Oiwa Izanami and the Ghost Warriors
By author Cubismo
The Fifteenth Primarch: Oiwa Izanami
Name:
Oiwa Izanami, the Mikoshi Supreme, the Immaculate Lady of Blood and Snow, the Oni Queen of Naruku, the Masked Primarch, She-Who-Invites.
Appearance:
It is said that Primarchs are beings so beautiful that they can inspire images of divinity even in an age where such things are outlawed. Jaded mortals from the harshest Hive Worlds and savage Feral Worlds have openly wept tears of joy at the sight of their perfected bodies and regal grace. Oiwa is no such being. Whatever angelic beauty or beguiling aura that her creator, the Emperor of Mankind, gene-coded into her form has been eaten away by the biting cold of Yomi and been replaced with a horror that chills the blood of mortals.
As with all her kin, the Fifteenth Primarch is a tall and imposing demigod that easily dwarves her Astartes daughters. Despite her height and constant aura of terror, Oiwa can be accurately described as spindly. Indeed, outside of her armour she is borderline cadaverous, lacking the chiselled superhuman physique that is common for a Primarch or even an Astartes. That is not to say that she is without the strength and resilience of a Primarch, with many a foe learning this truth far too late. Long, stringy black hair reins free from her mask and spills out as dark tendrils that seemingly have a life of their own when spotted from the corner of one's eye. Like her daughters, Oiwa is pale-skinned to the point of appearing ashen and bloodless. When not in battle or on a campaign, she can be found either in the traditional red and white attire of a Mikoshi priestess or a humble white kimono.
And then there is her mask. As with all the death priests of her homeworld, Oiwa permanently adorns herself in the mask of a monster from Yomi myth, with hers being a grinning golden demon with jagged tusks for teeth and large ivory horns. What visage lies behind this mask is a mystery. Whether it matches the rest of the Primarch's ghastly appearance or hides away the last untainted part of one of the Emperor's glorious children, none but Oiwa, her closest followers, and perhaps the Emperor can rightly say for sure.
In battle, Oiwa wields Sōru-Ītā-Yari, an incredibly powerful Force Spear fashioned in the configuration of a Yomi pole weapon. Though modelled off the ringing ritual staffs of her homeworld's shamans, this spear is powerful by virtue of its ability to channel the psychic strength of its incredibly powerful wielder. Though fully capable of easily cutting through ceramite and even battle tanks, Oiwa largely uses the weapon to blast her foes with chilling ice, ghostly flames, and rending winds, thus making it as much a ranged weapon as a melee one.
Into battle, the Fifteenth Primarch wears the Vestments of the Saikō-Mizoshi. This suit of armour has a dual purpose in not only being Oiwa's favored battleplate but also as ceremonial vestment for the rites of her people. Accordingly, it has the same red-white coloration of the Mikoshi and is covered in talismans, insignia, and scripture relating to the Yomi faith. Given its appearance, many who have seen it have questioned its suitability in war only to find themselves forced to take back their words after witnessing it withstand all manner of potent weapons and ammunition.
Talents and Personality:
"Vengeance is a monster of appetite, forever bloodthirsty and never filled."
—Ancient Terran maxim.
Oiwa Izanami is a conniving witch who sadistically torments the minds of mortals. Oiwa Izanami is a wise teacher who only seeks to advance mankind's knowledge of the Warp. Oiwa Izanami is a necessary evil who sorrowfully does what needs to be done for the greater good. Oiwa is a broken Primarch whose mask hides a woman betrayed by those she loved and once protected. Whether any, none, or all of those beliefs about the Primarch of the Ghost Warriors holds true it cannot be denied that she is an altogether enigmatic figure whose motives, and beliefs are shrouded in mystery and competing truths. However, despite these contrasts, those who encounter the high priestess of the XV Legion are likely to perceive a figure worthy of fearful reverence. Whether a consequence of her psychic aura or simply her unnerving visage and manner, Oiwa's mere presence conjures palpable horror and dread, so much so that many mortals cannot stand to be near her for long without suffering some kind of spasm. This comes despite the fact that Oiwa herself is eerily soft-spoken figure with few ever hearing her so much as raise her voice even in the heat of battle… or when performing foul atrocities against the guilty.
When it comes to her capabilities it is obvious that Oiwa's greatest strength lies in her knowledge and mastery of the psychic arts and the Warp. While she may possess the tactical and strategic brilliance of a Primarch, along with superhuman strength and endurance, those abilities all pale to her otherworldly powers and the insights they give her. Beyond the Warp, though, Oiwa possesses an incredible intellect, even for a Primarch. Indeed, while this intelligence is not centred around engineering, biology, statecraft, or some other field of study as it is for other Primarchs, it is striking nonetheless. For all the claims of her and her Legion being primitive folk sorcerers, it is obvious to anyone who converses with her that Oiwa is a formidable philosopher and astounding historian, archaeologist and anthropologist, whose knowledge of the past testifies to just how much time and effort she and her Legion devote to uncovering mankind's long-lost histories.
Homeworld:
Located in the infamous Ghoul Stars region in the galactic northeast, Yomi is a miserable world of constant winter, dense mists, and raging seas. With a scattered population in the few millions spread out across villages and hamlets, Yomi's dangers border on it being labelled a Death World. Its northern hemisphere is almost entirely covered in icy tundra and polar wastes, while its southern hemisphere is a vast ocean that is consumed by wild storms, making it nearly impossible to navigate. Only its middle regions at the equator are truly inhabitable for baseline humans, though even then the crooked peninsulas and archipelagos that most of the people of Yomi call home are often in danger of being drowned by the unpredictable tides or outright buried by snowstorms. And then there are the more unnatural threats that stake the world: beings from beyond that come in the mist or the night and drag the foolish and unprepared into their realm. While this danger has been largely checked by the Ghost Warriors and the Mikoshi, the threat still remains, always lingering.
Notably, despite the mandates of the Imperial Truth, the denizens of Yomi are a deeply spiritual people whose faith is shamanistic in nature. To them death is but a transition to another state of being, one where spirits, gods, and their own ancestral dead exist as immortal figures worthy of respect and fear. While each individual villages has its own ancient traditions when it comes to these shamanistic beliefs, it is almost universally held that those "touched by the gods" are conduits to the hereafter who must be revered if a community hopes to connect to the divine and better yet survive the dangers of their world. This reverence for psykers was not always the case. Before Oiwa brought ruin to the Last Empire, the closest thing Yomi had to a centralised state, the Mikoshi were considered pariahs by the other shaman cults who saw their lack of restraint as a sure path to corruption. Now in the current age, the Mikoshi hold hegemonic authority on Yomi and they rule the world as a fragmented theocracy, with the Ghost Warriors holding dominion over the planet.
