The Leonine Heresy

by Sharrowkyn

Inspired by the Roboutian Heresy, this is the tale of Lion El'Jonson's fall to Chaos as he leads half of his brothers (and not necessarily the ones you might think) in rebellion against the Emperor. All Index Astartes entries have been completed, and now we are journeying through the various War Zones of the 41st Millennium.

19. Index Astartes: Dark Angels

Chapter 19: Index Astartes- Dark Angels

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The future is not preordained. Endless omphaloskepsis regarding the endless depths of the Immaterium makes one wonder, just how many other heresies have there been? How many times have we tread this selfsame path? What worlds, what timelines fill your thoughts, of which mine is but a small piece? I have peered into the empyrean, seeking knowledge of the past and of the future, of other realms beyond, to learn what could have been, what might have been, and what Must Not Be. The stories may change, new courses and paths that might have unfolded based on a single action or difference in course, well do I know never the endings. I have witnessed the authors, and believe me, they are terrible. History does not repeat, but it is like poetry, it rhymes.

I suspect many of you have been waiting quite some time for this final entry in my tale. While it may just be fiction to you, dear reader, the events discussed in my Liber Leonina Heretica are quite real to me. I'm sure you had your reasons for following the steps of this path, but did you ever stop to ponder, at what point did your path become not your own? Have you forgotten there was ever a destination, and all that remains to you is the journey? The daemons know this better than anyone, for they perceive time far differently. They take the long view, always trying to match and overpower their rivals and cruelly savoring every moment, for they enjoy the game far more than the ending. Most of them cannot even comprehend ending it, contextualizing it as merely a setback for them to shrug at and start all over again.

I mean to change that. I have read the files concerning the actions of my father, my brothers, and my sons, but notice how little I or my own sons are mentioned. Did you think that was mere coincidence? Or have you noticed how informative these logs posing as Inquisitorial records are, how they have access to our innermost thoughts and opinions that they couldn't possibly know? I have supplemented these logs, the so-called Liber Leonica Heretica, with mine own knowledge in order to enlighten you about our past, so that when you finally understand what it is I will do, you will understand why I did it and why it had to be done. The Emperor's Dream and his Ideals are not dead, and when the time comes, he will praise me for having the strength to do what he never could. I am Lion El'Jonson, Lord of Caliban, High Preceptor of the First Legion, and I am the Last Loyal Son.

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Index Astartes- Dark Angels: The Fallen And Forgotten

Pride: it is the single defining characteristic which unites all rebellions. The arrogance of the traitor legions is well-known, those who thought themselves above the Emperor's decrees. What, then, of the greatest among their number, the legendary First, the Dark Angels? Was it pride which convinced them to turn their backs on the Imperium and embrace the madness that is Chaos? In the days of the Great Crusade, the Dark Angels were one of the largest legions, possessing an unparalleled tally of victories and an arsenal of ancient weaponry and ships unmatched by any other. The Emperor used them as his final sanction, and entrusted their primarch, thrice-cursed Lion El'Jonson, with tasks no others could be trusted to perform. Perhaps this was the beginning of their downfall, for they were never the same after the horrors of the Rangdan Xenocides, and it was soon after that the Angels Fell, breaking their oaths to lead the Heresy which nearly destroyed the Imperium. Little knowledge survived that galactic conflagration, and their actions and motives since then have remained a mystery. There are none better than the Dark Angels at keeping secrets, perhaps the greatest of these being that even they did not understand their father's true designs, unaware of the true reason they gather once more in numbers not seen in ten thousand years.

Origins: The Primordial Strain

To most worlds in the Imperium, the Legiones Astartes are figures of legend. A large part of this is due to how scarce they truly are: a million posthuman warriors, give or take, spread out across an empire comprising a million worlds. Small wonder, then, that the vast majority of Imperial citizens go their entire life without so much as seeing an Astartes, who are often regarded as angels sent from the God-Emperor. Only a select few, the most puissant and influential, have the privilege to understand the origins of these warriors, and even fewer understand that they were not the first breed of supersoldier utilized by the Emperor of Mankind. Before the Astartes, there were the Thunder Warriors: never as elite as the Emperor's Custodian Guard, but far more numerous, twenty legions of superhumans forged with arcane science and created solely for war. Their purpose was to bring an end to the precarious dance of the Unification Wars, a centuries-old conflict to see which of the Techno-Barbarian warlords would control Terra.

Their leader and chief was Arik Taranis, one of the first Thunder Warriors ever created, who led his brothers to a hundred victories over the Techno-Barbarians who had misruled Terra during the prior 2500 years during the Age of Strife. It was he who toppled Kalagann of Ursh, master of the Nuclear Storms, from his rule over the steppes of Asia, for which he earned the title of Lightning-Bearer. However, while Taranis and the Thunder Warriors were indisputably masters of war, they were not without their flaws. From the beginning, their genetic-engineering was the product of necessity and expediency, from the primitive metal power armor lacking any ceramite or neural interfaces, to the basic genhancements implanted in their bodies and minds that some later whispered had been intentionally designed to be far more rushed than the Custodians or the Astartes would ever be, for the Thunder Warriors were never meant to leave Terra.

For those few that do ever stop to ponder such an ugly train of thought, the truth seems obvious for those who know where to look. The most obvious proof of this can be seen in the stunted lifespans of the Legio Cataegis: as their enhancements degraded, they produced tumors and genetic abnormalities on a level unseen in the Emperor's other creations, both before and after them. Their very creation, which led to mental instability and overly-heightened aggression, makes it clear that these warriors were never suited for the task of uniting the galaxy in a Great Crusade. However, for the wider public to learn of this would reflect poorly on their creator, and therefore would need to be dealt with quietly. The question now turns from why to whom, for though the Thunder Warriors are now mostly forgotten in our ignorant galaxy, those that do know of their existence often associate them with their heroic last stand defending the Emperor at the Battle of Mount Ararat. Few stop to ponder how these warriors, the Emperor's soldiers who had never before lost a battle, came to be in such a tactical position.

Who were the foes faced by the Legio Cataegis? Who could be trusted to dispose of the Thunder Warriors? Not the Emperor himself, for the glorious Master of Mankind would not stoop to personally executing an entire legion. Some have suggested the Legio Custodes, for their martial might and loyalty to the Emperor is beyond reproach, but this seems unlikely as their numbers have always been few, designed to protect a singular individual rather than wage a war against thousands. While some individual Custodes such as Captain-General Constantin Valdor are confirmed to have been at Mount Ararat, there is no evidence that a large enough force of the Emperor's Bodyguards to destroy the Legio Cataegis accompanied him. No, the true culprits are the replacements for the Thunder Warriors who just so happened to appear in the Emperor's service in large numbers shortly after the Battle of Mount Ararat: the Astartes.

Combining the knowledge gained from the imperfect augmentations of the Thunder Warriors with the overly-refined genetic alchemy of the Custodes, the Emperor sought to create a new breed of warrior, a more-perfect version of the Thunder Warriors. Rather than adults, the Astartes were to be taken as children, thus allowing their new enhancements organs more time to adapt and grow to suit their bodies in a way the rushed implantations of the Thunder Warriors never allowed. To make even that much progress took more than a century of experimentation, an advancement made over the corpses of tens of thousands. Countless trials were performed in order to speed up the process, for the Emperor knew he would need far more soldiers than the meager legions of the Thunder Warriors or Custodians could provide, and so the experiments were altered. Adding genetic information from the most stable template from a separate experiment known as the Primarch Project finally yielded the results the Master of Mankind was looking for, and thus he created the Primordial Strain, one hundred warriors that were the first to bear gene-seed in their bodies.

While crude compared to their descendants, these Proto-Astartes were far more stable than their predecessors due to the addition of gene-seed, and far more powerful as well. Their mental stability was beyond reproach, for the Emperor himself used his psychic might to soul-bind them to himself, ensuring their minds would be protected from any outside psychic influence. Chief among them was Merir Astelan, whose unshakable loyalty had been evident from the beginning, for he had been a willing volunteer. After proving their success in minor field trials, the Emperor ordered the creation of the First Legion, appointing Astelan over the rest of his brothers, who were known as the Uncrowned Princes. As the years of the Unification Wars passed, the Emperor expanded his work, slowly changing from Proto-Astartes into true Astartes and crafting another nineteen legions, each taken from other strains in the Primarch Project. However, these new forces were a few cohorts in size at most, the effort in their creation less that which was put into the Primus, or First Legion, which remained the largest and the model for all the others.

Thus by the end of the Unification Wars, the First Legion was 5000 strong. They had been blooded over the prior two centuries, small groups whose success was outstanding even compared to their cousins, for it seemed not all legions had been created equal. They were the first to wear Mark II Power Armor, the 'Crusade' variant, which was a notable advancement from the more primitive Mark I Armor which lacked life-support systems. Astelan's zealotry toward the Emperor made him a natural fit to work alongside the Custodes, and so when the time came, it was he and the First who was chosen to accompany Captain-General Valdor to dispose of the Thunder Warriors.

Suspecting nothing, the impeccably-loyal Taranis led the entirety of the Thunder Warriors to Mount Ararat, an isolated mountain located in a region pacified decades before. It was there the guns of the Fourth Legion methodically pinned them down into small pockets that the First Legion in its entirety descended upon them to put them to the sword, just one test among many to prove their worth. The mountainside ran red with posthuman blood that dark day, as Taranis and his men fought back with the fury of those betrayed, and many of the Uncrowned Princes died holding back the berserk fury of the Thunder Warriors. In the end, some even managed to escape, including Taranis, whose body was never found. It mattered little though, for the vast majority of the Legio Cataegis had slain, and the few who had survived would be mopped up in the decades to come. None could deny the efficacy of the First Legion and the Astartes Project as a whole.

Thus in betrayal and blood did the Great Crusade begin, an expedition to unite the lost worlds of man under the Master of Mankind. The Emperor had been firmly convinced of the utility of the First Legion in their actions at Mount Ararat, and so decreed for them a role that would be theirs alone: Destroyers. Under the command of the unshakably loyal Astelan and his second-in-command, Voted-Lieutenant Hector Thrane, the ten thousand men of the First were tasked with eliminating any threats which posed a threat to the Emperor's vision, or more accurately, an alternate path. Their initial campaigns were lost to history even before the Leonine Heresy, so thoroughly were their foes destroyed, and so all that remains is to speak of their organization during this time. The First had always been the prototype legion, where the Emperor experimented to perfect his warriors, and so it is perhaps more accurate to view the First as not one, but ten legions. Split into various Hosts led by Masters, the First was designed to be able to handle any threat, and to this end, they were entrusted with relics of the Dark Age of Technology, each Host specializing in a different field.

These hosts were but the outer layer of the First Legion, the mere surface of a complex structure ruled entirely by Astelan, First of the First. His input went into every deployment, selecting the right Host for the job. From the psykers of the Host of Pentacles, to the crushing war engines of the Host of Iron, to the bloody-handed assassins of the Host of Fire, the First Legion could defeat any foe given the opportunity to bring the correct Host to bear. Astelan and his brothers remained the most trusted, tasked with scouring the outer worlds of the Solar System from the unnamed and uncategorized xenos which infested them. Where the other legions fought on Terra with bolter and sword, the First was deploying gene-phage munitions against the Khrave upon Enceladus, and unleashing the Excindio Battle-Automata against the Unspeakable King. It was they who scoured the Oort Cloud, a thankless task taking many years, and when Astelan's forces returned to resupply, they wore black in memory of the dead, the first of the legions to adopt a unique livery.

With the Solar System now cleansed, the First were given their own fleet, dispatched to hold back the horrors lurking in a galaxy filled with terrors. The tools they wielded were entrusted to no others, ancient archaeotech which attacked body, mind, and soul, weapons of such unholy potency that not even the memory of the slain could remain intact. The First only grew stronger, becoming more arrogant and fixed in their ways as they served as the hidden hand of the Emperor as his instruments of destruction. Where the other legions had fleets, they had an entire world, a base of operations hidden away from prying eyes known as Gramarye, and while they did not have a primarch, Legion Master Astelan stood at the left hand of the Emperor alongside men such as Malcador the Sigillite and Captain-General Valdor.

For over fifty years, their tallies of victories grew unseen, many tens of thousands compared to the few thousands of the other Legiones Astartes. They were the hidden, evening star to the Sixteenth Legion's morning star, acting in secrecy and remaining apart from their cousins to overcome every obstacle to the Emperor's rule. Even their structure remained unique, and it is small wonder that their complex arrangement of Hosts was not duplicated in the other legions. Seeking to simplify, the Emperor developed the Principia Belicosa, a revolutionary tome which provided the framework, strategy, and tactics that all the Legiones Astartes would follow. Each Legion would be self-sufficient and interchangeable, and while some were more suited for some types of war than others, they were to be far more generalist than the specialized First. However, their isolation and unchallenged supremacy would eventually come to an end, with the discovery of the Death World known as Caliban.

Knights of The Order

"Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god."-Aristotle, Grekian philosopher

To understand the story of Caliban, one must look into its past. The most ancient accounts tell us Caliban was settled during the Dark Age of Technology, merely one outpost among many settled on the edges of the Aeldari Empire. During the Age of Strife, it was, like so many other worlds, cut off from Terra, and it is then that the legend of Caliban truly begins. At the height of their power and decadence, the Aeldari Empire was consumed from within by the largest Warp Storm ever recorded, a reopened wound in reality that would one day be known as the Eye of Terror, which swallowed the majority of their populations along with the worlds they lived upon. Suddenly exposed to a radiation far more deadly than that of any sun, the planet of Caliban began to change, bathed day and night by the mutative influence of the Warp.

By the 30th Millennium, Caliban could be best described as a Death World, for its people lived in constant fear in walled towns that served as islands of civilization amidst a sea of emerald trees. Just like nearly every other world in the shadow of the Eye, Caliban's society had collapsed, its villages now isolated from each other by forests that grew increasingly dangerous to traverse. Innovation had become a thing of the past, and as the wonders of the Dark Age of Technology vanished, the societal unity which depended on it did too. Now that long-distance communication was impossible, each town was ruled by knights wielding powered armor and primitive chainswords, who defended their walled keeps according to the laws of chivalry. Into the forests they would venture on epic quests, seeking to burn back the vegetation and slay the monstrous Great Beasts that lurked within. At other times they would wage war, for the aristocracy of Caliban was filled with proud men with dark secrets.

