Reina Vont and the Steel Crows
By author Twiggierjet
The Twenty-Fifth Primarch: Reina Vont
Name:
Reina Vont, also known as the Grey Death, the Defiler, and the Emperor's Janitor.
Appearance:
Rather short by Primarchical standards, Reina has a stocky, muscular appearance, with a practical shoulder-length haircut which she keeps unadorned, a somewhat unhealthy pallor, and blue-grey eyes with noticeable bags underneath. She tends to dress either in a relatively plain military uniform or in her personal outfit from her days as an inventor on her homeworld: a mixture of technician's outfit and hazard suit with plenty of pockets. On the battlefield she wears a suit of Power Armour deliberately designed to not stand out from her daughters, allowing her to survey the situation up close without drawing attention to herself.
Talents and Personality:
Reina, like the rest of the Primarchs, is incredibly skilled in everything from diplomacy to warfare to administration. She has a particular talent for the spotting of small, seemingly inconsequential details, as well as possibly the greatest understanding of biology among her peers. This has been her primary contribution to the sciences of the Imperium. While her siblings produce ever-greater and more elaborate guns, bikes, and armour, Reina's personal labs are a source of a variety of combat stims and synth-fuels.
She can be charming when she wants to be, but prefers terse honesty to flattery, while her dark and morbid sense of humour and tendency for sardonic biting remarks has got her many a dirty look at sociable gatherings. This is something she does not appreciate, oftentimes complaining about how the nobles of the Imperium "can't take a bloody joke". Amongst her Legion, Reina alternates between being largely apathetic, letting different units handle their own issues themselves, and ruthlessly demanding, with failure to meet them being punished harshly. When on the war-path, she has a rather nasty sadistic streak, taking great pleasure in breaking down her enemies slowly and painfully. Hidden away is also a jealousy and desire to be first among her siblings, causing her to push for Compliances at an ever-greater rate. This has indeed given the Steel Crows a strong record, despite numerous complaints about the state of the worlds they leave behind.
She is loyal to the Emperor's ideals of a mankind united and ruling the galaxy, but she is rather pessimistic about some of the more ambitious dreams of her siblings, believing them to be naïve, as her own experiences have shown her quite clearly just how easy it is for humans to sink into comfortable corruption at the first opportunity. Such things cannot ever be truly prevented; they can only be managed, or if you are as skilled as she is, harnessed for the greater good of the Imperium.
She is definitely not as high-cultured as some of her siblings, once famously listening to a poem written by Anastasia Sophia Victoria and responding with a blunt "I don't get it." However, she is not entirely a workaholic, and enjoys vid-casts, tinkering, recreational brawling, and cooking. Supposedly she bonded with Haqqan the Red thanks to being the only Primarch willing to try his "Holiday Special" mystery meat and butter sauce filet.
Homeworld:
The world of Ravenstahl once had a different name: Eleria. The fourth planet next to a Sol-like sun in the northern Perseus Arm, it was once a land of great natural beauty, where diverse kingdoms and people's lived in peace, and where what little technology had survived the Age of Strife was carefully stewarded to ensure the people could continue to live in harmony with nature.
Today it is an industrial hellscape, as if someone took an underhive and shook it until bits and pieces of it were all over the planet. The ecosphere, already wounded by the relentless demands of Reina's military-industrial complex and the greed of the corporate oligarchs who supported her, was tipped over the edge by the arrival of the Imperium and the pressing of the planet to the cause of the Great Crusade. Reina transformed a forest of bright blues and pinks, interspersed with azure rivers and grass so soft a traveller did not even need to bring a sleeping bag, into a sprawling morass of manufactora, hab-zones, prison camps, testing sites, and waste dumps.
Life on Ravenstahl, renamed as such by Reina upon her unification of the world, is not a pleasant experience, for it is a land of unforgiving hierarchy and inequality. Between the constant corporate in-fighting, the gangs, the manufactorum overseers, the wandering flesh-shapers and pollution-induced mutants, it is not hard for the Legion to pick out promising candidates for recruitment just by observing the people fighting for their existence. The northern desert of the planet is where the fortress-monastery of the Legion may be found, a huge blocky mass of guns, fortifications, spaceports, and facilities overseeing everything from specialised equipment manufacturing to training. Despite its austere exterior the interior has actually been made fairly comfortable (by Astartes standards of course) over the course of years, as Reina has little desire to discipline her Legion about something so seemingly minor.
Psychic potential:
While she is not among the most powerful of psykers found among the Primarchs, Reina has a surprisingly advanced grasp of biomancy, honed over years of using it to augment her research before her discovery by the Emperor.
Background:
"What's that? Do I have a sad backstory? No, I am the sad backstory."
—Attributed to the Primarch Reina Vont during an interview with a rather socially awkward Remembrancer shortly after her reunification with the Emperor.
The world of Eleria was a beautiful, peaceful planet for millennia. While it had suffered regression during the Age of Strife as every world did, eventually the situation stabilised, and for generations its diverse population of humans, mutants, and xenos managed to suppress their feuding and figure out a way of living in harmony with each other and their world, preserving their great forests, grasslands, and oceans for future generations. Their technology stabilised at something resembling a medieval planet but with some technological relics providing almost mystical power to the sages who controlled them. It was a simple but happy time.