Notably, it has been theorised by many in the Imperium that Yomi was originally created by early human settlers to deliberately replicate an ancient Terran culture. Given the fact that Yomi has many cultural and aesthetic similarities to Terra's Pan-Pacific Empire and the Neo-Tokyo Hive, as well as such experiments likely to have occurred on similarly replicate worlds like Fenris and Chogoris, this theory has some merit. If so, it is also likely that the coming of Old Night, and the chaos that came of it, is the reason why Yomi collapsed into stagnation and ruin from whatever original purpose it had.
Psychic potential:
"Heed these words carefully, Oiwa. You are strong in the ways of the Warp and know some of its mysteries but know this old truth. If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
—The Emperor of Mankind .
Oiwa is without a doubt one of the most powerful psykers in the Imperium, with only the Emperor of Mankind being her superior and some of her sibling Primarchs being her equals. While entirely capable of dramatically summoning bolts of black lightning and otherworldly azure flames to smite her enemies, Oiwa's main focus in the psychic arts are in accordance with the shamanistic traditions of her homeworld. Divination, illusions, curses, mental manipulation and, perhaps most alarmingly, communing with the Warp are all powers that Oiwa has thoroughly honed and mastered to a disturbing degree.
Background:
The destiny of a Primarch is a fickle thing. Woven and tampered by gods and beings who claim not to be divine at all, to be a Primarch is to be a being of immense power whose fate is nonetheless pulled in directions both glorious and horrific by figures unseen. In this regard the destiny of Oiwa Izanami was no different. The Fifteenth Primarch was never meant to leave the Emperor's gene-vaults before the time he deemed right, nor was she meant to be stolen away by cruel and laughing gods who threw her capsule through the Warp to a place far from Terra. But perhaps most importantly, Oiwa was never meant to land on Yomi, a cold world haunted by glories of the past, malignant figures of the present, and ill omens of the future. Perhaps there may have been hope for her and Yomi if only she had been found and raised by men and women whose virtues rose above Yomi's gloom and despair. Indeed, for the briefest of times, the then-unnamed Primarch was. The Fifteenth's capsule was first found buried in the snow by a party of seven wandering warriors. These were lordless warriors of honor who travelled the frost-bidden countryside of Yomi in search of worthy causes. Using their blades and will, they defended the helpless from bandits, cruel lords, and beings from beyond who preyed upon the living. If they had been the ones to raise the Fifteenth Primarch to maturity, then perhaps her fate and that of her Legion would have been different. Alas, this was not the case. Those brave warriors would suffer an ignorable death no less than a month after finding the Fifteenth Primarch, a freak snowstorm trapping them and causing their slow descent into desperation, starvation, and then finally cannibalism. By the time the young Primarch was discovered by a lone priestess, the last of those valiant swordmasters had killed one another while trying to devour their former comrades.
The lone priestess was Akuma Kurayami, a member of the Cult of the Mikoshi, an infamous sorority of witches maligned by their fellow folk shamans for their unrestricted use of their abilities. It would be under Akuma's tutelage that Oiwa Izanami, named after an ancient Yomi goddess of the dead, was taught the psychic arts in a remote underground shrine far from the rest of Yomi civilisation. It did not take long for her fellow Mikoshi to realise that Oiwa was being far above themselves in terms of her strength in the Warp. Be it being able to see the skein of fate more clearly than all of them or showing unparalleled might when conjuring forth ice or confidently communing with the strange spirits of the beyond, Oiwa was a psyker who mastered all she put her mind to. Her thirst for knowledge was seemingly unquenchable—so much so that eventually her isolation in the Mikoshi shrine became far too confining for her. She had to see the rest of Yomi and learn its mysteries as well. Moreover, she had envisaged serving a great lord whose vision would change the world. Her surrogate mother was less than enthused, warning her that the outside world was far too consumed by petty fears to ever accept the ways of the Mikoshi and they would reject her in time. Unwilling to accept a life of isolation, Oiwa rebuffed these charges and made her way into the wider world with little more than the clothes on her back and her ritual staff.
It would not take Oiwa long to make her presence known throughout the land. Going from village to village she performed all manner of miracles for the impoverished people of Yomi, from healing their sick, calming approaching storms that threatened their villages, to banishing malignant spirits that sought their blood. Though many of these villagers initially feared the imposing ivory-skinned witch and her open affiliation with the reviled Mikoshi, they slowly started to come to her for help and wisdom, gaining Oiwa a growing circle apprentices who sought to learn her ways. Eventually the self-proclaimed emperor of Yomi would hear of her actions and send his retainers to bring her to him. Unafraid of whatever this supposed emperor wanted of her, Oiwa willingly went to his capital, a small fiefdom that served as the last remnant of Yomi's ancient world-wide empire. Though Oiwa expected the monarch to condemn her as a witch, he instead acknowledged her good works across the land and humbly asked that she serve as his spiritual advisor. Believing this to be an opportunity to not only bring greater change to Yomi but also fulfil her vision, Oiwa accepted the offer and for a time all was well. She loyally stood by her emperor's side and through him she was able to enact meaningful changes that improved the land. Literacy, medicine, and they very history of Yomi were all advanced and uncovered and the people's fears about the Mikoshi calmed. Unfortunately, the fates seemed intent to shift the Primarch's destiny once more.
The emperor slowly but surely started to fear Oiwa's growing influence in his court. She was an ethereal being whose power and wisdom far eclipsed his own as a mortal man. His advisors saw this as well and began to quietly warn him that his position could very well be usurped if he did not act soon. Eventually these fears overwhelmed him and turned into an envious paranoia that would in the end doom him. Knowing that he could not strike Oiwa conventionally given her powers, he plotted to have her killed in a remote village that had been prepared ahead of time for an ambush led by four-hundred of his best champions. When the emperor asked that Oiwa investigate the village, claiming that it was suffering from a plague, her divinations warned her that a great deception and cruel fate lurked there. Despite these warnings, Oiwa travelled there nonetheless, not believing that the man whom she had served so faithfully would betray her. Alas, this was not the case. Oiwa would arrive with her apprentices at the empty village and immediately be set upon by an army intent on killing her with their blades, arrows, or sorceries. They would fail, and badly at that, but not without slaughtering all the apprentices that Oiwa had brought with her.
