Aurora Starchild and the Bringers of Light
By author Perfidious Albion
The Tenth Primarch: Aurora Starchild
Name:
Aurora Starchild. Often called the Lady of the Dawn. 'Starchild' is not a surname; it is an epithet. She was called "the Starchild" on her homeworld, literally, for she came from the stars. Aurora has been with the Imperium for a very long time, since almost the beginning, and she has been given a multitude of admiring appellations: among them the Golden Lady, the Emperor's golden daughter, the Sun Queen (for the shining sun symbol that she marches under), and the Golden Primarch.
Appearance:
Impossibly beautiful. Tall, slender, with long golden hair and green eyes that sparkle with laughter. Back when she lived on her dim-lit homeworld, she was extremely and unhealthily pale. Now, since she left Sheol IX for the Great Crusade, she has come to have sunbronzed skin, due to spending time on brighter worlds while on campaign. Outside battle, she wears simple yet elegant formal gowns and dresses. In battle, she wears armour as golden as the Emperor's, engraved with exquisite carvings commemorating her many victories, and laden with sunstones. She wields a golden Power Sword, Dawn.
Talents and Personality:
Aurora Starchild is friendly, social, and always of good cheer. She lightens the spirits of all around her. Quick to laughter and good-humoured, she can tease a smile out of all but the grimmest of her siblings. She is not, however, a jester; she knows how to be serious when times require it, such as in battle. In battle she is fierce, fearless and determined. She is not strong by Primarchical standards, but she is very fast, and she possesses deadly skill with a blade. Few can claim to be her better in technique of swordsmanship.
Throw her into a melee, in the thick of her foes, and she could cut them all down without blinking, faster than many of the Primarchs who are her superior in physical strength. Despite this, Aurora is not arrogant. She is charmingly modest and humble to a fault, ever demurring from praise. She is polite and respectful to everyone from lowly cleaners to the lords of the Imperium. Where some Primarchs are closed off and reclusive, Aurora is open, social and approachable. She is often to be found chatting casually with her warriors. She comes across as likeable to almost everyone, although the way she lives and acts in life—brisk, decisive, larger-than-life, making huge decisions and moving on, like a whirlwind in human form—can feel overwhelming to mortals. Aurora is well-liked by most of the other Primarchs and many of them admire her. She has gone to great effort to befriend her sisters and brothers, as many as will allow her. It is, of course, deeply improper to speculate as to whether the Emperor has a favourite child… but idle soldiers of the Imperial Army do anyway, and the name which always comes up is that of the Emperor's golden daughter.
Aurora is adored by the people of the Imperium, who see her as the perfect Primarch: fearless, fierce in war, firm and decisive and of supreme deadly skill, and friendly and laughing in peace. Perfection in human form. She is wholly human in appearance, with none of the strange inhuman-looking bodily features some Primarchs possess; she lacks the unsettling, cold, grim demeanour of others; she has no unseemly fondness for xenos; and she is a true believer in the Emperor's dream. Aurora is the poster girl of the Great Crusade, quite literally: pict-casts of her appear more often than anyone except the Emperor in the Iterators' propaganda for mankind's glorious new age.
The perfect Primarch… or so it seems. Something very different lurks underneath the façade of the fearless, joyous golden daughter of the Emperor.
Ever since she was a child, Aurora Starchild has suffered from precognitive visions showing her terrible things to come. She cannot tell these visions when to come or not, nor can she demand of them more information to help her thwart the fates they represent. They just come, and she has no input as to when or why. Raised on a planet with a hatred of psykers ('abominations') so extreme it borders on pathological, Aurora hates her gift and hates herself.
Aurora is terrified and obsessed with thwarting the terrible enemy she has seen in her visions of the future. There is no-one in whom she has confided this—not her fellow Primarchs, not her Legion, not even the Emperor knows. Why should she tell? No-one would believe it, for she is an abomination of the Warp, and no knowledge gained from such a vile, untrustworthy source would or should be trusted. She knows her visions must not be ignored, for mankind must be protected from the deadly enemy she has foreseen, and she knows that she is the only person in the Imperium who knows what is coming. So she keeps her secret to herself. She laughs, and smiles, and throws herself into helping other people. She bears the heavy burden of responsibility to thwart the dark future she has witnessed, alone.
It has not crossed her mind that, if she told other people the truth of what she is, perhaps they would not hate her as much as she hates herself.
Homeworld:
Sheol IX, an icy hellscape of a planet orbiting a faint, ancient star. The star Sheol is a small red dwarf, possessing nine rocky planets, locked in a stable configuration of orbital resonance with each other. Seven of the nine, from Sheol III outwards, are inhabited by humans. (Sheol I and II are too hot for life.) Sheol IX, the ninth planet, is the furthest-out of those worlds and thus the coldest. It is barely capable of sustaining human life.
At the dawning of the Age of Strife, Sheol IX suffered from terrible nuclear conflict. It is a radioactive, freezing planet of icy wastelands, cast into a perpetually hellish glow by the red glare of its dwarf star.
The Bringers of Light do not maintain a fortress-monastery on Sheol IX. In fact, after the arrival of the Imperium brought space travel technology, no civilians live in the Sheol system. All human life in the star-system was evacuated to more hospitable planets. A large, impressively well-gunned and armour-plated Star Fort named the Light-Kindler serves as the Bringers of Light's fortress-monastery in the Sheol system.
The Sheol system lies in the Calixis Sector in the galactic north, up close against the Eye of Terror.
Psychic potential:
The other Primarchs would all swear that Aurora Starchild is one of the least psychic of them. They would all be being honest. They would all be wrong. Intrinsically, Aurora's psychic power is among the greatest psykers of the Primarchs. She has never learnt to use that power due to the pervasive fear and hatred of psykers that she was brought up with in her childhood. She hates herself for her psyker nature and represses it deep inside herself, power bound with chains of self-hatred and disgust. Excluding the gifts of superhuman charisma and resistance to psychic attacks which all Primarchs have in common, Aurora seems to be totally non-psychic. Her repressed power only acts in one way: the involuntary visions of the future that have haunted her for most of her life.
Aurora's psychic powers are repressed so deeply that no other psyker can sense that they exist. The other Primarchs, the Legions, including her own Legion… none know of her secret psychic nature, except the Emperor. Not even he can sense it, but he, alone, remembers that he made the Tenth Primarch to be one of the mightiest psykers of his children. Once, centuries ago, he spoke with his golden daughter about this. When she made clear, politely but firmly, that she had no desire to wield her psychic gifts, he relented and respected her wish. The Emperor well knew that attempting to force someone to draw on the power of the Warp against her will leads to madness and catastrophe. At her request he spoke of it to no-one. Nobody except Aurora, the Emperor and one witness knows that this argument ever took place; and that witness was Constantin Valdor of the Legio Custodes, who always keeps his master's secrets.
Background:
The Sheol system was a jewel in the hands of Man: a star-system of nine planets, seven of them inhabited. The planets of Sheol traded peacefully with one another and with the rest of the Terran Federation. Their people grew rich and happy on seven shining worlds. Then came the Warp Storms, born of the depravity of the Eldar.
The Warp Storms cut Sheol off from interstellar travel and trade. Worse, psykers started to be born: men and women with abominable psychic gifts, tying them to the eldritch domain of madness known as the Warp. Indeed, it warped them. Here, in Sheol, this close to the Eldar Empire—or as it is called today, the Eye of Terror—the effect was particularly terrible. Psykers were born, got their powers, and went horrifically insane. Their bodies became portals for terrible entities to come streaming out of the Warp.
The people of Sheol tried to survive, and perhaps, once, they would have. But they were still reeling from the Cybernetic Revolts that had ended a bare few decades before. Mankind had grown dependent on Abominable Intelligences over the millennia of the Golden Age. Learning to live without them was no quick and easy task. In that weakened state, the Sheolite humans were no match for the armies of mad, corrupted monsters pouring out of the Warp portals which psykers had become.
All the major cities of the Sheol system fell to the abominations. At last, in their desperation, Sheol's leaders had no other choice. They unleashed nuclear weapons on the armies of abominations, obliterating them in nuclear fire… at the cost of the destruction of Sheol's own cities. The seven shining worlds of Sheol became radioactive wastelands, their cities nothing but irradiated ash. The Age of Strife had begun.
Sheol IX was hit hardest of all. Of the planets in the Sheol system, this one was furthest from the star, coldest and least hospitable. Only climate-control satellites of the Golden Age of Technology had rendered it comfortable for life. With the cities gone in mushroom clouds and 90% of Sheol IX's population with it, these satellites slowly failed, one by one, for lack of maintenance, in the several centuries after the nuclear strikes. In those centuries, Sheol IX's climate reverted to its natural state: a tundra planet where the average temperature was 30 degrees below freezing. The green forests and beautiful landscapes of Sheol IX—those that had not already been poisoned by radioactivity—were strangled by the cold.