Perhaps the greatest of these warlords was the Lord Cypher, who led a group known as the Order from his fortress of Aldurukh, a walled castle of several thousand people. Such was Caliban's deadly wilds that this small town was considered the greatest city in all the land whose fame had spread far and wide. It was in such an environment that a man named Luther was born, raised on the legends of the Order's heroism. From a young age he displayed the qualities of a knight, studying as a squire with the eventual goal of joining the Order as a knight, a task which would require him to slay a Great Beast on his own. Such was his talent that he was permitted to embark on this quest at the age of 14, the earliest in the history of the Order. Thus Luther set out to prove his worth, traveling for weeks across the deadly forest until he reached a dismal swamp known as the Shadowmire. Luther was well-versed in the lore of this land, for long ago, a proud keep known as Greyhome held sway until it was brought down by a wicked sorcerer, who cursed it with everlasting rain and gloom. It was said only wraiths and spirits lurked in the Shadowmire, but Luther was not afraid. He followed the trail of a Great Beast down and down into the swamps, until he stumbled upon a cave.

The beast was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps the cave had another entrance? Luther shuddered, suddenly feeling the oppressive weight of some unseen, antediluvian presence turning its gaze upon him. Not all Great Beasts looked alike: what mammalian, reptilian, or avian features they showed were merely illusory, for they were all the same in nature: abominations.

As if sensing his thoughts, the pressure redoubled, and as Luther clutched his head, he spotted a brief glimpse of something moving in the darkness, followed by an unnerving yelp of pain. Steeling his nerves, Luther descended deeper into the cave, following the trail of gore faintly visible in the dim light of his torch. Eventually the path leveled out, and Luther found himself in a wide open chamber, his light reflecting off dozens of metallic crystals to reveal at his feet the mangled corpse of the Great Beast he had been hunting. Bending down, Luther sliced off a piece of the creature, for the Order would require proof of its demise, but as he straightened up, he sensed something was wrong.

Suddenly aware of the danger he was in, Luther hesitated. Peering around, he could faintly make out dozens of runic symbols, and in that moment, he began to recall the folktales of nameless fears buried in the deeps never to be dug up again. Faint sounds of clicking and popping began to fill the chamber, gradually growing louder, but Luther was frozen in fear. Thoughts of twisting vermicular coils came to his mind unbidden, a serpentine horror made intelligible only by the wards which restricted the creature's true form into something his mind could actually comprehend.

As the alien intelligence turned its full attention to him, Luther dropped his torch, whose flames guttered out on the ground. Now bereft of its light, Luther saw dozens of red eyes low to the ground. Though unnerving, they seemed different to whatever abomination was chained. Still frozen in fear, he felt his hand being tugged at, and without thinking, he followed where they led him. Soon enough he was back on the surface in the gloomy daylight of the Shadowmire, his mind still struggling to comprehend what had just happened. Turning around, Luther caught a brief glance of a small hooded figure descending back down into the darkness.

With the trophy of the Great Beast in hand, Luther made his way back to Aldurukh. However, when questioned by the masters of the Order, he was forced to admit the beast had been slain by a hand not his own. The arrogant lords of the Angelicasta accused Luther of attempting to steal credit and deceive them, a charge which he protested to no avail. Luther was cast out, back into the wilds of Caliban, to become one of the Wandered, a mercenary knight sworn to no lord. Few men could survive such a sentence, but survive Luther did, ranging across the vast forests of Caliban for many years, serving those who would accept him. Dozens of Great Beasts fell at Luther's hand, fruitless attempts to win the favor of the Order, but they steadfastly rejected him, calling him accursed and tainted by his time in the wilds. By the time he convinced a vagabond lord of no real repute to knight him, bitterness had sunk deep into Luther's heart, a hatred for authority aimed at the Order for doubting him.

Luther eventually fell into the service of Lord Sartana, Grandmaster of the Knights of Lupus, who recognized his peerless skill. After learning what Luther had observed, Sartana quickly inducted Luther into their order, enlightening him to the true nature of the prisoner as the object of their devotion, a creature the legends spoke of as the Ouroboros. Relying upon his natural talent, Sar Luther quickly became Lord Sartana's right-hand man, gaining access to many forbidden tomes in the process. It was during this time that he became a sorcerer, for while he lacked the natural talent to become a psyker, his drive to be respected was a powerful motivator indeed. Many nephilla, the spirits of the forest from Calibanian legend, were bound to his service, increasing his repute both among the Knights of Lupus and beyond. Soon other keeps began to swear loyalty to the Knights of Lupus in exchange for protection from the Great Beasts, and even lords sworn to the Order shifted their loyalties. Lord Cypher reached out to attempt to ally with them, but Sartana and Luther rejected their overtures for peace, swearing to become the undisputed masters of the forest. However, what Sartana did not know was Sar Luther's ambition far outstripped his own.

Urged on by his nephilla advisors, Luther began to plot against the Grandmaster, seeking to usurp Sartana's position as head of the Knights of Lupus. However, Sartana was too powerful to defeat by conventional means, thus Luther began to seek out alternative methods of assassination. Thus when the nephilla told him of a possible solution waiting in the forest, Luther quickly rode out alone, where he would discover the trail of a Calibanite Lion, the most powerful of all the Great Beasts. For many weeks Luther tracked the Beast, deep into the wilds of Caliban where no man had been for decades. Over mountain and under hill he and his men followed the spoor, heedless of the dangers which threatened them from all sides. Many times did Luther's followers urge him to turn back, but the Sar refused, for the nephilla had been very clear his destiny was tied to that of a Lion. However, when the hunters did overtake their quarry, they discovered something far more threatening.

Sensing movement in the branches of a towering oak, one of Luther's allies fired his bolt pistol up into the air, provoking a fearsome growl. From the height of the tree, a form leapt down, falling dozens of meters to knock the unlucky knight from his destrier. Before the rest of the party could react, their ally had his throat ripped out by a lightning-fast swipe, the creature hidden by the shadows of the canopy save for a mane of white-blond hair. As the rest of the knights aimed at the interloper, Luther ordered them to hold for his order to fire, to which the creature turned its emerald-green eyes to the Sar as if it had understood him. With a start, the Sar recognized this as no Great Beast, but a man, albeit a feral one, his mouth covered in the gore of his fallen companion.

It was unknown to Luther and his men how the man had gotten there, but it was clear he had been living in the wild for some time, for he was fully grown. The rest of the party clamored to open fire at what was surely a nephilla in disguise, for no mortal could survive the wilds of Caliban alone. However, Luther ignored them, instead taking the time to ponder the man, who returned his gaze without fear as the wound in his shoulder from the bolt pistol healed in less than a minute. As the last of the flesh knitted itself back together without so much as a scar, Luther came to a decision, praying a silent invocation to the nephilla in thanks for this opportunity. The wild man seemed to come to a decision in the same moment, and leapt at the closest knight, slaughtering all but Luther, who alone did not seem to be threatening. With each kill, the savage seemed to become less bestial, as though he was gaining the wisdom from the men he slew as prey.

As the last of the knights rasped their last breaths, Sar Luther offered his hand to the man, naming him Lion El'Jonson, a name which meant the son of the forest, and adopted him as his own. The two men returned to the fortress of the Knights of Lupus, where Luther sicced his new protege upon Lord Sartana, after whose violent and untimely death the Sar became the Grandmaster. Years passed as the Fortress of Lupus became the Fortress of Luther, a forbidden edifice known as Castle Camlann where Luther raised the Lion in the knightly ways of Caliban. However, Luther never revealed the existence of the Ouroboros to his son, nor tutored him in the ways of the nephilla, nor offered any explanation as to the red eyes which haunted the shadows of the fortress. Even the Lion's legendary skill at hunting was of no avail in catching these beings the legends named the Watchers in the Dark, and eventually he gave up.

When the Grandmaster judged the time right, he and his adopted son set out to enforce their will upon Caliban. Framing their takeover in the context of destroying the Great Beasts, Luther sought to create a new Order to surpass the old, to do what they never could. Soon dozens of keeps paid fealty to Luther and the Lion, bending the knee either willingly out of gratitude for destroying the predators, or when left no other option when faced with the unshakable authority and the flawless strategies of the Lion. In a matter of years, the Lion and Luther had taken nearly the entire planet in a whirlwind campaign, exterminating every Great Beast which had ever terrorized the people of Caliban. With each victory, the Lion took a prize, a sample of the creatures which he gave to Luther, whose advisors studied the remains in hopes of learning more of their world. In years past, Sartana and his allies had captured a few Great Beasts, studying them for their own reasons that died with them. Thus this research was continued by Luther's New Order, who built upon their studies in order to better understand the creatures they were exterminating.

As the territory of the Great Beasts shrank and shrank, so too did the numbers of those who opposed the Knights of Luther. Only the Order still remained independent, but their time eventually ran out. By fire and storm, their castle was seized, and Lord Cypher met a violent end at the hands of Luther himself. In the wake of their victory, the Grandmaster appointed a new Lord Cypher, who would serve as his Master of Whisperers. Soon after, the Lion announced that the last of the Great Beasts had been slain, and as he presented his adoptive father with the final trophy, Luther decided to reveal the existence of the nephilla to his son, a distraction to hold the attention of the Conqueror of Caliban lest he turn on him just as Luther had turned on Sartana so many years ago. The Lion pored through the vast collection of tomes the Knights of Lupus had collected, absorbing the knowledge of what later scholars would come to know as Chaos. However, the primarch seemed unimpressed by such knowledge, having no need to make bargains with the nephilla when his might already surpassed those around him.

Over the following years, the Lion and his adoptive father quickly drifted apart, for the two men were far too proud to remain together. Luther deeply resented how easily El'Jonson won the respect of others, effortlessly claiming the fame and honor he felt he deserved yet received only suspicion from the landed nobility. The Grandmaster knew he would easily be the greatest knight in his generation had it not been for the discovery of the primarch, though his pride only made him the target of mockery from the nephilla he continued to summon. It is all but certain he and Luther began to view each other as rivals during this time, a bipolar system where the balance of power remained murky and uncertain. It seemed like the two intensely proud men would sooner or later have to come to blows over a slight, imagined or otherwise.

Tiring of Luther's silent envy, El'Jonson decided to establish his own base of power atop the ruins of the Angelicasta, a fortress of his own far away from Luther's power base at Castle Camlann. There amidst his courtiers and knightly retainers, El'Jonson was left to contemplate his future, the inner machinations of his mind remaining an enigma known only to him as he pondered the role of Knights now that the Great Beasts were no more. However, before he came to a decision regarding the future, his reverie was disturbed by the arrival of some most unexpected visitors. From the skies of Caliban descended a unit of the Emperor's scouts, whom El'Jonson received into his castle in secret, hiding their arrival from Luther. Learning all he could of where they came from, the Lion told them to bring their master, that he might judge their claims for himself. The scouts left Caliban, and returned some months later, bringing with them the Master of Mankind.

Great Crusade: The Angels of Darkness

Tenth of the primarchs to be found, the discovery of the Lion marked a turning point. Prior to him, most primarchs had spent months, if not years, with their father after their rediscovery. In fact, one of those primarchs was still campaigning alongside the Emperor, Roboute Guilliman, eagerly winning praise and attention despite the fact he had been discovered almost a decade prior. The Lion however had no interest in staying beside the Emperor, for in him he discovered a superior predator for the first time in his life, and he did not like it. The Son of the Forest had no need for anyone to be looking over his shoulder, and so the Emperor permitted him to go his own way immediately, something that would play out quite frequently with the next few primarchs to be discovered. However, this only occurred after a night of intense questioning from the Master of Mankind, for he had observed firsthand the scar upon reality in whose shadow Caliban bathed.

What the two discussed was known only to them, but it seems certain that it involved the reality of Chaos, which was so evident in the corrupted forms of the Great Beasts. Whatever the case, the Lion evidently passed the test, for the Emperor would not have let his son go if he was visibly corrupted. In return for the Lion's oath, the Emperor provided his son with a ship and the coordinates of Gramarye, the hidden fortress-world of the First Legion. Thus the Lion departed Caliban in secret, not bothering to inform Luther of his plans, and made a similarly-clandestine entrance to Gramarye, stalking his way unseen into the heart of the legion's fortress to observe things for himself. Now familiar with Imperial technology courtesy of the Emperor, the primarch hacked into a data terminal in order to retrieve the unredacted service record of his legion, his frown deepening as he realized the scale of the task set before him. Thus he set his superhuman mind swiftly formulating a plan worthy of Calibanian legend to assert his authority.

Compared to the neatly-organized Ultramarines, who prided themselves on their adherence to the Principia Belicosa, the First Legion that the Lion discovered was a tangled snare. Where Ten Hosts once neatly divided the legion, now hundreds of tiny cells, no more than a few dozen warriors each, existed in a nebulous web of alliances known as the Hekatonystika, or Orders. Constant turnover in leadership, the natural result of always fighting the deadliest foes, had nearly shattered their organizational structure. Most Orders had grown to distrust one another, counting only on themselves and keeping their conquests and victories secret from the rest of the legion, let alone the rest of the Imperium. At its heart was Legion Master Astelan, whose company known as the Five Hundred were the oldest and most experienced, who mostly served to coordinate the various Orders into larger groupings known as Circles that he would direct against larger foes. However, his authority was far from absolute, and it seemed likely it would continue to shrink as the legion continued to grow.

Clad in unmarked, archaic power armor of deepest ebony, a mysterious warrior knocked upon the doors of the legion Chantry. Only a device bearing the Emperor's personal sigil prevented the startled sentries from firing upon him, and so the intruder was taken to the heart of the fortress, where the assembled Masters of the Hosts attempted to interrogate him as to how he discovered Gramarye. Tiring of their questions, the Black Knight challenged the commanders to a duel, denouncing them for failing to live up to their full potential and demanding they gather the legion to honor its oaths. Suspecting this to be some test from the Master of Mankind, Astelan recalled his forces, and gathered his champions to fight for the honor of the First. First assembled in full panoply, tens of thousands of legionaries watched the viewscreens silently as the Legion Master and his six champions known as Voted-Lieutenants, prepared to face the mysterious intruder in a ceremonial duel.