When Oiwa returned alone to the emperor's castle estate covered in blood and snow, she demanded that the emperor answer for his crimes in open court. To the emperor's credit he did not balk at the challenge. He denied the accusations and threw out some of his own, claiming that Oiwa was a witch beholden to daemons who wanted her to take his throne and plunge Yomi into darkness. Despite the years Oiwa had served the empire, the royal court swallowed the emperor's lies without a second thought and outright demanded Oiwa's death. Oiwa could have pierced the emperor's mind and forced him to reveal his secrets or even destroyed him with fell lightning or any number of things, but she did neither. Instead, she cursed the emperor and his court lackeys, telling them all that they would be haunted by ghosts born of their sins, before leaving to parts unknown. This would not be an idle threat.
Soon the court was assailed by an assortment of strange omens and events over several months. Servants disappearing in the middle of the night. Hale retainers losing their strength and skill each day until they were more akin to desiccated corpses than fighting men. Courtiers killing themselves out of guilt when they could no longer suffer the incessant disembodied whispers of those they had wronged. The worst of it, though, was left for the emperor himself, who was haunted by unending visions of Oiwa's dead apprentices who were slain by his orders. It would only end when a now masked Oiwa would return to the emperor's court with her Mikoshi sisters at her back. Now completely mad after months of her haunting, the emperor begged Oiwa to call off her ghastly warriors and return his empire to its former peace. In the end, she would do exactly that… after granting the grovelling emperor the peace of oblivion and claiming his throne for her own just as he feared. She would not lord over it for long though. The last empire of Yomi would be dismantled over time and in its place a decentralised theocracy controlled by Oiwa and her Mikoshi sisters would rule all of Yomi as its supposed benevolent matriarchs. This would be the Yomi that the Emperor of Mankind would find when he finally found Oiwa.
It would be a sombre reunion as the Emperor was troubled by his daughter's communing with the Warp and the sway her cultists had over a world that would have surely suffered a cleansing of its shamans and traditions if not for the fact that one his Primarchs landed on it. And so Oiwa and her father would talk amongst each other for several days, engaged in psychic exchanges that were more akin to debates than a joyous communion between long-lost family. However, in the end, an accord would be reached. In exchange for Yomi being allowed to remain in its current state, Oiwa would not only serve in the Emperor's Great Crusade but also swear an eternal oath that she would respect the limits he placed on her voyages into the Warp. With that oath made, Oiwa would join the Great Crusade and be granted a Legion—a fate that many would come to regret.
The XV Legion: the Ghost Warriors
Name:
The Ghost Warriors, formerly known pre-Oiwa's rediscovery as the Imperial Blades. Less formally, they are known as the Masked Legion, the Pale Revenants, and the Hungry Ghosts.
Insignia and Appearance:
The Legion's insignia is a pale woman's face which is half decayed and rotten, exposing the skull underneath.
The colours of their Power Armour are white (primary), blood red (secondary), sometimes draped with bones. Skull masks and faceplates made to resemble rotting corpses and demons of Yomi myth are omnipresent.
Gene-seed Status:
Highly unstable. Notable instability when it comes to implant performance, along with a high gene-seed rejection rate and high propensity for spontaneous psyker cultivation. Tellingly, it has been observed that those already in possession of the psychic gene have far greater chance of accepting the Fifteenth Primarch's gene-seed.
Faulty Melanochrome: As with the VII Legion, the XV's hormonal skin implant is partially non-functioning. While still well-protected from hazardous radiation, their skin tones will not physically change to better combat deadly amounts of ultralight light. Similarly, as with the Dread Wardens, the Ghost Warriors have deathly pale skin tones, though theirs is even more extreme and often bear a striking semblance to that of corpses. It should be noted that this dysfunction only started to happen once the Legion arrived on Yomi.
Limited Mucranoid: While the Mucranoid is supposed to provide an Astartes with the ability to coat their bodies in a protective gel that can shield them from extreme temperatures—be they hot or cold—and even hard vacuum to an extent, in the Ghost Warriors its capabilities are limited to only shielding them extreme frigidness though it does it a greater degree than most Legions. As with the melanchrome, this dysfunction only began to occur after the Legion found their Primarch and adopted Yomi as their new home and headquarters.
Unstable ossmodula: A far more serious and deadly deficiency is found in their ossmodula, the essential implant responsible for increased bone growth in an Astartes. Known within the Legion as the Twisting or Plague of Spirals, this ailment randomly afflicts a Space Marine of the XV with catastrophic destabilisation of their entire bone structure causing spontaneous and wild contortions across their body as they twist their bones and quite literally fold into themselves. The cause of this affliction is unknown with there being no scientific explanation why it strikes one Ghost Warriors and not another. Fortunately, since Legion's reunion with their Primarch, episodes of this horror have dropped dramatically to the point of its apparent disappearance.
Legionary Assets:
The Ghost Warriors are one of the smallest of the Legiones Astartes. Due to a combination of their gene-seed statistically being likelier to cause an Initiate's agonising death than her transformation into an Astartes and Oiwa's adamant refusal to recruit from anywhere other than her native Yomi, the Legion consistently only numbers around 80,000 to 90,000 Astartes. Attempts to remedy this situation and increase their numbers have gone nowhere, with Oiwa seemingly being content with her Legion's size.
Auxilia—The Ghost Warriors effectively have none to speak of. The reasons for this are myriad. For one, the Legion is something of a pariah force in the wider Imperium on account of not their status as a Legion of psykers from a world stemmed in superstitions that runs counter to the Imperial Truth but also because their tactics and strategies do not lend themselves to battles that can be glorified in the annals of the Imperium. To put it bluntly, very few regiments in the Imperial Army would voluntarily wish to be tethered to the XV Legion, nor would the War Council be eager to order them to do so. As for native auxilia forces, the XV do have mortal aides who assist them to a myriad of tasks. While these assistants are more akin to Legion serfs than a true auxilia, they nevertheless provide the Legion with a small army of menials—or cultists as their detractors would claim—who fill the roles that the numerically limited Ghost Warriors do not have time to do.
