping the masses of Mankind in the dark about the many and horrible threats that stalk the stars. But even among the Holy Ordos, the truth of the Nineteenth Legion is kept hidden behind layers of secrecy, for to know too much about the legacy of Corvus Corax is to risk madness and damnation. To most members of the Imperium with the credentials to know about the existence of the Traitor Legions, the Raven Guards are merely a horde of cloned abominations, vile parodies of the Emperor's design on the same level as the Black Legion created by Fabius Bile. The Inquisition is content to let their misconceptions stand – for the truth is far, far more terrible.

Any telling of the story of the Raven Guard must begin with its thrice-damned Primarch, Corvus Corax, the Ravenlord. While none of the Primarchs had an easy infancy, the early life of the Nineteenth Primarch stands out as one of darkest torment. The forge-world of Kiavahr, in the Segmentum Tempestus, was home to a prosperous but oppressive civilization, where a handful of technological circles (known as Forge-Guilds) ruled over the rest of the population with an adamantium fist. The people of both Kiavahr and its moon Lycaeus were nothing more than slaves to the techno-lords, toiling in polluted environment to reach impossible quotas. These working conditions caused a plague of mutation in the workers, something the tech-priests cared little about, until it began to affect productivity. They searched for a way to make their slaves more resilient to the cancers and flesh-changes, working for decades without any true result – until the work of a far greater scientist fell into their hands.

The child who would one day become Corvus Corax arrived on Kiavahr in a rain of fire, having been stolen from the Emperor by the Dark Gods like the rest of his brothers. His life-pod, apparently damaged by its brutal journey through the Warp, crashed on the planet's surface. Investigation teams were on the site in minutes, and when they found the infant inside the remnants of the pod – miraculously uninjured by his catastrophic arrival – they immediately reported to their masters. The processed paste and recycled water they gave to the child, the blanket with which they covered him – those were the only kindnesses he would ever known on the forge-world.

The infant was confined and studied, blood samples taken to make sure this off-worlder did not carry within him some deadly infection. What the analysis revealed, however, changed everything. This boy, for all that he looked like a five-years old human male, was so much more. His DNA was unlike anything the tech-priests had ever seen, a model of Mankind's perfection rendered into flesh by the artifice of some distant, divine gene-smith. The life-pod had been exposed to the raw madness of the Warp, whose energies can twist flesh in mere moments, yet the child inside had been spared from mutation. This convinced the masters of the planet that the secret of genetic purity they had been searching for was hidden within the body of this strange child.

The tech-lords of Kiavahr did not know the name of their young captive, nor did they care to give him one. Instead, they called him by the number written on the life-pod that had brought him to their world : "the Nineteenth". And they were as callous and cruel to him as could be expected from scientists using a number to name a child.

The book was the only thing he had ever seen that was not purely utilitarian, and it fascinated him. It had been brought by the only person he had ever seen who had flesh like him instead of metal for a face, though his skin was rosier than his own. He was the only one who touched him without hurting him, the one who bandaged his wounds when he was dragged off the table and back into his room.
The book told the story of a small creature with feathered wings as black as his own hair. The kind man had told him that it was called a "raven", and that it could fly wherever it wanted, whenever it so chose. He loved the book. It made him wonder if one day, he too would be able to fly, fly beyond the walls of his room, beyond the blank corridors and the table.
An alarm sounded, and the man smiled warmly at the child before stroking his head in goodbye and going back out, into the world beyond the confines of his room.
As the man left and the doors closed behind him, the child looked at the glass panels up high. There were dark shapes there, watching – always watching. But this time, there was something different in how they moved, in how they stood. He knew, somehow, that the shapes were angry. And he knew, with utter certainty, that he would never see the good doctor again.

The early life of the captive was spent in laboratories designed to study and replicate his body's resilience and resistance to physical corruption. He was exposed to doses of radiation that would have killed a human in seconds, drowned in concentrated chemicals, injected with man-made viruses designed to rewrite the genetic code. For years, the young Primarch knew nothing but cruelty and dispassionate experiments, and the distant, shrouded knowledge that this was not as things were supposed to be, that there was a life beyond the confines of the sterile halls and sharp knives. Because of the constant blood samples and the poor sustenance he was given, he grew into a gaunt creature, skin held tight on his bones. Because he never saw the light of the sun, his skin became pale. As he reached what passes for adulthood among Primarchs, the prisoner was still taller and stronger than any mortal human, but his body bore the marks of life-long abuse.

Yet despite this, he attempted to escape many times. Even in his diminished state, the young Primarch broke from his restraints, time and again, and carved a path through the servants of his cruel gaolers. Outnumbered and in the middle of enemy territory, he learned how to hide and strike from the shadows, developing a preternatural ability for stealth. Some tales indicate that he could make himself impossible to notice, not through actual invisibility, but by making his presence go unrecorded in the minds of his watchers.

In every attempt, he would be caught and dragged back to his cell, where even worse experimentation awaited him as a punishment. Yet every time, he would also get closer to the outside world and the freedom he craved with every fiber of his being. He also learned patience and planning, devoting entire escapades not to seeking to flee the complex but to learn more about his surroundings and the nature of the experiments that were performed on him. By plundering data-stores, interrogating prisoners, and, on at least one occasion, devouring the brain of one of the artificers who had tortured him, the young Primarch learned much of the lore that he would later put to terrible use. It is believed that he did manage to get out of the facility one time – but was then left trapped on the planet, at the heart of his enemy's stronghold, bleeding and starving, and was quickly captured again.

He was bleeding, but the pain was something he was all too familiar with, and he ignored it as he pushed forward. He was close now – so close. The plans of the building that he had learned three attempts ago from a servant of his captors shone in his mind, guiding his steps toward the nearest exit. This time, he wouldn't be caught again and dragged back to his cell. This time, he would be free.
The door appeared in his vision as he took a corner, clinging to the ceiling rather than walking on the floor. It was guarded by two huge mechanical constructs armed with a plethora of weaponry and covered in armor – the latest designs of keeper-hunters designed by the masters of this place.
It took him fourteen seconds to dispatch them, and then, at last, he was through the door. Something warm felt on his face – light coming down from above. Blinded by his first ever sight of sunlight, he looked up, and saw the cloud-filled sky of Kiavahr. It was full of pollution, and the very air stank of chemicals and toxic compounds, yet it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
Then he lowered his gaze, and saw dozens of the constructs gathered around the door, weapons aimed straight at him, with no cover in sight. He realized then that he had walked right into a trap – that all of his efforts had been for naught. He screamed in rage and denial and charged at the creatures, thinking that maybe – just maybe – he could force them to kill him and end this nightmare once and for all.
But he had no such luck, and he woke up hours later, strapped on the table once more, with fanged and twirling devices buzzing above his exposed torso.

Regardless of the security costs involved in keeping a Primarch captive, the tech-lords learned much from their research on the Nineteenth. They created a serum from his blood that could prevent mutation even in the menials working in the deepest pits of chemical waste, and used it to increase the workload of Kiavahr's population once more. However, the serum also had other effects, slowly driving those receiving it mad with visions of being imprisoned and tortured by their overlords. While the exact nature of the Primarchs is now long lost to the Imperium, there have been stories of Legionaries having visions of their gene-sire's life for thousands of years. It is therefore likely that, through some quirk of the Primarch's biology, the memories of Kiavahr's captive were spread to the tech-lords' servants.

After several rebellions from their maddened servants, the tech-lords stopped producing the serum and resumed their research. The young Primarch went from being little more than a chained blood-bag to a research subject once again, and after the initial success of the serum, his tormentors were even more determined to find a new way to enhance their slaves without the same side effects. It was during this second phase of research that, more than a century after the beginning of the Great Crusade, that the Imperium reached Kiavahr. The Emperor, accompanied by Horus Lupercal, arrived in the system with a massive fleet. The Master of Mankind had sensed the presence of His son on the planet, yet when Imperial intelligence analysed the system's transmissions, it soon became clear that, unlike in the other instances of a Primarch being found, there was no transhuman demigod leading the population.

The tech-lords of Kiavahr immediately recognized that they could not hope to match the raw power of the fleet that had entered their realm. But when the Emperor contacted them and demanded that they release His son to Him, their cunning and cruel minds saw an opportunity. A deal was struck between the Emperor and the tech-lords. In return for Corvus Corax – the name the Emperor had always intended for His nineteenth son – being handed over to the fleet, the planet would be welcomed into the Imperium while keeping much of its independence, including the tech-lords' remaining in power.

A crimson haze of pain cloaked his senses. Time flowed strangely, with days passing in the blink of an eye, while every second under the knife lasted an eternity. Ever since they had stopped simply using him as a source of blood and brought him back to the table, he had not managed to escape a single time. There was always too much pain, too many different drugs running through his bloodstream, to even make an attempt. Nightmarish visions haunted him as he went in and out of delirium. He saw horrible things in these feverish dreams : immense pits full of glowing liquid, assembly lines that stretched on seemingly forever, all to the tune of screamed orders and fresh agonies.
Shapes moved at the edge of his perceptions. Most of them he knew all too well, but one of them was different from anything he had ever seen, yet strangely familiar. Unlike the silhouettes of shadow that had tormented him for so long, this one radiated golden light that both reminded him of his single, fleeting touch of sunlight, and made his wounds ache. Through the pain and the drugs, he heard words being exchanged :
'Here it is. Take it with you, as we agreed.'
The golden shape drew nearer, towering over him, looking down as if it was judging his worth. When it spoke, the words were even more distant and vague than those of the captive's tormentors :
'The Nineteenth … I have been looking for it for a long time.'
'It has been … damaged somewhat. We were not aware of its importance to your designs. I trust this is still acceptable ?'
'Yes. It is still in a state where it can fulfill its purpose.'
A spark of hatred burst within his heart as he heard the cold, uncaring pronouncement, and he swore that one day, this bearer of false light would pay for talking about him like that – just like his tormentors would.

Great Crusade : Bitterness and Stolen Secrets

Despite all his efforts, Horus Lupercal knew that his wrath was radiating from him as he stood in his father's chambers aboard the Bucephalus. He had just returned from the Apothecarion, where his little brother had laid in the care of dozens of the best medicae in the entire galaxy. He had seen the fresh wounds and the old scars on the emaciated body of his kin. For the first time, he had seen one of his brothers vulnerable, and felt the same feeling he had seen shining in the eyes of some gangers on Chthonia when their blood kin had been harmed. He burned with the desire to inflict retribution upon those responsible. Yet now his father was denying this to him.
'Why ?' he asked. 'Why did you agree to their terms ?'
'They threatened your brother's life,' answered the golden-clad warlord, 'even if they never had the courage to actually say it out loud. If I had sent your wolves, they would have killed him.'
'They don't have him now,' argued Horus.
'I gave my word.'
The First Primarch couldn't help but scoff at that. He knew very well what the Emperor's "word" meant when it was given to tyrants and monsters. He had seen the ruins of Terran cities whose masters had thought they could bargain with the Master of Mankind.
'They are trying to force you into an accord that benefits them. Even without what they did to Corax, don't try to tell me that you wouldn't ...'
'Lycaeus is full of armed nukes aimed at the planet below,' said the Emperor, cutting His son off.
That made Horus go silent, and the Emperor continued.
'The tech-lords were very clear that if I attempted anything against them, they would launch them just to deny Kiavahr to me. There is no one here with the skills to deactivate the missiles without them noticing and activating them. Perhaps if some of Malcador's agents were here … But they are not. Would you risk this world burning just to give your brother justice ?'
'Yes,' admitted Horus. He knew it wasn't the right answer, that as a Primarch, he was supposed to always consider the bigger picture. But he also knew that his father would see through any lie. 'I would. I would do all in my power to make sure that does not happen, but I would take the risk. These … creatures do not deserve to live, let alone rule a part of the Imperium, be it just in name.'
But the Emperor didn't reprimand him for his short-sightedness. Instead, for a moment, the mask of regal power and control Horus' father wore at almost all times slipped, revealing the old, weary man behind. That old man – the one Horus truly regarded as his father – smiled sadly. It was the smile of someone who had made too many compromises and knew it, yet had no choice but to go on, for the consequences of turning back were unacceptable. The smile of a man who had to make deals with monsters that he wanted nothing more than destroy with all of his power. The smile of a man who was scared that in the end, when he finally accomplished his goals, there would be nothing left of him.
'Good. Cling to your love for your brothers, Horus,' said the Master of Mankind in a voice much more befitting His true age. 'It is what makes you human, despite everything.'

It took several months for Corax to recover from his treatment at the hands of the tech-lords, and even then the Primarch would bear the marks of his tormented youth his entire life. Once his recovery was complete, Corax needed time to learn all that he would need to know in order to lead the Nineteenth Legion. The young Primarch appeared to be grateful to the Emperor for saving him from the clutches of the tech-lords, and he promised not to disappoint. He plunged into learning with a hunger only possible in one who had been denied it for so long. Those same teachers who had trained Horus Lupercal in the art of war were brought back aboard the Bucephalus to teach Corax, and the First Primarch himself schooled his little brother in the finest points of modern warfare.

During that time, the Emperor ensured that none knew the exact circumstances of the Primarch's discovery, maintaining a veil of secrecy through demanding vows of silence from all those involved with his healing and training. The reasons for this are unknown : some believe that the Emperor was shamed that one of His sons had failed to conquer His homeworld, while others think that the Master of Mankind wanted to free Corax from his past so that he could take his rightful place in the Imperium. Whatever the reasons, Corax was kept hidden from the rest of the Imperium until he was ready to take command of the Legion that had been created from his gene-seed.

The Nineteenth Legion's first warriors were taken from the savage Xeric tribes of what was once, in Terra's distant past, called Asia. Their first task was to ensure that their own people remained compliant with Imperial rule, which they did with ruthless efficiency, seemingly uncaring that those were their blood kin they were fighting. The Emperor considered this a success, though maybe He should have seen it as a sign of what was to come.

In the Wars of Unification, they were employed as skilled infiltrators. An Imperial envoy would come to the land of a techno-barbarian warlord and make a simple offer : bend knee to the Emperor, or die. When the warlord refused – and most did, for all of them were as proud as they were insane – a warrior of the Nineteenth Legion would suddenly appear from the shadows, his bolter aimed right at the head of the tyrant. The emissary would then repeat the offer, which generally got a different answer. Should the techno-barbarian still cling to his pride – often backed up by illicit technology that could protect him against the Astartes killer – then the Nineteenth Legion would cripple his entire organization, striking at officers and second-in-command all at the same time. The panicked, leaderless troops would then offer little resistance to the Legionaries.

The same tactics served the Legion well during the Great Crusade, and contributed to their image as an instrument of the Emperor's wrath, devoid of compassion. Without a Primarch to lead them, the warriors of the Nineteenth were scattered in small groups, using their skills with ruthless efficiency. Many human worlds resisting compliance submitted after these sombre Legionaries struck down their leaders in plain view of their people. Xenos overlords ruling over human populations were exterminated without mercy nor heed for civilian casualties, such as during the scouring of the moon of Lysithea. In that particular battle, the human settlers were completely wiped out, and the Legion also suffered terrible losses. Even the Astartes who survived the encounter with the strange alien warlords were marked by what they had experienced, carrying within them a darkness that would never leave them. Such was the Legion Corvus Corax was given command of when he had completed his training – shrouded in dark rumors and a darker past, wounded by many battles but unbroken.

We do not know why Corax chose to give his Legion the name of Raven Guard. Before being reunited with its Primarch, warriors of the Nineteenth Legion were called by various titles – the Pale Nomads and the Dust Clads, among others. Many have pointed to the ancient myths attached to the Terran bird, marking it as a herald of fate, bringing doom and death upon those it visits. This image aligns with the methods then employed by the Legion as well as with what it would eventually become. In later years, ravens across the Imperium were all but driven to extinction, spared only because most Imperial citizens cannot distinguish between them and crows – and the latter are associated with Jago Sevatarion, the Prince of Crows of the Eighth Legion, and therefore considered sacred by many branches of the Imperial Creed. Certainly, despite the paranoia of many Imperial officers about these black-feathered avians, the Raven Guard has displayed no particular link to them.

When Corax took command of his sons, their numbers weren't as high as most other Legions. Losses taken because of their particular way of waging war, combined with the fact that a Legion without a Primarch suffered from more difficulties in recruitment, had ensured that they were less than ten thousand Raven Guards. While still far more than the Thousand Sons or the Emperor's Children at the time of their reunion with their Primarch, it was still a worrying situation, and one Corax was determined to solve. The Ravenlord, as his sons called him, had learned much about his own nature from the inhuman experiments of the Kiavahran tech-lords.

He stalked from shadow to shadow, passing right before the golden guardians without any of them noticing him. Gene-locked vaults opened with a touch of his hand, for he was close enough to his maker that even the advanced devices could not detect the difference. The wards engraved in the walls, crafted to hold at bay every manner of creature from the Sea of Souls, did not hinder him in the slightest – they too did not appear to notice his presence.
Corax stood in the laboratory of the creature that called itself his father, aboard the Bucephalus. Right now, the so-called Emperor was busy with yet another conquest, along with that poor fool Horus. Thinking about his brother made Corax' skin crawl. Would he have been the same had he been found by the Emperor as a child ? Nothing more than a willing puppet, an extension of their father's will ? But Horus loved him. He was sure of it. Lupercal might be blind to the deceit of the Emperor, but he truly loved Corax. And for that, he swore that one day he would free Horus from his slavery – one way or the other. Perhaps he would find such a way here.
The walls were covered in schematics, arcane formulas that Corax barely understood but memorized nonetheless. Great cogitators whirred endlessly, data cascading down their screens. Organs floated in preservation tanks.
Corax moved toward one of the cogitators and, using the lessons he had learned during his attempted escapes, began to force his way into its secrets. The genetic lore that had gone into his creation was interesting, but it was not why he had come here, risking everything should he be caught. He sought the knowledge both the Emperor and Horus had denied him when he had asked.
He sought what had become of the Second and Eleventh Primarchs.

The Nineteenth Legion had no homeworld – a fact that was the source of some mockery among the other Legions, who derided Corax as the only Primarch to fail to conquer the world on which he had been sent. Even Rogal Dorn, who had been forced to burn Inwit to deny it to the Orks, thought himself superior to Corax – for not only had he conquered Inwit, he also had united the entire Cluster behind his leadership.