The paradise of Sheol IX had turned to Hell. Its surviving humans, descendants of those who had been outside the cities when the nuclear strikes came, roamed an icy, radioactive wasteland that had once been their utopian home, cast in the eternally hellish glow of their red star.
By day, the humans of Sheol IX wandered always in full-body rad suits and thick furs, to protect themselves from the lethal embrace of the cold and the still-deadly radioactive elements of the nuclear attacks millennia ago. By night, they took shelter in bunkers deep underground, close to the mantle, warmed by geothermal heat that emanated from the planet's core. They wore weapons, too. For humans were not the only survivors of the nuclear attacks. Some of the monsters corrupted by the Warp had survived, too—those who had been far enough from city centres when the nuclear attacks ripped out the heart of the abominable armies. Their descendants roamed Sheol IX's icy surface, hideous mutants twisted with radioactive gene-decay and the fell powers of the Warp, hateful of all untainted human life, for, to them, humans were like a mirror held up to their eyes to show the mockery and degeneration of themselves. It was not just humans: animals were affected by the radioactivity and the Warp, too. Over generations of corruption, domestic cats, dogs, sheep and cattle became vile, fanged, tentacled beasts, utterly corrupted by the malevolent influence of Warp entities. The Sheolite humans called themselves the Pure Ones. Every Pure One who left the bunkers to hunt for food bore a weapon, to hold off the hordes of mutants and mutated beasts that sought to destroy him or her.
It was to this hell that the Tenth Primarch awoke, when she crawled out of her crashed pod, after being snatched out of the safety of her father's home.
Time passes strangely in the Warp, and so the Primarchs were different ages when they left it. Some were almost adults. The Tenth Primarch was only a baby. She did not understand why the comforting golden presence of her father was not here anymore. She burst into tears. Five drooling, hungry, three-eyed beasts—part wolf, part ant, part octopus—rushed to the sound of something helpless and the scent of fresh meat.
They did not get it. Laser beams lashed out. The foul wolflike beasts, singed and scalded, yelped and fled. They would attack a helpless baby, but not someone who could defend themself. Like any pack of wolves, they were cowards to the bone.
A squad of Pure Ones, young men out hunting to feed their family-clan, had heard the crash and come to investigate. When they saw what was inside the pod, their breath caught. Lovely, perfect, haloed against the light of Sheol's sunrise, a baby gazed at them, blinking her beautiful green eyes. The Pure One hunters were a fearsome sight, clad in face-concealing rad suits and thick furs stained with mutated beast blood. Yet curiously, she was unafraid. It was as if she somehow knew that they were not going to harm her.
Indeed they did not. The Pure Ones had no idea how a baby had ended up in a pod that had crash-landed from space on Sheol IX. But they would not abandon her, an untainted human, to a miserable death in the wild. They picked up the child, wrapped her in their furs to ward off the killing bite of cold, and took her to their own family-clan's bunker. There she was adopted by an old woman named Seraia Dajjalah and raised as one of their own. In Sheolite culture of this day, there were no surnames but patronymics. They did not know her father's name, so they called her the Starchild, for that was all of her origin that they knew. As for her own name, for the dawn-light in which they had first caught sight of her, they named her Aurora.
The babe grew quickly. At first her adoptive family-clan feared they had made a mistake by taking her in, for she ate much more than was normal for such a small child. They soon discovered why, though, when the Starchild rose to more than two metres in height, then three, then four. Aurora soaked up knowledge like a sponge and swiftly mastered every skill taught to her by the people of Sheol IX. By the time she was three Terran years old (Sheol IX's years were much shorter) she was a master hunter, tracker, fighter, and fixer of rad suits and other mechanical equipment. She also quickly picked up the fields the Sheolites taught themselves to keep the glory of past human civilisation alive: science, music, art, mathematics, literature both poetry and prose. Before long, Aurora was the best hunter of her family-clan, despite being the youngest in age. The Starchild brought home more food and slew more mutants and mutated beasts than any other.
Yet Aurora was dissatisfied. It was not enough for her to venture out into the icy, radioactive wastelands in daylight and bring home food for her family-clan to be sustained through yet another winter, yet another year of managed decline. She wanted more. She wanted better for them. From a very young age, she was an insightful child, and she heard much more of the adults' worries than they meant to reveal to her. How the equipment of their sealed underground bunkers was failing. How the mutant hordes grew ever bolder and greater in number. How the family-clan here was half the size it had been, a thousand years ago.
She had heard, also, stories of the Golden Age of Technology, the time before this misery had come upon them. She latched onto that thought and held it tight. This had not always been the way of things. Therefore, it need not be the way of things forever. Things could change. The lost Golden Age could return. And if that was to be done, who but she should be the one to do it? If she—the Starchild, the golden one, the one ever-admired in whispers when they thought she could not hear—could not bring the Golden Age back, no-one could. And Aurora refused to accept the belief that no-one could make a better future.
And so she set out to turn her new Golden Age into reality. Aurora attended the next clanmoot, a meeting of many different family-clans, traditionally undertaken to mate, for the avoidance of inbreeding. She had no interest in mating. The Starchild was not due to speak. Only the elders had that honour. She spoke anyway, and when she took the stage, all yielded it to her.
To a hundred assembled family-clans from across thousands of miles of Sheol IX, Aurora spoke forcefully of a better future to be won, of a Sheol IX where no mutant hordes remained to bedevil mankind. Her voice was like light and music, and a wind that stirred the Pure Ones into a torrent, rushing at her command. The elders were cautious, having known nothing but long, grim years of slow decay. The youth, however, rallied to her. From them, Aurora assembled an army, and she led that army against the mutant hordes in the wastelands of ice.
The hordes of Warp-twisted, mutated horrors were mighty in number, and many among them were stronger than a man. Aurora pushed them back anyway. Not for her, hit-and-run strikes. That was not the way the Starchild fought. She gathered her best warriors behind her, and at a terrific pace she hurled herself into the heart of the armies of her foes and set about stabbing and slashing until there were none left to assail her. Often her followers were too slow to follow, and they would behold her alone, a chainsword in each hand, standing triumphant over a heap of mutant corpses.
Word of the Starchild's victories spread quickly across Sheol IX. With every victory, her followers grew more devoted and greater in number, as those who had not believed in the hope of Aurora's promised future began to believe it; and more family-clans rallied to her banner. Over decades, the whole planet came into her service. By her unsurpassed combat skill and astute tactical cunning, she lured armies of mutants and mutated beasts to come where she wished them, and then she and her followers leapt out to pin them against gullies and cliffs, leaving them no way to run, and cut them apart. It should have been impossible; it was happening anyway: the numberless hordes of the twisted and monstrous were losing. Mile by mile, step by step, the surface of Sheol IX was being reclaimed by the Pure Ones of mankind. Soon, no longer did the Sheolite people call her the Starchild. They gave her a different name: the Lady of the Dawn, for she had brought the light of new hope to a hell-world where mankind's hopes had long been lost in the darkness.
Many a young man sought Aurora's hand in marriage, for she was tall and beautiful and golden-haired and they admired her greatness, her kindness and her skill. Many were fine young men. She rejected every one. Truth be told, Aurora felt somewhat distant from her people. They were her people, of course. She loved them and would die for them. Yet she knew she was somehow set apart. They always told her how much they admired her, and that, perhaps, was the problem.
Aurora had always known she was a starchild, yet in her youth she had not understood what it meant for her life. It was only as she grew older that the loneliness of it became apparent to her. Modest as she was, never the sort to be boastful, Aurora was no fool. She knew she was greater than her friends in every form and every skill. Not just in body. Her mind moved faster than theirs. Often, she had a grand idea, and when she tried to explain her chain of thought to others, she had to slow down so that they could follow the speed and linkage of her thoughts. She wished for someone who would not have to admire her; someone for whom she would not have to slow down. She wished there to exist somebody like her, and the chances of that seemed slim to the bone.
The Lady of the Dawn won many victories in the war for Sheol IX. She seemed the very ideal of the human species, its perfect champion: a superb swordswoman and a master of every art, clever and kind and tall and swift and strong. All was not as it seemed.
Since Aurora was a small child, she was taught the histories of her homeworld. This, of course, included psykers. Psykers were human beings infused with the abominable powers of the Warp. They were bad people, easily corrupted, and when this happened, as it inevitably would, they turned into Warp portals that would bring vast armies of hideous monsters to attack their families and friends. These 'abominations'—psykers—were the reason why Sheol IX was in such a miserable state. They had brought the hordes of monsters here, and they were why the leaders of Sheol had had to use nuclear weapons on the planet, giving rise to the persistent radioactivity that was still there to this day. To be an abomination was the worst thing imaginable, even worse than being a mutant. They were monsters in human form, utterly evil and irredeemable, and the galaxy would be a better place without them in it.