Fortress-monastery—The lair of the Ghost Warriors is a facility hidden deep within the dark caverns of Yomi. Known internally within the Legion as the Eight Icy Pits of Naraku, or simply as Naraku, the sprawling fortress is labyrinth nightmare of icy and shadow that only a Ghost Warriors or their devout mortal servants can safety navigate without fear of being lost. Nominally, the lair can be described as having eight levels or caravans that house specific faculties for the Legion. For example, the Third Pit holds the Apocatherion while the Seventh Pit, which is right above a coalescence of geothermal vents, is where the Legion houses its Armoury and foundries. Tellingly, the Legion has no separate Librarius as other Legions do. Instead, all of Naraku can be accurately described as one massive Librarius with countless shrines, athenaeums, and reliquaries being omnipresent across the entire fortress-monastery, filling it with arcane knowledge from countless worlds. While the subterranean nature of their fortress-monastery provides it with an extra level of added protection, the spiritual importance that this location has to the Legion cannot be understated. At the fortress's very epicenter is a small humble shrine, the very one where Oiwa was inducted into the ways of the Mikoshi Cult long ago. It is also within that innermost most sanctum where Oiwa resides with her closest apprentices, conducting all manner of arcane search and perhaps even sorceries.
Flagship—As with all the other Legions, a Gloriana-class battleship serves as the flagship of the Ghost Warriors. Back in their days as the Imperial Blades it was appropriately known as the Master Stroke and was a gilded marvel meant to proudly display the glory of the Imperium and Terra. Within her vast halls and chambers were row upon row of meticulously maintained trophies and weapons taken from countless battles the Imperial Blades fought during the Unification Wars and Great Crusade. The contrast between the golden Master Stroke of yesteryear and her current incarnation is striking to say the least. Renamed the Soratobu Yūreibune, which translates in Gothic to the Flying Ghost Ship, this ghost-white predator is bereft of the triumph halls of the Master Stroke and is instead filled with ritual chambers meant to mimic the underground caverns of the Mikoshi. Tactically the purpose of the XV's flagship has been changed as well. Whereas the Master Stroke was an assault ship meant to cut a swathe through the enemy and contemptuously endure their return fire, the Soratobu Yūreibune is a lean predator which is equipped with stealth technologies that allow her to sneak up the enemy without notice.
Legion Organisation:
To say the Ghost Warriors have utterly abandoned the structures of the Principia Belicosa would be an understatement. Almost immediately after Oiwa took control of the Legion, she began to radically shift its organisational structures into something more in line with her own ethos and that of her homeworld's traditions. Indeed, one need only examine the hierarchy of Yomi's various cults to recognise that Oiwa transferred its esoteric structures and hierarchies to her Legion. However, for the sake of simplicity, the Ghost Warriors can be nominally recognised in the broadest strokes as having a tier system that is superficially capable to the Principia Belicosa's standard convention of brigades, chapters, companies, and squads. Here, covens are understood to represent squads whilst Sects can possess varied strengths that are comparable to a company or battalion. Lastly, Cults are the largest military formations in the XV and can be considered equal to a very large Chapter, with there being a total of eight of them in the Legion. These eight Cults are more akin to demi-Legions with their own self-efficient allotment of Legion resources, arms, and even recruitment territories on Yomi. That is not say that these Cults are quarrelsome or even fiercely independent. They simply possess unique cultural traditions owning to their regional domains on Yomi whose preservation is actively encouraged by Oiwa. The Third Cult for instance is well-known within for possessing a relative abundance of Tech-Marines and artificers, a cultural legacy of that region being renowned for its smiths. Likewise, the Sixth Cult is notorious for using their psyker powers to conjure insanity-inducing mists and fogs which resemble the phenomenon that afflicts their costal home on Yomi.
Notably, each Cult, Sect, and even coven is almost always led by a member of the Mikoshi, the Librarians and spiritual leaders of the Ghost Warriors. Given that the XV is a Legion made up almost entirely of psykers, this should come as no surprise. Talent in the psychic arts almost always means a higher place in the Legion hierarchy, though this is not always the case. Adherence to the spiritual mandates and philosophies of the Mikoshi as well as merit in the mundane military sciences are all considered when it comes to advancement. Typically, a coven will be led by a novice member in the Mikoshi Cult and is otherwise known as a Kai Mikoshi. Accordingly, Sects are led by a Joi Mikoshi and Cults by one of the eight Dai Mikoshi. Lastly there is Oiwa herself, who exists as the supreme high priestess of the Mikoshi faith and order and serves as its Mikoshi Supreme or Saiko Mikoshi.
Beyond the macro-organisational structures of the eight Cults, there also exist over a dozen Paths. The Paths are unique formations comprised of specialised squads who undertook special training in that Path's shrine-temple on Yomi. For instance, the battle-sisters of the Path of the Tengu are dedicated Assault Marines who rapidly wade into battle with their jet-packs and Power Spears while donning corvine masks and giant black wings, while the Path of the Ogumo are elite infiltrators and assassins known for their trap and poison-making capabilities and eight-eyed masks. The most notorious of these Paths, though is the Path of the Oni. Unlike the rest of the Legion's predilection for silent covert action, Oni Squads are Terror Marines who exist to cause chaos and mayhem on the battlefield. To put it bluntly, they are frenzied terrorists and marauders who go out of their way to shed as much blood as possible on a grand scale through blood-chilling atrocities that are meant to shock the enemy into terror and surrender. They do this while blasting out vox-boosted screams from their helms and wielding their massive spiked Power Clubs and grinning daemonic masks.
The fact that these Paths are similar to the Aspect Warriors of the Eldar has not gone unnoticed by the rest of the Imperium, with some theorists speculating that Yomi may have been influenced by the xenos species at some point during Old Night. Such theories have been predictably neither publicly denied or accepted by the enigmatic Ghost Warriors, though concerns that the XV would have some kind of positive relationship with the Eldar have been thoroughly dashed given the Legion's infamous xenocidal ransacking of that species's Craftworlds and Maiden Worlds in their lore-culling operations.
Expertise and Combat Doctrine:
"Justice is but vengeance wearing a civilised face. Let us part with it this night and begin our works."
—Oiwa Izanami, on the eve of the Night of Ten Thousand Screams.
To comprehend the modus operandi of the Ghost Warriors, one must first understand that they are a Legion defined by two chief elements: psychic and psychological warfare. In the case of the former the Legion unashamedly uses its psychic powers to enhance the overall effectiveness of the latter in its campaigns, along with supplying them with other useful combat resources. Scrying the skeins of fate to see when and where an enemy means to launch their ambushes and counterattacks, summoning ethereal illusions and mental phantoms to confound and mislead them, calling upon the very skies of alien worlds to unleash apocalyptic ice storms on foes that have never experienced such meteorological phenomena… all these powers the Legion regularly employs to shift the battlefield in their favor despite their own limited numbers. However, as already mentioned, it is the Ghost Warriors' ability to meld these powers with the psychological and the covert that truly makes them one of the most feared forces in the Legiones Astartes and the Imperium.