But time marches on, and nature abhors such stasis. An alliance of human tech-adepts and biomancers were forced to flee their homeland after their experiments were declared illegal due to their high costs to nature and sentient life alike. Undeterred, these men and women fled to the northwestern continent of the planet, a sparsely populated land made up of rocky deserts and tundras. There, the abundant mineral wealth of the land would see the fledgling nation of Marova experience an industrial and technological revolution. After the original founders passed away, it came to be ruled by a series of brutal autocrats backed up by wealthy industrialist clans and corporations. These men and women of power set their eyes on the rest of the planet, which they increasingly regarded as theirs by right of vision.
During a planning meeting with his shareholders for the eviction of a border village that sat on a valuable chromium deposit, Jameson Vont, the CEO of Vont Arms, heard a thunderous boom outside his estate. Dispatching his guards, he was informed that the boom came from a crash-landed pod that contained a child. Sending this child away to the laboratories to see if any use could be found for her, her rapid growth and huge leaps in intelligence told him that he had stumbled onto something truly unique. And so the Twenty-Fifth Primarch was adopted into the Vont family, named Reina by her father.
Reina grew quickly. In a few years she was no longer challenged by even the most difficult of studies her father could think to send her to. In addition, she had become a topic of fascination amongst the upper ranks of society, and would soon volunteer for the Marovan military, insisting on starting as a private despite her father offering her an officer's commission. In three years, she would make officer regardless.
In the brutal culture of Marova, achievement was everything, and as Reina began to grow in stature, Jameson's firstborn daughter Annabelle began to fall out of favour. Despite this, Annabelle still loved her sister. She had no intention of sabotaging or betraying her, even if the lack of attention from her distant father and dilettante mother began to hurt more and more.
Unfortunately for her, her father did not believe her. Not wanting his star-child and golden ticket to the highest levels of power sabotaged by his first daughter, who was now far less impressive in comparison, he arranged for her to be ambushed by "rebels". Unbeknownst to him, a loyal guard revealed the plot to Annabelle, and gave his life to allow her to escape. Knowing she could never go back, she was forced to disappear into the underside of Marova's great industrial cities before fleeing the nation entirely.
As the years passed, Reina finished with her military service and took up a position in her father's company, her intelligence allowing her to rapidly leap ahead of the competition and advancing the nation as a whole by decades if not centuries. In particular, Reina would come to head the chemistry and biology division of the renamed Vont Industries. The topic fascinated her like no other and allowed her to practise her growing biomancy powers. She also frequently took to the battlefield when asked, for Marova was waging constant wars of expansion against its neighbours, often in exchange for being given the right to profit from some of the resources found there. By the time she was twenty, Marova controlled the entire continent, while the other nations had united in an alliance designed to counter it. The small strip of land connecting them became the most militarised place on the planet.
Things likely would have continued in that vein, if not for an unexpected return. Annabelle Vont had survived her exile. She had made her way to one of the other continents where she was taken in by kindly traveling monk, who trained her in the fighting ways of his order. Annabelle spent years protecting the villagers of her mountain valley from bandits and beasts, and was, for a time, happy. That happiness ended when a Marovan bombing run hit the valley, for the conflict between it and the kingdom where the valley sat had reached the level of a brief hot war. Annabelle ran back to the village to find her kindly caretaker dying. Cradling his body in her arms, she swore that she would do everything in her power to make sure that nobody else would suffer as the village had. She would protect the ones she loved, or die trying.
Setting out, she arrived at the castle of the local monarch and pledged herself as his knight. What followed is too long to be described in this tale, but suffice to say it was a great journey of friendship, struggle, laughter, sorrow, and even some love. Finally, after several years of preparation, the operation was ready. It had been kept secret, carefully concealed from the eyes of the arrogant Marovan leadership, and also concealed from Reina, who was increasingly busy with her own projects and pacifying the northern reaches of the continent to prepare them for a new wave of prometheum expansion.
When all was ready, Annabelle and her collection of friends, as well as her newfound lover, made a pact with one another, and used a psychic manoeuvre to teleport deep inside the borders of Marova. At the same time, a carefully timed slave revolt coupled with a sudden multi-pronged invasion commenced. On every front, Marova was pushed back. While the Marovan leadership scrambled, in the capital city the small strike team led by Annabelle carved through the leadership's weakened guards. Seeing the suffering of innocents, and facing memories of her own treatment at her father's hands, Annabelle cut through the guards like a hot knife through butter, trusting in her friends to sabotage different parts of the facility. Finally, she reached the sanctum where the Autarch of Marova and his council of advisors, including her father, were hiding. All of her pain, all of her sorrow, it came out in blade stroke after blade stroke, as she made the tyrants pay in blood for the suffering they caused. And just then, she arrived.
Annabelle looked at the woman before her. The woman she had once considered a sister. Whom she still considered a sister, no matter how much it hurt.
Reina's eyes moved to the bodies of the Autarch and his advisors. To Father. Then back to her. There was hate in there, but it was not the righteous hate that Annabelle saw in her fellow warriors, not even the hate of revenge. It was something different, darker, a sickening glint that made Annabelle's blood run cold.
Tears came unbidden to Annabelle's eyes. "Why? Why didn't you stop him, stand up for me? Father cast me aside like I was nothing, and you didn't even try! DO YOU KNOW WHAT I HAD TO ENDURE?"
She began to raise her sword, to charge and put it through her sister's heart. But she could not. For all she had suffered, for all she had hated Father, she could not hate her sister the same way, even if some part of her wanted to.
The sword clattered to the ground. "Let's… let's start over. Just you and me Reina, like old times. You don't have to follow Father's footsteps anymore, we can leave this place, go somewhere else. The Alliance Council trusts me. They will agree to a full pardon. We can be happy."