Within ten minutes, the contest had finished, leaving only the Black Knight standing and the seven Astartes disarmed and on their knees. The contest had never been close, the Stranger testing each of the seven in turn, before defeating them all at once; none had been so much as able to scratch his armor. With a flourish, the victor removed his helmet, and the First Legion as one rose to their feet, erupting into cheers as they instinctively recognized their primarch. That is, all except Astelan, who had been utterly humiliated before the rest of his brothers. In that moment, heedless of the fact his wrath was directed toward his own gene-sire, the Legion Master cursed him, swearing an oath to do whatever it took to see the Lion humbled, just as he had been, even if it cost him his life.

"We Space Marines were once human. No matter what happens to our bodies, at our core, in our hearts and souls lies humanity. That is something the primarchs never had. They had to learn to be human from their homeworlds. The people that raised them taught them this. I don't think Lion ever learned the nobility that was taught to many of the other primarchs. How could he, having been alone in the forest for decades? I have met Leman Russ, Primarch of the Space Wolves, who is a man playing at being a beast. El'Jonson is the opposite, who at his core is that same hunted creature, a feral animal hiding his true nature beneath a veneer of honor in the same way he once hid in the trees. And I fear for the day when that great beast finally slips out once more." -Astelan's personal log, recovered from the ruins of Caliban by Leman Russ

With his legion gathered together, Lion ordered his sons to make for what was to become their new homeworld, Caliban. Nearly every Astartes present made the journey, though some were left behind to begin the demolition of the chantry upon Gramarye, for it would no longer be needed. Upon the bones of Aldurukh, the Lion's personal fortress, the legion began to construct their new home. With the aid of Imperial technology, the forest was finally burned back as enormous machines cleared dozens of kilometers of forest per day, and soon the foundations for hives had been laid, vast arcologies which would house the workforce necessary to handle the logistics of one of the Legiones Astartes. The Lion spent his days overseeing the induction of aspirants from all over Caliban, to discover who was worthy to become an Astartes, and soon thousands of squires from the various knightly orders had been inducted. So too were some of the primarch's closest companions, including Luther himself, taken to become Half-Astartes, for while they were too old to become true space marines, the knowledge of the Mechanicum could serve as a stopgap.

As the new legionaries were trained, the Lion began to overhaul the structure of the First Legion. First to change was their very name: no more just a number, the First were to be known as the Dark Angels, a title deriving from Calibanian legend. Next was their structure: the Lion's intensely logical mind had immediately seen and despised how little authority Astelan had over the various Orders. Thus the Hekatonystika was no more, replaced with a system known as the Hexagrammaton, whose structure derived from the organization of the Knights of Luther. Hearkening back to the Hosts of old, Lion combined both Terran and Calibanian traditions to form the six wings, or hosts: the Deathwing, Ravenwing, Dreadwing, Firewing, Ironwing, and Stormwing.

Each was to have a unique purpose, but they would work in conjunction far more closely than the insular Orders ever had. The Lion seemed not to notice the seething hatred and silent curses sent toward him from Astelan as he casually dismissed him, instead appointing his foster-father, the Demi-Astartes Luther, to the role of Grandmaster of the First Legion, a position second in authority only to himself, a role known as the High Preceptor. Beneath him were the Voted-Lieutenants, the six members of the Council of Masters who would oversee the various chapters and the companies before them. In order to keep a sense of continuity, most of the ranks of authority known as Chapter-Commanders were filled by Terrans, but in certain cases, sons of Caliban would take their place. Astelan himself served in one such role, still in command of the Five Hundred but far less important, a humiliation he would not soon forget.

With his legion now being reshaped according to his will, the Lion left his sons on Caliban for a time, journeying to Terra to meet his brothers. Not many were on Terra, or had the time to come meet him, but eventually he would meet them as the years of the Great Crusade passed. As the tenth-found, most primarchs would have been at a disadvantage compared to their 'older' brothers, but not with the Lion. He was determined to be seen as an equal, if not the superior that he was, and intimated as much to those he met. Such was the case with Horus Lupercal, the Firstfound, a gregarious man whose personality did not complement the Lion's own, as well as Russ, the Second-found whom he had dueled with upon the world of Dulan. El'Jonson had avenged the dishonorable blow his brother had struck him, taking one of his canines as satisfaction before departing, and the two remained estranged ever since.

Other brothers proved better companions. The best of these pairings was the one between him and Jaga Tikan, Primarch of the Fifth Legion, for both men were apex hunters. The only relationship that could rival the bond between El'Jonson and Tikan was the one between him and Sanguinius, Primarch of the Blood Angels, who had been discovered only a few years after he had, but the Angel was close with everyone, so it was not the same. The Lion preferred to hunt alone, and kept his distance from his brothers for most of the Great Crusade, and the times he did fight alongside them were most often under the auspices of the Emperor. The Master of Mankind valued the First very highly, entrusting them with relics of the Dark Age of Technology, including the legion's flagship: the Invincible Reason, the first and greatest of three Gloriana-class battleships given to the First. It was from his own father that the Lion learned his role, and that of his legion, was that of the destroyer, war in its rawest and most fundamental aspect of death, to render unto ash all that stood in the way of the Imperium.

After observing his father and brothers on several campaigns, the Lion was now ready to join the Great Crusade in earnest. Returning to Caliban, the Lion ordered his sons to make for the Karkasarn System, where they relieved a garrison of Ultramarines caught in the midst of a sudden uprising. Uncaring of the reason why they had revolted, the Dark Angels unleashed the ebon-armored Dreadwing upon the people of Karkasarn, leaving only corpses and ash in their wake. Many of the Ultramarines were caught in the crossfire, but by the time the battle had concluded, the Dark Angels had already departed, for they had come to make a statement of their duty, not to aid allies or win fame. Over the following years, many rebellious or intransigent worlds felt their wrath, establishing a grim reputation. Soon entire systems began to surrender upon learning which of the Emperor's legions had come to conquer them.

The Dark Angels most often fought alone, just as they had before being reunited with their primarch. However, the Lion made sure to fight alongside each and every one of his brothers, though this was done more to learn what sort of men they were, their strengths and more importantly their weaknesses, as opposed to any sense of camaraderie. Such was the case with the Molech System, where the Lion joined forces with the Emperor himself alongside detachments of the Third, Fifth, and Sixteenth Legions. Such a show of strength quickly saw Molech submit to them, and after compliance had been obtained, the Lion joined his father and brothers on an expedition to the surface. There, beneath a fortress whose tunnels descended far beneath the surface, the Emperor and his four Sons, the Lion, Fulgrim, Tikan, and Horus, discovered the Gateway.

My eyes had widened upon seeing my father reveal his true power as he described the purpose of the obsidian gateway. To survive on Caliban, you had to be able to recognize how deadly a predator was. That was one of the reasons I had bent the knee. But now, he was far more than he had ever been before. Horus and Jaga could sense it too, and they began to ask questions, which I could see my father didn't like. He pressed his hand onto Horus's head, and with a flash of light, the Firstfound was staggered, his eyes now confused as though he had a concussion.

So that's how it was going to be, I thought. Clearly this is meant to stay a secret, he was just testing us. Well, he's not going to get into my head. Several of the Great Beasts had tried as much, but I had long since learned to shield my mind, to feign as though their trickery had worked before moving in for the kill. Jaga was next, then Gureimu, and when they both reacted in the same way, I was certain of my course. Thus when Father moved to do the same to me, I knew how to act. That's not to say it was easy, and I had to sacrifice other memories to substitute for it, but when all was said and done, I still remembered the Emperor and the Obsidian Gateway.

Molech was an unremarkable world, one which quickly submitted to the might of the Emperor and his sons, and soon became a garrison world, hosting over a hundred regiments of the Imperial Army and three Titan Legios. The First departed to go their own way once more to return to what they did best: seeking out the foe where he was strongest and breaking him. The Lion was not the most charismatic of his brothers, but he was authority and danger itself, and none dared cross him, or at least, none survived to tell the tale.

Such was the case with the Sarosh System, where the Dark Angels came to inquire into what was delaying a force of Star Hunters. The government of Sarosh was a deeply-entrenched bureaucracy, which had originally petitioned the Imperium to be admitted. Yet over a year had passed, and the system seemed no closer to joining. Thus the Lion dispatched his sons to investigate the planet, which he himself met with their leaders. Such a precaution proved vital, for the Sarosi attempted to smuggle a warhead aboard his flagship, to assassinate the legion's command structure in one fell swoop. This foul treachery had been averted at the last moment, not by Luther, whose purview as Grandmaster included the primarch's security, but by a minor legionary, a librarian by the name of Zahariel.

Furious at this breach of their defenses, the Dark Angels obliterated every last trace of Sarosh, leaving nothing but dust and echoes despite evidence that most of the Sarosi knew nothing of this plot by their leaders and had earnestly desired to join the Imperium. As a reward for his actions, Zahariel was permitted to join the esteemed Council of Masters as a representative of the Mystai, the legion's psykers, as was his cousin Nemiel, for he had a good head on his shoulders and it had long been the way of Caliban to reward family to ensure loyalty. Luther was stripped of his authority for his failure, and sent back to Caliban to oversee the garrison and recruitment there, along with a contingent of Dark Angels. In his place, Lion appointed Ninth Company Knight-Commander Urian Vendraig in his place, whose role was then filled by an Astartes named Corswain.

Alongside Luther, many other Astartes were sent back to Caliban, mostly rank and file along with more than a few chapter-commanders stripped of their rank. Anyone who seemed connected to the Sarosi plot, from those who couldn't account for the breach in security to even those who were merely part of the same squad or known to associate with the suspects, were exiled, hundreds in total. Before he departed, Sar Luther swore an oath of dark vengeance toward his foster-son, a second curse which echoed Astelan's own. Thus it was fitting that he and his garrison were joined in exile barely a few years later by hundreds more Astartes, led by none other than Astelan himself. However, as opposed to Luther's suspected treachery, Astelan's exile was the result of direct disobedience.

Responding to a cry for aid from the world of Keltis, under assault by orks, the Dark Angels had begun a pogrom to uproot the barbaric greenskins. Slowly the orks were hemmed in on all sides, but several Terran commanders, including Astelan, noticed what appeared to be flaws in the Lion's grand battleplan. Poring through the deployment data, Astelan discovered redundancies, multiple chapters deployed to the same areas without any of them being aware of the other's existence. Even more disturbing was the realization their encirclement in the mountains of Keltis did not extend into the plains, where a hive city with over five hundred million people lay defenseless. When the First of the First attempted to discuss this with his primarch, he was ignored, ordered to remain in his post until such time as he was needed. In that moment, Astelan realized his primarch's true nature, one of cold logic designed to shepherd legion resources even at the cost of the deaths of countless innocents.

Refusing to abet such an atrocity, Astelan ordered his men into battle, stopping the orks from entering the city at heavy cost to themselves. The Lord of Caliban's fury at this development was fearsome to behold, for now rather than trapping the orks in the plains to be wiped out in a single stroke, many had escaped, robbing the primarch of the decisive victory he sought. Astelan was banished to Caliban, exiled along with the men who had followed him. He was received with due ceremony by Luther, who was pleased to host others who shared both his disdain for the Lion's arbitrary commands and his growing suspicions regarding the primarch's paranoia. However, Astelan despised the Grandmaster for his pretensions, and kept to himself during the years of his exile, though even he did not know this was merely the beginning.

The War of Nightmares: The First and Second Rangdan Xenocides

"They were supposed to have arrived sooner." Reported quotation of the Emperor of Man at the Battle of Advex-Mors, 939.M30

Occurring just two years after the discovery of the Lion, the Battles of Sarosh and Keltis marked the first turning point for the Dark Angels. Any hope of influence the Legion Master might have hoped for ended with Luther exiled to Caliban, while the removal of Astelan and many senior Terran officers like him removed another possible counterbalance. Though no officers were stripped of their titles, their now-vacant positions had to be filled, and the Sons of Caliban chosen in such roles dared not question the judgment of the Lion or countermand his orders. Over the following decades, absolute obedience became the byword of the First Legion. It is said the primarch of the First never spoke of his adoptive father, or ever sent an inquiry regarding the recruitment process back on Caliban. Thus none were aware of the darkness growing on Caliban, of the hatred in Astelan's heart or the more tangible corruption growing in Luther, who now had all the time in the world to master the ancient tomes he had kept from Lord Sartana for all these years. Thus by the time the Great Crusade entered its second century, the Grandmaster was well on his way to damnation, learning of the Ruinous Powers, the true masters of the nephilla which had haunted the wilds of Caliban for so long. And all the while, the Watchers in the Dark kept their vigil, wary lest Luther attempt to free the Ouroboros.

Lion El'Jonson however knew none of this, and seemingly did not care. His legion was now the largest and most powerful: though he certainly did not boast of it as other primarchs might have, the Dark Angels now numbered well over two hundred thousand Astartes, surpassing even the famed Ultramarines. He had the complete confidence of his father, for he dutifully carried out his every wish, bestriding the galaxy as they defended the realm from all threats, both physical and moral. The Lion was confirmed to be at his side during the discovery of at least one primarch, Konrad Curze, though his legion was split into six smaller groups each led by one of the Voted-Lieutenants. Thus when cries for aid came from the Advex-Mors System, fifty thousand chivalrous knights of the Stormwing were quick to respond. However, they were far from prepared to face the horrors which lurked there: the Khrave.

The Rangda

Long Night spawned many horrors to blight the galaxy, from runamok legions of Iron Men and other unchained techno-abominations, to green tides of Orks whose Waaagh!'s counted into the trillions, to untold psychic devastation unleashed by unwary minds. Humanity truly teetered on the precipice of destruction, coming closer to extinction than perhaps ever before, for the Terran Federation which had once challenged the Aeldari Empire for dominion of the galaxy was consigned to history. The Federation's worlds were now prey, including systems in the very cradle of Mankind, the Solar System. Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn, was home to one such predation, from a species of parasites known as the Khrave. However, what none had suspected was that the Khrave was merely a scout organism, merely the first of dozens of different subspecies making up the collective known as the Rangda, or Rangdans.