A typical Ghost Warrior campaign against a foe capable of psychological distress will see them first, before all else, perform Mikoshi rituals of fate to tip the scales of fate in their favor and curse their enemies. Though such rites can never be assumed to make victory an inevitability for the Legion, material evidence recovered from the Ghost Warriors'defeated foes show an undeniable uptick in costly misfortunes, be they commanders suddenly falling ill, equipment malfunctions, or sudden famine. Once the enemy has been ensorcelled, and divinations collected, the XV Legion begins its campaign in earnest. Mass infiltration via modified stealth ships ensure that the Ghost Warriors are able to arrive without notice at operational zones that have been pre-selected by means of both mundane reconnaissance and psychic divination. Once these zones have been secured, what comes next is the dispersal of squads across the battlespace and the conducting of preliminary missions meant to weaken the enemy without their notice. Sabotage, kidnapping, and assassination are all tools meant to seed the ground for the great slaughter to come. It is only then that the terror begins in earnest. Entire hive cities are suddenly consumed by darkness as the Ghost Warriors spring from seemingly everywhere and nowhere at once, causing so much panic and terror that their opponents are incapable of response as their defences are destroyed one by one and their population centres left exposed and vulnerable to the Legion's predations. It is these predations that usually spell the end of the enemy's resistance, as the Legion's reign of terror becomes a constant spree of hit-and-fade attacks, psychic maledictions, and "strategic" atrocities that leave continued resistance both a material and psychological impossibility.
On an operational level, it should be no surprise that the Ghost Warriors rarely deploy together as a whole Legion. Instead, the XV Legion tends to use its Sects as small detachment forces that lend their services to an Expeditionary Fleet or operate on their own solitary missions away from prying eyes. Much of the time, this "assistance" comes without the Ghost Warriors bothering to coordinate with or even hail their Imperial allies. Instead they commit forces to the battlefield in their usual silence and start their terror operations with little delay. This lack of communication has been known to cause issues with the Imperial Army and especially with fellow Legions that the Ghost Warriors have lacklustre relations with. However, these issues have never been known to hamper a campaign so severely that it has been a fatal detriment. Far more often than not, the Ghost Warriors are eerily in sync with their nominal allies, with their covert operations somehow always assisting the main Imperial thrust.
Legion Weaknesses:
Beyond their low numbers, gene-seed ailments, and alienation from the rest of the Imperium, the Ghost Warriors are a Legion that is highly specialised in what it does. They have no great war-fleet in the void, no vast storehouses of heavy vehicles or Terminator armour, and certainly no taste for attritional warfare. The list goes on. Not that the XV care. The Legion unabashedly relies on its infamous psychic might to permanently still the hearts of the Imperium's foes and terrorise entire civilisations into Imperial Compliance. They are in essence horror-inducing psychic killers first, most and last, and see little reason to be anything else.
Beliefs and Practices:
As per the shamanistic beliefs of the Cult of the Mikoshi, the Ghost Warriors believe in a bisected universe. There is the material earthly realm of realspace where the fundamental laws of physics hold dominion over reality. Beyond that, there is also the Lands of the Dead, an amorphous realm of spirits, otherwise known as the kami, and the deceased. Though Yomi metaphysics stresses the chaotic and riotous nature of this ethereal realm, it also holds that order, harmony, and even transcendence can be reached by navigating it with knowledge as your metaphorical (and sometimes literal) torch and self-control as your shield against the unsavoury spirits and tricksters that haunt the realm. While these malicious spirits, or youkai, are seen as devious predators and liars who exploit the weaknesses of the mortal heart and mind to their advantage, the Ghost Warriors also holds that their opposites, the kami, can be wise if fickle teachers and guides for those mortals capable enough to earn their attention and respect.
The Imperial Truth's understanding of Warp entities as non-sapient xenobreeds rings hollow in the Ghost Warriors' view. Although the Legion has no interest in directly challenging this tenet of the Imperial Truth, and in fact sees it as a necessary lie for those not as "enlightened" as they are when it comes to understanding the mysteries and truths of the Warp, they also adamantly refuse to abandon their spiritual beliefs, and they are less than eager to enforce the Imperial Truth on other civilisations they encounter in the Great Crusade. Of course, even with that being the case, the Legion is careful to keep their own spirituality an internal secret, one that will only be revealed once the Imperium is ready for their wisdom. Oiwa, for her part, seemingly believes that the Imperium's, and more importantly the Emperor's, commitment to state atheism will fall to the wayside once the Great Crusade is at an end and mankind has grown enough to learn the "truth" of reality.
One misconception about the Ghost Warriors is that they worship death when this is not the case at all. It is quite the opposite in fact. To put it simply, the Ghost Warriors do not actually believe in death. In their eyes, the death of the physical body is simply the next stage in an unending journey of transcendence and transformation. Dying in the material world just means that your soul now resides in the realm of unreality and spirits. It is that realm that the Ghost Warriors Mikoshi commune with their dead and seek their wisdom. Of course, such practices are a brazen affront to the Imperial Truth and the common limitations placed upon most Legions' Librarii. For that reason, the Ghost Warriors have kept their beliefs an absolute secret, with any non-Yomi learning of them either having their memories destroyed or [REDACTED].
When it comes to their justifications for their infamous terror attacks, the Ghost Warriors are once again reliably esoteric. When pressed by the War Council and their fellow Legions they have openly admitted that while their actions are indeed brutal they are also undeniably effective in not only ensuring that an individual world surrenders to Imperial Compliance quickly and at less cost than through conventional invasion but such methods have repeatedly motivated other civilisations to immediately and peaceful surrender to the Imperium once they are aware that the feared Ghost Warriors may come to their world or sector. Of course, there is much more to it than simply cold pragmatism.
The Ghost Warriors are creatures of vengeance. The very honour codes of Yomi, perverted after millennia of cultural degradation and Oiwa's influence, demand that those who do harm to another suffer the fury of the living and the dead. In that regard, the Ghost Warriors' tendency towards performing retribution campaigns against those who betray the Imperium becomes clear. To the daughters of Yomi, they are honourably ensuring that the Imperium's betrayed dead are properly avenged… no matter how grisly that vengeance is. This is why they often carry the bones of the fallen on their Power Armour. By doing so, they ensure that the deceased may bear witness to their killers' downfall.