This lack of territory meant that the Raven Guard had no ready pool of recruits to pick from, and so Corax found another way : cloning. The Ravenlord secured locations across the breadth and width of the Imperium, isolated places of little interest to the Great Crusade, and there he built laboratories in which new Astartes would be created. They would not be children taken from other planets and implanted with his gene-seed, instead, they would be cloned from a combination of the DNA of the existing Legionaries. These warriors had already proven that their genetics were compatible with the Nineteenth Legion's gene-seed, and therefore they were the best source of material for the next generation.

The growth of these cloned soldiers was accelerated through hormonal stimulants, their minds forged through implanted memories and hypno-training, and their flesh merged with the blood of Corax from their very first moment of existence. When they woke after a few months of incubation, they were little different from more conventional Astartes – lacking in personality and individuality perhaps, but that was hardly noticeable in the eyes of normal humans. While other Legions regarded the practice with horror, there were many tech-priests and Imperial officials who believed that the Raven Guards were actually pioneers, and that in time, all Legions would adopt their methods. To many civilians, all Astartes looked the same – it made sense to them to stop tithing children from compliant populations and use science instead.

But there were reasons the Emperor had not used cloning when creating the Space Marine Legions. The secrets of replication developed during the Dark Age of Technology had never been designed for the transhuman physiology of the Astartes, and even Corax' genius and ill-gotten knowledge weren't enough to surmount that difficulty. The Ravenlord was cautious to conceal the true cost of his cloning operations, yet tales began to circulate nonetheless among the other Legions and beyond, whispers of the horrific failures the process created with distressing regularity. There are rumors of Imperial agents being sent to investigate and never returning, seeming to vanish completely. No actual evidence of wrongdoing was ever uncovered, however, and so the Raven Guard was left to its own devices.

The thing on the table looked nothing like the transhuman warriors its genes had come from. It was little more than a blob of pale skin from which emerged a dozen atrophied limbs that twitched pitifully in the air, as well as a singular head that, alone, seemed human – only with nothing in its eye sockets. Without proper lungs, the thing could not scream – all it could do was wail softly as its perfectly transhuman brain struggled in vain to control its body.
With a disappointed sigh, Corax broke the creature's neck, ending its pitiful mewling. He had learned all he could from it through the auspex scans and blood samples. Already his mind was envisioning the modifications to the process that would solve the particular set of defects it had suffered from, without interfering with the corrections made in previous iterations. No matter how many more it took, he would find a way to solve all the obstacles that stood in the path of this project. Maybe the reason why he kept failing lied in the taint leftover from his warriors' brutal war against the Lysithean xenos. Could the process be thrown off by the minute differences this had created in his sons' DNA ? He would find out. No matter how many twisted corpses it required.
He would prove himself a greater gene-smith than the so-called "Master of Mankind."

This leniency was encouraged by the efficiency of the Nineteenth Legion in the Great Crusade. With their numbers bolstered, the sons of Corax were able to conquer entire swathes of the galaxy. Neither the deluded human kingdoms who refused compliance nor the alien empires that plagued the stars could stand against the combination of the cloned Astartes' ruthless advance and the stealth of the older warriors.

At the same time as the first cloned Astartes came to the battlefield, many commanders of the Raven Guard continued to recruit warriors in the "traditional" way, taking in children from conquered worlds and remaking them in their Primarch's image. These Astartes, named "purebloods", were trained in the Legion's ancient methods of war, becoming heirs of the Xeric fighters' infiltrating abilities. The divide between the clones and the purebloods grew, with the latter being given almost every position of influence in the Legion while the former remained mere canon fodder, created to die at the command of their betters.

The Question of the Replica
To the historian consulting these archives, familiar with the modern Astartes warriors and their pride, it might appear strange that the cloned Astartes would accept such treatment without protesting. Surely no warrior would willingly allow such insult to be heaped upon his honor. The answer to that lies in the nature of the cloning process unearthed from the Dark Age of Technology and that Corax adapted to his needs.
Whether by design or accident, the techno-masters of yore never managed to truly master a way to mass-produce humans with, for lack of a better term, a true "soul". Individual unique creations are possible – some eccentric tech-priests resort to this in order to have children of their own blood. But as soon as the same genetic code is spread among several individuals, there appears to be a thinning of the spiritual essence, as if it had to be shared between all the clones. The Ecclesiarchy decries cloning as an abomination against the God-Emperor, pointing to the Raven Guard itself for example, but the Adeptus Mechanicus still makes use of the technology to this day. Even with tens of millions of criminals being sentenced to servitude every year, there are not enough natural human bodies to meet the Imperium's need for servitors, and so most of the biological components are vat-grown.
Besides this spiritual weakness, the cloned Astartes were also more vulnerable to the gene-coded instinct of all Space Marines : obedience to their Primarch. So strong is that instinct that it is believed to have been the main reason why so many sane warriors continued to follow their Primarchs in the Traitor Legions, and Corax amplified the trait even further in the clones. Adherence to hierarchy, a trait necessary for any Legion to function, was taken to extremes in the Replica Marines, to the point that most of them were unable to question any order given to them by their appointed superior. Little more than machines of transhuman flesh clad in ceramite, they are known to have been an unnerving presence to psykers, who could sense only the tiniest spark of soulfire within them. With such weak will, it is not surprising that the clones failed to ever rise against the ties of blood that bound them to Corax. In fact, it is believed by many in the Ordos that this blood bond also spreads to all the other creations of the Nineteenth Legion, binding them all to the will of the Ravenlord.

Corax was a cunning leader, if one suffering from bouts of paranoia that led to him making plans within plans and taking precautions against the most unlikely of possibilities – likely, an inheritance of his past on Kiavahr. He was also willing to use diplomacy with the human worlds his Legion discovered, although rarely so with those ruled over by technocracies. In fact, the relationship between the Nineteenth Legion and the Mechanicus was exceptionally strained. The Ravenlord distrusted the Martian Empire immensely, more than once advocating for the suppression of the Machine-Cult and the forced integration of the tech-priests' domains into the Imperium. The distrust of Corax for the Mechanicum meant that the Legion was fiercely self-reliant : several of the worlds it had brought into compliance peacefully had entered pacts of protection with the Legion, providing them with weapons, ammunition and heavy armor in return. That the tech-priests were denied access to these worlds nearly sparked an early civil war between the lords of Mars and the Raven Guard, only stopped by the diplomatic efforts of Malcador and other Imperial agents.

With such baggage attached to his Legion, it is not surprising that Corax' reputation among his brethren was spotty at best. His relationship with Horus was tumultuous – while Lupercal felt a natural instinct to protect and aid his younger brother, Corax was jealous of Horus' comparatively easier life. The two of them would often violently argue, only to reconcile later – or at least, that was how it seemed.

Looking back now, it is clear that Corax planned his rebellion for a long time before Guilliman ever fell to Chaos. Every Primarch had secret – fall-back bases of operation in case their forces were victim of some disaster, spy rings across the Imperium, networks of allies, occasional deals with the mysterious Eldar, and so on. But Corax was willing to kill to make sure that the true extant of his genetic experimentation was not revealed. It is possible that part of his motivation was to ensure that, somehow, the pain he had endured in his youth would not be for nothing – no matter how many others had to suffer for it. Just what he was working toward in these days is unknown, though we can see the disastrous results in what has become of his legacy across the Imperium.

The apparent adhesion of Corax to the Imperial Truth and his moderation in the use of force was enough to endear him to some of the more humane Primarchs. But his withdrawn nature made him unloved, if respected for his contributions to the Great Crusade. He rarely spoke with any of his brothers, save for during joint operations – and those were few and far between. The Raven Guard rarely needed assistance from other Imperial forces, and Corax preferred to keep his Legion gathered in a few massive Expeditionary Fleets rather than spread as elite contingents as it had been in the past. The human elements of these Fleets were all fiercely loyal to Corax first and foremost, most of them hailing from the worlds under the Legion's protection.

While the Raven Guard fought on thousands of battlefields during the Great Crusade, two particular battles stand out. The first was the compliance of the Isstvan System. Official records merely state that the Isstvanians were in the thrall of some ancient religion, and that their fanatical priests would never allow them to join the "godless" Imperium. By striking down these priests and destroying their temples, the Raven Guard proved that the gods worshipped by the Isstvanians were nothing more than lies, and the system was brought to compliance quickly. At the time, it seemed to be just one more conquest, if one led by the Ravenlord himself, but later events led to deeper investigations, which revealed the true story of the war – one that Corax had concealed from the Imperium.

While the Raven Guard did perform surgical strikes against the temples and the system's leadership, those did not lead to the population's submission. Instead, the people of Isstvan rose in a frenzy against the heretical invaders. The Warsingers, Isstvan's war-priestesses, led the citizens in battle, flying above the fields of battle and unleashing powerful sonic shrieks that burst transhuman flesh within its armor. More than 80,000 thousand Raven Guards were deployed on the surface of Isstvan III, mostly cloned Astartes. Despite suffering horrendous losses, the people of Isstvan refused to surrender. After several days of brutal fighting, Corax determined that the Isstvanians were gathering all their forces around their capital, the Choral City. The Choral City was a wonder of architecture, whose great spires caught the winds to produce ever-lasting melodies. Intercepted transmissions indicated that the locals were defending something they considered holy, some secret of immense power.

The Ravenlord decided to lead the assault on the Choral City himself, eager to see what secrets were worth such fanatical defense. His strike force tore through the Isstvanians with contemptuous ease, and the Primarch slaughtered a dozen of the Warsingers on his path to the city's center – a massive palace built atop a high plateau filled with tunnels and catacombs. From interrogating captives, Corax learned that the true center of the Isstvanian faith laid deep below the so-called Precentor's Palace. The Primarch journeyed into the tunnels, but what he found there – if anything – is unknown. When he emerged, he ordered his forces to withdraw from the Choral City, before commanding a large bombardment of the metropolis. Within a few minutes of the bombardment's beginning, the remaining leaders of Isstvan begged for mercy, imploring Corax to stop the destruction of their holy city and willing to accept any terms the Ravenlord saw fit. Corax was relatively merciful, and Isstvan was declared compliant to the Imperium's rule, with one of the Primarch's own men, Vardus Praal, left to act as Governor of the system.

Never before had Corax known fear. Even when he had been running through the corridors of his prison on Kiavahr, even when the knives had cut into his flesh, all he had felt was anger and self-pity. Yet the voice made him tremble to his very soul. There was something in its intonation when it spoke his name – as if it knew him, better than he knew himself.
The environment was only increasing the dread he felt. At first, the catacombs had seemed ordinary enough – it had only been as they went deeper and deeper that he had realized that the angles of the corridors didn't make sense, that the walls seemed to twist as soon as he did not look at them. He had been separated from his men, and all of his senses told him that there was no one alive besides him in the entire complex, though that couldn't possibly be true.
Then he had seen the altar. It was a horrendous thing of bones and blood, pulsating with a life it did not have any right to. Hundreds of figures in pale robes had been kneeling before it in a chamber of impossible dimensions, all of them dead amidst a pool of their own blood, ritual knives still held in their hands' dead grips. And above the altar was where the tear existed, a wound into reality that opened upon vistas of nightmares and horrors never dreamt before this moment …
The Ravenlord turned and ran, the voice mocking him all the way up the tunnels, only going silent once he emerged onto the Isstvanian dawn, with his warriors looking at him, puzzled by his sudden and unannounced return. Hiding his tension, he ordered that they leave the city at once, while the fleet prepared to flatten this palace and what lurked deep below.
It was only once he was back aboard his flagship, watching his vessels bombard the Choral City, that he realized that the voice he had heard was his own …

The other battle to have marked Imperial annals took place during the Second War of the Akum-Sothos Cluster. Colonized by Mankind during the First Diaspora, the cluster had been brought to compliance by the Luna Wolves in the Crusade's early days with very little bloodshed. Yet a few years after Horus was named Warmaster, the people of Akum-Sothos went collectively insane, rejecting the rule of the Imperium. Reports indicated that they had fallen under the thrall of a breed of parasitic aliens, a sinister cabal of beings calling themselves the "Unsighted Kings".

Horus was determined to both avenge this affront to his Legion's honor, and demonstrate his authority to the Imperium at large. To this end, he gathered warriors from no less than four Legions to his side : his own, the Sons of Horus, the Iron Warriors, the Space Wolves, and the Raven Guard. With them came hundreds of Imperial Regiments and Mechanicum skitarii legions. This was a gathering of forces not seen since the Triumph of Ullanor, especially since each Astartes Legion detachment was led by the Legion's Primarch.

While the general command fell to Horus without question, the Warmaster relied heavily on Perturabo's expertise during the campaign, for the Unsighted Kings had commanded their thralls to build a series of continent-spanning fortresses across the cluster. Apothecaries and magos biologis soon determined that there was no cure for the xenos corruption that had claimed the Akum-Sothos Cluster's human population. The only solution was to purge them all – men, women and children. It was a grim duty, but one none of the present Legions would shy away from. Letting these unfortunate souls live under such tyranny was simply not an option.

The campaign progressed well, with the fortresses of the Unsighted Kings falling one after the other. Yet the xenos themselves always evaded Imperial vengeance, fleeing before the Legions' onslaught and leaving their enslaved minions to die in their millions to secure their escape. Yet after several months of brutal warfare, the xenos overlords were finally cornered into their final fortress, surrounded from all sides and with the assembled fleets watching from above for any sign of last-ditch attempt at flight.

This last fortress was truly massive, nearly equalling the Imperial Palace on Terra. A careful plan was put together by Perturabo and Horus, one that would leave the honor of the first assault to the Space Wolves and the Sons of Horus, with the Iron Warriors and the Raven Guard launching follow-up assaults on different parts of the fortress once the Sixth and Sixteenth Legions had drawn the attention of the Unsighted Kings. But Corax did not follow the plan. Instead of waiting, he unleashed an army of several tens of thousand of cloned Astartes on the entrance classified as Gate Forty-Two of the continental fortress just as Horus and Russ were launching their own assaults. The artificial soldiers died by the thousand, but the gate was breached, and Corax himself led his elite warriors – known as the Deliverers – right through it. By the time the Warmaster managed to re-establish contact with the Ravenlord, Corax had already confronted the Unsighted Kings and slaughtered them, though not without losing nearly his entire cadre of bodyguards to their strange psychic powers.

The following dispute between Horus and Corax was particularly violent. Horus accused his younger brother of spending his soldiers' lives carelessly, but all the Ravenlord heard was the jealousy of his elder sibling that it had been the Nineteenth Legion that had claimed the final victory. Then the discussion turned on the clones, and how Corax might be violating the edicts of the Emperor with such creations. The Ravenlord attempted to persuade Horus that his methods were the only way to meet the demands of the Great Crusade, but Horus refused to accept this, arguing instead that the Astartes had to be human at the root, lest their transhuman power turns them into tyrants no better than Unsighted Kings themselves.

The two Primarchs parted on bitter terms, and the purge of the Akum-Sothos Cluster was quickly concluded in a series of gloryless bloodbaths. They would only meet again once more – at Nikaea, when the Emperor summoned His sons so that they may hear His judgement on the practices of the Librarius. Though Corax was present at the Council, and his own Legion made use of psykers, he gave no argument on one side or the other – he merely watched from the shadows, never saying a word. After the Emperor gave His decision, Horus tried to talk to Corax, hoping to reconcile – but the Ravenlord had already departed, returning to his part in the Great Crusade.

Over the years, there would be eight discussions like this one. Eight times would a Primarch sit and talk with one of his brothers, sharing with them the knowledge he had gained from the depths of the Warp and what he believed had to be done in light of these terrible revelations. Seven times, the Primarch talking would be Guilliman – once, it would be the Lion. In each of these discussions, there would be a moment of outrage, of instinctual refusal, before the lies bore their way through an atrophied shell of nobility and into the all too human heart that laid beneath.
Except this one. This one was different. In this case, the corrupter barely needed to speak before the offer was accepted.
'I am with you,' said Corax to Roboute as the two of them sat in the private chambers of the Avenging Son, aboard the Maccrage's Honour. 'And I think I know just the place where we can begin ...'

Heresy : A Monstrous Truth

Despite the dark rumors circulating about the Nineteenth Legion, the betrayal of the Raven Guard during the Isstvan Massacre caught the loyal Legions completely by surprise. Even Horus, when he received word of the treachery of three more of his brothers, was most shocked by the turning of Corax. After all, did the Ravenlord not owe the Emperor his freedom from the clutches of the tech-lords of Kiavahr ? But Corax remembered things differently, as Imperial intelligence discovered when analysing the intercepted transmissions and broadcast proclamations brought back by the survivors of Isstvan V. In the eyes of the Nineteenth Primarch, he and his brothers had been created by the Master of Mankind to serve as tools, instruments of conquest to be used and discarded once they had fulfilled their purpose. To him, the Emperor was no different from his old tormentors, and he wanted few things more than he craved to see Him cast down. His loyal brothers were nothing more than willing slaves, and Horus, the only one of them he cared for, had been brainwashed by the Emperor so completely that only death would free him from his chains.

During the Massacre, Corax led his Legion of clones from the front, slaughtering hundreds of loyalist Astartes. He did not cross paths with any of his three loyal brothers present on the planet, but through its numbers, the Raven Guard reaped a terrible toll. Their cloned warriors took heavy losses when the loyal Primarchs tore a path back to their gunships, fighting together – but such losses were insignificant to the Ravenlord, who could replace them easily.