Reina cocked her head slightly, studying Annabelle with a bemused expression on her face. Then, before she could react, Reina raised her gun and shot her in the kneecaps.
Reina had rushed back to the capital as soon as the attack began, her intuition telling her that some kind of a decapitation strike was coming. Unfortunately for her, she arrived but a moment too late. Annabelle was captured and kept alive, forced to watch as each one of her companions was broken by the best pain-smiths of Marova and made to confess their crimes, real and imagined. Her lover, the prince of the kingdom of Gelania, was the only one to escape, hoping to rally the forces of the rebels and alliance to crush the Autarchy once and for all.
It was not to be. With much of the leadership dead, and Reina unleashing the full weight of her Primarchical charisma, the Marovan military swiftly pledged their loyalty to her, what was left of it at least. With it she would viciously crush the rebellions. The forces of the allied kingdoms were forced to pull back lest they face encirclement. If Annabelle thought that she was punishing the Autarch for his mistreatment of the lower classes, this proved to be for naught, as all who had taken up arms alongside her now faced repression of a far crueller and more insidious nature then anything he could have devised. Rebel cells were infiltrated and made to turn on each other, Reina taking great pleasure in showing her footage of rebels desperately attempting to give her up to save their own skin. The message was clear. Annabelle had put her faith in solidarity, in justice, and these ideals were naught but ash in the wind. The rebels were heroes to a man, that was true. But in the face of pain there were no heroes.
In the aftermath of the attack, Reina seized the position of Autarch without much resistance, accusing the nation's enemies of conspiring against them, and promising the people of Marova to forge their nation anew and hand them the planet as their birthright. For five years, the nation forged itself into a new form under Reina's hand. In the single greatest act of military mobilisation the planet had ever seen, the military swelled, military prototypes rolled off the assembly lines, and all the while, spy networks were cultivated within the rest of the planet, slowly turning them against each other.
Finally, the order was given, Reina gave a thundering, fiery, hateful speech before an assembled army, calling on the name of her father as a martyr of the nation, and promising the people their rightful place in the universe. The single greatest military campaign in the planet Eleria's history began. Across the continents, sleeper cells were activated and destroyed command structures, barrages of chemical weapons turned entire cities into charnel houses of melted flesh, and traitors opened the gates to advancing Marovan forces.
If she so chose, she could have brought the planet to its knees right there and then. But Reina had no such desire. A death so quick you do not even know it happens is no death at all.
And so, for years, she waged a brutal war of destruction, allowing her enemies enough time to sink into despair as their fortifications and armies were swept aside, while Reina's growing biomancy transformed the creatures of the forests and fields into bloodthirsty monstrosities to haunt them in the night.
Capitalising on a growing sentiment of human supremacy, an attitude her father instilled in her from a young age, Reina ordered the complete destruction of non-humans, while the conquered human populations were broken and forced into the manufactora to fuel further conquest.
In time, it was done. The head of the prince, now King, of Gelania—the last holdout—was delivered to Reina by a traitor. This was a traitor whom she knew to be close to Annabelle and so spent a great deal of effort cultivating, just to twist the knife just a little bit deeper. Finally, when her former sister was nothing more than a hollow shell from which Reina could take no more, she simply shot her and had her tossed into one of the mass graves surround the battlefield. Even the glory of a climactic finale would be denied to her enemies.
As she looked around and realised that the whole of the planet was hers, Reina felt… satisfied. It was a good feeling, she decided. In mere moments it was broken by the arrival of a massive fleet in orbit. The Emperor—alerted to Reina's presence when her sister Yvaine Sybilla detected her psychic signature after a battle in which she used a particularly powerful biomancy spell—had arrived.
At first, Reina briefly felt fear, understandably thinking that this was an invasion fleet and that she was out in the open under full view of what looked like some very hefty orbital bombardment cannons. Her fear turned to relief as a single starship descended onto the planet and a bright golden figure stepped out. Sensing his presence to be a friendly one, Reina offered him a friendly handshake. Taken aback for a moment, as he was used to more traditional forms of greeting, the Emperor laughed and embraced his long-lost daughter.
They would spend a week in deep discussion, the Emperor telling Reina of his Great Crusade, and Reina telling him of her war of conquest, a story which pleased and worried the Emperor in equal measure. On the one hand, he was glad to see his daughter had got some proper leadership experience and had seemingly arrived at a humanocentric galaxy-view despite landing on a planet where she could have easily turned out differently. But the brutality and sadism present in her style of conquest, along with the state that the planet was in, made him urge her to take some time to centre herself and truly refine her leadership. Reina told him she would, like a liar.
Leaving the planet in the hands of a trusted clique of technocrats, military industrialists, and chem-barons, she departed her homeworld, but not before one final act. Deciding that even the memory of the old world must be wiped away, she renamed it to Ravenstahl, a suitable name for what the planet would become.
The XXV Legion: the Steel Crows
Name:
The Steel Crows. Once called the Carrion Fangs.
Insignia and Appearance:
The insignia of the Legion is a simple white triangle with a black arrow going through it, the former logo of her father's company.
The Steel Crows tend to paint the rest of their Power Armour in a shade of dull grey, which is then added onto with splashes of colour, symbols, and even some armour modifications depending on the achievements and preferences of individual Space Marines and units.
One particular piece of equipment that sets the Steel Crows apart is the Mark IV biohazard helmet, a modification of the usual Space Marine helmet created to fight in particularly polluted environments. It gives Space Marines who use it a frightening beaked appearance.