The tiny child listened solemnly and believed every word, drilled into her by her adoptive mother, Seraia Dajjalah. What Dajjalah did not know was that her adorable perfect-seeming daughter was herself psychic—in fact, the joint-second-strongest psyker in the galaxy, second only to the Emperor of Mankind and equalled by a tiny number of her Primarch siblings.
When she was four years old, Aurora watched a childhood friend about to die at the claws of a howling monster she was too far to reach with her sword. She wanted her friend to live. A burst of psychic wind took hold of the wolflike beast and hurled it away, to be cast broken against the rocks. Her friend lived.
That was when four-year-old Aurora learnt that she was an abomination.
The shock of it was terrible. Aurora ran from her friend. She spent days out on a snowy mountaintop, her rad suit off, soaking in the radioactivity and the cold, her legs dangling over the cliff edge, thinking of jumping off. She wanted to die. She decided to live, temporarily, only because Sheol IX's humans needed her right now. The mutant horrors were being pushed back as they had not been for five-thousand years. Yes, she was an abomination. The galaxy would be a better place without her in it. But she would wait to make it that better place until she had made it a better place by defeating the mutant hordes. This abomination (herself) could still be of some use to true humans if it helped destroy other abominations. Then, as soon as she was no longer needed, she would do the right thing: rid the universe of the abomination that was herself.
Thus resolved, Aurora returned to her people, rad-blasted, frostbitten and half-dead. They were delighted to see her alive. They had feared greatly in her absence that the Lady of the Dawn was dead. They had wisdom enough to know that their successes would not last without her. She assured them she was well. It seemed she was. But she was a lonelier figure, ever after. She hated herself, and hated herself more for not telling them the truth of the monster they were welcoming among their children. Furthermore, with Aurora's flight, the friend she had saved had not made it back to camp. That loss even further convinced her that abominable powers could bring nothing good.
For more than two decades after that, Aurora led the people of Sheol IX against the mutants and mutated beasts born of the unholy combination of the Warp and radioactive fallout. All that time, she suppressed her abominable Warp-gifts, thrusting them down deep inside herself. Whenever they tried to come up and aid her, her sheer hatred got in the way. Psychic gifts are, ultimately, nothing more than the expression of the soul. Knowing they were unwanted, her powers could not spring up to aid her, for she hated them more than she wanted to achieve whatever she was doing. With rigorous mental discipline, disgust and self-hatred, she shoved her powers away every time she felt them. For a time, she thought she had succeeded. But to hate oneself is never a healthy thing, and the powers of the Warp are not easily denied.
Unable to act when she was awake, Aurora's repressed psychic powers bubbled up to the surface when she was sleeping. They tormented her dreams with malevolent visions of the future. The first time her precognition struck, she saw her adoptive brother die. Aurora did not know it for a vision. She thought it was an ordinary dream, her subconscious fears playing on her mind. Then her brother died in front of her, in exactly the way she had foreseen. The next vision, showing the death of a friend, Aurora tried to avert. She put her friend in the reserve in the next battle, where she should be safe. That battle was fought as masterfully as always, with the Primarch's supreme skill. The Pure Ones trapped a mutant army in a valley of ice, where they could fire down at them from all sides; the surrounded them; and the killing began. It was a slaughter, in the humans' favour. Once the battle was won, Aurora returned to find a pack of mutated wolves, starving, had attacked her reserve. The monsters had been driven off, her subordinate solemnly reported, but not before… He showed her the body. Aurora's friend lay dead there, killed in the precise way her precognition had shown.
Aurora, of course, blamed herself. She truly was an abomination. She ruined everything she touched. She had as good as murdered her friend. Next time, she vowed, she would do better. Next time she received a vision, she ignored it, fearful that her reaction would make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Her change of behaviour achieved nothing. The vision happened anyway.
With that, Aurora finally understood. Her visions were not of possible futures. They were of the future. There was no alternative. No matter what she did, no matter what she tried, they would happen. She could not prevent the things she saw. All she could do was work around them. What she saw was not possibility. It was destiny.
Under that grim cloud of realisation, Aurora continued on her campaign. Her visions plagued her all the while. Not a single vision showed a victory, or a smile, or two friends getting married. This was not for want of happy events. Such things happened often. She never foresaw them. Her precognition showed her nothing but darkness and misery.
Over decades, Aurora led the Pure Ones in battle after battle, never speaking to anyone of the visions that tormented her. The mutants and mutated beasts fell back, and back, and back. Finally, in a grand battle on Sheol IX's southwesternmost continent, she lured an army of millions of drooling, fanged mutants into a trap, pinned them against high icy hills and struck them, herself as ever at the lead of the slaughter. This was the last great battle of the Purging of Sheol IX. Some of the Warp-twisted monsters remained alive, but only in small groups. Never again would they amass in grand armies to threaten mankind. No longer would the Pure Ones have to cower in bunkers to keep safe from the beasts that stalked their planet. Under the banner of the Lady of the Dawn, Sheol IX had been reclaimed for the human species.
Aurora, still, was not satisfied. Many expected her to retreat to a palace to savour her victory and govern her people. She did not. Instead, she stayed always at the head of her charge, throwing herself into the fray with suicidal recklessness. Nothing would lure her from the war effort. No report of a surviving, marauding band of mutants was too small for her attention. This she had promised herself, that week, when she found out she was an abomination. Once the last of the mutant horrors were purged, she would put an end to the last abomination: herself.
Thus it may have been, until a golden stranger descended from the sky.
Other Primarchs were reluctant, even resistant, when they met the Emperor of Mankind. Aurora never was. The moment she saw him, she knelt, immediately recognising him as her father and lord. The Emperor raised her to her feet. Father and daughter were reunited in happiness.
That story is often told, proudly, among the Bringers of Light. They do not understand the cause of it. Aurora knew the Emperor was her lord and father because he just felt right to her, instinctively. This was no coincidence. Born to be one of the most strongly psychic Primarchs, of course Aurora sensed the mighty Warp-presence of her father's soul, powerful and protective and kin. No wonder she knew from the moment they met that he was the father she had been stolen from as a baby, recognising the light that she had grown in until it had been brutally stripped away. Aurora herself does not know that her 'abominable' gifts are the reason why she was instantly, instinctively loyal to her father. It might have changed her mind if she knew.
All her childhood, Aurora had wished that there could exist someone like her, and there had not been. Truth be told, she had given up the hope of it. Then suddenly there was. He was the fulfilment of her childhood dream and she recognised him at once as family. She clung on tight to that newfound relationship and never let it go.
Together at last, Aurora and the Emperor spoke. She asked many questions of her father. Naturally she was curious of the galaxy whose great vistas had just been opened up to her. She was also curious of herself, her own origins. The Emperor explained both to her.
The Emperor spoke to his newfound daughter of the galaxy, the scattered peoples of mankind and the Great Crusade to reunite them, so that they could once again be happy and safe. Let there be unity, progress, the light of understanding and knowledge, the end of superstition and fear. The horrors between the stars were not gods, invincible and hopeless to fight; just monsters. And monsters could be slain. Mankind could recover the science and wisdom it had forgotten since the Golden Age of Technology. Reunited under a single banner—not fractious worlds to be picked off with ease, but one mighty Imperium—and with the technology of their forefathers, mankind need never fear the xenos and mutants again.
Aurora listened. The Emperor's ideology made sense to her. It fit perfectly with her experiences on Sheol IX and her own beliefs hoping for the restoration of the Golden Age. She agreed with every word.
Unlike some Primarchs, Aurora needed no persuasion to depart from her homeworld and become a general. She had no desire to rule over others and a general was what she already was. Unhesitatingly she joined her father on the Bucephelus. She spent months at his side, learning to command a Legion.
Aurora was already a general of tremendous skill, and she had led a technologically advanced civilisation that fought with lasguns, not wooden spears and iron swords. It did not take long to bring her up to pace. A bare two months after her finding, she was granted full command of the X Legion, the Hammers of the Emperor. When she met them for the first time, Aurora spoke movingly to her daughters of their mission to enlighten scattered peoples of mankind with the Truth the Emperor told; to drag mankind out of the darkness of barbarism, superstition and division and into the light of a glorious Imperial future. It was as stirring a speech for the Great Crusade and the Imperial Truth as has ever been spoken. The Emperor of Mankind stood at her side, listened to her heartfelt speech and watched in silent, complete approval. She renamed the Hammers of the Emperor accordingly as the Bringers of Light.