Recruitment and Discipline:
As already mentioned, the Ghost Warriors recruit exclusive from Yomi, with only the few dozen remaining Terran-born in their ranks representing the non-Yomi. The Ghost Warriors have no stellar empire to call upon for more recruits and Yomi itself has a population in the low millions. That, along with the fact that the XV's gene-seed is unstable, means that the Legion is quite small compared to its brother and sister Legions. Calls for the Ghost Warriors to diversify its recruitment pool have gone unanswered or been actively rebuffed, all but ensuring that the Ghost Warriors will remain entirely of Yomi unless drastic circumstances force Oiwa's hand. As for the Ghost Warriors' recruiting and training methods they are predictably harrowing.
Each Cult of the Eight opens its fortress-shrine to thousands of young girls every eight months so that they may be tested for their suitability as Aspirants. None of these recruits ever return home. They will either become Astartes, become servants of the Mikoshi, or be killed by their trials. These trials are drenched in mystery, with only the Ghost Warriors themselves and native peasantry of Yomi having any knowledge of them, though even in the case of the latter their understanding is mostly derived from the myths, rumors, and half-truths surrounding their theocratic Mikoshi masters. However, what is known is that the process of turning a mortal woman into an Astartes of the XV goes beyond the typical gene-seed implantation and training regime that is found in other Legions. No Aspirant becomes a member of the Ghost Warriors without induction in the Cult of the Mikoshi, learning that religion's shamanistic beliefs, and harnessing their psychic abilities, with those shown to have a talent for a specific specialty being forwarded to a Path temple. Tests of fear and mastering it is also a prominent rite in the training process, regardless of a Cult's more unique traditions, with Mikoshi instructors using their powers of the mind to see an Aspirant's greatest fear and inflicting it upon them. Similarly, the greatest known trial for any would-be Ghost Warriors is communing with the Warp itself and surviving its dangers without succumbing to its darkest influences.
Discipline in the Ghost Warriors is a strange thing. For a Legion so draped in violence and terror, the types of expected insubordination and hyper-aggression is seemingly non-existent. No Imperial Army regiment or fellow Legion has ever seen or heard of an instance of a Ghost Warriors disobeying the orders of their superiors. Indeed, observers have noticed that the XV is a force that is seemingly always in sync, with their Cults, Sects, and covens being able to seamlessly coordinate with one another through means that go beyond clear vox-communication and well-drilled discipline. In fact, those able to pierce into the Legion's vox-channels will realise that communication is minimal to nearly non-existent, leaving it all but assured that the Ghost Warriors use their psychic abilities to communicate telepathically.
Characters of Interest:
Equerry Okiku Kurayami—If one had to say who among the Ghost Warriors is second only to their Primarch in psychic mastery, it would most assuredly be Akuma Kurayami. Being not only the Dai Mikoshi of the First Cult, Kurayami also acts Oiwa's respected advisor and Equerry, as well as the Legion's Chief Librarian. Her relationship with the Primarch is a deep one, with Kurayami having been the one to first discover Oiwa as a child and raise her in the ways of Yomi's shamans. Kurayami herself is a mysterious figure, despite her high rank and status in the Legion. Most of the time she leaves the responsibility of commanding the First Cult to her many apprentices while she focuses on guiding her surrogate daughter and communing with the Warp.
First Captain Daikoku Noroi—The First Captain of the Ghost Warriors also serves as the Commander of the Zuishin, the elite honour guard to Oiwa Izanami. Having been one of the very first of Oiwa's Mikoshi acolytes as well one of the first of the cult to rise into transhuman nature as an Astartes of the XV Legion, Noroi is a steadfastly loyal to her ward having been one of her closest protégées. Like most of the Ghost Warriors, Noroi is a stoic creature who speaks little. When she does, it is almost always centred around her duties of protecting the Primarch and overseeing that her will be done and little else.
Oni-Captain Kijo Kurozuka—The members of the Path of the Oni are a notorious force in a Legion already known for its quiet cruelties, and yet Oni-Captain Kurozuka manages to stand out due to her sheer inventive malice. Always armored in black and red Tartaros-pattern Terminator plate in battle with her Yomi-styled Power Club in hand, Kurozuka is responsible for the Nightmare on Elm VI, the Arkas Chainsword Massacre, and the Screaming Campaign along with countless other terror campaigns in the Legion's bloody history. The Oni-Captain is without shame and is uncharacteristically gleeful of her Legion's actions. Whether this is earnest sadism or a mask as false as her faceplate, few can tell, but it matters little to her victims either way.
Blademaster Saigo Bushida—One of the last Terrans within the XV and its finest duelist by far. Before she was Blademaster Saigo, First Sword of the elite Sohei blademasters, she was one of the first Imperial Blades, having been recruited from Terra's Europa region. Her accomplishments during the XV Legion's time as the Imperial Blades was long and storied but would nearly end in indignity when her once-proud Legion was overtaken by the Twisting. Fortunately, she would be spared her sisters' fate when the Emperor rediscovered Oiwa on Yomi, who conjured a cure for her newfound daughters. It would be during the XV Legion's four-year-long rebirth on Yomi that the former Imperial Blade abandoned her Terran name along with all the other Terran-born Space Marines of the XV and she became Saigo Bushida.
Battle-cry:
None. Eerie silence interspersed with sudden chilling screams and ghoulish moans in battle.
Legionary History:
"Perseverance brings strength. Strength brings victory. Victory brings honour."
—Noémie Chevalier, first Legion Master of the Imperial Blades, after slaying Balor One-Eye in an honour duel.