Gene-seed Status:
Mostly stable and has a low rejection rate, but a variety of small mutations have crept in. As a result, many in the XXV carry a variety of discoloured skin and small bony growths, while some medicae have noticed an increasing number of cases of mild sociopathy, although that last part has been largely suppressed. The Twenty-Fifth Primarch's gene-seed also does relatively little to change the appearance of the Space Marines. As such, a wide variety of physical features can be found in her Legion, although they trend towards the Primarch's somewhat unhealthy appearance and stocky muscular frame.
Legionary Assets:
The XXV Legion consists of about 180,000 Astartes, although this number is far more scattered than usual across the Legion's countless fronts. The Steel Crows' numbers are kept from growing too rapidly thanks to a brutal rate of attrition.
The flagship of the Primarch and Legion is the Gloriana-class battleship Frozen Spite.
The Legion's other and most famous asset is its massive array of human auxiliaries, gathered from the breadth of their conquests and foisted on them by an Imperium eager to get rid of its ne'er-do-wells, whom Reina is more than happy to take. The genetically unmodified human auxiliary units of the Legion are outnumbered only by those of the V Legion, the Conquerors, and even then, largely only because Reina does not engage in the same style of empire-building .
A connection with various industrialists and commercial empires within the Imperium also means that the XXV Legion can be quite well-supplied, even when other units may be left wanting.
Legion Organisation:
The Legion remains organised largely as it was prior to Reina's arrival. It is a decimal system mostly following the Principia Belicosa.
—A squad is of 10 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Sergeant.
—A company is of 100 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Captain.
—A battalion is of 1,000 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Commander.
—An Army is of 10,000 Space Marines, led by a Sister-General. This is the largest permanent formation.
—A Group is of 30,000 Space Marines. This is the largest subdivision, under the full Legion. Combinations of Armies into Groups is rare and only done when necessary. As such, there is no permanent officer rank corresponding to Group level; a Group will be led by one of the Sister-Generals present.
While this may seem small, these armies tend to come with large amounts of support, and are the reason for the Steel Crows' relatively high Compliance rates. Of note is the particularly high amount of Apothecaries, a necessary adjustment for a Legion who suffer as much attrition as the Steel Crows do and whose genetically unmodified human forces rely on such a massive amount of various stimulants.
The primary change made by Reina is the introduction of specialised units designed to fulfil specific tasks, assigned to each army as necessary.
Special units:
The Whisperers—These are Astartes specially trained in diplomacy, economics, subterfuge and other such topics. Their purpose is to infiltrate planets and sow the seeds of distrust, crime, and betrayal to prepare for the primary invasion. More than one planet has fallen without the Steel Crows firing a shot, thanks to once-prosperous worlds turning on themselves in a frenzy of hatred and moral decay with the work of particularly skilled Whisperers.
The Sanitation Units—Their name is fairly self-explanatory. Masters of biological and chemical warfare, they are set loose on worlds where the Imperium wants absolutely everything dead and does not care how much destruction this involves. They are set apart by their distinct blue and yellow gloves and rubberised cloaks.
The Mobilisation Detachments—These brutal detachments have been nicknamed "the world devourers" by some Remembrancers who had the chance to watch them in action. They are deployed either when the Imperium comes under unexpected attack in a vulnerable area, or when a bridgehead is needed to be established quickly deep in enemy territory. Containing large numbers of Tech-Marines and Apothecaries, these detachments arrive on planets and rapidly conscript much of the population while converting every available resource into military industry. The end result usually sees the planet burned out and requiring heavy reconstruction and repopulation to be viable. But it has saved a vulnerable flank on more than one occasion, and the Steel Crows have a reputation for making worlds productive again at a fraction of the material cost other Legions do. Just ignore the living conditions of the locals.
The insignia of jaws enclosing a planet is a common symbol of the Mobilisation Detachments due to their infamous tendency to consume the resources of entire worlds for their projects.
Expertise and Combat Doctrine:
Rita looked upon the enormous bunker structure that sat perched atop what had once been her favourite hill in Keijala. A monster of concrete and steel, its bulk dominated the district. In front of it she could see masses of people. Some of them were the gas-masked soldiers that accompanied the giants, but most of them were her own people, each one clutching a stack of documents, ID and medical records that would allow the invaders to integrate them into their systems.
She wanted to hate them for forsaking the dream of their federation, for selling their neighbours to the invaders for the "crime" of not being human for a chance at survival. These same men and women who just a few months ago sang and danced as part of a beautiful new dream now silently waited for the invaders to call their names and present proof of their genetic purity, pretending they did not know where their alien neighbours went. Rita felt tears well up in her eyes, remembering the way things used to be. She missed her friends and the collective joy they felt in in building a future where all sapient beings could be free and happy. It was not supposed to end like this.
Was the past so easily forgotten? Could she wake up one day and pretend that she did not know what the invaders did to her friends, pretend that she had no problem with mass murder?
That was when she locked eyes with him: Vasya, once a fellow Woodshaper that was hoping to start a family with a Trenkal. He stood in line, shame and a deadness permeating his gaze. She understood why. The two had once been exceptional friends and fellow believers in the mission of the federation, and now they were here, staring at one another on the street of Keijala. They would never speak again.
Rita realised she had the same look in her own eyes, the same agony and sense of betrayal of the self. She clutched her medical records, and shuffled forward in line with the rest of them.