Every Space Marine Legion was pleased when their Primarch was rediscovered. With the Bringers of Light it was more than that. They were beyond pleased; they were overjoyed and in awe. Their Primarch seemed to be everything a Primarch should be. Fierce and fearless on the battlefield, ever first into the thick of the fray. Supremely deadly in a duel. Firm, decisive in leadership. Totally dedicated to human unity and the Imperial Truth. Properly ferocious against mutant and xenos slime. Outside battle, open, approachable, friendly, gregarious, even charmingly humble. Aurora Starchild seemed the very incarnation of the Imperial warrior-ideal, the Emperor's perfect golden child. Many whispered that the Emperor himself thought so, too. Since the Emperor set foot on the ice of Sheol IX, when a woman lonely in her childhood clung tight to her newfound kin, the Lady of the Dawn has had a close and loving relationship with her father. Servants gossip, and so it is known that the two often speak in private. Many believe the Emperor is partial to his golden daughter.
If her fearless diving into the thickest of the fighting hinted more at suicide than bravery… if her charming, un-Primarch-like humility hinted at deeper self-hatred underneath… if her warm, social nature, ever granting her company to her daughters, spoke of a soul who feared to be tormented by the thoughts in her head when she was alone… well, the warning signs were there. But no-one saw them.
The 'hammer-blow' combat doctrine of the pre-reunification Hammers of the Emperor fit well with the way Aurora herself waged war on Sheol IX. As such, there was no great change when their Primarch was rediscovered, for she saw their ways and she approved. There was no dallying to shape her Legion to different combat methods. Instead, she led them straight back into the Great Crusade, pausing only to take a flood of new Aspirants from her followers on Sheol IX. There, Aurora distinguished herself as a superb commander. Planet after planet was brought to Imperial Compliance with stunning speed. Heavy 'hammer-blow' attacks, shock-and-awe, aimed straight at the enemy centres of power. Xenos foes and un-compliant humans alike had their command structure decapitated before they even knew what was happening, then they were smashed again and again until their shattered, demoralised remnants surrendered to the Imperium. The Bringers of Light's rate of Compliances was unmatched, shockingly high. They have brought more inhabited planets into the Imperium than any other of the Legiones Astartes. All the while, Aurora remained humble and gracious to her brothers and sisters, her Astartes, and all others, be they lords of the Imperium or the lowliest of labourers.
Her reputation across the Imperium spread quickly. People started calling her the Golden Primarch, and not just because of the colour of her armour. It was as if she could do no wrong. Soon it was not just on Sheol IX but all over the galaxy that men and women called her the Lady of the Dawn, for she seemed, more than any other, to symbolise the promise of the Great Crusade, the Emperor's dream of a golden future dawning for all mankind.
And yet, as on Sheol IX, all was not as it seemed.
In recent years, the precognitive visions which torment Aurora Starchild have started to show her a new enemy, worse than any she has defeated before. It is a glowing figure, shaped like a human, tall and terrible. The enemy has an immense overpowering presence that she has felt before only from the Emperor, but where her father's aura feels cool, calm and protective, this aura feels boiling with heat and hate, sick, twisted and wrong. The figure is vague, glimpsed only from a distance, and their voice distorted as if through vox-static. That itself is a curiosity, for her visions are normally clear. It is as if some power is interfering. Whatever interference there might be, it is not strong enough to stop Aurora from seeing, on her enemy's head, a crown with an eight-pointed star.
As the shuttle descends, a billion voices cry out in salute. The plain is packed with capering, monstrous figures, worse than the worst of the beasts she saw on Sheol IX. There, too, are figures of shape which suggests them to be human, though through the fog of the vision it is hard to tell anything more than that. Each holds a victim, a naked quivering human-shaped slave, begging for mercy that will never come.
The moment the shuttle touches down on the ground, the butchers cut their victims' throats. The ground runs red with gushing innocent blood. The air writhes with power. A ramp lowers. From out of the shuttle stalks an indistinct figure, their features hidden by the steam but their aura unmistakeably the same. A billion voices, chanting: "ALL HAIL! ALL HAIL! ALL HAIL!"
Aurora wakes up every night gasping, sitting bolt-upright, covered with sweat, her green eyes wide with dread and terror. Her bodyguards think she is having nightmares. She lets them think that. She is not. Every night, she catches glimpses of the future: the dread figure whom in her thoughts she has named the Abomination-King, doing some new evil.
Aurora is desperate to prevent the reign of the Abomination-King. But how? She cannot tell anyone about her precognitive visions. All it would prove is that she herself is an abomination of the Warp, and why would anyone listen to the warnings of an abomination? That is her view of the matter. All that she can do is make the Imperium strong, hopefully strong enough to thwart the Abomination-King's invasion once it arrives. The darkness is coming. The Legions of light must be ready.
The closest thing she did to telling another about her precognition was when she asked the Emperor if he has a brother or sister with power similar to his own. For she was wondering as to the origin of the Abomination-King. The Emperor, perplexed, answered no. He asked Aurora why she was asking. Calling on all of her charm and intellect, Aurora invented an excuse that was bordering on the truth: she claimed to worry about other forces that might be a threat to the Imperium. She also asked, then, if there were any humans outside the galaxy, for she knew the Abomination-King's armies seemed partly human. The Emperor said no, or at least, no great number of them. There had been a few extragalactic expeditions in the Golden Age of Technology, but the distances between galaxies are vast, even with Warp Drive, and Warp travel is slower in the intergalactic void because there are no nearby souls. Those expeditions launched thousands of years ago, and still, they would not have arrived at other galaxies yet. Right now, they would be asleep in cryogenic freeze, drifting across the intergalactic void. And besides, those expeditions were tiny numbers of peaceful explorers and scientists without weapons, not great empires that could pose a military threat to the Imperium. Aurora backed off from the subject. The Abomination-King and their armies of humans must come from some not-yet-conquered region of the galaxy. The Imperium was rapidly expanding across the galaxy. In mere centuries, there might be no unexplored regions of the galaxy left. That meant the threat might come at any moment now. She vowed to herself to be ready.
So Aurora fights on, waging the Great Crusade, doing her utmost to keep the Imperium strong, ever-watchful for any hint of some sprawling empire which might be the Abomination-King's. To the outside galaxy, she is the Golden Primarch, the Emperor's perfect golden child. Inside, her secret fear and self-hatred stew and fester.
It would be easier if she knew more about her enemy. In all that she has seen of the future lord of the eight-pointed star, she has never seen their face.
The X Legion: the Bringers of Light
Name:
The Bringers of Light. Also called the Golden Tenth or the Daughters of the Dawn. Before Aurora was found, they were called the Hammers of the Emperor.
Insignia and Appearance:
The Bringers of Light's Power Armour is golden-hued, without trim. The higher-ranking Space Marines have their armour laden with sunstones.
A Bringer of Light's left pauldron displays markings of her formation and rank, in silver filigree. Her right pauldron, no matter her rank, always displays the Legion's symbol: the golden circle of a sun on a black background, emitting rays of light in all directions.
Gene-seed Status:
Aurora's gene-seed is decently stable, nothing extraordinary but a fairly low rejection rate, as long as the Aspirant is a woman of the right age and of excellent physical fitness. The latter is not a problem, because an Aspirant who was not excellently fit would not have made it past the trials anyway.
The gene-seed of Aurora has almost no effect on physical appearance, unlike that of many other Primarchs. Aspirants' hair, eyes and skin colour do not change to resemble Aurora's. As such, the Bringers of Light are a visibly multi-ethnic Legion.
There is one issue of the gene-seed, although it is not an issue of stability in the conventional sense. The recruiters and Apothecaries of the X Legion take great care to ensure, before the beginning of organ implantation, that none of their Aspirants are psykers. This is because Aspirants with pre-existing psychic powers, even weak ones, often find their psychic powers grow when they become daughters of Aurora. Psykers are considered 'abominations' in the culture of Sheol IX, Aurora's homeworld. The appearance of psychic powers in a new Space Marine is not greeted with death—the Aspirant is merely told, firmly, that they must not use their abominable talents—but it is nonetheless considered a failure by Aurora. The psychic enhancement effect of Aurora's gene-seed is undoubtedly related to the secret truth that Aurora would be an extremely powerful psyker herself, if not for her suppressing her 'abominable' powers through mental discipline, sheer disgust and self-hatred.
To solve this problem, since their reunification with Aurora the Bringers of Light have got more careful in their recruitment. Anyone who wishes to become an Aspirant must show that they have not a single psyker anywhere in their distant extended family tree, going back ten generations. The passing of the Ten-Generation Decree has greatly reduced the number of psykers appearing among new Space Marines, and psykers are rare enough among the human species as a whole that there has been very little decrease in the overall numbers of Aspirants, despite the decree's strictness. Therefore, from its makers' perspective, the Ten-Generation Decree has been a great success.
Legionary Assets:
280,000 Space Marines. Despite heavy casualties, the Bringers of Light's numbers are replenished by the constant flow of new Astartes, as they accept large numbers of Aspirants from all across the galaxy for recruitment.
Aurora's flagship is the Gloriana-class battleship Emperor's Light, in honour of the light of civilisation which she believes is brought to the galaxy by her father.