As with all the Legiones Astartes, the XV Legion was conceived on mankind's birth world of Terra during the days of the Unification Wars. What made the Legion stand out from its counterparts in those early days of the Imperium lay within its very origins and warrior culture. Whether out of happenstance or more likely deliberate consideration, the XV found itself recruiting its earliest Initiates from those defeated warlord kingdoms that had noteworthy and dignified martial cultures. Though warrior societies were by no means lacking on a Terra that was dominated by thousands of feuding techno-barbarian clans, kingdoms, and petty empires, the XV adamantly refused to fill its ranks with the debased and honourless savages of Terra. While some Legions swelled their numbers with hive gangers from Neork and road warriors from Ausland, the original members of the XV Legion were scions of the aristocratic Houses of Europa, neo-chevaliers from the kingdom of Franc, and the daughters of warrior clans once sworn to the emperor of Neo-Tokyo. Unsurprisingly, this exclusive recruitment strategy made sure that the Legion was filled with some of the greatest individual duellists and warriors in the Legiones Astartes, though it came at the cost of the XV being quite small compared to its sibling Legions. Not that the XV cared. As infamously stated by its first Legion Master, Noémie Chevalier, after their vaulted victory against Balor One-Eye in the Eirin Conquest, "Ours is a sisterhood of the finest, unpopulated by the dregs of the worst," the Legion manifestly held themselves in high regard. That sense of pride would follow them even as they left Terra for the stars in the Great Crusade.
Indeed, having been officially dubbed the Imperial Blades on account of their notorious skill with arms and reputation as the Astartes who most represented, or at least professed to best represent, Terra's lost high culture and ancient warrior traditions, the Legion would only hone their abilities as the Great Crusade went on. Campaign after campaign would see them best the champions of long-lost human civilisations and the finest warriors that xenos species could offer, all the while growing more renowned with each triumph. Alas, this string of victories would not last forever. On Beta-Seven-Four the Imperial Blades would seem to meet their match against an Orkish WAAAAGH! that had made this Forge World their fiefdom. While the War Council believed that it would take the assistance of several Imperial Army regiments and perhaps even another Legion to defeat the Orks, Legion Master Noémie Chevalier believed otherwise and stated that it would simply take a grand Deep Strike into the heart of the Ork's territory and the decapitation of its Warboss to end the threat. This course of action would turn out to be folly. Despite successfully cutting into the epicentre of the Orks with the majority of her Legion, Chevalier would be overwhelmed by the unrelenting might of Warboss Gettakill, who left her bladeless after biting off her sword arm. Bleeding out as her sisters were being overtaken by the Orks' sheer numbers, it was likely that the Imperial Blades would have died out that day if not for a miracle occurring at the eleventh hour. Just as Gettakill was about to consume the rest of the Legion Master, psychic fire erupted from her remaining hand that soon spurted out and obliterated the massive Ork. The same sudden unleashing of psychic abilities would ripple across the entire Legion as the Orks found themselves literally exploding. That change of fortune, along with the death of their Warboss, caused the Orks to rout, leaving them easy prey for the revitalised Imperial Blades.
In the aftermath, the Imperial Blades left the battle with their heads held high, despite the concerns around their newfound powers. Fully believing themselves blessed by a newly unlocked aspect of their gene-seed, they sought to master these abilities with the same obsessive enthusiasm as they mastered the blade. And for decades they did just that. Battle after battle in the Great Crusade would see the XV Legion win great victories with a sword in one hand and the ethereal might of the Warp in the other. Alas, this glory would not last for forever. During a campaign against Eldar raiders on Ferdia, Noémie Chevalier would raise a hand to telekinetically repel shuriken fire, only for that hand to suddenly contort and twist right before the eyes of her sisters and soon break the rest of her. With that, the Twisting came upon the whole Legion. Even after the Imperial Blades retreated from Ferdia in shame with the twisted body of their beloved Legion Master, their suffering only grew as more and more battle-sisters started to suffer the same inexplicably contortions in battle regardless of whether they used their psychic abilities or not. Legion Master after Legion Master would rise only to die a few months later of the Twisting, leaving the Legion increasingly bereft of leadership as no cure or answer could be found by their own Apocatheries, the genetors of the Mechanicum, or seemingly even the Emperor himself. Indeed, by the time the Emperor revealed that their Primarch had been found on Yomi, the once small yet still respectably numbered Imperial Blades numbered only four-hundred Astartes. Making it all the easier for a new Legion to replace the old…
The Imperial Blades' arrival on Yomi to meet their long-lost Primarch and gene-mother would be the beginning of the end of the old Legion of prideful duelists and psyker-knights and start of a new Legion of vengeful killers and death priests that cared little for the martial traditions of faraway Terra. When Oiwa Izanami first saw the four-hundred Astartes who professed to be her daughters she gave them a speech that was more akin to a bleak sermon. She knew of their ailment and twisting curse and told them that their own salvation could be found in death. The death of the ego. Imperial Blades were to renounce their old Terran names and customs and take on those of the Yomi. What transpired after this speech was a hallowing transformation as the last of the Imperial Blades went through a series of rituals and rites meant to fully indoctrinate them into Yomi culture but also change how they used and viewed their psychic gifts and the Warp itself. No longer were their psyker powers merely weapons to be used against the foes of the Imperium but instead a way of life and being that veered dangerously past the mere philosophical into something undeniably religious. Indeed, the Imperial Truth and its understanding of the universe was all completely discarded and replaced with something that would have meant death to a civilisation discovered by the Imperium to have had such beliefs. Perhaps that is why, of the four-hundred Terrans who came to Yomi, only a fourth of that number would ever leave it. In the end, four years would pass before the Imperial Blades, now known as the Ghost Warriors and seemingly free of the Twisting, would leave Yomi with four-thousand new Astartes for the Great Crusade. Their first campaign would showcase for all the great changes that had befallen the XV Legion.
On the rebelling Hive World of Daxum, the Legion held its battlefleets in reserve while stealth craft quietly took them past Daxum's formidable orbital defences which had already seen the death of several Imperial fleets and armies. What transpired after the Ghost Warriors made it to Daxum can only be described as a months-long campaign of terror, one inflicted upon a population in the billions. Known later by the surviving Daxumites as the Eight Ghost Plagues or simply the Terror, the XV committed a diverse assessment of atrocities upon their world. Using their psychic arts, they made the arid atmosphere of Daxum produce snow and ice for the first time in eons, quickly causing mass freezing and later starvation as the Hive World's aeroponics facilities were all mysteriously destroyed in a single night. After suffering cold and starvation, madness and anarchy started to consume the Daxumites as their very dreams became filled with haunting omens of death and carnage. Unable to achieve sleep, the once orderly populace started to grow depressed, maniac, and even violent, eventually turning on each in the open streets for food, supplies, and increasingly out of pure bloodlust. Even Daxum's elite were not spared. Indeed, their punishment would be uniquely cruel as each of the comptroller-houses of Daxum would begin to suffer endless walking-nightmares as vengeful apparitions of the dead, be they murdered Imperial diplomats or their own dead children, started to haunt them without rest. It was not soon after this mass haunting that Daxum outright begged the War Council to cease the attacks from their "ghosts" and unconditionally surrendered themselves into the Imperium. The Ghost Warriors would indeed eventually stop their predations, but only after the Daxumites officially gave their surrender to a dignity of the Imperium, an event that took several more months to occur—time which the Ghost Warriors used to continue to torment Daxum with "hauntings" of increasing depravity and creativity.