To put it quite simply, the Steel Crows are given the jobs nobody else wants to do. Sometimes this means grinding genocidal sieges on planets too toxic to survive without specialised equipment against xenos who have more bodies then the Legion has bullets. Sometimes this means cleaning up after the blitzkrieg operations of other Legions. But Reina does not particularly mind this, as she also gets a job she relishes: the job of crushing those entities whose causes and views are incompatible with the Imperium and must be ground to dust but who are nevertheless noble and righteous enough that high command worries that engaging them with other forces would at best allow seeds of resistance to be spared by sympathetic soldiers and at worst inspire outright defection. Rebellions rising up against the injustices of a harsh but otherwise competent Imperial governor, empires that have built successful societies of prosperity and culture while living side-by-side with xenos and may inspire movements towards the same within the wider Imperium, cultures whose faith runs so deep and true that no mere orator, Iterator or Compliance officer can possibly root it out in a timely manner. For these examples and more, the Steel Crows are deployed to break them.
By far the most known aspect of the Legion's combat doctrine is their heavy usage of human auxiliaries. Thanks to the heavy casualties the Legion suffered prior to their reunification with their Primarch, achieving the high rate of Compliances demanded by Reina was no longer possible with their previous strategies, which focused on large overwhelming attacks along all fronts. Instead, Reina's reorganisation of the Legion saw them broken up into relatively small Armies, each of which would be accompanied by a massive number of genetically unmodified human soldiers, with the Space Marines acting as elite units that accompany the genetically unmodified soldiers or range ahead of them to destroy particularly stubborn enemy emplacements. This change was made to allow Reina to increase her rate of Compliance without being forced to stop and wait for her Legion to build back up.
These human forces are often augmented with various chemicals and stims of Reina's own devising, allowing them to fight harder and longer than comparable human forces, granting the Astartes a force that can at least somewhat keep up with their pace. In addition, the background of many of the Space Marines as well as their preference and skill at close range small-unit combat means that the Legion is also quite skilled at urban combat. If you want a hive taken with… relatively minimal damage, the Steel Crows are the Legion to call.
Reina delights in ruining her enemies even before the first shot is fired. Knowing that nothing ever destroys a person's faith quite like betrayal, the first step of any Compliance by the XXV Legion is the deployment of the Whisperers, who gather intelligence, corrupt local sympathetic factions—usually some kind of wealthy elite or power-hungry gang or warlord—and destabilise the government through everything from drug addiction to stoking ethnic conflict to selectively targeting vital infrastructure for destruction, and even to just ambushing some remote patrol and leaving their dismembered corpses hanging where others will find them. When their networks are fully in place, the main force attacks just as the Whisperers trigger acts of betrayal, turning brother against brother. With any luck, this will decapitate resistance and allow the Compliance to proceed with few problems from there. In the cases of particularly greedy and immoral leadership, a few whispers of the wealth and temptations the Imperium has to offer are enough, and the planet surrenders without a fight, even though some Legions would deeply wish that they could have just a little purge of the area.
If it does not, or if the enemy is one that Reina has a particular dislike for, the next phase of the invasion begins. The Legion systematically begins to destroy lesser targets across the planet, either forcing the enemy to disperse their forces, or to sit in their strongholds and watch their world die a death from a thousand cuts. Forward elements of the Legion, working with intelligence gathered from the Whisperers and collaborators, rampage across the world, systematically destroying and desecrating that which the enemy holds valuable, while a continuous stream of chemical attacks slowly begins to choke the air. Infiltrators sneak behind enemy lines and sow terror, attacking randomly and defying any conventional military logic, in particular attacking targets that they know will anger their enemy and convince it to make foolhardy and hot-blooded attacks into prepared killzones.
This is not a rapid process, Reina's sadism winning out over her desire to conquer quickly. By the time the enemy has been reduced to cowering inside their last few remaining strongholds, the only parts of the planet that have not been utterly laid to waste are those controlled by willing collaborators.
These strongholds are either stormed or destroyed outright, and the process of "fixing the place up" begins. The remainders of the population's anti-Imperial beliefs are beaten out of them, while whatever valuable resource the planet can provide is exploited to the fullest. The XXV Legion throws up sprawling manufactora and refineries with a speed that would impress even the Mechanicum, while a new ruling elite is installed. Sometimes this means local collaborators, and other times this means imported Imperial elites—another way for the Legion to spread their political influence. The brutal conditions the people find themselves in usually lend well to producing those skilled at inflicting violence, requiring only to be tempered in the crucible of the Imperial Army training camps to break them of their ganger habits. By the time the Steel Crows leave, the population has been degraded to such an extent that future governors need to do little but sit back and let the recruits and industrial tithes roll in.
Unlike the Conquerors, however, the Steel Crows do not apply the same model to all worlds, preferring to install a little variety to best suit each world. One planet may be left as a sparsely populated desert, its population held in thrall to the petro-lords that extract fuel from the scorching ground, while another may be an advanced Hive World glittering with prosperity on the surface, but with violence lurking just under the surface as its merchant kings war over the best spaceports. In general, despite their cultural destruction, the Legion tries either to preserve the governmental system as somewhat similar to what came before, or to mold it on the wishes of whichever group helped them the most, as an extra incentive to help.
What Steel Crow-conquered planets all share in common is that they are worlds marked by violence, for Reina wishes for them to be able to provide a constant stream of recruits and to prevent the world from being a soft target for invaders. If the world had something truly silly in place, like a democracy, and no-one with a suitable mentality for ruling stepped forward to collaborate, the Legion usually just replicates the social system of Ravenstahl and moves on.