Few records are subject to as much security and scrutiny as those concerning these abominations. Originally forced-evolved from a virus, the Rangdan were predators from the beginning, set apart from nearly all the rest of the galaxy's species, which overwhelmingly derived their origin from bacteria. Their homeworld was located far to the northeast, in that realm of nightmares known as the Ghoul Stars, and they quickly proliferated, ruled by House-Monarchs which oversaw the infestation of nearly the entire galaxy before the first humans were even walking upright. Even the Aeldari at their height could not fully extirpate them, for the parasites thrived by infesting other sentient organisms to feed on their nervous systems, especially the brain, for which they were known as Cerabvores. The original Rangdan strain soon evolved into new and horrific infiltration forms, posing as separate species such as the Khrave and Slaught, in order to slip through the cordon established by the Children of the Stars, who knew them from the time before time as the K'Nib, a fellow Servant Race.

With the destruction of the Aeldari Empire, the Rangda were free to slip free of the Ghoul Stars once more. However, they had grown aggressive in the millennia they had been imprisoned. Now seeking to take revenge, they spread across the northern rim of the galaxy like a shadow, an executioner's ax waiting to fall upon the unready. The Rangda are unified in a way that humanity never could be, for a great central intelligence directs each and every one through means never fully understood. Their strength near the close of the 30th Millennium was greater than it had ever been, with knowledge of an expanding Imperium torn from the devoured brains of unlucky travelers and unprepared Crusade fleets. All that was left to do was strike a spark, a light which would reveal the endless shadows left by the Old Ones that would drown the only other power that could contest their might: the Imperium of Man.

Searching the old records of the legion from before they became the Dark Angels, the First Legion was shocked to see the Khrave, for they had been assumed exterminated during the Battle of Enceladus well over a century before. However, these were no mere scout organisms, no minor infestation, but a full hive of Khrave. Dozens of web-ships responded to the arrival of the Dark Angels near instantaneously, operating with far more coordination than any human ship ever could. A blockade of spines and flails and tentacles soon stretched between the Imperial ships and the people they had come to rescue, iron jellyfish which spat out radioactive shadows that burned away shields so that their tendrils could ensnare the Imperial ships as they drifted closer.

For many hours did the two fleets clash, for even the relics of Old Night entrusted to the Dark Angels struggled against such antediluvian monstrosities. Breacher teams were worse than useless, for the ships of the Khrave were living abominations which swallowed intruders before spitting them back, infested and corrupted into doing their bidding. Even the transhuman physiology of Astartes was not proof against such subversion, and many legionaries wept as they fought to euthanize their former brothers. Six weeks passed, an endless mutual hunt as the Stormwing sought to extirpate every last trace of the Rangda who in turn sought to turn their own ships against them. Legion Master Vendraig led his brothers across half a dozen worlds, straining to overcome the millions of slave-soldiers which opposed them. Blade to blade the knights of Caliban battled the horrors of Old Night, while in space the battleship Paradigm of Hate clashed with the artificial war-moons composed from uncountable Rangda worms.

By the time reinforcements had arrived, the Dark Angels had lost over fifty capital ships, along with ten thousand men, four thousand of whom had been slain in the first month alone. However, this outpost of the Rangda proved insufficient when faced with the might of a primarch, for Lion El'Jonson had finally arrived to turn the tide, journeying from Nostramo to the fringes of the Ghoul Stars to reunite with his sons. Though Legion Master Vendraig fell along with his flagship Paradigm of Hate, the Lord of Caliban was able to slay the House-Monarch commanding the Rangda fleet, after which the rest of the xenos fled the system. As the First Legion counted their dead, further reinforcements showed up: the golden Bucephalus, one of the Emperor's flagships. The Master of Mankind was most disconcerted to discover the identity of the creatures which had invaded Advex-Mors, speaking cryptically as though things had not played out as he might have foreseen. The Lion and his men were sworn to secrecy, and ordered to recoup their losses. Meanwhile, Advex-Mors was declared off-limits, and in later years would be renamed 'Rangda' to create the illusion that the homeworld of the Cerabvores had already been destroyed in what came to be known as the First Rangdan Xenocide.

In truth, Advex-Mors was merely the beginning. Wary of the xenos return, an entire chapter of Dark Angels, a commandery five thousand strong known as the Order of the Broken Claw, had been stationed there as an outpost ready to oppose the tides of darkness when they came again. For twenty-five years, the forces of Mankind steeled themselves, discovering the last of the primarchs and preparing the legions to oppose the threat whose scope only the Emperor seemed to know the truth of. The Great Crusade claimed across the entire southern half of the galaxy, but hesitated to plunge too far to the north, uncertain of what lay in the dark. Auxiliary forces such as the Star Hunters roamed the periphery, keeping a constant vigil as the galaxy held its collective breath, waiting for the storm to surely come. However, even they were unprepared for the true extent of the danger, for when the Rangda returned, it was not near Advex-Mors as had been anticipated, but far to the west, in Segmentum Obscurus. It was in the Xana System where a force of Raven Guard reported a Rangda incursion, which swiftly drew in the Star Hunters as well.

The Battle of Xana served as the opening thrust of the Second Rangdan Xenocide, a war which would strain the nascent Imperium as never before. It soon became clear that Advex-Mors had merely been a scouting party, for the forces arrayed against the Fifth and Nineteenth Legions were far more numerous. Two months passed before reinforcements arrived, totaling well over three hundred thousand Astartes, including forces and primarchs of the Dark Angels, the Death Guard, and even the Emperor himself. When the xenos were finally broken, the Master of Mankind tasked nine legions in total, starting with the /REDACTED/

No. I will not let their sacrifice be forgotten. Though their names have been torn from the pages of history, though I cannot speak their true identities, their numerals remain, marks of their sacrifice and contributions. I NAME THEE: THE SECOND AND THE ELEVENTH, THE LOST AND THE PURGED.

When the Imperium finally achieved, if not victory, then a stalemate above Xana, the Master of Mankind tasked the Second, the Space Wolves, and the Death Guard to defend Segmentum Obscurus. To the far east went the Night Lords and the Eleventh, to defend the regions around Nostramo, located so close to Advex-Mors and the Ghoul Stars. Joining them was the Alpha Legion, whose primarch had reportedly been tortured by the Slaugth before the Emperor had found him, though none knew if that were true. The task of patrolling the stars fell to the Raven Guard and Star Hunters, who would cover the distance between the two groups of legions and cleanse any forces which attempted to slip past them. Finally, the duty of exterminating the Rangda once and for all, to locate their homeworld and wipe it from existence, was given to the Dark Angels. Swearing to carry out his father's will, Lion El'Jonson gathered his sons, and set out into the dark.

Words fail to do justice to the nightmares faced by the Dark Angels during the Second Rangdan Xenocide, of the seemingly-endless affronts to sanity and decency they faced without faltering. Fearlessly did two hundred thousand knights of Caliban plunge into the darkness of the northern fringe, seeking out a new type of great beasts, of the dragons which lurked on the edges of the map of known space. If one is to believe the legends of the Aeldari, it is hard to imagine what horrors the Old Ones faced that required such abominations to contend with; unlike the orks, who seem to have devolved over the eons, it is clear the Rangda strain had only evolved. They were entirely different from the Warp-spawned horrors that would appear in the years to come, for the Rangdan were entirely of the Materium, parasites designed to feed off of, subsume, and corrupt everything they found. The worlds in their grasp had to be exterminated methodically, purged of all life down to the submicroscopic level, lest any trace of the infection survive. Every world was purchased in blood, tens of thousands of Dark Angels dying every single year, to say nothing of the casualties suffered by their fellow legions during the twenty-five nonstop, continuous warfare against the most horrific, antediluvian monstrosities to blight the galaxy.

For over two decades, the Dark Angels were alone, their only contact with the wider galaxy coming from the steady stream of new recruits sent from Caliban. Every year, a new generation of warriors made the journey from their distant homeworld, thousands of warriors whose demeanors soon changed to become as grim as those of their brethren when they came face to face with the enemy. Arraigned against them were the countless slave-armies of the Rangdan, consisting mostly of the walking corpses, human and xenos alike, which were known as Spikers due to the hundreds of obsidian spines protruding from their bodies. These beings were technically alive, but only just, and served as cannon fodder for the omniphages and war-forms that made up the different Rangda virus-strains. These worms often lived underground in reinforced burrows, forcing the Dark Angels to defend their drop-zones while sappers marked targets such as processing spires and the fortress-lairs of House-Monarchs for orbital bombardment. Only on rare occasions did the First Legion cross paths with their fellow legions, and each time was an instance of tragedy and loss, for only dire necessity brought them together. Such was the case with the Battle of Formendacil, where the First Legion was united with their brothers of the Second and Eleventh.

Blanks

Nearly all sentient species possess a connection to the Immaterium, a concept which in olden times was referred to as a soul. The souls of some species, such as the Aeldari, bore a stronger connection to the Warp than others, resulting in a high rate of psychic abilities among their population. The strength of this connection, the power of a psyker, can be measured on a rating system known to the Imperium as the Assignment. This twenty-four point scale goes from Alpha-Plus, the most powerful of all psykers, to Rho/Pi, which is the level of an average human who displays no psychic talent at all. Beneath this, however, are the negative psionic levels, descending from Sigma, those who are oblivious to psychic displays, to Upsilon (those with varying degrees of immunity), all the way down to Omega.

Also known as the Blanks or Pariahs, it is said those people classified as Omegas are not truly people at all, for they have no soul. Instinctually shunned by all decent folk, the Omegas produce intense feelings of wrongness and repulsion in those they are around, a dead area that is physically painful for psykers to be around. It is from the ranks of the Omegas that the Sisters of Silence are taken, as well as the Culexus Clade of Assassins. Most notably, the Eleventh Legion was noted to have the highest percentage of legionaries measured to possess negative psionic abilities, including their primarch, who is said to have been a Null of unprecedented potency, for which he was rejected by most of his brothers save the Lost.

Approached by his brother, the Third-Found, Lion agreed to lend his aid in order to ascertain the location of the Nineteenth-Found, who had been missing for years. The Lion was not especially close to him, as he disliked his personality, but a brother was a brother. The First and the Second Legions made for the world of Formendacil, a planet located in the Ghoul Stars which was the last known sighting of the Eleventh. It was there the beginning of the fall was unleashed, for Formendacil was a Rangdan Coffin-World, a fortress on a scale as yet unseen by humanity. Only by searching crusade logs had the world even been found, for it was a psychic dead zone, a blip of nothingness amidst the eternally-roiling Warp. However, when the combined fleets arrived, it quickly became clear the Eleventh had been there, for in orbit were the ruins of an entire armada. The shattered starships were now crisscrossed with thick pillars of black crystal, calcified Rangdan flesh no doubt, but the Imperials' attention soon shifted to the planet itself, which radiated the most intense feeling of wrongness any of them had ever felt. The surface of Formendacil was a black morass that squirmed and shifted on such a scale it was palpable from orbit, a silent scream that repulsed even El'Jonson.

However, such feelings were only the tip of the iceberg, for as scouting parties began to land, it soon became apparent that the entirety of Formendacil was part of a single, maggoty collective. Genetic sampling soon revealed the miasma to be made from the cloned flesh of humans, baseline and Astartes alike, a wriggling mass of Blanks kept alive in perpetual torment. The librarians and astropaths of the fleet sent out one final message for aid before they were quickly placed into stasis, lest they be driven insane by the psychic void around Formendacil. The First and Second Legions began to land in their entirety, determined to purge the planet by any means necessary even as the Rangdan rose to meet them. Tangled masses of worms the size of starships emerged from the crevices and craters of asteroids to clash with the Imperial fleets while towering Macrobeests war-forms fought claw to hand with the Astartes on the ground. The primarchs of the First and Second fought side by side, determined to reach the heart of the infestation in the hopes of discovering what had happened to their brother. Down and down they descended, accompanied by heavily-armored terminator bodyguards, into the depths of Formendacil, and thus they were unaware of the arrival of reinforcements, a warfleet of unprecedented scale including not only the Space Wolves, but the Emperor of Mankind himself.

We found him there. Just one more part of the House-Monarch that controlled Formendacil. My brother, now nothing but the Blank heart of an affront to sanity. He couldn't be called human anymore. Worse than that though, he was a liability. Young and inexperienced though he was, he still knew enough about Imperial tactics to be a devastating liability if the House-Monarch had managed to tear the knowledge from his mind, assuming it hadn't already.

With that in mind, we had fought the Rangdan. Yet as I moved in for the final blow, the Second got in the way. He insisted we could still save him. I tried to reason with him, all but begging him to get out of the way, but he wouldn't relent. His heart had always been greater than his logic, inspirational to a fault. I almost faltered then, but I remembered the Emperor's words. Suffer not the xenos to live.

That was the first time I had fought a brother in earnest. There had been occasional bouts in the sparring pit, but my time spent studying the blade meant I usually came out on top, at least when it came to swordplay. He wouldn't relent though, no matter how outmatched he was. Nor would he give up his beliefs, even though it might cost him his life. Why couldn't he just see sense? Why would he throw himself in front of my blade as it descended upon the corrupted flesh that had once been our brother? What mad beings had authored such abominations to begin with?

That was when Russ entered, with our father following soon after. The so-called Executioner wept at the sight of two dead brothers, glaring daggers of hatred at me. So be it. Our father's approval is all the vindication I need. Though he may wipe the minds of the others, I will not forget their sacrifice. A scrap of fabric, the shattered fragments of a sword. I will keep them close to my heart, a reminder to never hesitate to do what must be done to ensure humanity survives.

The Final Sanction: The Third Rangdan Xenocide

During the Battle of Formendacil, the intense null void emanated by that accursed world had shrouded the region around it from anything psychic, including astropathic communications. Thus the Emperor's fleet had arrived unknown to the Dark Angels, who were relieved to see friendly faces for the first time in decades. The Master of Mankind brought a full battlefleet to bear, along with the full force of the Space Wolves, including their primarch, Leman Russ. The Lion and Russ had only met once before, on the world of Dulan, and their mutual pride had seen them become instant rivals. Their relationship was done no favors by the events of Formendacil, Russ unable to understand the tragic necessity of that which had occurred there. The Emperor, however, did, and assured the Lion he had done what was required of him, to snuff out a threat which would have endangered the Imperium had it survived. However, the Master of Mankind knew knowledge of this day could not be allowed to spread, and thus began to enact his failsafes for such an occasion.