The Bringers of Light do not govern any civilian-inhabited planet, faithful to the Emperor's belief that the Astartes are meant to serve mankind, not rule. The Primarch's original homeworld, Sheol IX, is uninhabited by humans, except for the Legion's Aspirants when they are undergoing their trials on the icy, radioactive Death World.
An enormous Star Fort named the Light-Kindler—heavily shielded, heavily armoured, and with enough firepower to dominate the Sheol system, in which it permanently rests. Being a Star Fort, of course, it cannot move around. It's a fixed fortification. The Light-Kindler is twenty times bigger than the biggest battleship in the Imperium and correspondingly enormous in firepower.
Legion Organisation:
The organisation of the Bringers of Light starts out conventional and rapidly becomes anything but.
—A squad is of 10 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Sergeant.
—A company is of 100 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Captain.
Beyond that, the X Legion departs from the conventions of the Principia Belicosa.
—A Fist is of 500 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Fistleader. Each Fist is a collection of companies of the same type.
—A Thrust is of 3,000 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Thrustleader, and consists of Fists of numerous different types, plus aerospacecraft and artillery. The Thrust is the smallest combined-arms formation. It is quite a large formation, because of the Bringers of Light's preference for hammer-blow warfare where a lot of Astartes attack the enemy's centre of mass at once, over small-unit warfare.
—A Host is of 15,000 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Hostleader.
—A Banner-Host is of 60,000 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Bannerleader. Banner-Hosts are the largest subdivisions of the X Legion. Beyond them, there is only the Legion itself.
These are the theoretical numerical strengths. Because of the Bringers of Light's extreme high-intensity style of warfare and stunningly fast rate of planetary conquests, the true numbers often fall below this, and are replenished with a never-ending flow of young new Astartes eager to join the Golden Primarch's Legion. Understrength units are reinforced and truly mauled ones are dismantled entirely. The Legion does take care to ensure that no squad, company, Fist or Thrust should have too high a proportion of newly initiated Astartes. Squads and companies are kept together whenever possible, to preserve social bonds and unit cohesion. Other than that, formations are often rotated—for instance, a company moving from one Fist to another, or a squad moving to another company—in order to divide veterans more evenly between formations.
The Bringers of Light are highly specialised in individual roles. Whereas some other Legions, such as the Black Nineteenth, expect that every Space Marine should be capable of filling any role to suit whatever the situation demands, this is not the way of the X Legion. Every Bringer of Light has her role, and she excels in it.
—The Golden Wings are the aerospacecraft pilots of the Bringers of Light. Bringers of Light military doctrine depends heavily on air support, and the Golden Wings provide it: gunships for ground attack and sleek, fast interceptors to defend them. These pilots are famed for being somewhat more individualistic than the other Astartes of the X Legion. The Bringers of Light have more aerospacecraft than most Legions, so the number of Golden Wings is quite high. Every Thrust of the X Legion contains at least a hundred Golden Wings Astartes.
—The Sun Blades are the close-combat warriors of the Bringers of Light, fighting for Aurora's ideals with chainsword and bolt pistol. Each is a swift killer of deadly skill, dedicated to the ways of the blade. They are not as strong, physically, as the duellists of the Black Nineteenth, but they are much faster; speed is highly prized among the Sun Blades. The Sun Blades are also the Bringers of Light's main weapon in void warfare. Carried by Caestus assault rams, squads of Sun Blades break into an enemy starship with terrific speed and skill and seize it for their own. Many an enemy vessel has—ahem—undergone 'an involuntary change of ownership' in this way. Aurora herself is undoubtedly a Sun Blade.
—The Light Heralds show their dedication to the light of truth, progress and civilisation through the more literal light of explosions and firepower. They are the long-range troops of the Bringers of Light. Light Heralds are masters of tanks, armoured personnel carriers, artillery guns, and heavy infantry guns that can break and blast through any wall or gate in their way.
Special units:
Librarians—The Bringers of Light have no Librarius and make no use of psychic powers. There are some Astartes in the X Legion who do have psychic powers, mostly those Terrans who joined the Legion before their Primarch was found, but they are not permitted to use the 'abominable' powers of the Warp on pain of execution.
The Dawn Swords—The personal guard of Aurora Starchild are known as the Dawn Swords. They are selected from the deadliest Sun Blades in the X Legion. They are 3,000 strong, a strangely large number for a Primarch's personal guard, because of the Bringers of Light's style of warfare. In a hammer-blow attack, Aurora leads from the front. She is always to be found in the thickest of the fighting, her golden blade Dawn slashing through foes with startling speed, skill and grace. The Golden Lady exposes herself to personal danger more often than almost any other Primarch in the Imperium. Accordingly, her guard needs to be large to keep her safe. Every Dawn Sword is a master of bladework beyond compare. She has to be, or else she would not last ten minutes, given the way Aurora throws herself into peril, fearlessly, in every battle she fights. It is almost as if the Emperor's golden daughter has little regard for her own life.
Expertise and Combat Doctrine:
The Bringers of Light's speciality is the 'hammer-blow': a shockingly sudden, swift, strong attack against a location crucial to the enemy army with instantly overwhelming force: thousands upon thousands of Space Marines, tanks and Titans, backed up by vicious strafing and bombing attacks from Bringer of Light aerospacecraft. This decapitates the enemy's command structure, seizes the centre ground, and inflicts paralysing shock, awe and confusion. Then the victorious Astartes spread out in all directions and blast their way through the rest of the enemy army with the aid of Imperial Army forces following them up, before the enemy have the chance to recover their wits and start thinking straight. This doctrine is unchanged since the days before their Primarch was found, when the X Legion were called the Hammers of the Emperor.
This 'hammer-blow' way of war is optimised against Orks, because Orkish armies have a habit of losing discipline and collapsing into infighting when their Warboss is slain in combat. (The same effect does not take place if the Warboss is killed in bombardment. In that case, the Orks just pick another Warboss. The demoralising effect—if such a word can be applied to the green xenos, who do not think as humans do—clearly is not just the Warboss's death. There is something about the Big Boss being beaten which impacts upon the Orks' WAAAAGH! field, shifting them from the Orkish thought-mode of loyalty to the Warboss to the Orkish thought-mode of fighting to find out who will make the strongest next Warboss.) This is no coincidence. The Emperor knew very well that Orks are a common species in the galaxy. However, it also works well against many human enemies. Countless times, a human civilisation which intended to resist Compliance has been stunned by the loss of its leaders in the massive ferocity of a Bringer of Light attack, resistance has collapsed, and new leaders have rapidly sought peace with the Imperium.
In this way, the Bringers of Light use much more air support than many Legions. Aerospacecraft are a key part of the shock and awe of the hammer-blow. So, too, are tanks and Titans. There are several Titan Legions that have served alongside the Bringers of Light so often that they are more loyal to Aurora than to their nominal superiors in the Mechanicum.
With this way of war, the Bringers of Light conquer planets staggeringly quickly. Their number of Imperial Compliances is the highest of the Legiones Astartes. Unlike some Legions, Aurora's daughters do not tarry long on the planets they have conquered. They do their duty, win a battle, and then move on. Aurora believes in the Emperor's words that the Astartes are meant to serve mankind, not rule. Her Legion are soldiers, not governors or repairers of worlds. She puts her faith in the civilian institutions of the Imperium to bring the newly conquered worlds to Imperial prosperity, rather than attempting to micromanage everything herself. Her job is to conquer, and she does it very, very well.
Since the Bringers of Light leave quickly once the enemy has been broken, it is the Imperial Army who do the clean-up and secure the newly Compliant planet. Many an Imperial Army officer has spent his or her entire career following in the wake of the Golden Primarch, securing and enforcing Imperial order on the trail of thousands of stunned, awed, newly conquered worlds she leaves behind her. These divisions often seek orders from Aurora, as if they were her auxilia, rather than from Imperial Army High Command on distant Terra. This is partly because sending and receiving Astropathic messages across the stars to far-off Terra takes a lot of time. Relying on the commander nearby is just practical. But it is also partly because of how much they admire Aurora. They obey her commands as they would obey the Emperor himself.
In void warfare, the Bringers of Light's starships do not rely on heavy guns to batter enemy starships into submission. They prefer to close in on the enemy and launch Caestus assault rams. Their armour is quite light, by the standards of the warships of the Legiones Astartes, so that they have the advantage in speed and can close the distance on a fleeing enemy. They rely on Void Shields instead of armour for their protection. And instead of heavy starship guns, they carry enormous numbers of fake assault rams, along with the real ones. These are thrown out at the same time as the true assault rams, and are outwardly indistinguishable from them. That way, an enemy finds it almost impossible to shoot down all of the assault rams. And few enemies can withstand a Bringer of Light boarding assault. Such assaults are carried out with the same ferocity, shock and awe that is the X Legion's hallmark in ground warfare.