The Legion carries the regular assortment of air power and land vehicles, and prefers weapons that are relatively simple and reliable, the heavy bolter being a favourite. For close range, the Legion carries none of the elegant polearms or terrifying swords of other Legions, instead preferring shotguns, brutal trench knives and machetes, as well as chain weapons. Most units will carry some form of chemical weapon, either in the form of grenades or a specialised chem-thrower weapon, a particularly horrifying thing to face in close combat.
Legion Weaknesses:
The truth is, by the high standards of Astartes, the Steel Crows are just not as good at open combat. They are not as good at melee combat as the best melee Legions, they are not as good at ranged combat as the best ranged Legions, and while their mobility and logistics are pretty good as well, other Legions have them beaten there as well. Their reliance on brutality, environmental destruction and psychological undermining mean that when facing an enemy that is too tough to be easily exterminated and cannot be frightened, such as the Orks or the remnants of Abominable Intelligence armies made in the Golden Age of Technology, they are forced to rely on numbers and suffer disproportionate casualties. Some have (in private of course) compared them to a schoolyard bully that folds as soon as they have to fight someone their own size. While this is of course not an accurate description of a Space Marine Legion, it rings more true than most want to admit.
Beliefs and Practices:
"We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The Technocrats and the New Church supporters came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me."
—Attributed to Reina Vont, or sometimes to an anonymous Steel Crow.
Ironically enough for a Legion famed for its uncaring brutality, the Steel Crows may actually have some of the closest relationships with the ordinary humans who serve under them, owing to their doctrine having them fight side-by-side. If there is one negative quality they lack, it is the arrogance that so often characterises Astartes. The Steel Crows know where they came from, and they know that in truth very little separates them from the mortals underfoot.
In addition, Reina espouses the belief that mankind requires a degree of hardship in order to survive and be able to resist the horrors of the galaxy, as making life too easy runs the risk of leaving it a soft morsel to consume for whatever will come along from the dark reaches of the cosmos one day. How much of this is genuine belief and how much is a convenient lie designed to justify the cruel practices of her Legion is something no-one outside her inner circle knows. She puts little faith in the promises of enlightenment her father and siblings preach, knowing just how easily supposedly enlightened states can be brought down. She is not disloyal to the Imperium, but she is loyal to it out of respect for its strength and because she believes in the mission of keeping the human species on top.
The Legion as a whole is generally left to find its on entertainment. Whereas some Legions gravitate towards things like poetry or art, the Steel Crows prefer carousing and arena fights. The art found in their bases either is of practical use, such as denoting recent victories or casualties, or resembles the graffiti of underhive gangs more than the elaborate paintings of noble museums. "Space Marine's name was here" is an always-reliable classic, as are a variety of seemingly random symbols denoting specific emotions, thoughts, or inside jokes of specific companies and squads. This can also double as a way of covertly communicating between units in warzones. Collective watching of the combat vid-cast footage of other armies is also a favourite pastime, both for entertainment purposes and to familiarise the troops with new enemies and tactics. Unusually for the Legions, the Steel Crows also sometimes carouse among the regular troops, partially to build rapport and partially because Reina does not care enough to prevent this. They are also known for their dark sense of humour, something they get from their Primarch.
Recruitment and Discipline:
The XXV Legion recruits from just about anywhere it can, although it shows a distinct preference for those whose backgrounds make them more likely to be accepting of the Legion's brutal work. Juvie gang members, post-apocalyptical Death World tribeswomen, the daughters of aristocratic and mercantile dynasties known for instilling in their children a vicious ruthlessness, et cetera. There are no great treks through the wilderness. Aspirants are brought directly to the fortress-monasteries and made to participate in a variety of tests of strength, skill, and leadership—a particularly necessary quality given the likelihood that they will have to lead a squad of genetically unmodified humans at some point. Those who fail either die in the process or are washed out into the auxilia. There is no great sacredness or ritual involved, just pure utility so that the Steel Crows may grind out new units as quickly as possible.
When it comes to punishment, the worst sin in the Steel Crows is to fail. While in a few cases Reina has been known to show mercy to those who were up against well and truly impossible odds, for the most part failure will result in either demotion or death, and commanders will be quick to throw each other under the bus when a truly monumental failure occurs. Otherwise, punishments are generally situational and left up to the discretion of individual unit leaders, although the culture of blame-shifting has filtered down through the ranks.
Characters of Interest:
Anila Eigon—Former commander of the Third Army's Sanitation Unit, Anila was recruited as a girl from one of the prison camps dotting Ravenstahl after she was sent there for the brutal murder of an opponent twice her size and age. She is known to be bloodthirsty even by the standards of the XXV. Eigon has distinguished herself by a thoroughness in her work that impressed Reina enough to make her one of her advisers after the Defiler witnessed her directing the brutal trench warfare on the Agri-World of Keforhe VI.
Sonya Feighershaft—Recruited from one of the industrialist families that supported Reina during her reunification of her homeworld, Sonya has proven herself to be a master diplomat, and she has a stellar track record of allowing the Legion to simply walk into a planet's capital after convincing its elites to betray their independence and sign up for the Imperium. Reassigned from her original post, she has been made the chief diplomat of the Legion, a position that has allowed her to indulge in many great feasts and balls—a task which Reina is more than happy to hand off to her more sociable lackey.