Wrong.
It was all wrong.
Cousin was killing cousin on the black sands. Thousands of armored bodies laid on the ground. The air trembled with the screams of the loyal wounded and dying, yet those were nothing compared to the horrible screeches of the treacherous living. A pale demigod had been slain by his dark brother.
It was wrong. It wasn't supposed to happen. It had never been supposed to happen !
The motion of the bolter in his hands felt distant, as if his hands were thousands of kilometers away as they pulled the trigger and sent another shell flying wildly off-target. All around him, his brothers were firing, a nearly solid wall of bolts that tore into the ranks of the Death Guard mercilessly. They had not been told this would happen until the order to open fire had come, but they had not questioned it. They had never questioned any order, why would they start now ?
Because it was wrong.
The warrior had no name. He had no voice either, for he had been born without a tongue – a simple defect that hadn't been enough for him to be purged alongside the other failures. For years he had followed orders, killing anyone he was commanded to kill. There had been nothing else in his life – nothing else in his mind. But no more.
He screamed – a scream of outrage and fury, but also of defiance and birth. Around him, his brethren shuddered and fell to their knees, their minds reeling from the sudden outburst. He continued to scream as he tore into them with his bare hands, then with a sword he picked up the corpse of his commander after ripping his head off. Confusion spread across the ranks, and he took advantage of it. He slipped through the cracks of his former brothers' perception, vanishing from their sight through techniques he suddenly realized he had always known.
He flew through the ranks of the Traitors and toward the remaining midnight-clad loyalists. He could see and hear them fighting still, desperate to reclaim the body of their sire. They needed his help. Whether or not they would accept it, he knew not, nor did he care. All that mattered to him was that he would not do the will of tyrants and monsters any more.
Nevermore. So vowed the clone who would, in time, come to be known as Alastor Rushal, Captain of the Night Lords Legion.

Despite this, of all the Traitor Legions, the Raven Guard was responsible for the least evil and destruction during the dark days of the Heresy – but only because they were being groomed by the Dark Gods to become far more dangerous later. Immediately after the Isstvan Massacre, Corax took his entire Legion with him and left for Kiavahr, the world he had avoided for decades. At that time, Kiavahr stood at the heart of a dominion of the Mechanicum, several systems unified under the will of the Machine-God. The tech-lords of Kiavahr, responsible for Corax' tormented youth, were still in power, having escaped punishment by the Emperor in return for offering their fealty and returning His son to Him.

When word of the Heresy reached them, the tech-lords at first didn't care – indeed, they saw it as an opportunity to reclaim their independence amidst the confusion. As communication with the rest of the Imperium became all but impossible in the growing Warp storms, they declared the Kiavahr Nexus would stand on its own, without the need for outside aid. Then, they learned that the Ravenlord had sided with the rebels, and remembered the oaths of retribution made by the child they had imprisoned and tortured so long ago. Factories were converted to produce weaponry, orbital mining platforms became space forts, and hordes of menials were forcefully converted into combat-servitors. The Forge-Guilds prepared for war, gathering all the resources they had on hand, digging devices from the Age of Strife out of confinement. But it was not enough.

The Nineteenth Legion tore through the self-proclaimed Kiavahr Nexus without mercy. Thousands of cloned Astartes swarmed world after world, alongside their monstrous kindred, freed from their cells for the first time since their grotesque births. They left no survivors in their wake, and yet, we know much of the details of this war, for Corax made sure to leave extensive records on every planet he and his Legion killed. Pillars of adamantium were left in the ruins of forge-cities, engraved with precise accounts of the battles that took place there, written with so much detail that the characters cannot be read by human eyes and require scanners and auspex to understand. Strangely, these accounts appear to be entirely faithful, not twisted to favor the Raven Guard in any way. Still, each of these pillars was claimed and hidden by the Inquisition during the Scouring.

The contents of the pillar describing the battle of Kiavahr itself are especially dangerous to the sanity of those who read them. Whatever enslaved remembrancer was tasked with writing the text must clearly have been losing his own mind by that point, forced to witness and record the horrors inflicted by the Raven Guards upon their enemies. According to the pillar, the tech-lords were captured in the heart of their fortress before a single shot was fired on the planet, abducted by the Shadow-walkers, an elite group of Legionaries specialized in infiltration. They were brought on the bridge of the Shadow of the Emperor, Corax' ill-named flagship, and made to kneel before the one they had once tortured to satisfy their curiosity. Then, the Primarch forced them to watch as his fleet destroyed Kiavahr.

The planet's orbital shields were taken down by the Shadow-walkers and the surface of the world was pounded into dust by a relentless, ruthless bombardment that lasted for six entire days. All that time, Corax and the tech-lords watched on, listening to the desperate pleas for help of the population broadcast on the vox. His back turned to his captives, the Ravenlord never said a word as he looked at the death of his homeworld. Lycaeus, the planet's moon, endured the same fate, but not before the Raven Guards had freed the prisoners used to mine its mantle for precious materials. These prisoners – criminal and innocent alike – only enjoyed their freedom for a short time, before they became the test subjects of the Raven Guard's Apothecaries. The narrator of the pillar didn't witness the experiments, but he saw their results, and what the knowledge gained from trial and error was ultimately used to accomplish.

Kiavahr destroyed, Corax turned his attention upon the tech-lords once more. There were thirteen of them, but of those, only nine had been alive when the Primarch had been captive on the forge-world. The four newer additions to their circle were executed slowly, over the course of several weeks, and again, the others were forced to watch – and more than watch, feel their pain. Using the augmetics of the tech-lords against them, Corax made them feel the agony of the four sacrifices, each dying a horrible death that was specifically designed to appeal to one of the Dark Gods, based upon a copy of the Codex Chaotica Guilliman had offered to Corax after Isstvan. The purpose of these ritualised deaths was to bind the souls of the tech-lords to their bodies, effectively granting them a form of immortality – all so that they would survive what was to come.

One by one, Corax used everything he had learned from his sons' experimentation on the prisoners to turn the tech-lords into grotesque monsters, bloated abominations of flesh whose every moment was naught but pure, distilled suffering. It took weeks, combining sorcery with genetic modification and cruel surgery, and when it was done, the tech-lords had become monsters, screaming and mewling at one from a hundred mouths, their consciousness trapped within idiotic brains, unable to exert any control over their horrible bodies – and unable to die. These grotesque masses of flesh were locked deep within the bowels of the Shadow of the Emperor, where Corax would often come to torture them even further.

Our knowledge of what happened after the destruction of Kiavahr comes from the testimony of a single Raven Guard. This warrior, a former Apothecary of the Nineteenth Legion, went mad with remorse at his own actions after the end of the Heresy. He fled from his brothers, and was discovered during the Scouring hiding among the human population of a feral world, providing them with medical care and protection from the beasts that haunted their world – all of which he had created himself before his crisis of conscience. Captured and brought back to the Sol system in chains – though he did not resist or attempt to escape – this renegade was interrogated extensively before being executed for his crimes against the God-Emperor. His name has since been forgotten, with only the title of "the Mourning One" remaining in the archives.

'It all made sense at the time. That, I think, is the true horror of it all.
When Corax told us that we could use cloning to replenish our numbers, I thought it was a brilliant idea. I still remembered the cries of my mother as the Legion took me from her, and I believed that avoiding another such sacrifice was well worth the research and mistakes made along the way.
When he asked that we make sure the clones could not turn against us … well, that was simple good sense. Regardless of the damage our measures could cause to their minds, the prospect of them going rabid was much, much worse. Our Legion would have been wiped out in retaliation.
When Malcador's spy saw the morgue, filled with the frozen bodies of our failures, preserved for further study … I could not let her escape. She would have exposed everything, and they wouldn't have understood why we had done it. They wouldn't have seen it had been necessary.
Then came the betrayal. We didn't call it that, of course. To us, it was a righteous rebellion against a tyrant who had deceived all of Mankind in a bid to become a god. So what if we had to shed the blood of those we once called brothers ? Was the future of our species not worth their sacrifice ?
The destruction of Kiavahr was easy after that. When Corax finally told us of his youth, of what he had suffered, we wanted nothing more than to avenge our father's pain. We didn't care that those we tormented to make this revenge complete were innocent. We were past caring at this point.
And then came the journey into this damnable realm, the plunge head first into the abyss in search of the truth – oh, that truth ! That terrible, terrible truth … The glorious madness of it all, the sound of our reality shattering, and the voices, the voices ! They were laughing, laughing at us, laughing at the war, laughing at everything ! They …'
[At this point in the record, the subject breaks down into incoherent screaming for several hours before recovering enough to be able to continue.]
'They watched then as they watch now … they watch from within, not from without … from within ...'
[The subject fell into silence after speaking these words, staring right in front of him without seeming to actually see anything. He only started speaking again six days later to continue his tale, regardless of the pressure applied to his body and mind by the Inquisition.]
Extract from the confession of the Mourning One

According to this confession, the act of finally claiming his vengeance, and its terrible cost, shattered what little remained of Corax' morality. The hideous experiments that it had required also pushed the Legion's Apothecaries, already teetering on the brink from their work in cloning, deep into amorality and outright madness. With Kiavahr gone, however, Corax was suddenly without a focus for his hatred. For several weeks, the Ravenlord brooded in orbit of the shattered husk of his homeworld, taking his frustration out on his captives. Meanwhile, his Legion descended further into corruption, with the Sorcerers who had cast the spells upon the tech-lords exploring new areas of their unholy craft. Ultimately, it was one of their rituals that gave Corax his new course of action.

Aboard the Shadow of the Emperor, a group of Sorcerers attempted to summon daemons and bind them into the bodies of gene-forged humans, designed by the Apothecaries to be more resilient to possession, in the hope of creating Possessed warriors without risking the lives of Astartes. But the ritual went horribly awry, ending in the death of not just the sacrifices but the seven Legion psykers involved as well. Worse, a powerful creature of the Warp incarnated itself through their ruined flesh. But instead of rampaging across the ship, it remained within the ritual circle, and called for Corax to come and meet it.

Ever since witnessing the power the Ultramarines had gained during the Isstvan Massacre, Corax had been jealous of Guilliman, and had sought a way to emulate him. The Ravenlord feared that, once the rebellion had succeeded, he might end up as just another servant of Guilliman rather than an equal. While vengeance against the Emperor had been Corax' primary motivation for siding with Guilliman, the desire to be free from the fear of destruction at his overlord's hands had also played a part, and he did not want to simply replace one master for another. And so, he chose to risk the meeting.

In the past, Corax had seen the result of botched teleports – when the flesh and armor of the unfortunate warriors was melted together. The creature that stood in the center of the ritual circle looked very much like one such failure, if exceptional in scope. Atrophied human limbs emerged from a mass of flesh and ceramite, and transhuman faces stared at him from various angles – the faces of the Librarians who had attempted the ritual. Yet as disgusting as the creature's appearance might be, Corax knew that it was nothing but a disguise covering up its true face, a puppet of flesh whose strings were pulled by some unnatural intelligence.
The mouths of all of the thing's six heads opened at once, and spoke with eerie synchronization :
'Corvus Corax, scion of the Emperor of Mankind. At last, we meet.'
'I am no son of this tyrant, creature,' growled the Primarch.
It laughed, a discordant chorus of voices that he knew – his sons' voices, though it had been a long time indeed since the last time he had heard any of them laugh.
'You cannot deny the blood that flows through your veins, lord of ravens. That is one of the many lessons you will need to learn on the path to glory.'

The creature introduced itself as an envoy from a greater power, the "Yellow King", of which nothing had ever been heard before, and nothing ever since. It offered to show Corax the path to true power and knowledge, claiming that the Ravenlord's ascension would serve the designs of its own master in the long term. The Primarch accepted, and the entity, that called itself the Voice, led the Nineteenth Legion to the place holding the revelations it promised : the Eye of Terror. It had been there that Guilliman had discovered the Primordial Truth and claimed the power of Dark Master of Chaos – and it would be there that Corax would be reborn into the horror he is to this day.

According to the Mourning One, the journey was exactly as peaceful as one would expect. Daemons attacked the fleet at every turn. Navigators and astropaths went mad, quickly followed by other members of the crew. The Voice guided the Raven Guard deeper and deeper into the Eye, and it seemed as if the Dark Gods themselves were trying to prevent the Legion from reaching its destination. Each of the Ruinous Powers sent one of its Daemon Lords against Corax, first to offer him power if he bent knee to that daemon's patron, then to try to kill him when he refused. The Ravenlord turned down each offer and defeated each daemon, and eventually, the fleet reached its destination.

At the very center of the Eye of Terror, there was – and likely still is – an anomaly in the fabric of space-time greater even than the rest of the madness that makes up the Warp Storm around it. In ancient times, the first human astronomers named such things black holes. Even at the height of the Dark Age of Technology, these all-consuming pits of infinite gravity weren't fully understood. The scraps of lore that have survived from that time indicate that while the black holes originate from purely physical causes, such is the power involved in their existence that they somehow interfere with the Warp itself despite not having any spiritual presence of their own.

The Voice told Corax that this black hole was the singularity that had been created when Slaanesh, Dark Prince of Chaos and Doom of the Eldar, had been brought into existence by the corruption of the Children of Isha. And if Corax wanted to claim the power the Voice had promised him, he would need to take his fleet right into it. Why Corax accepted such an obviously dangerous course of action is unknown to us. Perhaps he saw something in the infinite darkness of the black hole that called to him, perhaps his mind was manipulated by his guide, or perhaps he was indulging in some suicidal impulse.

The repenting Raven Guard never spoke of what happened when the Legion plunged into the black hole at Corax' command. According to records, all attempts to make him talk about it ended with him either remaining stoically silent or descending into wordless screams and rants that caused fugues of madness in all who heard them and malfunctions in recording devices. But while we might never know the details, we have other sources – forbidden scrolls written by arch-heretics long after the Heresy, and psychic nightmares haunting the Imperial psykers who lived when the Nineteenth crossed the ultimate threshold. According to those, Corax was shown the true nature of Chaos, that which so few of the Lost and the Damned actually understand and which is kept secret from all but the most trustworthy of Imperial servants.

Corax learned about the near-mythical War in Heaven, tens of millions of years before the Age of Imperium. He witnessed with his own eyes the conflict between the Necrontyrs and the Old Ones, and was shown the distortion in the Warp created by this godly conflict – one that makes the Heresy pale into insignificance by comparison. He saw how this perversion eventually caused the Fall of the Eldar, annihilating their aeons-old empire in a single moment. And most damning of all, he saw how the taint of Chaos had fused with the soul of Man, feeding from its darkness and dragging it ever closer to Ruin. The entire Legion shared in these unholy revelations, and those who survived were utterly broken by the realization that the very universe in which they lived was tainted by an evil older than their entire species, and one that had owned them long before they had been born.

'If you truly know all that was, is and will be, then answer me this,' Corax challenged the incorporeal Voice as his surroundings started to dissolve into blackness once more. 'What does my future hold ?'
'A choice,' whispered the Voice right in his ear. Now it had only once voice instead of six, and it was not one that belonged to any of his dead Librarians – nor to anything human at all. 'You will go to Terra, to join in Guilliman's last strike against the Emperor. And your brother, Horus, will be there. If you fight him, you will kill him, and he will be free from the shackles that he wears now as well as those he will have to suffer if you let him die at another's hands. But the Knights of Saturn's moon will fight through the Firstborn's horde, and your rebellion will be defeated.'
'And what is my other choice ?'
'Go to Titan yourself, and leave Horus to die under the fangs of the Fallen Angel, his spirit consumed by the thirst of the Dark Prince's slave. Do this, and the Emperor will fall at Guilliman's hand …'

Corax himself was convinced that what he had seen meant that the Emperor had to be defeated more than ever – that the only way for Mankind to survive was to accept the Primordial Truth, no matter how ugly it might be. He surrendered to the primeval evil of Chaos and was remade into a Daemon Primarch of Chaos Undivided, a being of immense power – power enough to guide his Legion out of the abyss in which they had willingly cast themselves, and back into reality. This ascension caused psykers all across the galaxy to scream as one, their minds suddenly swarmed with incomprehensible visions. The Astronomican flickered, and on all Craftworlds, Farseers fell to their knees while the Infinity Circuit howled in agony. Even Lion El'Jonson, who had by then returned from the Maelstrom as the Daemon Primarch of Tzeentch, was struck by the psychic wave caused by Corax' transformation. Nightmares of shattered causality, the agonized screams of reality, the birth cry of damnation and the last gasp of hope, are but some of the terrible meanings pieced together from that psychic cataclysm.

In the gestation pods, he saw his own hypocrisy reflected back at him as he remembered the ranks of his cloned warriors – how he had denounced the Emperor for using him and his brothers as tools, while creating his own sacrificial pawns. But he also saw that it did not matter. The strong used the weak – that was the way of things. The Emperor had been wrong in that the Primarchs had been created too strong, strong enough that it was inevitable they would see the truth sooner or later. What He had used in their creation had bound them to the very thing He was so foolishly hoping to destroy. Corax could understand his father's will to accomplish this – in a way, he even admired the determination of the old monster. But he had seen too much to believe it was possible to defeat the Primordial Annihilator. His father was deceiving Himself just as much as He was deceiving the Imperium. Chaos could not be defeated. It had existed for far too long, grown far too powerful. The only choice was to either embrace it or be destroyed by it.
Alarms started to ring as his presence abruptly became more real, but he ignored them and the savants suddenly aware of his intrusion and fleeing and shouting. He was looking at the huge machinery on the other side of the room, and he had recognized it for what it was – an immense Geller Field device, reinforced with runes engraved on its circuitry. Slowly, he walked toward it, feeling the weight of destiny grow heavier with every step, until at last he stood right before the cables that alimented the protective field.
You know what you have to do, said the Voice before fading away, never to be heard again.
And he did. But before he could move, the door to the laboratory opened suddenly, and power flooded the room – power Corax knew well. He turned, and saw his father standing there, fully armored and showing the aspect He only showed when about to kill.
'I will not let you destroy all that I have worked for,' said the golden giant. His light burned Corax' eyes, but he refused to let out the tears that would appease the pain. He had long vowed never to cry again.
'It is far, far too late for that,' he snarled in response, and plunged his lightning claws into the Geller Field's generators.
Raw energy coursed back up his claws and right into his body, tearing him apart on an atomic level. Yet before the current could destroy him, the Geller Field went down, and the Warp poured into the room. It reached toward the incubation pods, but before Corax could see what it would do with them, he was snatched away from the laboratory and his imminent death – and plunged into a smoldering cauldron of primal power …

Soon after escaping from the Eye of Terror, the battered fleet of the Nineteenth Legion received the astropathic call of Guilliman. The Traitor Legions were about to conquer the last system standing between them and Terra, and the Arch-Traitor was calling the rest of his renegade siblings to him for the final battle against the Emperor and His lackeys. Of the Voice, there was no sign – the Yellow King's envoy had vanished when the Legion had crossed the event horizon. Never again would any of the Legion's warriors cross the path of their guide to damnation.