The Labyrinth of Night, he called it. No doubt due to where he found it, back on Mars. More of a failsafe than a weapon, it was a panel of living metal, constantly flowing and shifting, defying any attempts to define it into a particular shape. Its silvery hue reminded me of Ferrus's arms, though somewhat different, and Father had frowned when I said as much. He called it a Shard of a Star God, though that meant nothing at the time.

Father told us we would have to forget our brothers, that their legions would be reassigned. Russ had protested as first, but eventually assented. He never did have the heart to disobey Father in anything. A flash of sickly green light, and Russ forgot everything. Father moved to do the same to me, but I stopped him. Told him someone would have to excise any trace of the Lost and Purged.

Father agreed, of course. The First had always been his hidden hand, sent to expunge every trace of that which threatened his vision. Though he would never know the full truth, Russ would get the credit for what had happened this day: no glory, only a burden upon his conscience, to keep him from his worst excesses. The Sixth would be his Executioners, the snarling hounds meant to send a message; the First would remain in the shadows, the Angels of Darkness whom nobody would see and live. I did not begrudge my father for this; that did not mean I didn't start to hate him for it. For all his wisdom and foresight, he still couldn't save my two brothers.

The Second Rangdan Xenocide came to an abrupt end in the year 989.M30. Thousands of worlds were now smoldering husks, burned beyond recognition so that they might never again support life. Of the nine legions tasked to bring the xenos to heel, only seven remained, all of which had taken heavy losses. Astartes casualties ran well over a million, surpassed only by the tens of trillions of innocent lives caught in the crossfire of the Rangdan invasion. Intensive bio-pogroms had been exacted upon any worlds suspected of Rangdan infestation, no doubt leading to the death of countless innocents in the drive to cleanse the northern fringes. This grim duty weighed heavily upon the men called upon to carry it out, upon the legions who suffered heavy casualties in the process. Of these legions, it was perhaps the Dark Angels who had taken the heaviest casualties due to their frontline offensive role, and barely one hundred thousand legionaries still remained. The vast majority of their archeotech arsenals had been exhausted, their fleets ragged and piecemeal, and their senior commanders gone to an early, unmarked grave. Half a dozen Legion Masters had come and gone, leaving Duriel, who had been Grandmaster of the Ironwing, as the current office holder at the end of the Xenocide.

Having taken such heavy casualties, the Dark Angels were no longer the largest or most powerful legion. The remaining legionaries of the Lost and the Purged Legions had been folded into the Ultramarines, where forged records showed they had always been there. Any planets which the Forgotten had conquered or left records of their existence were visited by the Dark Angels, a process which took the better part of a decade. The First was now nearly all entirely of Calibanian stock, but despite the removal of this conflict, none were in a celebratory mood. Documents containing information regarding the Second Rangdan Xenocide were among the most censored documents ever recorded, and thus the heroism of the First went unnoticed. The Lion and his sons had long been used to working in the shadows, but having suffered such losses, it seemed their legacy would now be permanently eclipsed by larger legions such as the Luna Wolves or Ultramarines. Worst of all was the knowledge that the Second Xenocide was merely a stalemate, for the Imperium had simply lost the will to continue the fight after the dark events of Formendacil.

However, the Lion knew this situation would not last forever. The Emperor would not simply allow a threat such as the Rangda to remain at large indefinitely. He focused on rebuilding his forces, gathering his strength in preparation for the coming offensive he knew would come. Thus when word came from the Emperor in the year 998, just under a decade after the events of Formendacil, the Lion was ready. The Master of Mankind told his son that his scouts and analysts had pinpointed the origin of the Rangda to be somewhere beyond the Ghoul Stars, for detailed astrogational records revealed that region of space was where the vast majority of enemy ships had originated. The First Legion was to destroy every trace of the Rangda they could find, to render them extinct no matter the cost. Thus began the Third Rangdan Xenocide, a war of utter extermination, and the Rangda knew it. Caught unprepared, the Dark Angels were able to thrust deep into the Ghoul Stars, snuffing out dozens of incubation worlds and Pariah farms in quick succession. No heed was paid to the cost as the First Legion kept up their momentum, an unstoppable juggernaut smashing ever-closer to the edge of known space in search of the Rangdan homeworld.

Backed into a corner, the Rangda began to fight more intensely, for they had nowhere to go and nothing to lose, defending not only their worlds but their very existence, but the Dark Angels would not relent. During the First and Second Xenocides, the Rangda had always been on the offensive, but now the tables had turned, for it was now the Imperium's turn to choose the battles and wreak terrible vengeance. Spurred on by loyalty to the Emperor, the Lion seemed driven like never before. Even his own sons could not stand to be in his presence for very long, for his cloak radiated a sense of wrongness due to the material it had been made from, a keepsake from Forgotten comrades that he refused to take off. Before they had departed, the Emperor had warned his son there was something wrong about the Rangda, once more cryptically alluding to the idea they should have invaded far earlier, though he would not say how he knew this. The Lion was no fool: he fully believed they were attempting to prepare some sort of trap for him on their homeworld, but that would not prevent him from doing his duty.

For over a year they fought alone, blazing a trail of light into the shadows of the Ghoul Stars. However, on one occasion they did receive an offer of aid, from a most unexpected source: the Alpha Legion. Any humor once possessed by the Lion had long since been bled away, and so the meeting between the Lord of the First and the delegation from the so-called 'Ghost Legion' quickly turned sour. The mysterious warrior calling himself Alpharius claimed the Lion was making a mistake coming to the Ghoul Stars, that his absence and actions would have dire consequences for the Emperor. Should the Dark Angels continue into the unknown, he warned, their strength would be bled away, forcing the Master of Mankind to delegate the Lion's position at his father's right hand to another, to a Warmaster. El'Jonson scoffed at such dire portents, accusing his brother of trying to play kingmaker, to which Alpharius remained silent. The Last Primarch slunk away, but the First Primarch never forgot their meeting, mulling his brother's ambitions over as the campaign grew closer to completion.

The turn of the millennium came and went, and still the First Legion remained on the fringes. Their bio-pogroms had reduced the Rangda to a shell of their former selves, but the Lion was suspicious, for it seemed to be too easy. Thus when scouts reported discovering what they believed to be the homeworld of the xenos, he split his forces, unwilling to lose them in what was no doubt a trap. Indeed, it seemed almost too good to be true, for only broken remnants of the once-mighty Rangdan Armada opposed the Dark Angels fleet as they entered the system, battered war-moons and the whiplike web-ships all but drifting in the void. The First had long since given up showing clemency or chivalry to this most hated of foes, blasting the jellyfish-esque vessels with no thought of mercy until there was nothing left. However, the xenos fought to the bitter end, crippling dozens of ships in return and killing thousands of legionaries as they began to land upon Rangda Prime, including Legion Master Duriel.

Ordo Sinister

To face such monsters as the Rangda required monsters of our own. Such was the thinking behind the creation of the Titanicus Terranic Ordo Sinister, or Ordo Sinister for short. Designed to handle menaces no others could face, the Titans of the Ordo Sinister were forged from technology forbidden to all others, weapons crafted from the science of the Dark Age of Technology given only those in the Emperor's shadow. Their crew were entirely narco-enslaved psykers, whose energies were sapped by Culexine-shackles to power esoteric weaponry, and whose tortured screams flowed and bled into an aura of fear utterly terrifying to any sane being.

Only on the rarest occasions did the Ordo Sinister walk, tasked to topple only the greatest of foes such as the Warlock-Titans of the half-shattered Craftworld Magc'Sithraal, the King of Terrors upon Skagan VI, and of course against the Rangda. Accompanying the Psi-Titans were Ordinatus Siege Engines, and the entirety of the Dark Angels legion save for those exiled to Caliban, for the Imperium was utterly determined to wipe out these xenos once and for all. After the events of Rangda Prime, the Ordo Sinister would not see combat again for quite some time, and it was not until the War in the Webway that they took to the field in any great numbers.

Unwilling to allow his sons to shoulder the burden alone, Lion El'Jonson led from the front, his fearsome blade Lionsword an instrument of death in his hands. Accompanying him were hundreds of terminator-armored Deathwing led by their commander, Voted-Lieutenant Holguin, one of the few legionaries to have survived the prior two Xenocides. Together the Lord of the First and his men smashed their way through the horrific lair that served as the Cerabvores' capitol, destroying every trace of Rangdan civilization. Down and down below the ground they descended, rooting the worms from their burrows as they clashed with no less than three House-Monarchs, towering war-forms infesting the desecrated remains of an Imperial titan. Incensed by the sacrilege, the Dark Angels fought tooth and nail to topple the corrupted warmachine which stood between them and a door to a chamber which no doubt contained their ultimate leader. As the last of the House-Monarchs fell, the Lion ordered his sons to secure the rest of the palace-burrow, steeling himself before entering the final lair to put an end to Rangdan leader once and for all.

The creature was called the Autochthonar. I knew this because it told me. It was much smaller than I thought it would be, but it made up for it with the most potent mental assault I had ever experienced. It wormed its way into my head with ease, far more adept at such violation than the Emperor, though it was not psychic as I understood it.

It showed me things. Horrific, wondrous things. For the first time I contemplated the existence of other timelines, of the way things might have been. The Rangda, or at least their leaders, perceived time in a way far beyond most species. Imagine, if you will, a two-dimensional being, a creature completely flat. He could scarcely comprehend a third dimension, the very concept of depth being utterly alien to him. My brother had been driven mad by the terrible weight of this revelation, and even my mind began to fray as I learned that what I thought of as the Rangda were no more than shadows cast by beings from some higher reality. The Autochthonar showed me the past and future, from the moment of its creation by some sort of reptilians, to the end and the death when the last stars finally gave out.

Yet all of that was simply our timeline. One way out of myriad myriad ways it might have been. In my desperation I struggled to narrow the possibilities to those concerning myself, to my brothers and father, and the Rangda obliged. I saw universes where we had never been scattered from Terra, realities where Horus Lupercal slew the Emperor and was obliterated in return, pathways where each and every primarch led a rebellion against our father. Yet it was the Emperor whose ideals kept me sane. The concept of the Shining, Golden Path, the future where Humanity's survival was guaranteed, that's what kept me going.

It was he who imbued a piece of himself in each of us, his sons, a way for him to live on even should he himself somehow fall. Three of those pieces were now with me, my own and the two others whose essences had flocked to join mine. What would happen if all of us died, I wondered. Such a question had been unthinkable before the Lost and the Purged, but it made me think nonetheless of what would even have the power to destroy all the primarchs, or even the Emperor himself. It was then I also began to wonder what might happen if the Triumvirate Engines Luther had tried to conceal from me were to be reunited once again.

Of course, thinking of possible threats was perhaps what made the Autochthonar reveal to me some of them, the greatest obstacle to humanity's ascension, the abomination which lurked behind it all: the Primordial Annihilator, Chaos. The festering tumors which festered in the one thing connecting all of these timelines: the Warp. The Immaterium was the spider's web tying everything together, the once-calm sea of souls now kicked up into a turbulent hell that sheltered four beings of immense power and a multitude of lesser imitations. Beneath this stormy pond lurked still more creatures, or perhaps it was one, a single hand whose fingers poked out of the water so as to give the appearance of being separate entities.

I recognize now how mad this all sounds, but I swear to you it is the truth. I cannot give it a title or appellation, for it is That Which Must Not Be Named. As best I understand it, it lives in, or maybe actually is the Deep Warp itself, feeding off of every reality it touches. It was the perfect symbiote, a peerless parasite which survived even if the host they fed upon died, for they could simply retreat to the Immaterium and return to try again when a new timeline emerged.

I apologize for not being able to explain it better. The Rangda had tried and failed to stop it: Humanity's war against them had eliminated their best chances. Thus they had migrated the better part of their collective consciousness to another timeline, to try again using another Rangda strain in another reality. Humanity doesn't have that option though, so I resolved to try another method. If Chaos cannot be starved out, perhaps it can be overloaded, I reasoned at the time, though I admit my mind was on the brink of utter madness. I swore to turn the powers of the Ruinous Powers against themselves, to stop the emergence of the Nex-/DONOTSAYTHEIRNAMESTOPEVENYOUAREFORBIDDEN/.

As the last of the visions began to leave my mind, I was left shaken, but with new purpose. I now knew Luther to be a servant of those same parasites. He would show me the way. The Rangdan Xenocides were over. It was time for the Age of Leo to begin.

Errant Knights Erred: Downfall of the First Legion

Enlightened as to the true nature of reality by the visions of the Rangda, Lion El'Jonson was now a different man than he was at the beginning of the Third Xenocide. He now had a new goal, with all the problems that came with it, not least of which he had little to no idea as to how to actually accomplish it. Chaos. If such a route was possible, it stood to reason the Emperor would have attempted it, but whether or not he had failed or if it was an ongoing process was unknown. More information would be required, but luckily the Lord of Caliban knew individuals far more versed in the ways of Chaos and the Warp, not least of which was his foster-father. To consult the Emperor would invite too much attention; Luther on the other hand was a tantalizing prospect, for the Grandmaster had never been able to hide his interest in the occult very well. In addition, a return to Caliban was necessary, for the legion had suffered heavily in the Third Xenocide, losing thousands including Legion Master Duriel, whose role was now filled by a legionary named Alajos.

Thus the fleet of the First departed the shattered ruins of Rangda Prime, erasing it from their records and eliminating any trace it had ever existed to prevent any others from searching it out. No legionary suspected anything was amiss with their father, nor dared to question why they were returning home, for it seemed self-evident. None were privy to the primarch's thoughts and doubts, nor did any accompany him into the tower of the Angelicasta, Luther's private chambers at the heart of Aldurukh, where El'Jonson confronted his foster-father and demanded he instruct him in the ways of Old Caliban, to teach him everything he knew regarding the Warp. Though suspicious at first, the Grandmaster delighted to wield authority over his foster-son once more, and many weeks passed without any legionary seeing the two of them. This absence did not go unnoticed, least of which by Astelan, who was infuriated and suspicious to see the primarch conversing with a known rebel such as Luther while he himself remained unforgiven.