Maria Notill—Former commander of the Eighth Army's Mobilisation Detachment, Maria came to the attention of Reina after the Compliance of NT-1945038. Originally believed to be a rare uninhabited Garden World, the original colonists were slaughtered by the local population of Exodites, for this planet was in fact one of the Maiden Worlds of the Eldar. Calling on their Craftworld-dwelling cousins, the Eldar managed to ambush and wipe out the first Astartes responders, prompting a greater invasion from the Eighth Army. It was a hard-fought conflict. In the process of it, Notill—a notoriously spiteful leader—deliberately transformed the world into a polluted hellscape just to deny its remaining value to the xenos, destroying even their bodies to deny the Eldar their proper funerary rites. Brought into Reina's circle of advisors, Maria nevertheless has got quieter recently, unable to shake the memory of a strange lilting laughter in her head as she and her forces smashed the jewellery the Eldar seemed to be determined to preserve even above their military objectives…
Tessa Mivado—The chief Apothecary of the Legion, and the unofficial representative of those Space Marines who were born on Terra when they were still called the Carrion Fangs, Tessa has long been an intellectual sparring partner for Reina. She is one of the few able to provide Reina with a stimulating challenge in discussions of science. Mivado has long held a deep fascination with her own nature as an Astartes and by the potential for mankind to be uplifted not through ideology but through fleshcraft. She largely kept these opinions to herself until she reunited with Reina, whereupon she swiftly became one of her most devoted loyalists thanks to Reina's demands for ever-more effective chemical tools with which to drive the human forces of the Legion forward. This gave Mivado a chance to perfect her work like never before. Reina silently approves of this research, although she has warned Tessa to be careful prodding too deeply into the Emperor's work, for Father can be a jealous man indeed.
Battle-cry:
The Legion's battlecry is often customised to cause as much offence and fear to the specific enemy they are fighting. When such is not available, the Legion often defaults to "Kill them all!" and "Break them!"
Legionary History:
Dion sat shivering in his home. Outside, he could hear the sounds of screaming and the roar of the monsters' horrifying spinning weaponry as they massacred what was left of the ecclesiastical militia raised to defend their village. His father would be among them, and he felt sick with shame at running from battle. He justified it as having to protect his little sister. If they both perished, she would have no-one. Moving to check on her under the floorboards of the house, he quickly backed away once he heard loud footsteps outside. The last thing he wanted was to give away her position.
The door gave in as a massive walking suit of armour pushed through into the house. It was a terrifying thing, a dull grey colouring mixed with the brown-red of dried blood and the caustic blue-green of the vile poison the metal birds of the invaders had been dropping on the forests where the fae lived.
With shaking arms he lifted his spear and pointed it at the monster. He tried to whisper a prayer but his chattering teeth failed him and all he could squeeze out was "oh God…"
The monster looked at him before speaking with a distorted female voice. "God?" it said, mockery dripping from every letter. Looking up into the ceiling, the creature made a show of glancing about, as if it was searching for some kind of divine punishment being sent down on it.
When nothing came it looked back down at Dion and shook its head with fake, mocking sympathy. "No God," it said, and revved its chainsword.
The XXV Legion was from the start developed to be something of a policing unit. Many of their early operations on Terra and beyond were sweeping in after other Legions tore out the heart of the enemy and cleaning up pockets of resistance that risked being able to scatter and go to ground if fought against by the Emperor's non-Astartes armies. Their task was to crush these forces and eradicate them in their entirety, from the purges of the nomadic mutant clans of Sibir to the destruction of the anti-Imperial rebels that attempted to rise up in the hives of Merika. Despite the necessity of this task, the Legion was looked down upon as vultures by the rest. Even their name, the Carrion Fangs, came from, and carried with it, such connotations. The Legion tended to take lower priority when being resupplied and being given recruits.
This resulted in much of the Carrion Fangs' early strategy relying on large amounts of low-quality (by Astartes standards of course) equipment and ad hoc repairs along with hastily trained recruits. Usually this worked out, but as the Great Crusade spread out, sooner or later this approach was doomed to run into failure, and run into failure they did. They took enormous losses against several entrenched Orkish domains, leading to frustration which they vented on the unfortunate people of those worlds they brought into Compliance. By the time they were reunited with Reina, the Carrion Fangs numbered only 80,000, despite one of the lowest rejection rates among the Legiones Astartes.
Despite fears of widespread punishment, Reina gave a rare show of kindness to her daughters and decided that the core concept was something she could work with. She renamed them the Steel Crows after a particular kind of bird on her homeworld. Recruiting a crop of new Astartes from her home planet and reorganising the Legion with her new unit ideas, Reina used the industrial power of Ravenstahl and her weight as a Primarch to demand higher-quality resupply for her Legion.
Had she kept at this process for a time, she could have emerged with a powerful, albeit generalist Legion. However, wanting to look good in front of the Emperor, Reina decreed that high Compliance targets would be implemented, far more than the Legion could take in their current form even assuming everything went to plan. To resolve this, Reina found a simple yet ingenious solution. She had conquered her homeworld with nothing but human soldiers. Why could they not continue to be useful? As her Legion recuperated, they also trained in a new kind of warfare, one where they would fight as units alongside masses of humans, acting as hardpoints, commanders, and speartips to take out armoured points and allow for the other units to turn the small holes into gaping wounds in the sides of the enemy.
Reina set out to raise huge waves of conscripts from both her world and surrounding ones, but soon found that even with the weight of a Primarch behind it, many planets were reluctant to send their sons and daughters to fight alongside a Legion with as ill a repute as the XXV. Not wishing to sour her reputation with the Imperium's elites, Reina did not push through with mass conscription of her civilians to feed her war machine. Instead she emptied out the underhives and prison planets of the surrounding sector, taking on populations that local governments were all too eager to get rid of. This recruiting practice would become the standard for the Steel Crows as their reputation continued to take on darker and darker connotations.