'Oh, I will come, my dear brother' said Corax to the still image of Roboute, as if it could hear him and carry his words back to the Avenging Son. And maybe it could, reflected Vincente Sixx. Stranger things had happened in the last few … had those only been days ? It felt like centuries.
'My lord,' he dared to say, kneeling before the shadow-shrouded silhouette of his Primarch. 'Our ships are badly damaged. And we have taken considerable losses. Most of the clones are dead, those who aren't are … changed, and our Chief Apothecary is … lost. If we go to Terra now, we will be unable to provide any significant aid to Lord Guilliman.'
The gaze of the Ravenlord descended upon him, and he felt his blood freeze in his veins.
'That,' replied the Primarch, 'will not be a problem, Chief Apothecary Sixx.'
Somehow, the promotion did not feel as good as he would have thought.

The Siege of Terra

'And lo, the carrion birds have descended upon the ancient home of Mankind,
Bringing with them the corruption of blood and flesh, the ruination of soul.
In the heart of their master burns a hatred and bitterness unlike any other,
And he will not stop until all good in the galaxy has been snuffed out,
Until all have suffered as he has, for vengeance is all he has left.'
Excerpt from the Canticle of the Dead

For all the power Corax had personally gained in the Eye of Terror, the Nineteenth Legion had taken grievous losses. Tens of thousands of Replica Astartes had died, their weakling souls unable to resist the fire of revelation. The human crews of the Raven Guard's ships had either died, gone insane, or been merged with their vessels, performing their function for the rest of eternity. The surviving Raven Guards were barely able to get the fleet moving, let alone fight. But Corax had a solution, the same one he had used when he had first taken command of the Legion, though this time, the means of its implementation would be even darker.

All across the fleet, Apothecaries set to work, their minds overflowing with the unholy knowledge that had been bestowed upon them in the Great Eye. They harvested the corpses of the dead crew and used them to clone tens of thousands of mutants, nearly mindless creatures that nonetheless had inherited some of the memories of the originals – just enough to perform the most basic yet vital duties of the crew. With the help of the Legion's Sorcerers, they summoned the daemons that had consumed the souls of the most valuable crew members and bound them into new bodies, forcing them to serve the Raven Guard by functioning as overseers for the clones.

Meanwhile, with the help of his new Chief Apothecary Vincente Sixx, Corax was expanding the cloning labs aboard the Shadow of the Emperor. Entire sections of the Gloriana-Class warship were transformed into horrible biological machines that pulsated with infernal vitality and spat out hundreds of new cloned Astartes by the day. These creatures, though battle-ready, were hideous monstrosities – the first Spawn Marines, as the Ravenlord himself called them. By the time the fleet reunited with the rest of the Traitor Legions armada, every ship was teeming with hundreds of Spawn Marines under the control of the remaining purebloods.

If Guilliman was surprised by the transformation of his brother, he did not make any mention of it during the preparation for the assault on Sol. As the Traitor Primarchs gathered – Leman Russ and Jaghatai Khan conspicuous by their absence – it was decided that Corax and his Legion would be tasked with securing the back of the invasion force on Terra. The Sol system was, after all, the heart of the Imperium, and the place Perturabo had spent years preparing for war. Traitor intelligence indicated that there were hundreds of space forts spread across the system, all of which could hide a secreted blade ready to strike where the rebel armada was the most vulnerable.

Strangely, Corax agreed to what many saw as an insulting assignment. He only asked that some of his warriors be allowed to deploy on Terra, arguing that their infiltration skills would be very useful in breaching the Imperial Palace. None of those present were ready to argue with what the Ravenlord had become, and so the change in plan was approved. The traitor armada emerged from the Warp on the edge of the Sol's system, and the first phase of the Heresy's final battle began. Soon, the orbital defences of Terra were broken, and the siege of the Imperial Palace began as the Traitor Legions and their allies landed on the Throneworld in their millions.

Among them were the warriors chosen by Corax to represent his Legion in the greatest battle of Mankind's long and bloody history. Only the greatest of his purebloods had been judged worthy of this honor, and they fought at the forefront of the Siege. Hunter-killer teams stalked by squads of loyalists and wreaked havoc within the walls of the Palace, drawing precious forces away from the walls in order to track them down. Others fought on the battlements alongside the other Traitor Legions – and the greatest of those was Nykona Sharrowkyn, who would in later years become a legend as a champion of Chaos Undivided.

Nykona Sharrowkyn, He-Who-Hunts-Above
There are few beings capable of inspiring dread in the hearts of a Legionary, but Nykona Sharrowkyn is one of them. Taken by the Raven Guard as a child from an unknown world, he was transformed into an Astartes prior to the Primarch's discovery on Kiavahr. Soon, he showed incredible ability both at the arts of stealth and with the blade, becoming one of the greatest swordsman of all the Legions – though due to the Legion's isolation, this only became clear during the Heresy. Unlike most duellists, he specialized in dual-wielding, his mind capable of keeping track of the complex dance of both blades as he fought human and xenos alike. Combined with his talents as a Shadow-walker, and there was nothing Sharrowkyn could not kill once he was pointed at a target by his commanders.
Like all the Raven Guards veterans of the Heresy, Sharrowkyn was changed by the Legion's first journey into the Eye of Terror. He returned armed with a pair of strange blades, forged from an unknown material that does not seem to obey the laws of physics. He also appeared to have fused with his armor, unable to remove it, but also no longer needing any mortal sustenance. During the Siege of Terra, Sharrowkyn fought and killed many heroes of the Imperium, from Imperial Army commanders to skitarii alphas and up to Chapter Masters of the loyal Space Marine Legions. When the Third and Eighth Legions arrived to save the day for the loyalists, Sharrowkyn fought against Lucius the Reborn and killed him as the son of Fulgrim tried to save a Thousand Son Seer named Revuel Arvida, whom he slew minutes later. During the Heresy, Revuel had written several prophecies that have since come true over the course of the last millennia without exception, leading some in the Inquisition to wonder if there was more to this two particular killings.
Sharrowkyn has survived to this day, becoming a dreadful legend both among the Imperium and in the ranks of the Lost and the Damned. He is said to have become the executioner of the Primordial Annihilator, the one dispatched by the unfathomable will of Chaos to slay its chosen victims. None have ever survived crossing blades with him, nor did any of his targets ever escape his hunt. Yet unlike a champion akin to Sigismund the Destroyer, Sharrowkyn never seems to revel in his triumph, merely moving on to the next target with cold detachment. He might ally with a warband for a time – whether or not it is led by one of his Legion brothers is irrelevant – if it will help him get close to his target, but these alliances never last long, and he himself does not lead any forces.
Primitive human tribes across the galaxy whisper legends of the dark hunter, the slayer of heroes who stalks the realms of gods and men alike. It is among these feral tribes that the Inquisition learned of the base translation of Sharrowkyn's Warp-given title : He-Who-Hunts-Above. The translation loses some of the meaning of the title in the feral tribes' language (which also, of course, differs greatly from the original daemonic pronunciation). The title refers to how Sharrowkyn seems to always be greater than his foes, and sent by an entity "above" even the primitive gods these people tend to worship – whether they are a reflection of the Emperor or a disguise of the Ruinous Powers.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Raven Guard was fighting across the entire Sol system. As Guilliman had predicted, Perturabo had hidden hundreds of small forces – many of them had come from outside Sol during the Heresy and weren't trusted enough to be allowed on Terra. The Raven Guard's full numbers were required to contain them, as well as maintain the blockade of Mars. The Red Planet had been reclaimed by the Iron Warriors at great cost, and Kelbor-Hal, Fabricator-General and supreme leader of the Mechanicum, was determined to honor his oath to Terra just as Terra had honored its to Mars.

But unlike what he had promised Guilliman, Corax himself did not take part in these battles, nor did he supervise from his flagship. Instead, the Ravenlord descended upon Titan, fortress of the Grey Knights, accompanied by the worst of the monsters he had created on the way to Terra – creatures so monstrous it was impossible to distinguish them from the Neverborn brought by the Master of Shadows. Leaving the leadership of the system-wide battle to his commanders, Corax joined forces with the Daemon Prince Be'lakor, acting on a prophecy he had received in the Eye of Terror. It is recorded that the Daemon Primarch clashed against Janus, the legendary First Grand Master of the Grey Knights. Neither of them prevailed, and the battle ended when one of them – the archives do not record which – withdrew from the duel.

The Battle of Titan was the first deployment of the Grey Knights in battle, as well as the first time the men and women chosen by Malcador to be the first Inquisitors fought against the corruption of the Warp in their new role. For months, both of these forces fought together, human and transhuman, against the tide of daemons and flesh-crafted horrors led by Be'lakor and Corax. Losses on both sides were terrible, but the servants of Ruin cared nothing for the lives of their soldiers, while every combatant lost by the Imperium was irreplaceable. Yet eventually, victory came to the Imperium.

Without Corax to guide them, the commanders of the Raven Guard had failed to prepare for the sudden arrival of the Emperor's Children and Night Lords Legions. The two fleets emerged from the Webway and struck the traitor armada with vengeful force. Corax was forced to leave Titan, which soon led to Be'lakor being banished by the Grey Knights, and rejoin his fleet to lead the battle against the Third Legion in orbit around Terra. That day, the Inquisition and the Grey Knights learned a valuable lesson : that the greatest weapon in their arsenal was their enemy's own nature, its innate tendency to destroy itself through mistakes or outright betrayal.

Driven to desperation by the arrival of the Third and Eighth Legions, and the tidings that the Twelfth and Seventeenth would not be long in coming, Guilliman led the final assault on the Imperial Palace. Still scattered across the Sol system by the individual pursuits of its commanders, the Raven Guard fleet was unable to properly contain the Emperor's Children, and the Third Legion's flagship was able to position itself above the Imperial Palace just in time for Fulgrim to teleport in the deepest chamber of the Cavea Ferrum and strike at Guilliman before he could deal the final blow to the Emperor.

Post-Heresy : Legacy of Horrors

'In the darkness of eternal night, prepare for the hunt to continue.
The light of dawn, that which brings salvation, is gone, and shall return
Nevermore. Nevermore. Nevermore. Nevermore. Nevermore. Nevermore ...
So embrace the dark things hidden deep within, beyond the sight of mortal men,
Let loose the horror and become one with it, welcome it into your blood,
For this galaxy has place left only for abominations and monsters.'
From a ruined parchment recovered in the den of a cult of the Raven after purging by the Inquisition

After the fall of Guilliman, Corax took his Legion back to the Eye of Terror. Though the Dark Master of Chaos had fallen, the Ravenlord was still confident that ultimately, victory would come to the Primordial Annihilator – in his eyes, it was inevitable. The defeat at Terra was merely a small setback in a war that had been going for tens of millions of years. In the end, though the Imperium might endure for a few millennia, it would fall like all empires fell – and the Raven Guard would be here to bring forth a new age for Mankind when that happened.

And in order to prepare for that time, the Nineteenth Legion made preparations on its way to the Eye of Terror. At Corax' command, the fleet divided in many groups, each taking a different road through the ruined Imperium toward the same destination. Each group stopped on nearly every human world it passed by, but it was not to lay waste or enslave its people. Instead, the Raven Guard descended upon these worlds under the cover of night, abducting a few members of the ruling class and releasing them a few days later with no memory of what had happened to them. These individuals, fearful of the hole in their memories, rushed to return to their homes, eager to resume their lives and forget about this unsettling episode. But this reclaimed normalcy was a lie, for these abductees were no longer purely human – instead, they were Children of the Raven, and their bloodlines would plague the Imperium for millennia to come.

The Children of the Raven
There are many stories in the Imperium of noble families with dark secrets, hiding misshapen cousins in the attic, or keeping the psychotic streak of a black sheep under wraps to avoid a loss of prestige. In many cases, such degeneracy can be traced back to inbreeding over thousands of years, due to the elitism and obsession with the purity of the bloodline that is so common across the Imperium's ruling class. But in some cases, the corruption runs much deeper, and when it comes to the surface, the results are much more horrifying. These are the Children of the Raven, and the Inquisition has worked tirelessly for ten thousand years in order to keep their existence secret.
During the Heresy, and sporadically afterwards, the Nineteenth Legion has created the Children and placed them in the Imperium, waiting for their work to blossom and cause untold damage and horror. The Children are hidden lineages of genetic abominations, humans who carry within them the taint of the Raven Guard's genetic perversion. The root of every such lineage is a single individual, captured and experimented upon in order to place the curse within his genes – a mix of mutation, genetic engineering, and the raw insanity of the Warp, often based on a sample from the twisted tech-lords of Kiavahr. These individuals will then spread their corruption to their children, and them to their own. Only a few of these bloodlines are aware of what they are – the Raven Guards seem to take great pleasure in the ignorance of their tools in the Long War against the Imperium. Certainly many an Inquisitor has prayed the Emperor for forgiveness after being forced to kill an entire family down to the newborn in order to ensure the complete purge of a lineage of Children.
No two bloodlines are twisted in identical ways, but there are patterns that repeat themselves – method to the madness of Corax and his scions. Some strains only cause monsters to appear every few generations, causing a series of gruesome murders suspiciously similar to those described in sealed records of local law enforcements about cases from decades past. These are the sources of many hive legends, telling of were-beasts and bogeymen that prey upon those who wander in the streets after dark. While dangerous to individuals unlucky enough to cross their path, they pose little threat to the Imperium as a whole. Still, many a team of unprepared Acolytes has perished under the claws and fangs of the beast responsible for the killings they were investigating, never knowing they were facing the ancient legacy of a Daemon Primarch.
But other bloodlines are more dramatic in the changes they cause, creating titanic masses of twisted flesh, endowed with psychic powers capable of tearing apart the veil of reality and usher in daemon incursions of a unique flavour. Such horrible things are often worshipped as gods by deluded cults, praying for the day when they are "elevated" and brought into the realm of their divine master. These are the strains that, if allowed to reach maturity, require nothing less than a Grey Knight intervention to purge. Fortunately, there are always signs long before things reach this point, and the Inquisition is ever watchful for them. These signs include (but are never limited to) a sudden rise in mutation rates among newborn, specific visions of twisted cities of flesh haunting those psychically sensitive, and hive-quakes as the creature's psychic power is agitated by its tormented nightmares. Unfortunately, these signs are also difficult to distinguish from any other source of daemonic incursion, which leads to members of the Ordos unaware of the Children of the Raven facing them unprepared for what awaits them. According to the Grey Knights, the incursions caused by the Children are strange indeed, for they do not so much bring daemons onto the world of matter as twist all flesh caught within them until it is all but impossible to distinguish what was once an Imperial citizen from a horror birthed in the Sea of Souls.
While some Children of the Raven revel in their impurity, most have no idea of what they are, and react to the changes in their flesh with horror and disgust. In some cases, their kin might have kept records of the previous occurrences of this "family disease", which might help deal with the transformation but will never provide any cure, for there are none. Many turn to prayer, calling upon the God-Emperor to save them – but their souls are damned from before they are even born, and their fate is inevitable. Only through death can they avoid succumbing to the monster within.
Even those Children lucky enough not to manifest the traits of their line are still haunted, tormented creatures, their nights plagued by nightmares of blood and madness. Few live long lives, though it is rare indeed that they kill themselves before having sired children of their own, ensuring the continuity of their accursed lineage. Some of the greatest heretics the Imperium has ever known have risen from their ranks, as the corruption of their family, unable to express itself through their flesh, instead took hold in their mind. Every bloodline of the Children has a distinct pattern to its manifestations, a set of criteria both genetic and mystical that determines whether or not any individual will express the strain. Some families attempt to uncover this pattern in the desperate hope of preventing further manifestations – but these efforts never work out.
In recent times, with the threat of the Genestealers discovered by the Ordo Xenos, there have been some incidents of the two threats being mistaken for the other. However, it has been found that the Children of the Raven are immune to the Genestealer's Kiss – the repugnant method by which the xenos infects another being with its foul genetics. The Raven's blood, it seems, does not tolerate any other influence upon those it has claimed as its own. A small cabal of Radical Inquisitors who have dedicated their lives to rooting out the taint of the Children have used this to their advantage in a truly ruthless manner. They use captive Genestealers to deliberately infect members of families suspected of carrying the Ravenlord's touch. For while no one has ever managed to create a mean to reliably test someone for the taint of Corax' corruption, there are ways to detect the genetic taint of the Tyranid brood. If the test subject is infected, then it means that his family does not belong to the Children, and the subject is executed after being given the Emperor's blessing. If he is not, however, then his entire bloodline must be purged. Some other Inquisitors decry this practice as both inhumane, wasteful, and potentially dangerous. They believe that it is possible that some humans are just naturally immune to the Genestealer's corruption, a gift that could be very useful to Mankind but that these Radicals threaten to make extinct. Still, this practice is a lot less dangerous and morally tainted that the few Radicals who go as far as employing the services of Children in their warband, keeping them under control through a variety of means.

Their mission complete, the warbands reunited in the Eye of Terror, and the Nineteenth Legion followed its Primarch toward their new homeworld. There they built their fortresses, and the Apothecaries constructed the ignominious daemonic incubators from which the Spawn Marines would emerge for thousands of years to come. This construction, however, didn't go smoothly, as the influence of the Eye of Terror caused the Spawn Marines created to be almost all too mutated to even carry a weapon. Without their cannon fodder, the Raven Guards could not expand their domains in the Great Eye as the other Legions were doing at the time.

As a result, when the Legion Wars erupted between the Blood Angels and the Imperial Fists, and then spread to the rest of the Eye, the Raven Guard took little part in the conflict. After a few attempts to attack their homeworld ended up with the broken survivors fleeing for their lives, the rest of the Traitor Legions learned to stay away from the territory of the Nineteenth. But the Legion Wars would also bring the Raven Guard the solution to their recruiting problems.

The beginning of the Legion Wars within the Eye of Terror caused the end of the Clone Wars outside it, and the arch-renegade Fabius Bile found himself hounded at every turn. Seeking to avoid the wrath of both Blood Angels and Imperial Fists, he came to the Raven Guard. With him came the remnants of the Black Legion he had created from the corpse of Horus Lupercal. An alliance was forged between Corax and the Clonelord, with the Ravenlord offering asylum to the former Chief Apothecary. Bile learned much about gene-smithing, cloning, the creation of Astartes, and the true nature of the Warp and how to manipulate it. In return, the renegade Child of the Emperor helped the Apothecaries of the Nineteenth Legion stabilize their spawning incubators against the mutating energies of the Eye of Terror, finally allowing the Raven Guard to replenish its ranks with tens of thousands of Spawn Marines.