Legion Weaknesses:
Probably the biggest weakness of the Bringers of Light is their 'cult of the offensive'. On the offensive, they are all but unstoppable. Weak counter-attacks will not change this and are easily brushed aside. However, when truly forced onto the defensive, they are very ill-suited to it. Frustrated officers may launch ill-advised counter-attacks in a vain attempt to get back to the offensive. A major flaw of the Bringers of Light is their impatience.
They are particularly ill-suited to siege warfare. The problem is bigger than just that. Even in a campaign where there are no sieges and they are merely defending a sector from some xenos empire, the Bringers of Light are restless. They do not do well at anticipating where an enemy will attack and preparing their forces to defend it. They are so used to fighting with the initiative on their side that they are poor at fighting without it. Aurora's daughters are at their best when they can seize the initiative and never let it go, inflicting heavy blows on the enemy, stunning the enemy and leaving the enemy scrambling, with no time to do anything but react.
The Bringers of Light work together seamlessly in large formations practising combined-arms warfare. They do so very well. They never fight in groups of less than a Thrust, a formation of 3,000 Astartes. They would not do well at small-unit warfare, for they have no practice in it. Waging warfare as individuals would suit them even less well.
The Daughters of the Dawn are crusaders to the core, and their fighting style works best on crusade: massive-scale open warfare, well supplied with abundant fuel and ammunition. They are not a force that would cope well with shoestring supply lines.
Among the Bringers of Light, individuals' roles are highly specialised. The Bringers of Light are highly skilled at both range and in melee, with both bolter and chainsword, but that is the X Legion as a whole, not individuals. A Sun Blade of the Bringers of Light is superb in close-up combat with her chainsword and bolt pistol. She would do very badly if she were asked to take a longer-ranged role, albeit badly by the Legiones Astartes' lofty standards, not by mortal standards. Likewise, a Light Herald would fare poorly in melee.
The Bringers of Light take severe casualties in the 'hammer-blow' phase of battle, when they smash straight into the centre for a decapitation strike and rip out the heart of the enemy's power, although they rapidly decline once the enemy collapses and resistance breaks and splinters. The Bringers of Light use this high-intensity warfare approach, even when a slow, attrition-based approach would be able to succeed with fewer casualties, because of their belief that the galaxy must be conquered as quickly as possible, or else xenos foes will beat the Imperium in the race for the galaxy and then destroy mankind. And the Bringers of Light wage these battles very often, due to their staggeringly fast rate of planetary conquests. These lost Astartes are swiftly replaced, because they recruit Aspirants from such a large number of planets. Hence, this weakness is not one of numbers. Indeed, the Bringers of Light are one of the most numerous Space Marine Legions. The weakness is that, due the high churn rate of Space Marines dying and being replaced, the average Bringer of Light is less experienced than the average Space Marine in other Legions.
In void warfare, the Bringers of Light's style of war is only excellent when the distances are short, such as in planetary assaults—no matter if they are on the defensive or the offensive—because that allows for their favoured boarding attacks. In a true fleet battle, if the enemy fleet can keep its distance far enough, it can pummel a Bringers of Light fleet with its heavy starship guns and not let the Bringers of Light get close enough to do any boarding. As such, the X Legion's fleets are more suited to attacking planets than holding friendly space against a hostile xenos empire.
Beliefs and Practices:
Aurora Starchild is a true believer in the virtue of the Emperor's ideology. She believes every word of the Imperial Truth, the promise of human unity, the hope of progress and understanding, the banishment of fear and superstition, the unification of mankind and the destruction of xenos and mutant monsters, the triumph of the human species over the forces of darkness. Some may fight only out of personal loyalty to the Emperor. Aurora does have personal loyalty to the Emperor—she loves him as a parent, and the two are personally close—but that is not why she fights. She fights because she has the same dream the Emperor has of mankind's better future.
The Bringers of Light adore Aurora. Not just as every Space Marine Legion loves its gene-parent, but as something more. The Bringers of Light not only love their lady, they admire her, respect her above all others and see her as the perfect Imperial, the epitome of everything that everyone should want to be. Aurora—who does not share their lofty view, and in fact feels outright self-hatred—attempts, gently, to discourage this extreme admiration. Of course, that only makes them admire her more.
Aurora evokes an extraordinary degree of loyalty, not just from her Astartes daughters but also from Imperial Army soldiers, Iterators, Remembrancers, tech-adepts of the Mechanicum, numerous civilian governors, nobles and propagandists, and everyone around her. People are pulled in like planets orbiting a golden sun by the gravitational force of her charisma, humility, extraordinary courage, kindness and warmth.
The Emperor has no concern over this. Aurora is his loving daughter, very close to him. Why should he fear that she is so well-loved? Being loyal to Aurora is effectively the same thing as being loyal to him, of course!
On Sheol IX, Aurora learnt not only war but art, science, mathematics, music, and literature both poetry and prose. The glories of past human civilisation, a flame kept stubbornly alight by Pure Ones when they gathered in their rad suits in the radioactivity and the cold. She has passed on this passion to her Legion. They are great patrons of the arts. More Remembrancers travel with the Golden Tenth than any other Legion. It is by far the most oft-requested assignment. So, too, do countless Iterators, musicians, artists and sculptors, eager to be at the Lady of the Dawn's side.
Due to her upbringing on Sheol IX, Aurora hates psykers or 'abominations', though the extremity of this hatred is little-known outside her Legion because she does not speak of the subject, which is more painfully personal than is known. She is aware that the Emperor has psychic powers himself, and she does not think of her father as an abomination. She has a rationalisation for this, which sounds logical: the reason to hate abominations is that sometimes, without warning, they are corrupted and turn into Warp portals spewing out legions of monstrous entities on their planet. Thus, every psyker is a risk of bringing ruin and doom to everyone around them. The Emperor is enormously powerful. No vile entity of the Warp would be capable of corrupting and controlling him. Therefore it makes no sense to treat him as a risk like lesser psykers. That is the rationalisation. Her real reason, though, is that the Emperor just felt right to her, the moment they met. She cannot think of her golden father as a psyker, an abomination, something filthy and disgusting. That is the polar opposite of her view of him. She was wonderstruck by the loving, powerful, protective psychic aura she sensed from her father on the first day she met. She was immediately, instinctively loyal to him. She has been ever since.
Recruitment and Discipline:
Discipline among the Bringers of Light is unexceptional, unchanged from their days as the Hammers of the Emperor before Aurora's finding, because she saw no need to alter it. It follows the standard Imperial codes of law and individual punishment that were used for all the Legions in the early Great Crusade, before any of the Primarchs outside Sol were found.
The Bringers of Light are an unusual Legion in that they do not have recruiting worlds. They take Aspirants from the length and breadth of the Imperium, with the exception that they leave alone the recruiting worlds of the other Legiones Astartes in order to avoid starting conflicts with other Legions. The main limit on their recruitment arises from the Ten-Generation Decree: an Aspirant must have records proving that she has no psykers in her family tree for ten generations—sisters, brothers, parents, aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, second cousins, and so on. Technically this is a limit on people, not planets. In practice, it limits X Legion recruitment to those planets which have clear genealogical records, going back for many generations. Most Death Worlds do not keep such records, nor do Feudal Worlds and Feral Worlds, except perhaps for the high nobility. For the most part, then, the Bringers of Light recruit from the galaxy's Civilised Worlds: a very broad term for planets with a decently high technological level. Bringers of Light hail from hundreds of thousands of planets.
Thanks to Aurora's reputation as the perfect Golden Primarch and this welcoming, galaxy-wide recruitment, there has never been a shortage of hopefuls. There are too many hopefuls. Not even the Golden Tenth, one of the biggest Legions, can initiate them all. Many, many trials are required in order to winnow down the numbers to be small enough to handle. These trials are conducted by X Legion employees, not Astartes personnel, because there are not nearly enough Bringers of Light to do this on all the planets that they recruit from. The Bringers of Light take the best of the best. The others are encouraged to enlist in the Imperial Army.
Promising young women undergo a variety of trials on their homeworlds, designed to pick out the fastest, strongest, fittest, and most instinctively capable in combat. Those who make it through the trials are taken up to the Light-Kindler, the huge and heavily armoured Star Fort that dominates the Sheol system. The Light-Kindler is the Bringers of Light's main fortress-monastery. There they are given a further set of trials, testing them physically and mentally. This period of testing is quite short, just a couple of months: anyone who was not exceptionally talented would not have got past the earlier trials and been granted passage to the Light-Kindler. The Bringers of Light just like to make sure of it themselves. Sending anyone to the next trial who was not capable of it would be inhumane.