These units were brutally trained, equipped with the industrial output of Ravenstahl (a project which put the nail in the coffin of its already struggling ecosphere) and pumped full of whatever Reina and her apothecaries could conjure up. After putting their new tactics through their paces by subjugating a few nearby worlds holding primitive xenos species (and quietly ensuring that it was Ravenstahlic industrialists who got the first pick of the resources), the Legion split up into a number of crusading Expeditionary Fleets. These went their separate ways, as they do to this day. They reunite only briefly when vital announcements or equipment refits have to be made, or when a truly dangerous enemy requiring the strength of a full Legion is required.
Notable battles:
—The suppression of Liberation's Light
The "Liberation's Light" revolt in the Arcturus Cluster was a religious revolt seeking to overthrow the reign of a particularly harsh Imperial Sector Governor. It soon captured dozens of planets thanks to the defection of PDF and even a few Imperial Army units. As the local Subsector Governors feared that calling in the likes of the Black Watch or the Dread Wardens would either see them purged as well or else see so much of the population killed that the recaptured worlds would not be able to meet their tithe, it was decided that the Steel Crows would be the best Legion for the job.
Several Armies of the XXV Legion, including the one led personally by Reina, descended upon the rebelling worlds and engaged in a campaign of relentless brutality, causing the population to turn on each other in recrimination, and defiling its sacred spaces. This culminated in the execution of the head priestess of the faith by nerve stapling. Despite the fact that these worlds have long since been rebuilt, the sheer trauma of this suppression has left a permanent mental scar across the Arcturus Cluster.
—The Compliance of the Oolong Cloud
Within a stellar cloud, there lay the Divine Oolong Magocracy, a society that had resisted all Imperial incursions for years thanks to the fact that it was made up of an abhuman species with a particularly high amount of psykers, who had honed a powerful sense of future vision that allowed them to predict the actions of Imperial soldiers. Reina had a simple solution. Several landing craft full of soldiers were pumped full of Frenzon and then crashed into one of the fortress-worlds of the Magocracy. With the soldiers' minds too addled to be properly predicted and their actions directed by a few Astartes who had their mind shielded by Legion psykers, they were able to overcome the defences of the world and open up a beachhead into the rest of the Magocracy.
Upon the advice of her psykers, Reina murdered the captured witches in such staggeringly high numbers that the psychic shock emanated from the planet and disrupt the rest of the empire's defences, their psykers going mad or dying from the shock, allowing the Imperium to eventually overwhelm them. Reina planted the Imperial flag on their strange homeworld—a massive collection of ancient skeletons of stygian creatures—five months later.
—The Defence of the Spinward Salient
Responding to an emergency call from an Imperial Army naval flotilla that claimed to have been heavily damaged by an unknown xenobreed (Imperial term for an alien species), the Seventh Army of the Steel Crows found themselves cut off from reinforcements by a strange race of silicon-based aliens capable of shifting form with a thought. Hunkering down on a nearby inhabited star-system, the Seventh Army discovered the local human society, a peaceful planet that had achieved a technology level comparable to the early to mid-3rd millennium and kept the xenos at bay through regular tribute. Despite the offers of the locals to hide amongst them until they could peacefully return to their home, the commander of the Army refused, as the xenos would no doubt continue to push back against Imperial forces if left undistracted. Swiftly taking over the planetary government, the Seventh Army cannibalised the society with the help of its Mobilisation Detachment. Then they openly taunting the xenos and let them know where they were.
Unwilling to allow such a collection of enemies to their rear, the xenos took the bait and assailed what they thought to be a world of mostly docile tribute-givers. Instead they found a hell of fortifications, poison, and hordes of degraded but vicious conscripts. This tied them up long enough that Imperial forces were able to regroup and attack in force and push through to the xenos homeworld. However, of the 10,000 Astartes that made up the Seventh Army, only 2,300 would limp back to Imperial lines. And the less said of what was left of the planet's original inhabitants, the better.
Since then, the Steel Crows have been keeping up a strong track record of rapid Compliances. What is more, the initial complains about their tactics are being slowly silenced by a growing network of wealthy merchants and industrialists, who appreciate the rapid rebuilding and control the Legion provides them as they move across the galaxy.
As one might imagine, many of her siblings do not have a good relationship with Reina. Those who value culture despise her Legion's lowbrow tastes and tendency to destroy the cultural artefacts of the worlds they conquer. Those who care for the well-being of mankind are appalled by the conditions of those worlds. Those who secretly hold on to religious faith are horrified by the glee with which her Legion destroys such things. And those who care for naught but brutal efficiency are offended at the rampant corruption and greed that follows the Legion across the stars like an oil slick from a leaking tanker. Meanwhile, Reina throws this right back at them, sickened by their judgement and relentless idealism.
Reina has nearly come to blows with several of her siblings. She actually did come to blows with one, outright swinging at Karmella Moros after the latter executed the leadership of a world that Reina was working on bringing in peacefully, before being broken up by their respective daughters. Reina instead satisfied herself by sending Karmella detailed battle reports of her Compliances against groups whom she knew her sister might be sympathetic to, until Karmella elected to simply stop accepting messages from her. Ivan Zelezhonov outright refuses to fight alongside the Steel Crows, officially in protest of their tactics, and secretly out of disgust at their treatment of religion.
However, it is not all bad. Reina has forged good relationships with the likes of Hernan de Leon, Jiun Xiao and Haqqan the Red, among others. They may not agree on everything, but they are at least able to have friendly conversations and spirited debates as opposed to arguments or terse messages.