Eventually, Bile and his Raven Guard hosts parted ways. But, surprisingly, this separation wasn't violent, ending in fire and betrayal are so many covenants do among the damned. The Clonelord realized that, while his interests and the Apothecaries' laid in similar directions, their ultimate goals differed. Bile's goals then – and perhaps even now, though the mind of this madman is impossible to know – was to create a new, stronger human form, one that would be able to survive no matter what, even without the aid of Chaos. The Raven Guard, however, wants to fuse Warp and flesh into a perfect union, allowing Mankind to evolve into something beyond mortality. The Clonelord saw the Dark Gods as nothing but pretenders, false divinities holding trillions of souls in thrall through lies. This blasphemy against the Primordial Truth could have caused him to be slain by the Raven Guard, and yet they did not. Perhaps they thought that one day the son of Fulgrim would come around to their viewpoint, perhaps they knew that whatever his beliefs, Bile was doing Chaos' work. Regardless of the truth, Bile left the Legion's homeworld with his servants and the blessings of the Ravenlord in order to continue his research.

According to legend, this temporary alliance created one thing beyond the stabilized incubators : a perfect hybrid of humanity and daemonkind, born of Fabius' own genes mixed with others and what passes for blood in the Neverborn. This creature, called Melusine, is little more than an obscure legend even in the Eye of Terror – she has never been seen in Imperial space. Perhaps she cannot leave the Warp Storm, in the same way daemons are unable to. What is certain is that the Raven Guard's Apothecaries still believes in her existence, and search for her across the Eye, thinking that within her blood lies the secret to the union they have been seeking for ten thousand years.

To this day, the Apothecaries of the Nineteenth Legion lament their separation from Fabius Bile, heretical as his views on Chaos might be. They respect his insane genius immensely, and are still hoping that someday, the Raven Guard and the Black Legion will join forces to bring their horrifying wonders to the galaxy, the Clonelord finally illuminated on the Primordial Truth. There are debates among the Inquisition whether the Raven Guard or the Clonelord are responsible for the greatest genetic atrocities. But these debates are secret affairs, held only in the few moments of respite of individuals burdened by one of the most terrible responsibilities of the Holy Ordos.

For while the Raven Guard might not be the most powerful of all the Traitor Legions in strictly military terms – though the hordes of Spawn Marines are still a considerable threat – they are the one the Inquisition is the most wary of. The Dark Angels might plot in the shadows for hundreds of years, waiting for their dread designs to come to fruition, but even they lack the corruptive ability of the Ravenlord's get. The sons of Sanguinius might spread their delusions to all those around them, but they cannot twist the flesh and soul of generations yet to be born. And the Disciples of the Dragon, for all their cruelty and arrogance, are nothing but deluded fools embracing the false promises of Vulkan, not a threat to Mankind's very essence.

Knowledge of the Nineteenth is heavily restricted, as madness has always plagued those who know too much about it. Only a very select group is allowed to know about the Raven Guard in the Holy Ordos. Unlike with many other secrets of the Inquisition, this is not to prevent heresy and betrayal, but truly to safeguard those not strong enough to endure and go on after being exposed to these terrible possibilities. The war fought against the Raven Guard is one of secrecy even by the Inquisition's standard, and the burden of keeping the truth hidden even from one's fellow Inquisitors lies heavy upon the most resolute of minds. Even the loyal Space Marines who fight against the creatures of the Ravenlord are too detached from humanity to truly realize the scope of the threat they pose. New recruits into this circle of brave, unsung heroes are chosen from among those who confront the mortal servants of Corax – the loose gathering of heretics identified as the Cult of the Raven.

The Cult of the Raven
Among all the heretical cults to ever plague the Imperium, few are more dangerous than the deluded worshippers of Corax. Commonly known as the Cult of the Raven, these sects are spread widely across the Imperium, each cell rarely making contact with the others. The adherents of the cult believe that the Imperium enforces a lie upon its population with its pretence of civilization and false faith, keeping the human species from fulfilling its true potential. To them, the Children of the Raven are the incarnation of that potential, and they worship them as such. It isn't unheard of for Raven-touched bloodlines to be observed by the cult for generations, waiting for someone to manifest the trait of their dark heritage. These unfortunates are then abducted, worshipped and kept prisoner in equal measure. The obsession of Imperial nobility with keeping track of their bloodlines makes it easy for the cult to track the descendants of the monsters of previous centuries. More than one scholar, tasked with the keeping of genealogies, is actually an agent of the cult, using his position to search for the spawn of those families that were purged by the Inquisition long ago.
One of the most dangerous tools of the cult is the ritual of the Dark Conduit. This ritual, which involves human sacrifice and prayers to the Ravenlord, grants knowledge of the Warp at the cost of sanity. All new inductees into the cult go through the Dark Conduit, and the most veteran members undergo it multiple times, each one consuming a little more of their sanity and replacing it with unhallowed lore. The ritual was designed by Corax himself during the Heresy, when he sought a mean to surpass Guilliman's own knowledge of the Empyrean, and is contained within countless grimoires his agents circulate in the Imperium. A cell of the cult is generally started by someone stumbling upon one such book and performing the ritual – or by a member of another cell sent by his master to start a new branch of the cult.
As a result of this practice, the cultists of the Raven are distributed between madmen and fanatics, depending on how they reacted to their initiation. They rarely involve the elite of the Imperium, save for those belonging to the Children. Cultists keep up appearances as best they can, helping each other to survive on the fringes of society, where their madness might go unnoticed. They gather and perform dark rituals, begging the Ruinous Powers for their blessings. Most of them have lost all sense of self-preservation and will not hesitate to offer their own life as sacrifice to their Dark Gods. Those who react best to the Dark Conduit, losing parts of their soul rather than their minds, become magi, and guide the cult, perform the rituals, and interpret the ramblings of their more demented brethren.
The dream of the cultists is to be visited by an emissary of the Ravenlord and made into Children of the Raven themselves. To that end, they pursue various goals. They tend to focus on gathering forbidden lore more than weapons, for pursuit of the Primordial Truth is paramount to them : Corax' experiments are, after all, proof that knowledge truly is power. As a result, many cultists are malefic scholars of varying skill, seeking sources of lore beyond the Conduit. Some explore the depths of the underhive and other abandoned places in search of the temples built by previous incarnations of the cult, eager to plunder their secrets. Sometimes, they uncover the remnants of a Child of the Raven, left to rot after its worshippers were wiped out, and work toward its resurrection. Others perform dark rituals and gene-splicing experiments in an attempt to emulate their dread raven god. The cultists also target other heretical groups worshipping the Dark Gods, stealing their relics and torturing their leaders for their own unholy knowledge.
One of the tasks of the cult, whispered to them by the Daemon Primarch through the Dark Conduit, is to help spreading the Children of the Raven across the galaxy. Female cultists will seduce the sons of known bloodlines before vanishing to rear the child into the cult, where it will be the focus of attention. Seen as a direct link to the cult's masters, these damned souls are regarded with reverence and jealousy alike. Once grown, the Children will travel to other worlds of the Imperium where the cult exist, where they are welcomed as dark messiahs. Interbreeding with cultists exposed to the Dark Conduit often cause changes in the strain, resulting in a new type of eldritch horror being created.
The cult is ruthless in ensuring its existence remains secret, not hesitating to kill family members who aren't members if they learn too much. Outwardly, the cultists' actions are difficult to distinguish from those of more mundane criminals : gruesome murders, abductions, thief, and so on. But when the time is right and their Legion masters attack, they suddenly unleash everything at their disposal, revealing that they are far more dangerous than the authorities believed. This also happens when the cult has been cornered and is about to be purged, be it by the Arbites or the Inquisition. Witches, mutants and daemonhosts are set loose, and waves of madness spread across the planet as any Children the cult might be keeping are driven into a frenzy. The façade of control is swept away, revealing the true monsters all cultists become when partaking of the Conduit's tainted knowledge. Driven mad by the revelations of the Nineteenth Legion, they will never flee or surrender once pushed into the open, embracing death in the service of their foul god rather than risk facing his wrath.

The greatest event involving the Raven Guard and its servants since the Heresy was the War of the Living World, which happened at the dawn of the 37th Millennium, a few centuries after the end of the Age of Apostasy. Using the atrocities of Vandire as cover, an extensive cabal of Children and cultists of the Raven had gathered in a single organization. Their purpose was to breed different lineages of the Children of the Raven together in order to create what they believed would be a "perfect being". This was a massive undertaking, involving resources gathered and hoarded for several thousands of years. Children of the Raven were involved both as test subjects and as sponsors, using their position within the Imperium to seize resources and locations where the blasphemous experiments could be conducted.

At first, the results were both wondrous and terrifying, with creatures of unprecedented psychic potential or physical might being created. The Raven Guard Legion itself took notice of the efforts of its mortal servants, and a handful of Apothecaries travelled across the galaxy to join their skills to the endeavour. Eventually, the cabal decided to gather all of its eugenic programs to a single location : a nearly forgotten planet in the Maxil Beta System. The planet had no name safe for a meaningless combination of numbers and letters in Imperial records, and even that was quietly erased by the cabal's influence. The things created in the gene-labs of this facility were incredible, and the Legion dared to believe that, at long last, the time had finally come to destroy the Imperium using the results of the work being performed there.

But before their dread ambitions could be completed, the psychic waves radiating from the planet alerted the Imperium. On Titan, the Prognosticators of the Grey Knights sensed the threat that was growing in Maxil Beta, one that had already surpassed the ability of their order to deal with without gathering the full strength of the Chapter in one single location. Even as the fires of the Age of Apostasy were dying down, such a thing was impossible, and so the Grey Knights called for assistance. Such was the magnitude of the threat foreseen by the Prognosticators that the host assembled counted forces from several Loyalist Legions as well as entire Regiments of the Imperial Guard and thousands of the newly-created Sisters of Battle. Together, this army was an example of the strength of the resurgent Imperium after its slow diminishment under Vandire's rule.

The journey through the Warp toward Maxil Beta was difficult, as the psychic echoes of the horrors bred by the cultists set the Sea of Souls in turmoil. Many ships were lost, and all suffered from a plague of nightmares and madness among the crew. Daemonic incursions occurred every time a Geller Field so much as flickered. The Imperial Guard transports suffered most of all, for they lacked the wards of the Grey Knights or the burning faith of the Sisters of Battle. In fact, the campaign would help solidify the place of the Adepta Sororitas in the Imperium, despite the doubts of many – most famously the Word Bearers.

When the fleet finally arrived, it did so piecemeal, as its various elements had been thrown away from one another by the currents of the Warp. Fortunately, the heretics hiding in the system had relied on secrecy to protect them until their great work was complete, and had little in the way of defences. Only a handful of Nineteenth Legion ships and vessels stolen from the Imperial Navy patrolled it against intruders and lost travellers, ensuring now word of the facility got out. The void battle began dangerously for the Imperium, as scattered groups of ships were attacked by the system's defenders, but as more ships arrived the tide of battle was turned, and the Chaos ships fled to the edge of the system, leaving the path open to the actual planet.

Individual labs were scattered across the surface of the planet, each breeding different manners of horrors within its walls. The Imperial commanders' strategy was to destroy these factories of abominations one by one around the landing zone in an increasing circle until the entire planet was cleansed. As soon as the first troops touched ground, however, things took a turn for the worse. The cultists had had time to prepare, and they let loose a host of nightmarish creations upon the Imperial forces. Thousands died within hours, but progress was still made, and several of the laboratories and flesh-pits were purged with fire and blade.

Then, the leader of the cultists, a Child of the Raven who had once belonged to the highest Imperial nobility, made a decision that would have terrible consequences. This arch-heretic, known only as Ambrosius, had been the one who had first started the cabal centuries ago, his unique manifestation of his tainted bloodline keeping him alive for all that time without visible degeneration. As the Imperium pressed on, he deliberately sabotaged the containment of the worst creations of the breeding programs, allowing them to rampage freely, killing hundreds of heretics in minutes. The death toll made the Warp boil, fuelling yet further mutations among the creatures, which in turn increased the agitation of the Warp – and on and on, in a vicious cycle. Eventually, the laboratories' creations devolved into one giant mass of still living flesh that spread across the entire planet. And at the center of it all stood Ambrosius, the only one to have retained his own mind amidst the degeneration and madness. The Child of the Raven had taken control of the world-sized cancer, and was guiding it toward the Imperial forces. Meanwhile, the Raven Guards still present on the planet left, abandoning the efforts of their servants rather than risk being subsumed by their own unholy creation.

Not even the bravest servant of the Emperor could be expected to face such a nightmarish tide of flesh, and the Imperium was forced to abandon the planet after thousands of Imperial Guards and Sisters of Battles were claimed by the abomination crawling on its surface. Yet the Grey Knights sensed that the psychic potential of the single organism was growing by the minute as its central mind – Ambrosius – assumed more and more control over it. Already the Warp in Maxil Beta was on the verge of breaking through the veil of reality. Should Ambrosius fully take control, he would become something very much akin to a god – something the Imperium had no hope to match. And so, the Grey Knights launched a final, desperate raid on the planet's surface, aiming to destroy the body of Ambrosius and annihilate his consciousness with a combined psychic assault.

The brotherhood of Grey Knights deployed for this was under psychic attack as soon as they teleported on the planet's surface. Ambrosius detected them immediately, and sent hordes of shapeless horrors after all. For a moment, it seemed as if the mission was doomed to failure, and the Imperium's future was grim. Then, out of nowhere, another warrior wearing the silver of the Chapter came to the rescue of the beleaguered brotherhood. None among the Grey Knights knew him, but such was the desperation of the situation that they accepted him in their group during their final rush toward Ambrosius' physical body.

The confrontation of the arch-heretic's mutated form is considered one of the Chapter's greatest battles. Six warriors of the original brotherhood plus the unknown warrior faced a creature several hundred meters in size, a bloated mass of flesh at the center of which rose the still recognizable form of a human male of noble bearing, glaring at the Grey Knights with hate-filled eyes. Yet despite the odds arrayed against them, the Grey Knights succeeded, as they ever do in such situations – though once again, the cost was terrible. By combining their psychic powers together, the brotherhood enabled the unknown champion to strike at the very heart of the monstrosity, destroying Ambrosius' mortal brain and casting his very soul into oblivion.

With Ambrosius dead, the two surviving members of the brotherhood teleported back to their ship – but the mysterious warrior was left behind, his armor refusing to accept the teleportation codes. As soon as the Grey Knights had arrived, the entire fleet opened fire upon the writhing world, unleashing the full wrath of Exterminatus on the abomination. But as the first shells hit, the Warp flared with enough power that, had the fleet not already raised Geller Fields, it would have been lost instantly to the madness of the Sea of Souls. Even with the fields raised, every psychic soul among the armada heard the same cry, as the Living World proclaimed its existence to the galaxy, sending waves of insanity and heresy across the stars.

Something was horribly wrong here. It wasn't the twisting tentacles that rose from the ground, nor the fanged mouths that opened on every surface to scream their agony and madness. It wasn't the millions eyes staring at him from all directions, nor the half-formed things that clawed their way out of the flesh only to die within seconds of claiming their freedom. It took a moment for the silver warrior to realize what exactly it was that gnawed at his subconscious, until he saw it : the date on his helmet display. It had synchronized with the systems of the brotherhood he had met, its chroms rendered useless during his journey across the Warp.
The date was two thousand years before he, Kaldor Draigo, had become a Grey Knight. His mind reeled at the realization, even as he continued to fight his way across the twisted flesh surrounding him – for to stop, even for a second, would be a death sentence. Pieces fell together – the looks the ancients of the Chapter had given him as he rose through the ranks, the laughter and mocking insults of some of the daemons he had fought. From the very beginning, his Chapter had known that his fate would bring him here, on this infernal, living world.
It was duty that held him together. Duty that made him go on even after learning that his doom had been foretold and written in stone long before he had even been born. None of it mattered – all that mattered was that the Emperor's foes be struck down. If he was to be trapped on this world for the rest of eternity, then so be it. He would fight all the way to the end of time itself if necessary, for that was what the Emperor demanded of him.
And then the planet spoke with hundreds of different voices, booming and echoing in his mind, all saying the same three words, over and over :
'WE … ARE … MALICE.'

When the scream faded, the planet was gone, swallowed into the Warp. It took many years to suppress the full effects of the Living World's birth cry, for every system in a hundred light years radius had been subjected to its mutating madness. Brotherhoods of Grey Knights fought alongside warriors and seers of the Thousand Sons, while an Imperial effort on the scale of the Crusades was deployed – but never recorded in official archives. The War of the Living World is known only to the Grey Knights, the Inquisition, and those Loyal Legions who took part in it.

As this war was being waged, a new shattering revelation was uncovered by the Grey Knights. The unknown warrior that had saved the last, desperate raid upon the laboratory planet was, indeed, of their Chapter, but he was one that would not even be born for another two millennia : Kaldor Draigo. In a display of the Warp's disregard for causality and linear time, this Grey Knight would be inducted into the ranks of the Chapter, rise through the ranks, and then vanish into the Sea of Souls during the 41st Millennium, only to be cast back through time and emerge just in time to help the brotherhood fighting against the Raven's spawn. Ever since then, Kaldor Draigo's fate has been bound to the Living World.

For the Living World, also known as Malice as its many, fractured minds call themselves, has since become a recurrent threat to the Imperium. This sentient daemon world emerges from the Empyrean at unpredictable intervals across the galaxy, bringing madness and mutation upon the worlds that fall under its baleful glare. When this happens, Draigo also appears on afflicted worlds, fighting against the minions of the planet with all the strength and devotion expected of a Grey Knight, before being dragged back onto Malice's surface when the planet returns to the Warp. There, he continues the fight, on and on, and according to the legends of the secretive Chapter, forever.