Those who pass these tests on the Light-Kindler are taken to Sheol IX, a horrifically cold, radioactive planet with plenty of once-human mutant hordes and hideously mutated beasts that are always trying to kill you. Before that, the Aspirants are given knowledge of the danger and a chance to back out. If they do not, they are handed rad suits and tasked simply to survive. They are told for months, but not how many. This trial, called the Light Against the Cold, serves three purposes. First, it thwarts those who just want glory and are not willing to tolerate hardship, because nobody wants to spend time in an icy wasteland full of lethal mutated monsters and radioactive waste. Every Aspirant is given a tracking chip, a vox-caster and a backup vox-caster, able to reach orbit. They can call for help and the Bringers of Light will come and rescue them, but they are told that this removes all chance of being accepted into the Legion. Secondly, it ensures that those who survive are clever, resourceful, determined, and good at fighting. The third purpose is cooperation. Regularly, groups of Aspirants decide to band together to survive their hellish sojourn on Sheol IX. The Aspirants are not ordered to work together. They are not even told that it is permitted. For all that they know, maybe they will be expelled from consideration if they work as a group. They do it anyway. Only Aspirants who befriend their sisters-to-be and band together with them ever pass the Light Against the Cold. Those Aspirants who try to work alone inevitably fail. They need to have the Bringers of Light come and rescue them. No-one survives the horrendous frozen hell of Sheol IX by working alone. Likewise, according to the Imperial ideals of Aurora, mankind cannot survive the horrors of the galaxy if people and planets choose to be aloof. Selfishness is failure. Humans must band together and stand against the darkness side-by-side. This is an ideal that the X Legion holds dear.
In their three months trapped on the icy, radioactive Death World, groups of Aspirants learn to rely on each other, to trust each other like sisters. These bonds are to be carried forward when they are adult Bringers of Light. This is not an accidental effect of the Light Against the Cold. It is by design. The Bringers of Light, if they wanted, could tell the Aspirants that they will need to work together to pass. They do not. The kind of women they want in their Legion are people whose instinct to form friendships and work as a team is very powerful. A lone operator who prefers to rely on no-one but herself would fit in very badly with the Bringers of Light. For Bringers of Light virtually never fight alone. They fight in big groups of many battle-sisters, waging large combined-arms operations together. Different Bringers of Light have been trained to be Sun Blades or Light Heralds or Golden Wings, and they work smoothly together as if they are all cogs of the same great machine. The Golden Tenth's specialisation is an act of trust: each battle-sister is free to focus on training to be as good as she can at her role, not on branching out to be a jack-of-all-trades, able to do anything but less well. This only works because she trusts her sisters to have her back. She knows that she will do her part and her sisters in other roles will do theirs; they will not let her down.
To assure this vital trust between sisters, there is a moral test. The Light Against the Cold is not one test but two: the Test of Survival and the Test of Sisterhood. This is a secret held close by the X Legion. Inevitably, eventually, one or more of the members of a group of Aspirants will receive a significant injury. In that case, she ought to call for the Bringers of Light to come and rescue her, or if she is too hurt or too unwilling, one of her friends should make that call for her. The problem is that they have been told that calling for rescue means failing the trial. It has been left deliberately ambiguous whether this applies to the whole group. For all they know, this means they are giving up their chances of becoming Astartes. All of these young women are extraordinarily motivated, driven people who want desperately to become Daughters of the Dawn and have spent a huge amount of time and effort to get this far. Unknown to them, the injured Aspirant will be rescued and given medical care, no matter what they do. The Bringers of Light will always know when an Aspirant is seriously hurt, because the Aspirants' rad suits are secretly taking vid-casts and monitoring their health, and they must wear rad suits at all times when on the radioactive surface of Sheol IX. She might even get another chance, if her injury was not due to her. Sometimes, a good Aspirant gets hurt saving someone else from a bad situation that was their fault. So this is not really to decide her fate, but the rest of them. Aspirants may guess that there is extra monitoring, but only guess it, not know it. As far as they know, abandoning their friend might be fatal for her.
If the group call for a rescue but then flee the scene, thus leaving their wounded, helpless friend at the mercy of the mutant hordes until the Bringers of Light arrive, they are placing their selfish ambition over the good of a companion. If they do not call, that is even worse, though that is rare. Aspirants who fail the Test of Sisterhood will remain on Sheol IX until some other obstacle. Then they will be cast out and told that they have failed the trial for inadequate response to that obstacle. It does not matter that they passed trials of skill and strength. A person who would abandon her sister is unworthy to be a Daughter of the Dawn.
If the Aspirants call for aid and stay at their injured friend's side, to tend to her and protect her until help can arrive, they are doing right by their friend at the price of their ambition. They have shown the decency and loyalty expected of Bringers of Light. Usually this is a whole group, though it is not unheard of for a few brave young women to pass the Test and refuse to leave the side of their downed comrade when the rest of their group gives up and leaves.
If this happens after at least two months, they have also passed the Test of Survival by enduring Sheol IX for long enough to prove their resourcefulness, determination, strength and skill. They are brought at once to the Light-Kindler. If the injury happens too early in the ordeal, they are not taken up yet, for they have not yet proven themselves in the Test of Survival, but they are told graciously that this incident will not be counted against them, as if this were a generous concession to an unexpected circumstance. They still have a chance to finish the trial, it is said. They are told to proceed as normal. Once their trials are over, they are told about the secret test they passed and told that to join the Legion one has to pass it. Every Bringer of Light knows that her sisters are the sort of people who will not abandon her when she needs them.
Those who pass both tests are swept back up to the Light-Kindler. These Aspirants undergo gene-seed implantation, during which they receive yet further training, including duelling against each other. It also includes training in the armour, weapons and tactics they will be expected to use if they become true Astartes. The Neophytes quickly learn to lay suppressing fire, shoot from cover, drive a tank, pilot a shuttle, and unhesitatingly trust and rely on their battle-sisters. Failure at this stage is rare. Anyone who passed both tests of the Light Against the Cold and the many trials before it will usually pass these last hurdles easily. Half-way through the process, the Neophyte chooses her path: to be a Golden Wing, a Light Herald or a Sun Blade.
At the end of her training, by tradition, she travels to Terra, the cradle of Man. She goes to a place where one can see the night sky. For a night, she kneels silently, staring out at the galactic swirl of stars: innumerable little points of light shining stubbornly against a great expanse of darkness. She contemplates the galaxy, the history of mankind and the meaning of the oaths she is about to take. This vigil, called the Light Against the Dark, is often attended by crowds of patriotic men and women eager to see the golden-armoured angels at this moment of significance, though the Bringers of Light ensure that they stay at a respectful distance. Naturally, with the Bringers of Light's group ethos, she is not alone. Dozens of young Neophytes spend their vigil together. There, at dawn, she takes oaths, not to serve Aurora but to be "a sword in the hand of galactic mankind", to "spend my life serving them and fighting for them", to "bring light where there is darkness, safety where there is danger, unity where there is division, understanding where there is ignorance, and hope where there is fear". She pledges to obey the Emperor as "leader of mankind's great endeavour" and "his duly appointed representatives". By Aurora's fierce insistence, this is the only mention the oaths make of Aurora. Finally she swears to "protect the people of mankind" and to "guard them through the night and into the coming day". Upon those words, spoken as rosy sunlight dawns over the horizon, she rises as a full Bringer of Light.
Characters of Interest:
Issy Korah, First Bannerleader—Born on Sheol IX before the coming of the Emperor, Korah fought for Aurora Starchild in the Purging of Sheol IX against the mutant hordes. She would follow Aurora anywhere, and is well known for her personally fearless style, ever one to lead from the front and leap into the hardest of the fighting, just like the Lady of the Dawn. That she has done this so often and emerged alive renders Korah a subject of admiration in the Legion and the wider Imperium. She is one of the most celebrated Astartes warriors alive. As First Bannerleader, the formal honorific term for the Sister-Bannerleader who commands the First Banner-Host of the Bringers of Light, she is the highest-ranking person in the X Legion, after Aurora.
Zephany Gehennah, Sister-Bannerleader of the Second Banner-Host—Also born on Sheol IX, Gehennah was another of Aurora's Sheolite followers. She is not as famed a warrior as Korah, but where Korah is to be found at Aurora's side, urging fearless advances, Gehennah is the naysmith of Aurora's inner circle. Hers is often the role to challenge Aurora's plans in council, point out where they might go wrong, and thus work them over and improve them. This somewhat scandalises the rest of the Legion, whose adoration of their golden lady is so extreme it borders on worship. It is also precisely why Aurora values her and keeps her in council. Aurora is well aware that she is not the embodiment of Imperial perfection. Arrogance is not one of her flaws. Quite the opposite, actually.
Livia Endoris, Sister-Bannerleader of the Third Banner-Host—Endoris is a rare member of Aurora's inner circle born on Terra. She was a Sister-Brigadier in the Hammers of the Emperor, the name of the X Legion prior to its reunification with Aurora. Like virtually all Astartes of the X Legion, be they born on Terra or Sheol IX or any other planet in the galaxy, she adores and admires Aurora and would follow her anywhere and into anything.