For many months Luther and the Lion studied the Warp and other occult subjects. Though the Grandmaster attempted to hide it, El'Jonson quickly discovered the trove of information regarding the Lore of the Triumvirate Engines, which intrigued him but did not have the same immediate results as other fields. His talent for the psychic was nothing to be laughed at, but the concept of having to practice something was almost entirely new to him, and thus El'Jonson used it only sparingly, for such was an affront to his pride to not immediately be good at it. The study of Enuncia, the so-called Language of Creation, was more to his liking, offering instant power at high cost, but the ancient crumbling tomes in the libraries of Caliban could offer only theories, not power, making them hardly useful. Thus knowing he would need greater power and knowledge, the Lion listened to Luther's advice, and the two set out together aboard a single vessel to claim it for themselves.

Even as events unfolded at Ullanor and Nikaea, the Lord of Caliban and the Grandmaster were making their way through the uncharted shallows of the colossal Warp-storm which Luther named the Eye of Terror. There amidst the dangerous tides of the storm which had lurked in the skies of Caliban for millennia, the two stopped at the world of Ar'Cadia as they waited for the rest of the fleet to arrive, their ships slowly navigating using the beacons El'Jonson's ship had left for them. Ar'Cadia was a feral world, filled with towering pylons and ancient ruins situated right on the doorstep of the Storm, but its shaman-chiefs were welcoming, for their legends told them that warriors from the stars would arrive one day, though they seemed surprised, as though they expected the Dark Angels to be somebody else and decades earlier. While the fleet assembled in orbit, for nearly half of the legion had been selected to accompany them, the Grandmaster and the Lord of Caliban walked among the people of Ar'Cadia. Luther was highly intrigued to note the similarities between the natives and their own homeworld, from the shared belief in nephilla to their very language, strikingly similar to some of Caliban's dialects. Lion on the other hand remained impassive, watching with barely-concealed disgust at how oblivious Luther was to the obvious corruption and degeneration of the planet's wretched inhabitants, who performed a foul ritual for them in order to bring an affront to decency known as Ingethel the Ascended into being.

With their new guest onboard, a foul guide for the journey to come, the Invincible Reason plunged into a realm without any reason, journeying through a dimension of insanity on a dark Quest. During this time, the legionaries aboard the vessel gave themselves fully to the Ruinous Powers, many of them dying and being reborn in a grotesque parody of their ascension into Astartes as lesser daemons were superimposed onto their flesh to create Possessed. Each step was paid for with blood, with dozens of ships lost during the journey to be never seen again, but with each death, the passage of the fleet became easier. The Dark Angels fought their way through a dozen Daemon Worlds on this Path to Glory, overcoming the countless obstacles in their way, from rival daemons seeking to stop them in what the Ascended claimed were merely tests to ascertain worthiness.

The fleet traversed the length and width of the Eye, learning of the fate of the Aeldari and the Path which they had refused to tread, along with countless other secrets of the damned which no human had ever learned. So too did Ingethel show him the visions of the Prometheus-Emperor stealing the fire of the gods on a world known as Molech, a new context for what his father had tried to manipulate in his mind. After swearing his allegiance to a quartet of warp entities calling themselves Greater Daemons, Lion received their blessing and accepted their gifts of power as his own. A snarling behemoth of a Daemon Prince known as Be'lakor anointed him with the Mark of Chaos Undivided, transforming his helm into a crown of domination before vanishing into the shadows once more, swearing to see the new Everchosen cast down as all the others had been before him.

It is said throughout the Lion believed his own heart remained incorrupt, that he had steeled his mind against the horrors and abominations claiming to be emissaries of gods. Through martial might he overcame the minions of Khorne, with predatorial cunning solved the riddles of Tzeentch, and withstood the entropy of Nurgle and temptations of Slaanesh with the patience and stoicism of the perfect hunter. Yet can anyone receive their gifts and not fall sway to their influence? Does the knowledge that the chalice offered by the Ruinous Powers is a tainted one make one immune to the poison within? In the end, there is no proof to the Lion's claim to be unaffected, especially considering how much of their will he would accomplish over the following years. History is full of those who thought they could master the Warp and enslave daemons to their will only to become a puppet without even knowing it. Yet the possibility that he was not truly corrupted and retained his free will remains a tantalizing one for theorists and speculators…

After completing their trials, the Invincible Reason and her escorts left the Eye to begin the task of gathering up the various remaining fleets of the Dark Angels. Within a year, the seeds of corruption had been planted and had borne fruit in his sons, whose loyalty shifted away from the Emperor to El'Jonson himself. Yet the Archtraitor knew he still did not possess the might he would need to defeat the Emperor, much less Chaos itself, for the visions of the alternate Heresies the Rangda had shown him revealed still more would be required. Thus the Archtraitor set out to corrupt his brothers, to bring to his side useful pawns who would serve to delay any retribution and maintain the appearance of serving the gods of Chaos. The Lionhelm proved to be of great use in that regard, for the blessings of the Dark Gods had imbued it with the ability to see the deepest flaws in those it gazed upon, thus revealing how best to tempt them. Thus it was over the next ten years that the seeds of corruption were sown: through pride did El'Jonson win over Guilliman and Tikan, through fear for Sanguinius and Perturabo; wrath convinced Angron and Dorn, whereas knowledge was the key for Magnus and Fulgrim.

It was the whispers of the Ruinous Powers that pointed El'Jonson to the best positions from which to engineer the downfall of others, as did the fragmented visions of alternate Heresies witnessed by the Rangda. Visions of the Scattering showed the Master of Mankind had attempted to hang onto some pods more than others, as well as which had been more affected during their transit in the Warp. Thus did El'Jonson complete the self-fulfilling prophecy, concentrating his efforts on those pods which had been taken sooner. So too did they reveal which primarchs would be a threat, for the Ruinous Powers delighted in mocking him with misleading information, such was their nature. For example, his efforts to tempt Fulgrim to the worship of Slaanesh proved fruitless, for the Plaguefather had staked a claim upon his soul. Another example was that of Angron, whose bloodlust made him all but uncontrollable even before the Ruinous Powers could complete their dominance over him. To contemplate a brother's execution, even a brother such as the Gladiator, was no small thing, but in the end, El'Jonson's pragmatism won out as always, and thus contingency plans for all his brothers and their legions were accounted for by the paranoid Lord of Caliban.

Seeds of Ruin: Warrior Lodges and the Legion Auxilia

This same foreknowledge allowed him to maintain appearances for over ten years, his true self hidden from all his brothers as well, especially Horus. From the beginning, El'Jonson knew the Warmaster was the key to any potential rebellion, for it was his charisma which would either rally the galaxy to his side or turn it against him. His position in the middle, at the heart of the Imperium, was the ideal place from which to corrupt some and outflank others. Thus the Archtraitor made every effort to win Lupercal over, feigning duty and allegiance to the man he now knew to be just one of countless identical copies, some of whom were the greatest of heroes and others the vilest of traitors. After many months of subtle hints and displays of loyalty Lupercal named him Voice of the Warmaster, empowering him to be his go-between to those brothers who appeared disloyal or rebellious for one reason or another. Thus he was able to block the knowledge of Nikaea to certain primarchs, ensuring more voices opposing the Librarius would be present so as to deny the loyalists a weapon in the war to come.

The time surrounding the events of Nikaea gave the Lion many chances to approach the brothers he most wanted at his side. First among these was Ferrus Manus, Primarch of the Iron Hands. The Gorgon was one of the best generals of all their brothers, and his legion's track record was up there with the best of them, for he had been Fourth-Found. However, Manus's headstrong nature made him unlikely to turn his back on the Emperor, and thus the disappointed Archtraitor was forced to write him off as a lost cause, instead turning his attention to seeding Mars with cults. So too were the Death Guard rejected, for their petulant primarch Mortarion had declined any offer of alliance with great vehemence. Better success was had with his favorite brother Tikan, and both Rogal Dorn and Perturabo joined him, a surprise to be sure but a welcome one, as El'Jonson had only anticipated getting one or the other. Likewise, the whispers of the Ruinous Powers revealed how little it would take to corrupt Guilliman, whose massive legion was second to none, and Fulgrim and Angron, who were on the verge of giving into despair and rage anyway.

These whispers also put the Lion in the perfect position to ascertain which would never join his rebellion compared to those who might. For example, Lorgar and Konrad had both been deeply influenced by the Emperor, becoming unshakably loyal in the process. Such was about to occur to Magnus the Red after the events of Nikaea, and thus the Lion stepped in to begin the process of corruption in the Thousand Sons, for Magnus would never go against his legion. This was made much easier by the Emperor's decision to split up the Fifteenth Legion while their primarch was on Terra, and Lupercal was quick to agree to his suggestion of assigning two of the nine fellowships to the watchful care of the First Legion. From there, the alliance of the Thousand Sons was all but guaranteed, ensuring the Lion's forces possessed the most powerful psykers in the war to come.

Of course, this meant alienating Leman Russ, for the two were diametrically opposed, but after the events of Dulan, El'Jonson was not particularly interested in having him as an ally anyway. Nor was he particularly interested in corrupting Corax, whose legion was too small, or Vulkan, whose presence on Terra would mean the Emperor might learn of their plans before the time was right. That left only the undecided legions: the Sons of Horus, the Blood Angels, and the Alpha Legion. Alpharius Omegon's leanings, as ever, remained a mystery, even to him, and it was only through the intelligence gathered by the Firewing, the branch of the Hexagrammaton led by the legionary named Cypher, that El'Jonson had even been able to track down the secretive Alpharius. However, his brother seemed uninterested in joining him, and thus the Alpha Legion was written off as a lost cause. That left Lupercal and Sanguinius, both immensely charismatic and respected primarchs with large, powerful legions. If either one of them, or preferably both, could be swayed, the Lion's cause would be greatly enriched, and they would be able to serve as a figurehead and distraction to divert attention away from his true goals.

Within ten years of the Quest, the Dark Angels were ready to unleash their Heresy upon the Imperium. Their agents were everywhere, posing as advisors who managed to corrupt nearly every legion through the use of Warrior Lodges. The Lion's network of spies was most potent in the Sons of Horus, the newly-renamed Luna Wolves, following the creation of the Legion Auxilia, an organization which at first glance appeared to be the opposite of the secretive Warrior Lodges. The Auxilia was a diverse group comprising forces of various sizes from all eighteen legions, tens of thousands of Astartes in total. They became a focal point for Lupercal's ambition, for the Warmaster enjoyed the unquestioned authority he wielded over them compared to the resentful and sullen responses he received from his brothers and the Council of Terra. However, in truth, they served as little more than a distraction and mouthpiece for the Lion, who was able to utilize his representatives in the Auxilia to direct the Warmaster where he wished, and none were more central to this effort than Paladin Corswain.

Corswain

Also known as the Hound of Caliban, the Astartes known as Corswain grew up in a world split apart in a cold war stoked by the ambitions of Lion El'Jonson and Sar Luther. Born from peasant stock, Corswain was never trained as a knight, and so when El'Jonson returned to Caliban alongside the Dark Angels, Corswain picked what he saw as the side most likely to give him the opportunities he had been searching for. He quickly proved an adept fighter, rising to the rank of Company Champion or Paladin of the Ninth Order, which he retained as his favored title even after ascending past that rank. Corswain's unswerving devotion to the Lion in all things was finally recognized in the wake of the Quest, in which he emerged as one of the few legionaries to have resisted the dark promises of the Ruinous Powers. Recognizing his son for his strength of will, Lion brought him into his inner circle of favorites, even referring to him as a little brother rather than a son. Thus when the time came, it was Corswain chosen to join the Legion Auxilia as part of the Mournival, where he soon gained the Warmaster's ear.

Over the following ten years, Corswain's influence in the Legion Auxilia continued to grow as more legions joined the Lion's cause. Lupercal's desire to be loved meant the voices of the Mournival meant a great deal more than they should have, and as his coalition grew, Corswain was uniquely-placed to influence the outcomes of any policies. In addition, denied the use of psykers by adherence to the Edict of Nikaea, the loyalists were unable to intercept El'Jonson's hidden commands to his sons. Thus through the foreknowledge given him by Ingethel the Ascended, the Lion was able to ensure the Paladin knew just when to act, and so when the Sixty-Third Expeditionary Fleet discovered the Interex Civilization, Corswain was quick to act. Under the cover of night, he seized the ancient dagger known as the Anathame of the Kinebrach, ensuring the outraged Interex would attack the Warmaster. During the tumult, Corswain's agent Luc Sedirae plunged the dagger into the back of his own gene-sire. His reasons for doing so have been lost to history, for Corswain disposed of him in order to tie up loose ends and to take back the Anathame for his own use.

However, fate forestalled the Hound of Caliban's ultimate plans. As the Mournival learned of the Warmaster's status, they took a vote on how to proceed. Corswain's proposal to take the Warmaster to El'Jonson won the approval of nearly half the council, but in the end, the efforts of Erebus of the Word Bearers and Jago Sevatarion of the Night Lords won the day. As the fleet prepared to head for Terra, where they hoped the Emperor would be able to cure Horus, Corswain and his forces made ready their own departure, rejoining the Lion to inform him of the developments. The Archtraitor's fury at their failure was great indeed, for had Corswain succeeded, the rebellion would have been won before it even began, as without the Warmaster to rally or even warn the loyalists, the traitors would have been able to sweep down upon Terra in a lightning strike. However, the Lord of Caliban had suspected his rebellion was never going to have been that easy, and so the Archtraitor enacted the next stage in his plans. Even as the Vengeful Spirit battered its way to Terra, the rest of the Sons of Horus forces were taking heavy casualties against the Interex in the wake of the unexpected withdrawal of half the Legion Auxilia, ensuring the mighty Sixteenth would be much reduced in strength in the war to come.