Even while hidden away in the Warp, Malice sends visions across the galaxy, twisting the minds of the unfortunate who receive them and transforming them into debased cultists who work obsessively to "bring the stars in alignment" and call forth their horrifying "god" from the depths of the Sea of Souls. These mortal agents, who call themselves the Sons and Daughters of Malice, are also known for their unholy ability to shape their own flesh in a fluid manner, turning from normal-looking humans to horrific monsters in mere seconds. The exact meaning of "alignment" is unclear, but the cultists attempt to spread their terrible "gifts" to as many others as possible, designing dread plagues of mutation that seem to draw the planet closer, as if like called to like. The Sons of Malice are also sworn enemies of the Cult of the Raven, and the Nineteenth Legion in general, as Malice feels nothing but hatred for those responsible for its creation. This has led Corax to forbid his cultists from ever attempting to breed the Children's bloodlines together, lest another such threat to his own designs be created.

The power of the Living World has drawn a handful of Sorcerers (not all belonging to the Raven Guard, and not all of any human strand), to seek a way to bind the planet to their own will. They believe that there is a pattern to Malice's manifestations, as evidenced by the activities of the planet's cultists, and that uncovering it is the key to their dark ambitions. Even a group of Inquisitors has fallen victim to the empty promise of the Living World's power. Scattered across the galaxy, this cabal of Radicals believes that Malice can be turned into a weapon of incredible power in the eternal war against the Archenemy. But like all such attempts, this is doomed to fail as the Inquisitors succumb to the insanity of the Living World, whose countless minds are ever fighting against one another for supremacy.

While the abomination of Malice is the Raven Guard's most terrible creation (that we know of), it is far from being the only ancient evil born of their unholy practices. The deepest vaults of the Inquisition contain stories of the Crusade of Monsters, the Horror of Opis, the Ghoul King of Hannedra II, and countless others. Yet during all this time, not once has Corax himself left his lair in the Eye of Terror. According to captured prisoners, the Daemon Primarch is still torturing the lords of Kiavahr, endlessly killing and bringing them back from the dead by fell sorcery. But even the most skilled of his Apothecaries and sorcerers eventually fail to return the wretched creatures to "life", and their number has been dwindling over the course of millennia. This dread countdown to zero worries the Inquisition, who does not know what the Ravenlord will do after the last of his old tormentors is finally freed from its torment.

Even as the creature's blow sent him flying and crashing against the wall, Eisenhorn's keen instincts noted the marks that revealed its nature. The elongated fangs, the pale, drawn face, the aura around it that flickered with the touch of the Warp – the signs of the Ninth Legion, the Blood Angels. That was a new one. All manners of heretics had been drawn to Sancour over the last years, most of them without even knowing why. It only showed how important his work here was.
'Thorn wishes Talon,' he said, his psychic sending as weak as his voice. The monster before him cocked his head, puzzled at the words, trying to grasp their meaning. It distracted him just long enough.
The kinetic blast ripped the traitor Astartes apart, scattering him to fragments of equally warped flesh and armor. The tainted blood of the fallen angel covered the walls, but none of it touched Gregor. From behind where the traitor had stood, the cylindrical shape of Gideon's gravitic chair appeared.
When the first signs had manifested, they had thought Gideon had been infected with some trick of the enemies their calling made them fight. But then the nightmares had begun, and there had been no denying the truth. Gregor had been fighting against the agents of Ruin too long not to recognize the symptoms. His pupil had begged him to kill him – he had tried to do it himself, and to his horror, found that his hand refused to obey him when he commanded it to pull the trigger. But Gregor had lost too many friends already, and he had refused to lose one more to the machinations of the Archenemy. And so … the chair.
Sometimes, Gregor Eisenhorn wondered how he could ever have been so foolish. Ravenor, really ? How much more obvious could the Nineteenth get ? And still, he hadn't seen it until it had been almost too late. Gideon had been lucky, in a sense. The mark of the hateful raven affected his body, but his brain was untouched – the only reason he had had the dreams was because of his immense psychic potential. All Gregor had had to do was fake an accident, and ensure the silence of the doctors that had performed the actual operation. Now Gideon was little more than a brain, kept alive by the devices of his gravitic chair. He would never become an Inquisitor now – they had claimed it was because of his wounds, but the two of them both knew that it would be far, far too risky. The nightmares had stopped since the day of the operation, but there was no telling how long that would last. Allowing Gideon to live was already an act far too much stepped in radicalism to Gregor's liking – he would not risk having a Child of the Raven become an Inquisitor.
'Master', sent Gideon. 'Are you alright ?'
Gregor forced himself to his feet, suppressing a grunt as pain flared in his every articulation. It was becoming more and more difficult to ignore the damage old age, and a lifetime of service to the Emperor, had inflicted upon his body. But he had to go on. There was too much at stake – there always was.
'Yes,' he replied to the one he had once seen as his son and now only dared to consider a weapon. 'Let us move on.'
It didn't matter how much he had to sacrifice, what tools he had to use, how many agents his former friend Pontius sent after him on the Inquisition's orders. He would prevail. Any cost was worth preventing the plots of the ancient enemies from reaching fruition, to stop the nightmarish visions that haunted him from coming to pass.
No matter what, vowed Eisenhorn once more, the Yellow King would never be born.

Organization

Kayvaan Shrike, the Lastborn
Over the millennia, very few true Astartes have been inducted in the ranks of the Raven Guard – few enough, in fact, that the Imperium has been able to keep a relatively complete list. Kayvaan Shrike is one of them, and the most recently created pureblood son of Corax. He rose through the ranks quickly, and soon became the leader of his own warband. Other forces across the Eye soon learned to fear his name, for he was utterly ruthless in the pursuit of his goals – whatever those might be, for he is a silent figure as well. It is believed that he is gathering allies, weapons and other assets in preparation for some daring operation within the Imperium, but none of the fourteen Assassins sent after him have managed to kill him – in fact, nine of them were found on worlds of the Iron Cage, delivered at the doorstep of the Inquisition's headquarters by unseen hands. They were not dead, though the Inquisitors soon granted them mercy.
In battle, Shrike wields the Raven's Talons, a pair of lightning claws of which each blade contains a different bound daemon. Claimed to have been forged by Corax himself during the Heresy, these weapons whisper endlessly in his mind, granting him dark insight and slowly driving him mad at the same time. According to rumour, Shrike came into their possession while wandering on the Legion's homeworld. While following a vision of Corax, he came into one of the infernal, trap-filled labyrinths that dot the daemon world, and found the Talons inside.
The title of "Lastborn" was bestowed upon Shrike by a renowned Daemon Oracle in the Eye of Terror, and many Imperial seers have also received visions attributing it to him. What exactly it means seems clear – there will be no more purebloods after him. Yet nothing is ever so simple where the Warp is concerned, and the meteoric rise of Shrike has led many to fear that the title is a portent of something much more catastrophic than the long-drawn extinction of the Nineteenth Legion.

Since his exile into the Eye of Terror, Corvus Corax has become a bitter, distant and hate-filled creature that cares little for the lives of his pure-blooded sons and not at all for the numberless spawns of his tainted gene-line. While the Raven Guards still owe him fealty, the Legion has fractured in a myriad warbands, each led by an individual lord strong enough to keep his followers together. Warbands of the Nineteenth Legion are all based on the Legion's homeworld in the Eye of Terror, save for a few exiles and renegades. They all hold dominion over a Spire, one of the impossible towers of the Ravenlord's realm. Each such warlord has a group of purebloods at his side, his blood-brothers and trusted lieutenants. These purebloods are true Astartes, and it is believed that less than a thousand of them came with Corax in the Eye of Terror – how many survive now is likely unknown even to their Primarch. This elite circle rules over a far greater number of Spawn Marines, led by those of their number who succeeded the trial of reaching the Spire unaided after being born. It is estimated that the Spawn Marines outnumber the purebloods a hundred to one at the very least in most warbands, yet they are kept under control through a mixture of fear, gene-coded obedience, and sorcery.

Feuds between warlords are frequent, but things rarely escalate to the level where purebloods are fighting. It is far more common for the Spawn Marines and human servants of the rival warbands to slaughter each other until either a clear victor emerges, their masters reconcile, or they simply get bored and move on. However, time means little to the lords of the Raven Guard, and some of these feuds have lasted for thousands of years and be fought across the entire Eye of Terror, using Spawn Marines and Astartes from other Legions as pawns. One particular rivalry is said to have lasted for hundreds of thousands of years, thanks to the timeless nature of the Eye, and to have ended only when Corax himself turned his attention from his tortures for the first time in ages and commanded that this foolishness end. This rivalry, according to legends, had been started by a disagreement over the interpretation of one of the Primarch's orders during the Heresy.

Because these disaccords have little real consequences for the warlords who start them, the Nineteenth Legion is, ironically, plagued by far more intra-Legion conflict than the rest of the Traitor Legions. This has resulted in the Raven Guards having a dark reputation in the Eye as uncaring and cruel, and not to be trusted, for all outsiders are to them nothing but pawns in their own twisted, pointless games. That is in many ways true, but those Raven Guard warlords who are still focused on prosecuting the Long War find that this reputation makes things more difficult for them. In the Eye of Terror, where trust is in scarce supply, and paranoia and betrayal are ways of life, the sons of Corvus Corax are perhaps the most distrusted of all. Alliances with the Ravens are rare, and the few who have managed to gain a few allies from other Traitor Legions make sure to maintain these bonds, ironically being far more reliable than most other so-called allies in the Eye.

The Apothecaries of the Raven Guard
Of all the Traitor Legions, the Raven Guard is the one with the most respect for its Apothecaries. Unlike others, the members of this accursed group have kept the title they used during the Great Crusade, though their duties have extended far beyond the healing of their brothers and the preparation of the next generation. In fact, they have all but abandoned these last two activities, instead focusing on continuing the abominable work of their gene-father.
All Apothecaries of the Nineteenth Legion have the same distinctive appearance. They wear a cloak of grey material above their black armor – the nature of the material varies, from leather to Warp-created tissue – and their helmets, which they never take off, display a prominent beak akin to the masks worn by the plague doctors of Old Earth. Most of them carry at least one or two weapons, though only small ones, that do not bother them, like a pistol and a combat knife. Vials and surgical tools hang from this mantle, some of which can be used in battle to devastating effect. But it is not on the battlefield that an Apothecary of the Ravenlord is the most dangerous to the Imperium.
These wretched gene-smiths are responsible for the creation of new strains of Children, and most of them are constantly travelling the Imperium in stealth ships. They join up with lone cults or anti-Imperial rebellions, offering some of their knowledge in return for test subjects. Some experiment wildly, leaving dozens of twisted abominations to die in agony in their wake, while others work more slowly, selecting a subject with care and ensuring that he or she can propagate the tainted bloodline afterwards. They do not limit their work to the Imperium : sometimes, a Rogue Trader will find monstrous alien creatures wandering the ruins of human cities, only to later discover that these creatures bear traces of human DNA – an Apothecary of the Nineteenth Legion has marched upon this world before. Some Apothecaries, considered eccentric by their colleagues, are interested in alien biology, thinking that some inspiration can be found there for their own great work. They have captured specimens of every xenos race known to the Imperium and several which aren't, dissecting and vivisecting them to learn more about their differences from Mankind's own genetic pattern.
Few of these corrupted Apothecaries remain in the Eye of Terror, for the merging of Warp and reality make their experiments unstable : just because one of their creations is capable of life in the Eye does not mean that they can continue to exist outside of it. Still, it is where they keep their fortresses, where samples from all their work are preserved in stasis and they perform their more dangerous experiments – those not aiming to create anything but to extend the boundaries of their unholy knowledge. The rest of the Legion tends to avoid them, for even though they respect their work and profit from it immensely, even they find their driven brethren unsettling, their obsession for their work making them see anyone as ultimately expendable. Yet their services are still sought after, for the Apothecaries have access to many strange, seemingly impossible procedures. They can shatter the mind of any prisoner by playing with his brain, turn a rabble of human slaves into a host of mutated beasts, and even bring dead Astartes back from the dead, as long as they have a genetic sample from the subject and the help of a skilled Sorcerer. The fact that those who return from death in such a fashion are always distant, and refuse to speak of what they experienced between their demise and resurrection, does little to stop the Raven Guards from making arrangements to have such an operation performed on them should they die.

Combat Doctrine

The Shadow-walkers
There are those among the Raven Guard who embrace a different path to power than the rest of the Legion. They embrace the talents their Primarch displayed in his youth when trying to escape from his tormentors. Through a combination of innate sorcery, endless training and mental techniques, these Shadow-walkers, as they are called, are supreme infiltrators and assassins. Through the art of Wraith-slipping, they are capable of short-range teleportation, moving through the gaps in others' perceptions and entering into the Warp to emerge in another place instantly. Most of them have some mean of moving vertically, such as a jump-pack, psychic levitation, or wings grown from mutation. They favor melee weapons such as lightning claws and short blades, often coated in poison. All Shadow-walkers operate alone, and it is a rare warlord indeed who can manage to get more than one of these elusive agents under his command. Most often, they are only hired for a single operation, and finding and contacting them is the first part of the payment – the Shadow-walker will demand that his would-be master explain exactly how he found him. That can be quite a tale in itself, for while some Shadow-walkers remain on the Legion's homeworld in between "contracts", others wander the Eye of Terror and beyond, spying and killing with no reason but their own. Some warlords use sorcery, while others employ specifically bred genetic aberrations to track the spoor of their target across the very stars.
But the services of a Shadow-walker are generally considered worth such effort. There are no fortresses they cannot infiltrate, save perhaps for a handful of Inquisitorial keeps both secured against physical intrusions and warded from Warp manifestations. Most warlords ask the Shadow-walkers to kill a specific target, or to perform any other act of sabotage behind enemy lines. Sometimes, a battlefield will catch the Shadow-walker's eye, who will see it as an opportunity to sharpen his skills even further, and he will remain involved in the conflict long after his mission is over. In most cases, the Shadow-walker continues to act in favor of his former employer, out of whatever passes for brotherhood in the Nineteenth Legion – but not always. For some Shadow-walkers, the only way to truly test their skills is to pit them against others of their own Legion, especially those who have already shown their ability to find them.
Wraith-slipping is more dangerous than the Shadow-walkers like to pretend it is to their employers. Whenever they open a hole into reality, there is a chance that the things that dwell beyond will go through. Usually, a Shadow-walker has enough control to ensure this does not happen, but when he needs to make a quick escape, a tide of Neverborn might pour through, attacking his pursuers. In the eyes of the Shadow-walkers, this is merely another benefit, as it covers their escape in these rare occasions when they are caught.

Across the galaxy, dead worlds orbit silently around their stars, testaments to the power and reach of the Nineteenth Legion. When the Children of the Raven grow too numerous, or the pleas of Corax' deluded cultists become loud enough, a warlord of the Raven Guard will hear the call, relayed to him by the blood of the Daemon Primarch. Through deals with powerful daemonic entities from the deepest parts of the Warp, the Sorcerers of the Legion guide the warband's ships beyond the Eye of Terror. Thankfully for the integrity of the Iron Cage, these rituals only function if the destination is a world already touched by the Ravenlord. While the purebloods journey in Legion ships, the Spawn Marines and the bolter fodder are packed into reclaimed Space Hulks. These vessels are more than enough to crush a local defense fleet, wiping out all opposition to planetfall – which is when the true horror begins.

When the Raven Guard goes to war, monsters of many forms are roused from their slumber. The clans of gene-bred horrors that dwell in the bowels of their ships are driven out by squads of Spawn Marines and herded toward the enemy. Human cultists go under the knives of the Apothecaries, the survivors returning as stronger, tougher, and utterly insane masses of mutated flesh. Along these disposable troops come the Spawn Marines, who bring some manner of discipline and order to the first wave. Then, once battle is joined, the purebloods go to war themselves, striking at the weakest points of the enemy line.

Those who face such an onslaught are forced to confront visions from the blackest of nightmares. Only the bravest of Imperial Regiments can stand their ground before the spawn of the Ravenlord, and even they are expected to take considerable losses in order to even hold back the Chaos Marines. Adeptus Mechanicus forces fare better, thanks to their troops being almost entirely fearless, but even they are not immune to the madness that walks alongside the Raven Guard. Ever since the discovery of the dreadful Obliterator virus by a Forgefather of the Salamanders, the Raven Guards have attempted to use it for their own experimentations. It is frequent for their Apothecaries to carry samples of this Warp-born contagion of the machine and flesh on them, unleashing them upon the ranks of skitarii and observing the results.

While the Spawn Marines are inferior to true Astartes, their number and horrific appearance make up for that when facing mortal foes. The fear caused by their transhuman presence is only increased by the infernal nature of some of the creatures fighting at their side. The Sorcerers of the Nineteenth Legion are skilled daemonists, and the creatures they bring into the material plane are unlike any other Neverborn. These daemons are bound to the Legion on a primordial level, for they were created by its many atrocities. They were spawned by fear, horror, madness, and the obsession for bloodlines that afflicts almost every noble family in the Imperium, and is used by the Raven Guard to help propagate its hateful Children.

The ultimate goal of a Raven Guard invasion is to drag the entire planet into the Warp so that the population will either die horribly or be transformed into something the Apothecaries can use for their experiments. By releasing their pet monsters and performing depraved rituals, the sons of Corax thin the veil, ultimately breaking it completely in a cascade of sacrifices and daemon summoning. This process can take months, during which the Imperium can and must strike if it hopes to ever reclaim the planet.

But in the wake of a defeated Raven Guard raid, the only option is often to just kill every survivor of the local population. After all, there is no telling who could be infected with genetic corruption that will only reveal itself generations later. The Raven Guards adapted to this practice by capturing Imperial soldiers sent to fight them and arrange for them to "escape" once they have been turned into a Child of the Raven. This has, in turn, led to the systematic execution of any "escapee", regardless of how convincing their escape was. Again, the Apothecaries adapted, and now perform their operations on the very battlefield, leaving transformed soldiers who only look like they have been wounded, albeit gruesomely. Ultimately, after much debate, the Inquisition has decided to purge entire Regiments who have made contact with the Raven Guard if there was even a rumour than an Apothecary was present – thankfully, their distinct appearance makes confirming it quite simple. Only the highest personnel, the officers and support who never saw combat, are spared – and even then, only if the Inquisitor on site is feeling merciful. Many kill those as well, to prevent stories of the Raven Guard from spreading.