Later, when asked by the War Council as to why she had used such a vile and sadistic method to get the Daxumites to surrender, Oiwa dispassionately argued that her method of war-making ensured that not only would the Imperium not lose a single another life to the Daxumites and their guns but that Daxum itself would be spared the destructiveness of a conventional military campaign. Whether the War Council, and later the Emperor, agreed with this supposed rationale is unknown but the Ghost Warriors were not censured for the events on Daxum. They were, however, quickly tasked soon after the Daxum Campaign to work with the infamous Dread Wardens to reclaim a similarly rebellious foe in the Azur Sector. But the events of that campaign are transcribed elsewhere.
After Daxum and Azure, the Legion continued its bloody terror campaigns throughout the Great Crusade. The War Council considered them as a necessary evil to be unleashed on the worst of foes, be they man or xenos. As such, the Ghost Warriors, a Legion once respected as superlative warriors worthy of respect, became a grisly tool whose victories were rarely commented upon or immortalised by Remembrancers in the annals of the Imperium of Man. This suited Oiwa and her army of revenants just fine. They did not care for accolades or recognition and simply carried on at the fringes of an Imperium that hated and feared them.
Notable battles:
—The Kaimona Cleansing: Working alongside the mighty war machines of the Titan Legion Legio Ultima, the Ghost Warriors saw to the extermination of the monstrous megafauna of the Feral World of Kaimona. Though such extermination missions were usually not in the purview of the Ghost Warriors, their Primarch divined that that their participation would not only be essential for the Imperium's victory but that it would provide a great boon for the Legion itself. This prophecy would turn out to be true as after six Terran months the planet was purged of its monsters, with even the once thought to be immortal "alpha-monsters" like the plasma spewing atomicus-tyrannos and psychic lepidoptera-regina being slain by the big guns of the Legio Ultima and the might of the Ghost Warriors, who, in a rare display of their more direct psyker abilities, summoned great ice storms and thunder bolts to slaughter the beasts. Notably, it was this battle that helped secure the Ghost Warriors the respect of the Legio Ultima, one of the very few forces in the Imperium that the Ghost Warriors could count as true allies.
—The Siege of Megidii V: The Ghost Warriors came to the assistance of the illustrious Therion Cohort, who for months failed to break the last redoubt of the Megidii Noocracy, an advanced human civilisation whose last remnants doggedly refused Imperial Compliance. When the commander of the Therions finally shallowed his pride and had his Astropaths call the wider Imperium for help he expected his plea to be answered from a vaunted Legion like the Thunder Warriors or the siege experts of the Black Watch. Instead, a Sect of Ghost Warriors came and landed their forces without so much a word between them and the Therions. Attempts to contact them in their encampments via vox went nowhere, with the Therions receiving nothing but strange chanting on the other side of the transmission. Outraged after more than a week of silence from his supposed allies, the Therion commander was the verge of gambling his entire regiment against the fortress's walls when a strange fog suddenly descended upon the redoubt. All-encompassing, the Therions could only watch and listen as nightmarish screams started to come from the fortress as its defenders literally started to fling themselves from the high walls. Later, once the screams had stopped and the fog had dissipated, the Therions entered the fortress without resistance and discovered an abattoir of gore as their former foes seemed to have gone mad and started to slaughter one another in a frenzy of rage and fear. As for the Ghost Warriors themselves, they left Megidii V as enigmatically as they arrived, saying not a word to their Therion allies.
—The Azur Reclamations: When Imperial Governor Titus Vann of the Azur Sector recanted his oaths to the Imperium it was the Ghost Warriors and their cousins in the VII Legion, the Dread Wardens, who came to punish him for his treasons. Tasked by the Emperor himself to do this, the two Legions were made to work together and bring the rebelling Azurites back into the Imperial fold. Even then, with the reputation of the Ghost Warriors not yet solidified in the eyes of the Imperium, there were many in the War Council who feared that the Legions' differences would compromise such a vital campaign. Those concerns would turn out to be warranted as the Legions split their efforts and performed their own separate campaigns against the rebels. The Ghost Warriors would use their psychic abilities and terror tactics to horrify entire worlds back into Compliance while the grim Dread Wardens either inspired, or outright fabricated, counter-revolutions amongst their foes. It was only on Azur Prime that the two Legions would be forced to work together. It was also there that they would see the immensity of Governor Vann's madness. Now calling himself the Profane Prince, Vann had been driven insane by artifacts found in a recently uncovered temple. Recognising this corruption for what it was, the two Primarchs and their Legions immediately cut a bloody swathe through the corrupted streets of Azur Prime's capital as they made a bid for the temple and Vann. Once there, they found the warped governor and his cadre of followers, all now undeniably tainted with [REDACTED] and surrounded by malignant creatures from the depths of the [REDACTED]. The fighting that occurred in the temple was both parts horrifying and glorious as the Mikoshi priestesses and Caligite exorcists banished [REDACTED] while Dread Warden Silverswords and the elite warriors of the Zuishin Guard cut down the debased converts of [REDACTED] all the while their mighty Primarchs ended the short reign of the Profane Prince. Alas, such unity would collapse once the last of the corrupt was slain and the battle won. The question of what to do with the ancient human temple—destroy it as dictated by the mandates of the Imperial Truth, or save it in the hope of covering its secrets?—divided them immediately. Unsurprisingly, the Primarch of the Dread Wardens demanded the temple be destroyed while Oiwa coolly stated her intention to "purify" it and save it for study. This impasse would quickly go from a legal and even philosophical debate to outright violence in little time, with both Primarchs and their children fighting. No one knows who drew their blade first, but the internecine infighting would end with the unexpected arrival of the Emperor himself and his Custodes. It is unknown what words of recrimination, disappointment, or anger were made by the Emperor to his daughters, but both Legions would leave Azur Prime with no official rebuke and the events there would henceforth be deemed a state secret, one whose mere utterance was capital offensive. As can be imagined, neither the Ghost Warriors nor Dread Wardens have interacted, let alone campaigned together, since the battle.