So too were the other loyalist legions dealt with and accounted for. Years of strategic planning had isolated anyone who might pose a threat, both Legiones Astartes and other hosts, leaving them in a position where they would shortly be destroyed or at least crippled by their traitorous counterparts and by the fifth column hidden in their own forces. When Lupercal returned to command his forces, he never suspected half of his forces had already been subverted while the other half was accounted for. In the north, the Raven Guard had been shattered in secrecy by the World Eaters, who followed them into destruction shortly thereafter at the hands of the Blood Angels. To the east, the Night Lords and Word Bearers were trapped by Guilliman, while Russ met his end at the hands of Magnus. Dour Mortarion would be in no place to aid anyone, for Tikan was sworn to either corrupt or destroy his Death Guard, while warp storms and a rebellion on Mars turned the attentions of Vulkan and Ferrus away from the wider galaxy. Only the Alpha Legion remained unaccounted for, but even they would be unable to come to the aid of the Sons of Horus, for their agents had been discovered and eliminated through the use of sorcery.

As the legions began to report less and less frequently, Lupercal's suspicions only continued to grow, an atmosphere of paranoia and isolation encouraged by the Lion. The Sons of Horus represented both the single greatest opportunity and most dangerous threat to the Lion's plans, for the Sixteenth was the icon emulated, even if only unconsciously, by every other legion, for only they and the Blood Angels perfectly combined both discipline and savagery. Thus the Lion had chosen the Ninth to aid him in breaking the Sixteenth, relying upon them to occupy the Sons of Horus for long enough to encircle and destroy them. Had they been successful, the mighty Sixteenth would have been removed from the board, ensuring the loyalists would be too isolated to overcome a united traitor front. Yet once again the Everchosen's allies failed him, and the Ruinous Powers cackled and roared as the Sons of Horus escaped the trap of Davin, greatly reduced in strength but still a deadly threat now that their fury had been roused. The easy victory he had sought was now forever beyond his grasp, and El'Jonson was left to curse his Ruinous Patrons, who had already begun to play him falsely in order to exploit circumstances for their own benefit, ensuring they would be well-fed in the years to come.

Fire of the Gods: Thramas to Molech

In the aftermath, the Lion was left alone upon Davin, with nothing but frustration regarding his plans, an uncertain future, and an unconscious Sanguinius. He had little doubt that just as in the other timelines, Horus and the rest of the loyalists would resist to the bitter end. Thus the Archtraitor began to set the next stages of his plans into motion, calling his kin to his side to ensure they knew who was truly in charge. All that was left was the pageantry of Davin, the Dark Triumph to signal the beginning of the Leonine Heresy, which would occupy the attention of the Materium and Immaterium while he gathered strength in the shadows. Already some of his brothers had become monsters, pawns of the Primordial Annihilator that would only continue to increase in number and would one day need to be dealt with. It was with no small relief when the Dark Triumph ended so he could finally send them away, for he was disgusted by how easily they had traded their freedom for power.

With his father and brothers now occupied fighting amongst themselves, the Lion and his forces journeyed to the far east. Ostensibly, this was to seize territory and secure the traitor flanks, a claim which held some basis in reality, for already the Dark Angels had engaged loyalist forces in the Ghoul Stars. It was with no small irritation that the Lion learned only half of the Night Lords were trapped in Guilliman's domain. It seemed the other half of the Eighth Legion had been tasked by their primarch to defend the outlying reaches of the Imperium. However, their presence would serve as an ideal distraction, and so the Lion dispatched Corswain to handle them. The Paladin took to this task with alacrity, eager to atone for his past failures and to obtain revenge against Sevatarian, whom he saw as the one who had derailed his efforts to corrupt the Warmaster. However, the Night Lords proved a difficult foe to pin down, and so the Thramas Crusade began to bog down as Corswain and Sevatar went back and forth in a war of maneuver.

In the meantime, the rest of the Dark Angels remained unengaged and on the move, seeking out the relic known as the Tuchulcha Engine. This device was vital to the Lion's plans, though why it was so important remained unknown to Legion Master Alajos, who had been tasked with retrieving it while the Lion was busy elsewhere. However, when they tracked it down to the world of Perditus, they were unable to retrieve it, for the Death Guard had somehow obtained it before them. Thus Alajos's fleet began to pursue them, whittling away at the forces of the Fourteenth and conquering every system they came across in between jumps. The slaughter they unleashed enabled their sorcerers to continually track the Death Guard, but despite that, they proved unable to catch up to them, for the loyalist fleet seemed to have no trouble navigating the ever-more treacherous warp storms that choked the Immaterium.

While Alajos sought out the Tuchulcha, the Lion continued to claim system after system, seizing their repositories of knowledge in hopes of locating artifacts and sources of power. It took several months of searching, but the world of Dwell finally yielded a tangible clue over the shattered bodies of an entire garrison of Iron Hands. The sons of Ferrus Manus had died to the last man to defend a city-sized vault known as the Mausolytic Precinct. At its heart, hundreds of cryo-chambers containing countless memories of the ancient past revealed the location of the world of Molech, for while the Everchosen remembered the existence of the Obsidian Gateway, how to get there had been swept away by the Emperor's power. However, El'Jonson knew he would need the might of his legion to overcome the Emperor's defenses, and so he made the journey north to the Ghoul Stars, where he was joined by Legion Master Alajos. It was there that he learned with no small annoyance that not only had Corswain had failed to eradicate the Night Lords, but Alajos had yet to retrieve the Tuchulcha.

The Everchosen quickly reversed the gains of the Eighth Legion, throwing them back on all fronts, and victory seemed imminent when they received a vox transmission from none other than Konrad Curze himself. Though he did not know how Curze had managed to escape Guilliman's Ruinstorm, the prospect of eliminating another primarch was a chance too good to pass up. Thus El'Jonson accepted Curze's invitation to meet upon the world of Tsagualsa. Accompanied by Legion Master Alajos and Corswain, the Lion met his brother, a summit which quickly devolved into combat. The Everchosen struggled to maintain his calm in the heat of battle, for despite the gifts of the Chaos Gods, Curze proved to be more than an equal, fighting at blinding speed despite being blindfolded. Both primarchs took many wounds, and the Lion's wrath threatened to explode like an overheating plasma gun as Curze seized the initiative.

The laughter of the Ruinous Powers echoed as their champion began to fight for his life, even his skill with the blade eventually overcome by Curze's foresight. The Blind Judge threw the Lion to the ground, wrapping his hands in a deathgrip around his brother's throat, and it seemed to the Archtraitor in that moment as if that was the end, his rebellion unraveled before ever coming close to Terra. However, the Chaos Gods are nothing if not fickle. Taking advantage of a distraction, the Hound of Caliban abandoned his duel against his hated rival Sevatar to come to his master's aid. Having never been a knight, Corswain gave no heed to honor or chivalry, taking up his lord's blade and plunging it deep into the back of Konrad Curze. The Lord of the Night let loose a truly awful scream, hurling Corswain bodily into the ruins, and by the time he rose, the Eighth Legion had fled, leaving behind the heavily-wounded Lion to think about his future as he and Corswain stared at the decapitated body of Legion Master Alajos.

Returning to their ship, the Dark Angels quickly departed Tsagualsa. With Alajos dead, El'Jonson decided against splitting their fleet again. Once more they returned to the shadows, calling upon the Emperor's Children to take up the mantle of completing the Thramas Crusade. Corswain was rewarded with a permanent place at his master's side, both as a reward for saving El'Jonson's life as well as to keep him from revealing the truth to any others. The Lion's need for greater power seemed more evident than ever before, and thus the Everchosen ordered the remainder of his fleet to make for the world of Molech. To their side came the Star Hunters, whose numbers would make up for the losses incurred during the Thramas Crusade. As they journeyed, the Everchosen sent word to the garrison of Blood Angels and Ultramarines to begin an uprising on Molech itself, a diversion intended to hide the true goal of the incoming invasion force.

However, when they arrived, it quickly became evident that the two sides had begun to fight each other, both influenced by their rival patrons and the self-destructive nature of Chaos itself. Even worse was the presence of loyalist forces led by none other than the Warmaster himself, who had somehow beaten them there. His desire for secrecy thwarted by incompetent allies, El'Jonson ordered his forces to make a full-scale assault upon Molech. The Knightly World became a free-for-all brawl between the forces of six legions, who gladly slaughtered each other without any regard to their past bonds. In orbit above, the Invincible Reason clashed with its counterpart in the Vengeful Spirit, while the Endurance, the ponderous and implacable flagship of Mortarion, dueled against the lightning-fast outriders of the Star Hunters which had enjoyed tormenting it in years past.

In no mood to play games, El'Jonson quickly teleported into the heart of the Dawn Citadel at the start of the battle. Accompanied by his Dreadwing bodyguards, the Lord of Caliban descended into the fortress upon the shortest path to the Gateway, his memories gradually coming back to him as they traversed the fortification his sons had raised during the First Conquest of Molech. As the Everchosen of Chaos entered the cave containing the Gateway, he found himself startled to find they were not alone. In this cave was a woman claiming to be something called a perpetual, and she pleaded with him not to make the same mistakes the Emperor had. However, he had no intention of turning back, and with contemptuous ease, seized her, impaling the woman upon the spikes crowning the Archway. As her blood flowed across the mantle, the Obsidian Archway opened, and the Lion stepped through the Gate into the realm of the gods.

What was a moment in the real world was eons to me. The Warp makes little sense at the best of times; it makes essentially none when the Four focus their attention in the same place. I felt their hateful gazes upon me as I traveled across living landscapes, leading armies of Neverborn in their names. I received their visions of times already passed and times yet to come, of every atrocity committed in my name. In moments of depravity, I spoke to each one of the Four, or at least their avatars, and gained their blessings and might many times over. In moments of despair, I spoke to the Emperor, warning him of the Scattering, all but begging him to not let his sons be taken, to take more interest in them before they fell. In moments of insanity, I spoke to myself, from beings of shadow and corruption who had given themselves over to the Ruinous Powers fully, to those who had remained loyal, who spat on me for my supposed treachery, to me as I was in years passed, half-forgotten whispers in dreams to complete the ouroboros loops I had never known existed.

Yet I never gave in. I am the last loyal son. I am. I must be. I have to be the one to strike the blow in the Emperor's name, to save humanity through whatever means necessary. It was then, in my visions of the future, that I learned of the Emperor's claims on our very souls, of the watermarks he inscribed upon us when he imbued a piece of his soul into each one of us.

The Chaos Gods laughed when they learned of my goal to undo that claim. They refused to give me the power to remove those marks. It seemed they enjoyed the present arrangement, where each primarch death sees their soul merge into a Silver Being in the Warp, a Dark King whom they hope/hate/fear will one day Ascend to join them, another player in their Great Game that furthers the universe's march to dissolution. I still remember their mocking prophecies: 'The Fifth of Four seeks audience. The fifth of Five would be. The Fifth forever stillborn. The fifth who never shall be.'

I refused to accept their view. It was then, in my visions of the past, that I learned of Enuncia, of the power to rewrite the universe through a spoken word. I observed the Etemenanki, the Lightning-Struck Tower of Babel whose bricks each contained a piece of the primeval language. It was then, in visions of the future, I realized the potential to bind those shards into a new source, to prevent the creation of a new Anagogic Annihilator.

Still laughing/raging/crying at what they saw as impossible hubris, the Gods of Chaos granted me one last bargain: the ability to bind the Emperor's shards embedded in each of my brother's souls into talismans, relics which held great significance to them. It would have no effect on them while they were alive; all it would do was capture the potent energies, the raw warp-stuff the Chaos Gods claimed had been stolen from them by the Emperor. I don't think they even realized what they were giving away freely: no doubt they knew/thought/doubted themselves safe from any scheme, for already some of my kin had ascended to daemonhood, placing them seemingly beyond my ability to kill.

But that's just it. They aren't my brothers anymore. Their essences, their 'souls' if you will, were hollowed out and replaced with the madding energies of the Warp. What others call Princes are merely daemons pretenders wearing the stolen memories of the soul they have replaced. Thus the shards from Corax, Angron, Tikan, Guilliman, and Sanguinius are all already mine, and as the years pass, I have no doubt more of my brothers will perish, either in this war or in battles to come. And without those shards, there will be no coalescing God-Child, no new finger of the Annihilator to join in their Great Game.

All I need to do now is reach Urartu, to uncover the Tower of Babel and claim its ancient wisdom as my own. Once the attention of the Ruinous Powers is fixed upon Terra, glutting themselves on its dying corpses, I'll be free to claim the Triumvirate Engines, and strike a blow like no other against them. I just need to find a way to undo the Emperor's claim upon my soul…

As Lion El'Jonson emerged from the Obsidian Gateway, he discovered he was no longer alone. Standing over the broken bodies of the Dreadwing were his brothers Horus Lupercal and Mortarion, who both aimed their weapons at the Archtraitor as he attempted to regain his bearings. The pools of blood on the floor reflected his appearance, and what he saw shocked him. His mane of blond hair was now graying, his face lined with age, and his sword now gave off a sickly-black glow akin to the hideous Rangda warforms it had once put down. However, there was no time for reflection, for Horus and Mortarion quickly hurled themselves at him, both trying their hardest to kill him. Marveling in the new power and skill he had been granted, El'Jonson toyed with them, blocking every blow with minimal effort. When he finally switched over to the offensive, the battle was quickly concluded, leaving his two brothers disarmed and on their knees. Reaching down, Lion took his trophies before walking to retrieve his helm, which he had left behind before entering the Gateway in order to leave a record of his presence.

Signaling to the Invincible Reason for retrieval, El'Jonson took a moment to savor his victory. The doubts in his skill created by Curze's assault were now gone, for his swordplay was now entirely subconscious, honed over millennia of combat in service to the Dark Gods. Once aboard his vessel, his fleet broke away, leaving the Imperials behind as they made for the Mandeville Points to jump for Caliban once more. The Battle of Molech would be the last time Lion El'Jonson would be spotted by Imperial forces until Verzagen years later, but he was far from inactive. His low profile can often be attributed to the complete annihilation of all his foes at every battlefield on which he fought, as well as the time he spent directing his disparate forces. Across the galactic stage, the Archtraitor masterminded the deployments of his increasingly-erratic forces, all in preparation for the final battles to come. However, the Dark Angels remained embroiled in many lesser conflicts, not least of which being the war raging on their very homeworld.