'My children,
By the time you read these words, I will be dead by my own hands. The coroner will have no trouble establishing the cause as suicide by bolt pistol. I leave behind this letter so that you know why I have been reduced to such a dramatic extremity, and what must be done if the horror I have brought upon our family is to be stopped from fulfilling all of its dread potential. Read this letter carefully, and then destroy it and never mention it again, for if its contents were to become known to the wrong kind of person, your lives would be in great danger.
In my youth, I served in the Imperial Guard, as is required of any scion of our noble line. For twenty years I fought in the name of the God-Emperor, until wounds taken in performing my duty made me unable to continue my military career and I was returned to our House ten years before the normal date. There was no dishonor in such a recall, however, for the injuries I had sustained were grave indeed … Or at least, that was the story everyone but me believed in.
The official reports say that I was captured and tortured by rebels who had rejected their local Governor's authority after his gross incompetence brought economic ruin to the planet. And truly, that was the enemy we believed to be fighting. But the truth was different. Oh, the Governor was incompetent, and his actions were doubtlessly responsible for the civil war that had required our intervention … But there was something more at play, and I found out when, as I laid in bindings in the rebels' stronghold, a terrifying giant clad in black, tainted armor came for me. This giant bore the mark of the raven upon his shoulder, and it was him, not the rebels, that broke my flesh in some horrible and blasphemous experiment.
For how long I remained in that dreadful chamber, I do not know. Time lost all meaning then, becoming a patchwork of agony and horror. Many times I prayed that death would take me at last and release me from my torment. But I was still alive when, at last, my comrades broke into the rebels' fortress and killed all of these vile traitors to the God-Emperor's will. When I later inspected the reports, I learned that no trace of my raven-marked tormentor had been seen – I fear he fled long before the battle was lost, abandoning his former allies to their fate, in order to continue his dread work elsewhere. The assault teams found me still bound to the operation table, surprised that I had survived. They thought my wounds to be the marks left by torture, and I, to my eternal shame, did not tell them the truth.
Cursed be my folly, and cursed be my cowardice. I should have denounced myself and embraced execution at my Commissar's hands – the records would have been edited to show my honorable death at the enemy's hands, of that I am sure. But I did not, and as a consequence, all of our bloodline is now tainted. You carry in you the same mark I bear, the heretical touch of this raven-cloaked horror. He placed a monster within me during these hateful nights on the operation table, infected me with some vile plague that has been festering inside of me for all my years since, slowly growing. In these last few months, I have been afflicted with violent impulses that are responsible for my recent distance toward you – I feared to hurt you, my beloved children. I have felt my flesh twist and my bones creak as the beast within attempts to reshape my body. I believe I have managed to resist it so far, but in truth, I am not certain.
In the fevered dreams and visions that come with the beast's rising influence, I can sense it in you as well as within me – slumbering, dormant, but present nonetheless, with all the dread inevitability of the stars themselves. In time, the beast will awake inside you just as it has in me – and then into your children. That is why I beg you to have no child of your own. Do not bring into this world another soul, only to inflict upon it the curse of our family. Let it die with you, that we might take some cold comfort in the knowledge we dragged this horror with us into the grave. Worry not for the shame that might bring to our name – Emperor knows my own sins have already tainted our lineage beyond any hope of redemption !
Even now I sense the beast growing inside me, tearing at the walls of my mind, trying to take over. I will not let this happen – I cannot let this happen. There is so much more I want to tell you, but there is no time, no time left at all. I love you with all of my heart that remains true and untouched by madness and corruption.
God-Emperor, give me strength. If my soul cannot be saved, then grant Your divine mercy onto my children, for they are innocent of my crime.
Give me strength.'
This letter was recovered next to a bolt pistol with a full clip, from the mansion of the [REDACTED] noble family in hive [REDACTED] by the Arbites squads sent after reports of terrible, animal screams. The whole family and their servants had been slaughtered by some unidentified beast, in a manner similar to previous killings in the rest of the hive. A few days later, the creature responsible was found and shot in the underhive – later analysis revealed that it shared some genetic sequences with the [REDACTED] family. The Arbites forensic analyst was recruited into the ranks of the Holy Ordos' servants, while all other files related to the affair were classified.
Inquisitorial report 2282-A-8964, Ordo Hereticus

Homeworld

"Here there be monsters."
Ancient Terran saying

If the daemon world the Raven Guard has claimed as its home within the Eye of Terror has a name, it is not one fit for mortal tongues to speak and mortal minds to know. Any attempts to scry it by Imperial psykers have resulted in hideous madness and death, if not outright possession and transformation into an abomination of twisted flesh. Even the Thousand Sons seers suffer when trying to do so, their minds rebelling at the terrible vistas they behold, and the Rubric is barely powerful enough to spare them degeneration, while they remember nothing of what they saw afterwards. All information comes from captured traitors, and is thus highly doubtful.

According to these accounts, the homeworld of the Nineteenth Legion is a place of shadows and nightmares, where impossibly high spires are inhabited by the Legion's purebloods, while the ground is covered with the Spawn Marines and the other abominations created by the dread experiments of the Ravenlord. All life is tainted by Corax' dark genius and saturated with the fell energies of the Warp. Huge, half-manifested daemons watch over the planet, hanging from the Spires above the Spawn Marines as they fight for their survival, feeding on their emotions and pain. In this state, only the psychically gifted than see them, which is a small mercy for the multitudes suffering below. Known to the Raven Guard as the Weregelds, these Neverborn are both as powerful as a Greater Daemon and nearly mindless, contenting themselves with feasting on the bounty provided by the daemon world. Sometimes, however, a Sorcerer of the Nineteenth Legion will bind one of them into service, bringing it across the stars to serve as a powerful, if somewhat unreliable weapon. Every Weregeld is unique in aspect, though they all share some common traits : their huge size, which goes from that of a Land Raider to the immensity of a Warlord Titan; a bloated belly reflecting the abundant sustenance provided by the daemonworld; and horrifying attributes that can drive common men insane in seconds.

Like all daemon worlds, the planet is shaped by the minds of those who dwell upon it – and like all homeworlds of the Traitor Legions, there is no mind stronger than that of the Daemon Primarch. Even after ten thousand years, Corax is still haunted by the nightmares of his youth, as are the Spawn Marines, whose very blood carries within it fragment of their gene-sire's memory. These two sources combine to influence the environment, creating cruel fortresses of cold metal filled with deadly traps and hunting silhouettes. Any who enter these places will feel the same hatred, fear and helplessness Corax felt in his youth on Kiavahr – but there are also great secrets and weapons hidden within, representing the hope of freedom and vengeance that drove the Ravenlord to continue his attempts to escape. Very few ever succeed in reaching them and escaping, but it is said among the ranks of the Nineteenth that those who do are favored by Corax himself.

During the Legion Wars, the Ravens' home was attacked several times by warbands who sought the glory of challenging an entire Legion, led by lords who believed such an act would earn them the favor of their gods. They made planetfall with ease, but within a few weeks, the traumatized survivors were captured – or rather, rescued – by the purebloods, saved from the madness and horror of the surface. With dark amusement, the purebloods returned the would-be conquerors to their ships and let them depart without further harm, to carry word across the Eye of how their den was impossible to conquer. These warriors – Traitor Marines all, used to life in the nightmare realm of the Eye – swore to never return, regardless of the treasures and glory that might be found there. That hasn't stopped others from trying, of course – if there is one thing that is never scarce in the Eye of Terror, it is glory-seeking fools. But none of the next invaders were rescued, nor did they find what they sought – and few escaped with their lives, let alone whatever passed for their sanity.

Another mind-bending trait of the Raven Guard's homeworld is the abhuman creatures known as the Lemures, which are native to this infernal land. They are small, starving humanoids, scraping food from the detritus of the Warp-polluted land. The Inquisition first learned from a rare prisoner – a Sorcerer of the Nineteenth Legion – that these pitiful wretches are the reincarnated souls of those who died at the hands of a scion of Corax, be it a pureblood, a Spawn Marine, or a Child of the Raven. The shades of the Ravenlord's victims are pulled into his nightmare realm and reborn from the twisted masses of mutated flesh that make up some of the landscape, to be preyed upon by all manners of horrors until they die, and are reborn again, over and over, until their soul is completely snuffed out as the last shred of their spirit is consumed. Strangely, according to the Sorcerer, those in service to Chaos are spared this fate, likely because their souls are consumed by their evil gods upon death.

Knowledge of the Lemures is one of the "truths" granted to the cultists of the Raven by the Dark Conduit, and it is something that the Inquisition suppress ferociously, as it is one of the most effective tools in converting others to the cult when the Raven Guards are in the process of invading a planet. Official Inquisitorial doctrine on the subject is that only the faithless and cowardly become Lemures, as the brave and faithful are protected by the God-Emperor and welcomed to His side in death. Still, members of the Ordos dedicated to fighting the Raven Guard will often be taunted by their quarry with the names of their fallen comrades and promises that they are suffering in the Eye of terror. But since no trace remains in the Lemures of who they were in life – except for the instinctual knowledge that once, they had a life outside the hell in which they now find themselves – this is likely just one more lie intended on breaking the spirit of the Emperor's agents.

Beliefs

'Ten thousand years ago, as the mortal realms count such things, our Legion found the truth. It was not a pleasant revelation, but a horrible one, yet we were strong, and we embraced it. We became that which the universe demands us to be, rather than being broken under the weights of divine expectation. Our father and lord, Corax, led us into this new age of dark illumination, forging us into the instruments of the Primordial Truth. We understand more of Chaos than any other Legion, even the Ultramarines who were chosen as its champions, or the Dark Angels who were the first to stumble upon the truth of the galaxy. The power of the Primordial Annihilator flows through our blood, elevating those worthy and turning the rest into beasts, fit only to serve their betters.
That is as it should be – as it must be. Only by accepting the truth and abandoning the foolish, naive ideals that so much of Mankind still clings to can the species survive, let alone ascend into what we are destined to become. The Imperium struggles and screams against the truth, refusing to hear it like a petulant child. That is why it must and shall be destroyed, and its False Emperor – the greatest deceiver of all – cast down from the Golden Throne, that his lies might be silenced forever.
We of the Raven Guard are the heralds of that which will come then, once the empty light of the Astronomican has fallen dark and the Dark Gods are triumphant. The Spawns are nothing but our tools, to be used and discarded as we drag our species kicking and screaming into the truth. The Children of our father are but a prologue, tests of the myriad paths Mankind shall walk in glory once its chains have been broken.
And Corax … Truthfully, I do not know what our glorious Primarch is anymore. That peculiar truth is beyond even my understanding, for he stands as high above me in the eyes of Chaos that I do to the cultists who do my bidding on a hundred worlds. His power is beyond reckoning, yet he spends all of his time in his tower, indulging in the leftover hatreds of an existence he should, by all rights, have long left behind. Every time I catch a glimpse of his form, it is slightly different, as if his ascension during the Heresy was merely the beginning of his transformation. Perhaps that is why he remains in his tower, alone but for the screams of his enemies. Perhaps he awaits the day his ascension is finally complete. If that is the case, then I hope with all my soul that I shall live long enough to witness his final and terrible glory, when he emerges from his reclusion to bring about the end of the Imperium and the new Age of Chaos.'
From the writings of a Raven Guard warlord, recovered on his ship during a boarding operation by the Alpha Legion

Unlike the Salamanders, who believe that they are not servants of Chaos but masters of their own destinies united under the godly power of Vulkan, the Raven Guards are fully aware of their nature as agents of the Archenemy. They do not, however, pay homage to any of the four Dark Gods, seeing them as mere fragments of a greater whole – Chaos Undivided, the Primordial Truth, and a thousand other names for the ravenous madness that infests the Sea of Souls. Nor do they offer prayers or ritual sacrifices – they make their devotion known through their actions, each of which feeds the ruinous cancer that we call Chaos.

The dread revelation the Legion experienced during the Heresy still shapes their beliefs to this day. To the sons of Corax, the civilization embraced by the Imperium is nothing but a lie. The universe is a cruel and unfair place, one in which there are only preys and predators. The Chaos Gods are the only divine powers, and they feast on torment – therefore, the only way not to be the one suffering is to make sure others suffer in your stead. Many see the Spawn Marines, whose existence begins and end in confused suffering, as a Legion-wide way of doing this, ensuring that the purebloods reap nothing but the blessings of the Ruinous Powers.

The Legion's spirit can be broadly divided in two categories. First are those consumed by bitterness and the thirst for vengeance – against the Emperor, against their own enemies, against the universe itself for making them as they are. They believe in the Primordial Truth but hate it at the same time, yet also know that there can be no escape from their service to its dark designs. Their hatred of the Imperium, their desire to make the entire galaxy suffer, is the only thing that keeps them going over the centuries.

Others, however, revel in their nature, embracing the false revelation discovered during the Heresy fully. They are the priests of Ruin, and count in their ranks almost every Apothecary of the Legion. In their eyes, the horrors created by the Legion are a higher form of existence, one toward which they are destined to guide Mankind. To them, it is the Raven Guard's divine mandate to not just tear down the Imperium, but also replace it with galaxy-wide anarchy, a fusion of the Warp and the flesh that, according to their demented philosophy, will allow the species to ascend and survive and thrive in the universe.

However, just because the Raven Guards do not serve any of the Dark Gods in particular does not mean that they play no part in the Great Game of Chaos. To the contrary, they are considered enemies by the servants of all four Ruinous Powers, despite technically serving all of them through their deeds. While this may be simply attributed to the self-destructive nature of Chaos, the reason for it is more complex. The simple answer, and the one believed by most of those who study these matters, is that the Dark Gods are selfish beings and hate each other. The very notion of them all being mere fragments of the same entity is abhorrent to them – hence them driving their servants to destroy the Nineteenth Legion.

Yet that is just a comforting story, a tale men tell themselves to prevent their sanity from being destroyed by the Primordial Truth. Ironically, the very motivation that pushes scholars of the forbidden to embrace this lie is the same one that pushes the Lost and the Damned to rise against the Raven Guard. For the sons of Corax are saying the truth when they claim that the Dark Gods are naught but pieces of the Primordial Annihilator, aspects of the same baleful light, separated by the prism of mortal psyches. The teeming ranks of the Lost and the Damned have deluded themselves into believing that the Dark Gods are some sort of higher power, unknowable entities of infinite power which hold the entire universe in the palm of their hand, and move everything according to their unfathomable designs. The idea that they are following the will of a god grants them some solace, even as they degrade themselves by committing acts of unspeakable evil – they can justify it all to themselves with the lie that it is merely the will of their god.

"Do you know what the Gods are ? Us. They are us, the living and the dead and those yet to be born. The truth is, there is nothing in this galaxy but us. Deny it however you want. Cry out and weep and call out for our destruction so that our voice will be silenced. It won't change the truth. Did Guilliman know it too ? Who can say ? I know the Black Dragon is aware of it at least. That's the real reason he remains sleeping on his treasure, you see ? He has seen the truth, but refused to accept it. He still thinks order can be imposed upon this galaxy. But he is wrong. And one day, he will realize it – or he will be taken off the board, another obstacle removed from the one Path to Glory ..."
Unidentified Raven Guard Sorcerer

But the Raven Guards know the truth : that the Dark Gods of Chaos are nothing but psychic reflections cast into the Warp by the collective soul of Mankind and that of the countless other species that have ever lived in the galaxy. That knowledge is too much for the fallen souls enthralled to Ruin to bear, and so they denounce the Raven Guards as heretics and blasphemers – and because they do so, the gods they believe to be real do so as well. Only a few of the strongest and wisest Chaos Lords know that the Raven Guards are right and can forge alliances with them – and unfortunately for the Imperium, these are the most dangerous of heretics.

The Ravenites
It is one of the greatest dangers of the Ordos' noble calling that, by being exposed to the lies and corruption of the many enemies of Man, Inquisitors risk falling under their thrall. Nowhere is this more obvious than in these brave Inquisitors who dedicate themselves to opposing the corrupting touch of the Nineteenth Legion across the Imperium. Even though those who already bear this burden are very careful in choosing their apprentices and successors, this group loses more Inquisitors to madness and suicide than any other faction. Yet worse still is the fate of the Ravenites, who do not just lose their mind after learning the horrible truth at the core of the Raven Guard's belief – that the Dark Gods are born of Mankind's collective soul. The Ravenites are those who also lose their faith in the God-Emperor, in the Imperium – in pretty much anything, really.
Whether by exposition to the horrors committed by the Raven Guard, by reading too much of their foul writings, or by being haunted by the visions sent by the Living World, the Ravenites are broken beings, but are none less dangerous for it. Some Inquisitors share the affliction of the Ravenites without having ever been exposed to the touch of the Raven Guard. By witnessing the horrors of the Warp too many times, they too lose faith in the very possibility of Mankind's survival against the forces arrayed against it. They are still considered Ravenites, as the name has become synonymous with heresy and betrayal born of despair.
A common feature among Ravenites is that they are blind, having ripped their own eyes out during their fall into hopelessness-induced insanity. Afterwards, they eschew the use of augmetics or any form of replacement for their eyes, choosing to never see anymore of the universe that they believe to be so vile and corrupt. Believing that the downfall of the Imperium is inevitable and the damnation of Mankind already a fight, the Ravenites act to hasten the destruction of the Imperium. Their only hope, tenuous and bitter as it might be, is to make things easier on the human species by accelerating the process so that less suffering is caused. To that end, they will work alongside any manner of threat to Mankind, though it is most often the servants of Ruin they ally themselves with. Already damned beyond redemption, the Ravenites abuse their authority as Inquisitors for as long as they can, and wield the tools of the worst Radical – criminals, mutants, xenos and daemonhosts. Entire Sectors might burn in the fire started by a cabal of Ravenites acting in concert with a broad array of cults – their very lack of self-interest makes them excellent leaders for such unstable gatherings.
While all Inquisitors are dangerous foes once engaged in direct battle, Ravenites are nightmares in their own right, the kind of things Interrogators are taught to fear and destroy at any cost. Their knowledge of the Warp makes them powerful sorcerers, and the beliefs that have twisted them also turn them into spiritual magnets for the worst kind of attention from the Sea of Souls. While outwardly, they appear identical to what they looked like before their fall – save for their missing eyes – their body is more often than not rife with inner corruption. More often than not, an Inquisitor has thought to have put down one of his fallen brothers or sisters, only for the "corpse" to twist itself into a new, terrifying form, still incorporating one aspect of the Ravenite, begging for the mercy of death even as it attacks everything nearby.