Margrit Jaksin, First Sword of the Dawn—Born on Praetoria, one of the many Bringers of Light to come from planets in the galaxy far from Terra and Sheol, Jaksin is the leader of the Dawn Swords, Aurora's personal guard. She is one of the greatest warriors in the Legiones Astartes. She is unlikely to live long. Due to Aurora's fearless style of fighting, always leaping into the thickest of the fray without regard for her own life, the coveted position of First Sword of the Dawn has a high turnover rate.
Battle-Sister Obdia Hadis—An up-and-coming Sun Blade who only recently became a Bringer of Light. At the age of nineteen Terran years, she has already caught the eye of other Sun Blades as a particularly deadly swordswoman. In the future, likely to become one of the greatest warriors of the X Legion, though today she is still young.
Battle-cry:
By far the most common battle-cry of the Bringers of Light shows their love, admiration and dedication to their Primarch: "AURORA! AURORA! AURORA!"
A call-and-response cry is also common: the commander yells "Glory to the light…" and the battle-sisters respond "DEATH TO THE DARKNESS!"
To motivate each other when a battle is about to begin, another cry is: "Aurora expects victory!"
Legionary History:
There are countless battles the Bringers of Light have fought and won. Of all the Legions in the Great Crusade, they have one of the fastest rates of planetary conquest, and they have been conquering for a long time. The Golden Lady was reunited with her father very early in the Great Crusade, third of the scattered Primarchs to be found off Terra. Mere months after that reunion, near unto the dawn of the infant Imperium, the Emperor tasked her as principal commander of the Perseus Illumination, the Imperium's decades-long campaign to secure the western Perseus Arm. The Bringers of Light were as ever at the tip of her blade. Nor did their record of blood and glory end when that gigantic arm of stars was conquered.
One could speak of the Miraculous Realm of Miracula, a dread psiocracy whose armies of giant robots were piloted by children enslaved to the will of the arrogant Psi-King, until the Bringers of Light descended in steel and fire upon the bloody fields of Krankule and the golden blade of Dawn took off his head.
One could speak of the Orkish empire of the Thramas Sector, the greatest Greenskin state ever encountered before the Ullanor Wars, until Aurora Starchild led a grand campaign that toppled it entirely in a month of peerless manoeuvres of dazzling military brilliance.
One could speak of the Empire of the Cacaraxian Elite: six-hundred worlds ruled by a vicious, militaristic and tyrannical upper caste of genetically enhanced super-warriors who lorded it over the rest of the human species with the aid of their Mechs, until three Space Marine Legions surged in and brought them to heel—the Bringers of Light operating together with their oft-friends the Rust Spiders and the Crimson Guard.
One could speak of the dark rumours of the Carmatulus Incident, when the war for the planet Carmatulus Prime was nearly brought to a peaceful ending by the Bringers of Light's honourable approach, honest diplomacy and fierce fast-paced way of war, until elements of the XVII Legion, the Scourge, came to the scene in an orgy of bloodletting, loot-taking and callous mass murder while the Bringers of Light were still negotiating—causing the Carmatulans to cut off negotiations with the Imperium and fight to the death.
One could speak of Warlord Steelskull, leader of the fiercest WAAAAGH! ever to invade the Imperium, who menaced the realms of Man for two years, until the Daughters of the Dawn came to thwart him. They shattered his WAAAAGH! to shards of ruin, fleeing from Imperial might, and Aurora ripped her Power Sword through his chest.
But one campaign will be chosen in particular: the famous Liberation of Istvaan.
The Istvaan system was a star-system of three inhabited planets Istvaan III, IV and V, long occupied by humans, but beset by the murderous green tide of the Orks. Worse, it was not just one Orkish WAAAAGH!. Several competing WAAAAGH!s had descended upon the star-system, attracted by the tough fight put up by the human inhabitants, and soon set to fighting each other as well as the Istvaanians. An Imperial Expeditionary Fleet from a different Legion had come to bring the system to Compliance, only to find, unexpectedly, the presence of the Orkish threat. The humans of the Istvaan system—a reasonably technologically advanced multi-planet civilisation that had been expected to fight—immediately accepted Imperial Compliance before the 87th Expeditionary Fleet's commander could even finish speaking, so desperate were they for aid.
The Imperials of the 87th Expeditionary Fleet duly rendered aid. However, despite having forty-thousand Astartes and millions of soldiers of the Imperial Army, they soon got bogged down against the enormous, churning numbers of Orks. For the Orks, when the 87th came along, they immediately ceased their struggles against each other and unified against their common foe. Despite their brutish appearances, the Orks are no fools. They have a certain savage cunning. To underestimate the Orks is to invite peril.
Taking heavy losses, and losing the confidence of the Istvaanian humans in the Imperium's ability to aid them, the 87th Expeditionary Fleet called for reinforcements. The nearest Legion to arrive was the Bringers of Light. All five Banner-Hosts of the X Legion combined together into a single mighty taskforce and Aurora Starchild led them to the Istvaan system at top Warp speed. Once her fleet dropped out of Warp, the Lady of the Dawn did not waste time. She immediately divided up her fleet and sent its sections to assume orbit of the planets Istvaan III, IV and V, ready at her mark to launch a coordinated assault. No single decapitation strike would suffice. This was not one WAAAAGH! but several whose Warbosses were temporarily cooperating. It would not be enough to kill one Warboss and watch the rest disintegrate. What was needed was the breaking of all Orks in the system. Even though they outnumbered the Bringers of Light by hundreds to one.
The battle began with a blaze of explosions as the Golden Wings rained down death from above. Following hot on their heels came the Sun Blades, the assault troops of the Bringers of Light, and the Light Heralds in their tanks and artillery air-dropped in special deployment aerospacecraft. Aurora herself raced ahead of her daughters, smashing into the encampment of the biggest, nastiest Ork Warlord in Istvaan—whose Orkish army was far too large for the whole Legion to cut through to reach him… but perhaps a small force could. Three-thousand Dawn Swords, some of the best swordswomen in the Legiones Astartes, struggled to keep pace. Wielding Dawn in a whirlwind of death and destruction so fast she was like a blur that could not be seen, Aurora drove her way through the entire Orkish army like a spear-thrust to the heart, found the Warlord, and decapitated him. Then she had to fend off the rest of the army of Orks. When the rest of the Legion—eventually—caught up, all of the Dawn Swords were dead or injured. Aurora lay alone, panting, bleeding from a hundred wounds. The broken bodies of sixty-thousand giant Orks lay strewn like child's toys around her. She had fought them all, well beyond the point of injury and exhaustion, until there were literally none left.
All across the system, elite Bringers of Light forces did likewise, smashing into the centre of the Orks' armies and ripping out the hearts of what passed for their command structures simultaneously. It was a high-speed, shock-and-awe attack, carried out with incredible speed and backed up by thousands of tanks, aerospacecraft and artillery. Within mere hours, the Ork hordes across the whole star-system were reeling. The Bringers of Light spread out from the central nodes they had already occupied, striking hard and fast, and mopped up the rest of the Orks before they had time to settle on new Warbosses or get their act together, cutting them into manageable pockets and pieces and slaughtering them with a surgeon's precision. The Orkish armies had turned from dominating the star-system to fleeing dregs, being cut down by the Bringers of Light and their Imperial Army support. All of that, in the less than ten hours since the attack had begun.
From the encampment of the great slain Warlord, the Bringers of Light bore their wounded gene-mother away. She soon made a full recovery. For a Primarch to be injured at all is exceptionally rare, much less one as skilled and swift as Aurora. She would not have been thus hurt, had she not charged, unsupported by most of her Legion, into the very heart of the Ork Warlord's army. The Istvaanian campaign is mentioned because it shows something of the character of the X Legion and of Aurora.
Aurora was soon up and about, yet seemed agitated, despite the quick vanishing of her injuries. She barely stopped to receive the outpouring of gratitude from the saved Istvaanians before she demanded that the Bringers of Light vacate the star-system. They obeyed, of course, puzzled though they were. The Lady of the Dawn's every word was beyond dispute and beyond question. She explained she had no patience for tarrying. The Great Crusade was calling. There were ever more planets to be liberated, she said; vulnerable humans in the galaxy who needed them now.
This satisfied the Bringers of Light's curiosity. It was not the real reason. As soon as Aurora was outside the star-system, she seemed more at ease. Curiously, she had not been upset when her daughters bore her, wounded, to medical assistance. Back then, her mood was tired but triumphant. Her agitation did not start after the battle. It started when she woke up after the night after the battle. Why she was so ill-at-ease in this random star-system, none could say. Nothing important. Probably just a dream.