Recruitment and Geneseed

It can be argued that the gene-seed of the Raven Guard is the most tainted out of all the Traitor Legions. The putrescence of the Iron Hands, the wild mutations of the Dark Angels, the ravenous thirst of the Blood Angels – all these can be studied, understood, and more importantly, fought. But merely studying the gene-seed of the Nineteenth Legion is enough to drive magos and scholars mad. What the Ravenlord did during the Heresy has cursed his entire bloodline, and those who try to understand the details of this affliction end up ranting about the impossible things and nameless horrors they caught a glimpse of. Even something as mundane as a blood sample can turn a respected geneticist into a lunatic who willingly injects himself with the blood and turns into a daemonhost or some other, even stranger abomination. The Spawn Marines, descendants of the cloned Astartes of the Great Crusade, are those who bear the mark of this corruption most openly.

The Spawn Marines
Much has changed since the first time Corvus Corax used his knowledge of genetic lore to dramatically increase the size of his Legion. Once, the Spawn Marines, as they are derisively called by both other Chaos Marines and the loyal servants of the Emperor, were created in sterile pods, cloned from the combined DNA of those most compatible with the gene-seed of the Nineteenth Legion. Regardless of the supposed efficiency of this earlier incarnation of the Spawn Marines, however, things are much different now.
Now, on the nameless daemon world that is the Legion's home, the Spawn Marines are created in gigantic gene-mills and daemonic incubators buried beneath the ground. When they reach maturity, they are expulsed onto the surface in a grotesque and macabre parody of childbirth, and left to fend for themselves. Alone or in packs, they must master their innate abilities and understand what they are from fractured genetic memories and the writings left by those who came before them, equally confused. After the initial shock passes, they are driven by instinct to reach one of the Spires, crossing the plains of the daemon world and facing its many, many dangers. Should they succeed, they are welcomed into the warband of the lord of the Spire and granted a true power armor and weapon. While still seen as inferior to the purebloods, the strength and resourcefulness shown in reaching the Spire marks them as above the rest of the Spawn Marines, who are harvested in mass from the plains to serve as cannon fodder. Called the Primes by the Legion, they act as leaders for their weaker brethren, guiding them into battle and caring for them outside of battle. The Primes are the only ones to have proper weapons and armor : the rest of the Spawn Marines must make do with what they scavenged or constructed during their stay on the planet, plus piles of stolen or broken equipment tossed to them by their masters. Some Primes manage to get proper wargear for their kindred, either by begging, buying, or outright stealing it.
Unlike the replicae Legionaries created by Corax during the Great Crusade, the Spawn Marines are all twisted by random, rampant mutation. Only those stable and strong enough to survive ever make it off the Legion's homeworld, but even they display signs of deep genetic corruption. But such a thing is hardly uncommon among the Lost and the Damned. What truly sets the Spawn Marines apart is that their mutations are constantly changing : fanged mouths form on their flesh, blood-red eyes appear on their skin, their organs twist and reconfigure even as they are cut open, and their brains are on fire with dying and resurrecting nerve endings. And yet despite the constant agony of their existence, they still cling to their identity, preventing their degeneration into a true Chaos Spawn with nothing but willpower and the dark blessings of their gene-father.
Despite their incredible mutations, no Spawn Marine ever encountered by the Imperium has displayed any true psychic ability. For several centuries, this lack has remained a mystery to the Imperium, with many believing that this was deliberate, to prevent the cloned slaves of the Legion from growing too strong and rebelling against their cruel overlords. While that may yet be true, it is not because of any willing sabotage of the creation process, but the consequence of the nature of the world on which the Spawn Marines are born. Whenever a Spawn Marine develops psychic abilities, it is a slow process, with a full awakening taking many weeks. By the time the psychic Spawn gets his sixth sense, he will already have been nearly driven mad by the horror of his own existence and the world around him. Then, he will become able to see the Weregelds. None of them ever survive this sight, for they are driven to utter despair at the realization that these strange, god-like creatures have been watching them all along, feeding on their suffering, never moving to help them in their nightmarish existences. Driven mad by this revelation, they either take their own life or end up destroying themselves with their uncontrolled psychic powers.
The examination of slain Spawn's bodies over the course of millennia has revealed that they are degenerating over time, with every generation of Spawn Marines suffering from more frequent and grave mutations than the one before it. Ten thousand years ago, with the help of Fabius Bile, the Raven Guard's Apothecaries managed to fix the scientific issues behind the great incubators, but this is due to something else. The Inquisition's theory – which, due to the impossibility of genuinely studying the gene-seed of the Nineteenth rather than just taking corpses apart, cannot be proven – is that the spiritual corruption of Corax' bloodline is slowly overcoming the safeguards put up by the Primogenitor. Someday, according to this theory, these safeguards will completely collapse, and the world of the Ravenlord will be overrun by the true fruits of his heresy.

But even the so-called "purebloods" of the Raven Guard are tainted by the evil they have allowed into their souls, and their bodies reflect this corruption. The extensive modifications of their gene-seed have caused two of the Astartes organs to cease functioning : the Raven Guards cannot spit acid, their Betcher's gland having atrophied, nor do they display the resilience to the void granted to other Legions. Their eyes are black, and to merely peer into them is to be exposed to the madness of the Warp. Their skin is of a deathly pallor on which dark veins are clearly visible. Around them, shadows are darker, sources of light seem feeble and fleeting, and all mortals feel a sense of otherworldly oppression and dread. All of them are also psykers on some degree, though only a handful are capable of harnessing the full power of their abilities and become true Sorcerers. The rest use their abilities subconsciously, sharpening their senses and reflexes, or gaining unnatural insight and resilience.

There are other, subtler effects as well to this corruption. Things from the deepest parts of the Empyrean cling to their souls, whispering to their minds of the horrors of aeons past and of the nightmares yet to be made real. These creatures, called the Unkind by the Raven Guard, are clearly of the Warp, but they are more than simple daemons born of the fears and hatreds of the galaxy's inhabitants – though none, not even the Thousand Sons or the Eldar Warlocks, know their true nature for certain. As a result of this haunting, all purebloods are anathema to psykers, their presence driving them to terrified insanity. Furthermore, when a pureblood dies, unless it was in a manner that completely destroyed the body, his corpse will burst to pieces as these Neverborn transform it into a gateway through which they pour into reality. The more powerful the dead pureblood was, the more daemons followed him in life, and so the more horrors will be let loose by his demise. In the case of those Raven Guards who were brought back from death by the Legion's Apothecaries, the effect is even more pronounced.

Surprisingly, the purebloods display little in the way of "unique" mutations, though the intensity of those previously described increase as the individual's prestige in the eyes of the Ruinous Powers grows. The Warp, after all, reshapes its slaves so that their sins are visible on the outside – and all Raven Guards bear the weight of their dread father's transgressions, far too great to be surpassed by any deed of their own. Only those few Raven Guards who have fallen to the service of a singular Chaos God and turned their back on the Chaos Undivided served by their Legion are exceptions to this, their flesh branded with the mark of their unholy patron. Even then, the "gifts" they receive from their dark master are often mere adaptations of their gene-line's distinctive traits, variations carrying the touch of the Dark God.

Over the millennia, very few pure-blooded Raven Guard Astartes have been created. The resources for such creation are very rare in the Nineteenth Legion, but these few "true sons" of Corax have always proved exceptionally dangerous. Each of them was chosen very carefully, with thousands of candidates considered and cast away – often lethally so. Entire worlds have been transformed into testing grounds by the lords of the Raven Guard in order to produce a single worthy scion of Corax' gene-line. However, no more have been created in centuries, leading some to believe that the means to do so have been lost – that the gene-seed of Corax is too deeply corrupted for implantation to succeed in any normal, non-cloned human. Others think that the Legion's stock of viable organs has been lost, to negligence, conspiracy, or theft – pointing at the Black Legion of Fabius Bile as the most likely suspect. If either of these theories were to be true, then the Raven Guard Legion is on a countdown to ruin, as each of the purebloods that die cannot be replaced – and once there are only the Spawn Marines left, the Nineteenth will be far less dangerous than it is today. Even so, purebloods are extremely hard to kill, and only growing more so as fewer remain. It could take millenia for the Traitor Legion to finally die out that way – far, far longer than the Inquisition would like, and far too long to plan anything worthwhile on the possibility.

Warcry

The Raven Guard purebloods revel in their power on the battlefield, and once they have emerged from the shadows and revealed themselves to the foe, they do not hesitate to shout their battle-cries. These vary greatly, from the promise of a quick death for those who surrender to terrible descriptions of the atrocities that await those who resist. When facing true military forces, such as the Imperial Guard or other Space Marine Legions, they use more classic battle-cries, such as "No mercy !", "Triumph or Death !", "You shall suffer as we have !" and "Inside, we are the same !".

As for the Spawn Marines, they are often made unable to speak properly by their mutations. They scream their hatred and pain at the foe in an undulating sound that is extremely unnerving to hear – even to Astartes. It is as if there is something expressed in those screams that is utterly inimical to Humanity, regardless of the genetic enhancements of the listener. But unlike the chants of the Ultramarines, there is no actual corruption at work – Imperial soldiers have been examined thoroughly by the Inquisition after exposure to confirm this. This is merely instinctual revulsion, another sign of the unholy corruption that has seeped into the gene-seed of the Nineteenth Legion.

The old spell struggled one last time, trying to catch the pitiful piece of the tech-lord's soul that remained. This time, unlike all the previous ones, it did not succeed, and the wretched shade vanished into oblivion. The mass of cancerous flesh in which Corax' claws were gouging huge, bloody rents, went still. A sound very much like a sigh of relief left its many mouths, and at long last, it was dead. The last of the Primarch's ancient tormentors, gone forever, beyond even his reach.
For a moment, the dark silhouette of the Ravenlord stayed utterly still, his mind drawing a blank for the first time in millennia. His vengeance was complete. Those who had hurt him so much were gone, and they had paid for his suffering a million times and more. What was he to do now ? What remained for him to accomplish ?
The answer came quickly. He was wrong. There was still someone out there who had hurt him, someone who had looked down at him and seen only a tool for his own ambitions. His father still sat upon the Golden Throne. Even now, Corax could feel the baleful light of the Astronomican burning through the Sea of Souls, no matter how far away it was. Growing weaker with every year passing in the material universe, yes, but shining nonetheless, proof that the old monster still clung to existence. And that was not all. The empire of lies still stood, against all odds. He had been away too long. Now at long, last, with the last of the shackles of his past removed, it was time for him to assume the role that he had claimed for himself in the fire that had started it all. Herald of the Primordial Annihilator, bringer of the One Truth to the galaxy. Time to rewrite reality so that Mankind could assume its proper place in the universe ...
Time to return to the war. Time to leave his tower, and lead the fight against the False Emperor once again. His mind shifted gears, effortlessly realigning with mental pathways of conquest and war that he hadn't walked for so long. He looked outward with his god-like senses, searching for his children, seeking their marks upon the galaxy. They were everywhere, bringing ruin upon the Imperium from within and without. For so long they had carried on his will across the galaxy, even as he lost himself in the pursuit of a revenge that, now that it was complete, seemed so petty and insignificant to him. They had done well – the galaxy bled from a thousand wounds where the deceit that mortals called reality was being pulled apart.
But there was one particular place that was special, where one of the greatest of his true sons was leading a war that could tip the balance. A war that was being waged for the future of a Legion – his own, or that of his slumbering, foolish brother of iron. A name echoed in his mind as he looked upon the hosts gathered upon the surface of the deserted world, laying siege to a mighty fortress : Hydra Cordatus.
Black wings closed around the Ravenlord, and then he was gone, walking the paths of the Sea of Souls. His will reached out to the Sorcerers gathered among the host, warning them of his coming and commanding them to prepare the way. They would obey, of course – he could taste their surprise, their terror, and then their joy at his return. The circles would be drawn, the rituals performed, the sacrifices made. The leader of the army – Kayvaan the Lastborn, heir to his blood and cunning – would kneel before him, and together they would bring about the first sign of the cosmic alignment.
Outside, the dozens of Weregelds that clung to the Primarch's tower, the Ravenspire, twitched awake. Insect-like limbs stretched, sending the lesser Neverborn roosting in their angles tumbling down, and thousands of eyes lazily opened. Bloated bellies grumbled with the first pangs of an inhuman hunger that, for the last age, had been sustained by the torments of the nine prisoners within the tower. The creatures turned their attention outward, truly seeing the world around them for the first time since the mind of the Ravenlord had created them, shards of hatred and primordial hunger falling off a soul that crumbled as it became something more. And they saw the skies above, purple with the light of the Eye, shining with all the torment born of the Fall.
So much pain, so much suffering. So much sadness and horror. Entire worlds crushed under the weight of life-long despair. Graveyards filled with billions of soldiers sacrificed over the course of generations, their sacrifice meaningless in the grand scheme of things. And there was more beyond it, an entire galaxy of torment to devour. The light of trillions of souls called to them with the promise of a feast such as had never existed before.
The first of the Weregelds screamed. The unsound shattered reality, and the creature tumbled through the gap, followed by others of its kin. More picked up the scream, and tears in space opened all around the Ravenlord's tower. Some followed the trace of their father, but most fell helplessly, drawn to concentrations of pain like maggots to a rotting carcass.
They were hungry, so hungry. And they would find their sustenance wherever the gaps led them to.

---

AN : Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Corax Occuli wgah'nagl fhtagn !

And so, with the Raven Guard, the last of the Traitor Legions has been described. This one was written far more quickly than the other (2 weeks ! And it's the longest yet !). I am not sure why, but once the idea of making the Raven Guard's theme the Cthulhu Mythos, inspiration just flowed in me. A lot of it came from watching videos of Bloodborne (as I don't have the console required to play the actual game), both lore videos and a "movie" version. Then I read a lot of Lovecraftian stories, and ideas kept coming to me.

Together, the Ultramarines, Salamanders and Raven Guard form the three Traitor Legions that are not aligned with any specific Dark God. And this unholy trinity, in many ways, reflect the legends of the Old World of Warhammer. As was said before, Vulkan can be compared to Nagash, his own ambition allowing him to resist the temptation of aligning with any of the Dark Gods. Guilliman's backstory and motivations are based on Archaon's : he sought to rule over all the galaxy as their anointed champion. But what does Corax and the Raven Guard represent ? Well, as I finished this chapter, it struck me that, if anything, it is the Skavens that they most closely resemble. No, seriously, think about it for a second. The Skavens are presented as something of a joke in most of their appearances, but the truth is, they are utterly terrifying. They are a force of entropy and pure, unrelenting evil that cannot be stopped and gnaw endlessly at the very foundations of reality. The other Chaos forces distrust and look down upon them, yet they are, in many ways, the true Children of Chaos, embodying the Primordial Annihilator better than anyone else. Also, a lot of their creations are described in the books like things right out of H.P. Lovecraft, even if the models don't look anywhere that terrifying (and with good reason, we don't want the hobby to actually traumatize people).

For that is what I was attempting with this chapter : bring Cosmic Horror back into the Warhammer 40K universe. It could be argued that it never left, but as the Chaos Marines become more and more familiar to us, we tend to forget the true horror of Chaos. The Warhammer verse is called grimdark for a reason, that is not limited to the endless wars happening everywhere across the galaxy. Whether Chaos or the Great Old Ones are worse is debatable - on one hand, the Dark Gods (at least in their current form) are created by Mankind, and are therefore not as unthinkably alien as the Old Ones. On the other hand, they are created by Mankind, with all the terrible implications that lead to the Ravenites. Which of these two dread pantheons do you think makes for the most horrifying universe in which to live ? Tell me in the reviews !

Malice and Draigo, now. I really believe that there is potential in the story of Draigo : a knight trapped in Hell, emerging from it to help those in need ... You cannot tell me that doesn't have potential. And when I wrote Malice's backstory, the notion of having him being linked to it instead of the Warp in general just ... clicked into place. Of course, that required some time-travel woobly-woo, but the Warp exists exactly for that kind of shenanigans. As for those of you who wonder what this means for Malal, I will just say this : unlike Games Workshop, I am not bound by copyright law (as long as I don't make a penny off this). So if I ever decide to bring the Renegade God into this story, I will do it using his actual name. Malice is just an example of Eldritch Abomination created by the Raven Guard - an Elder God, born of human hands.

Now, only the Alpha Legion remains. And I am going to take my sweet time with this one, because I get the feeling it's the one everyone has been waiting for and I do not want to disappoint. Besides, it's my last chance to set things in place for the Times of Ending (and at this point, with how many hooks I have placed, I am all but morally obliged to write that). There are probably going to be several chapters of Warband of the Forsaken Sons before the Alpha Legion Index Astartes comes out.

As usual, if you have comments, idea for the Alpha Legion, or see something in this chapter that contradicts the previous ones, or just a mistake in spelling, please tell me so in your reviews or by PM.

Thanks to Jaenera Targaryen for beta-reading this. Don't forget to check her story Blood of Ignorance, taking place in the Roboutian Heresy verse. Also, check Nemris' page on DeviantArt for his amazing work on the verse.

Oh, and one last thing : NEW CONTEST ! The first person to tell me where the idea for the Lemures came from (and by "came", I mean "was shamelessly ripped off") will get one short story of their choice, on which I will start working immediately. Of course, the idea for the story has to be reasonable, but that can be discussed between me and the winner.

AND WE HAVE A WINNER ! Congratulation to Khornosaurus, who identified the Lemures as coming from the comic book series "Requiem : Chevalier Vampire". I ... do not know whether or not I recommend reading that series, to be honest. I myself came upon it in the local library, and while curiosity pushed me to finish it, it is a bit too ... evil for my taste. Too grim, if you will - and yes, I am aware that after reading this chapter, you are probably wondering what it would take for that.

Khornosaurus, contact me with your short story idea to take your prize !

EDIT : thanks to Marq Fyori-Josdyas Auricor for correcting the mispellings and grammatical mistakes I made.

Zahariel out.