Ouroboros Unleashed: The Lies of Luther

The seeds of this hidden war were sown well over a decade before the Battle of Molech, during the events of the Quest when El'Jonson had emerged from the Eye of Terror empowered with the blessings and approval of the Ruinous Powers. To all that observed him, it seemed he had left the Lion of yesterday behind, and some said he had been born again. He was not the only one favored by the gods of Chaos: Luther too had been blessed with diabolic strength, his demi-Astartes form swollen by the pacts of flesh and mind that he might better serve the Ruinous Powers. Accompanied by the Mystai, now more sorcerers than librarians, the Grandmaster had returned to Caliban so as to complete the corruption of the First Legion, earning the epithet of Cursed Tongue. So too was it during this time that Luther assumed the mantle of the Tenebrous Patriarch, binding countless daemons and torturing them for knowledge to increase his own power.

Under Luther's supervision, the ancient libraries of the Order were opened to all the men under his command. Entire scriptoriums were given over to copying forbidden tomes, disseminating their foul lore to the various knightly orders of the First Legion and their allies. To the Mystai, those who possessed psychic gifts, especial attention was given to the art of malefic daemonology, tutoring them in the ways of summoning and possession. The very ground of Caliban was cursed that daemons could more easily walk amongst them, and not a day went by without some horrific sacrifice. With his new power, Luther began to sunder the wards containing the Ouroboros one by one, allowing the ancient entity to spread its influence across Caliban once more. Infernal jealousy toward the Everchosen consumed the former Grandmaster, who remained confined to Caliban as part of El'Jonson's strategy to keep up an illusion that all was still the same. Even after the Heresy erupted, Luther remained trapped on Caliban, bereft of a fleet and forced to act through intermediaries and spies in order to exert his will upon the wider galaxy. Many of these agents began to turn their backs on the Grandmaster, no longer trapped on Caliban with him, and thus Luther was left to nurture his poisonous envy, his hatred growing with each new betrayal and in direct proportion to the contamination of the forest world.

Attracted by such hatred and malice, the corruptive energies of the Eye of Terror began to shine upon Caliban in ever-greater frequency. In years past, it had mutated the wildlife of Caliban into the monstrous Great Beasts, but with the seal of the Ouroboros weakening, the winds of the Warp began to manifest in other ways. Nightmares filled the dreams of its people while whispers called the psychic into the depths of the forest, where they were never heard from again. The weak-willed were corrupted, mutations and deformities increasing with every passing year in outlying villages. Miners began to report the discovery of a new mineral, which they named Wyrdstone, a glowing green crystal that mutated and corrupted those who were exposed to it. Even Astartes physiology was not wholly immune to its effects, but they continued to handle it nonetheless, for it was revealed after much study to be a powerful reagent in sorcery. Soon the legionaries began to mix it into the diets of the people they ruled over, tainting the water supplies with concentrated Wyrdstone which rendered many into near-mindless slaves and empowered psykers.

However, not all of Caliban had fallen so easily to Luther's preaching. His suspicions confirmed, Astelan was filled with horror at the abominations that nearly all the rest of the legion had become. Of the many thousands of legionaries still in training upon Caliban, the First of the First was forced to flee into the wilds of Caliban with his Terran brethren, escaping the trap Luther's minions laid for him. Astelan had never given much heed to the tales of the forest, but now forced to live them for himself, he found himself gaining a grudging respect for his Calibanite brothers who had lived there all their lives. It was these same brothers which kept the Emperor's light shining in the darkness of the Heresy, for even on Caliban, there were those still loyal to the Throne. Known as the Unsullied or Unforgiven, they were a motley bunch, spread across the entire world in small cells so as to avoid detection. From the heart of the forest they waged a guerrilla war, striking at Luther's keeps and infuriating the Grandmaster to no end, who was forced to keep their existence a secret lest his shame be exposed to El'Jonson.

For almost twenty years, Astelan and his brothers fought the minions of the Grandmaster, unable to escape Caliban due to the isolation created by Luther's exile. The death world slipped ever closer to the brink of dissolution with each severed chain, and as the Heresy neared its climax, Caliban was on the verge of becoming a Daemon World. The Unsullied knew this full well, for the forest had become increasingly deadly over the years to the point where even an Astartes struggled to survive in its depths. The villages which had once housed them were now charnel houses, put to the torch by Luther's men to flush out the loyalists or by the Unsullied themselves as they sought to purge the corrupted. They had taken heavy casualties over the years, and thus only a few hundred still remained, accompanied occasionally by Agents of the Sigillite, as well as the creatures known as Watchers in the Dark. The goal of these diminutive hooded creatures remained a mystery to Astelan, but the pictorial warnings they left carved into trees and stones foretold a dire future indeed should Luther have his way.

Thus despite being heavily outnumbered, the Unsullied readied themselves for a last, desperate strike. Their target was the Angelicasta, fortress of the Dark Angels, which Luther had seized for himself as his new fortress after Astelan and his Terran allies destroyed his previous lair, Castle Camlann. Until now, Aldurukh had never been seriously contemplated as a target due its defenses, but the machinations of Luther had become too dire to ignore, as evidenced by the gathering of dozens of Watchers in the camp of the Unsullied. Astelan and his men followed the mysterious creatures deep below the surface of Caliban, observing the shattered sites of power and the worm-passages that now riddled the underground. For days they marched through the lightless tunnels, gloomy enough to trouble even the eyes of Astartes, but eventually the passages began to lighten, and the sons of Caliban recognized they were in the lowest levels of Aldurukh.

In utter silence did they slaughter the serfs and menials they found in the dungeons, and it was not until they reached the lower floors of the fortress that the alarm was raised. Their cover now blown, the Unsullied opened fire, clashing against their tainted brethren. Astartes fought Astartes as the loyalists pushed for the upper spire, heedless of their casualties as they attempted to halt Luther's ritual. Alerted to their intrusion, the Tenebrous Patriarch redoubled his efforts, hurrying through the cursed syllables and diabolic sacrifices to break the last chains holding the Ouroboros. By the time Astelan and his kill team reached the spire, barely a few dozen loyalists remained, for the rest had been either scattered or slain. The First of the First denounced his traitorous counterpart, firing not at Luther but at his assistants and the six-pointed mandala inscribed upon the stones of the ramparts. The Grandmaster remained engrossed in his ritual, protected by a sorcerous barrier, but when a coterie of Watchers emerged from the shadows, he began to take notice. Screaming at their intrusion, Luther made a twisted gesture, summoning lesser daemons to protect him, but it was too late.

With a wrenching twist felt by all, reality shattered across Caliban. Yet rather than complete the transformation into Daemon World, the ground crumbled into continent-sized chunks, a Breaking from which there could be no recovery. Billions of tons of stone and earth were hurled into the void, tossed through time and space along with those who had been on it. Deep below the surface, the Ouroboros felt not only the last of its chains slip away, but also the unwelcome glare of the Eye of Terror. This was the first time it experienced the direct emanations of that scar upon reality shining upon the flaws etched in its side from where its other two halves had been torn away, and it found it did not like it. The Ouroboros recoiled, for while it was a creature of the Warp, it did not appreciate the hostile glare of rival powers. Its thrashing tore a hole of its own in reality, burrowing into new tunnels to escape that awful glare.

As the Ouroboros vanished from the Materium, the strain of its passing was too much for reality to bear. Countless rifts began to emerge as the energies of the Immaterium slipped their bindings, maddened energies pouring onto Caliban even as Luther and Astelan crossed swords, both men locked in hatred and determined to destroy each other. Initially confident of his ability to best the Half-Astartes, Astelan had grown increasingly frustrated as Luther's sorcerous gifts protected him from what should have been mortal wounds. As he prepared himself for another charge, Astelan found himself hurled backwards as both he and Luther were tossed by the bucking of the ground as the tower crumbled around them. Time itself began to slow, stressed by Luther's foul rituals as he attempted to gain a few more seconds to finish the ritual, but it was too late, and the Grandmaster let out a bellow of rage as he felt the Ouroboros slip away.

Now without a target, the energies Luther had summoned began to rebound upon him. A shockwave rippled out, and across the Angelicasta, the Unsullied were plucked from reality, vanishing in the midst of battle. Astelan was the last to be taken, and as he vanished, he swore an oath of vengeance to slay Luther if it was the last thing he ever did. As the dust settled, all that was left of Caliban was a debris field of asteroids and echoes, as well as a crackling rift in space-time marking where the Ouroboros had fled. Across the various asteroids, the traitorous Dark Angels peered out into the void, protected from the vacuum of space by their power armor. On the largest stone, a continental chunk of bedrock which held the Angelicasta, still clung to existence, cracked but mostly intact, for it had been protected by ancient machineries hailing from the Dark Age of Technology, including a potent force shield generator whose shell flickered with barely-halted energies.

Over the following decades, the Dark Angels worked to repair the Angelicasta, utilizing the various transports to gather their men and supplies from throughout the debris field. When all the traitors had been gathered, the Rock, as they now called their home, lurched into motion, drifting silently into the vast tear in the fabric of space-time left by the departure of the Ouroboros. Luther's fate, and that of Astelan and his men, remained a mystery to the rest of the galaxy for many years to come, hidden in the shadows by the supernova luminosity of the events occurring elsewhere as the Leonine Heresy raged across the galaxy. Of these events, there was one campaign in particular that truly shaped the Dark Angels for the rest of the Heresy: the Battle of Verzagen.

Fallen Angels: The Seneschal's Sacrifice

Unquestioned masters of the traitor host, the Dark Angels remained in the shadows, conserving their strength for the contests to come. The hatreds and rivalries born from treacherous assaults between the various loyalist and traitor legions simply did not exist for the First Legion, as save for the Sons of Horus, the Dark Angels were not involved in most of the battles raging across the galaxy. As the Leonine Heresy progressed, they remained on the fringes, allowing their allies to soak up the brunt of casualties pushing toward Terra while they secured other systems. Even their role during the Thramas Crusade saw them take far fewer casualties than might be expected due to their overwhelming numerical and technical superiority over the Night Lords.

Thus by the sixth year of the war, the Dark Angels stood at nearly eighty thousand strong. While they were not the largest traitor legion, as the Ultramarines and Iron Warriors far outnumbered them, they had the highest percentage of veterans, not having to resort to the rushed hothouse techniques to induct new Astartes as their allies had. After the events of Molech, Lion himself had begun to see the entire war as a sideshow, but his natural reclusivity meant he did not share his reasons with his sons. Thus many of his commanders began to chafe at their assignments, for the conquest of isolated systems seemed far less glorious than the missions their cousins undertook against the loyalist forces defending Bastion Omega.

In order to satisfy the increasing bloodlust of his sons, El'Jonson invested Corswain with the title of Seneschal, a new Legion Master to finally replace Alajos who had been beheaded by Sevatar on Tsagualsa. Corswain was now empowered to lead the majority of the legion into battle, while the Lion turned his attention toward wrangling his brothers, meeting with the primarchs and senior commanders of other legions in order to turn those who had strayed back toward Terra. Thus the Hound of Caliban moved his forces to the far southern reaches of Segmentum Tempestus, seeking to wrest control of the Forge Worlds which had hitherto been untouched by invasion. Bastion Omega had never stretched this far south, for no major Warp routes connected it to Terra, and so only sporadic fighting had engulfed these regions, minor civil wars erupting in systems wishing to regain their independence from a helpless Imperium.

However, the Dark Angels had no care for the political pretensions of the systems they claimed as theirs by right, and as the First Legion fleet knifed through sector after sector, they faced very few serious threats. Few Astartes garrisons, if any, still existed, for most had been recalled to join their respective legions as the traitors ground ever-deeper into Bastion Omega, Vulkan's vast network of defenses. Headed by Corswain's flagship, the Wrath's Descent, the Dark Angels quickly brought all foes to heel. Upon learning who had come to claim them, most worlds submitted without a fight, yielding up their resources to resupply the fleet, for Corswain knew full well they would need all the resources they could get for the battles to come.

However, not all planets spurned their oaths so readily. Greatest of these was the Sovereign Omnissian Domain of Zhao-Arkhad, a Forge World of ill-repute. Zhao-Arkhad was a Death World, home to reptilian fauna so large that an entire Titan Legio, the Legio Xestobiax, remained as a permanent garrison. Its people were incredibly devoted to the Machine-God, a fervor not seen elsewhere save Mars itself, though the tech-priests of the Forge World Principal distrusted the Arkhadian's esoteric creeds. Thus as Corswain's scouts entered the system, they were immediately fired upon. When the Seneschal learned of their defiance, he swore to make an example of them to send to the remaining systems of the region.

The Dark Angels returned to Zhao-Arkhad in their full strength, matching their relics of Old Night against a dizzying array of technological masterpieces, many of which verged on heresy. The manufactoria of the Forge World ran day and night, pumping out the munitions to feel their countless defense systems, and the initial assault of the First was actually repulsed, a rare occurrence indeed. It was only through the intervention of the Intolerant, a capital ship dating back to the Unification Wars, that the orbital batteries were silenced. The Intolerant's primary armament, a rare Warp-cannon developed by the Emperor himself, blasted a hole in the heart of the Mechanicus defenses, through which the Dark Angels poured onto the surface.

As they landed upon Zhao-Arkhad itself, the First were met by wave after wave of Taghmata soldiery, entire armies of war machines which fired with preternatural precision. Hundreds of Dark Angels fell attempting to maintain their beachhead, their bodies joining those of their brethren whose drop pods and transports had been shot on the way down. Towering Titans lurched forth from their hangars to face the armored spearheads, for Corswain's fleet lacked god-engines of their own, and each reaped a fearsome tally as they fell. By the time the last fane had been seized, Zhao-Arkhad lay in ruins, and its few surviving tech-priests captured and enslaved. Though the cost had been high, thousands of legionaries in total, Corswain deemed it well worth the expense, for now they could repair the relics which had lay in their holds unused since the Xenocides: the Excindio Battle-Automata.

Excindio-class Battle-Automata

The rebellion of the Men of Iron, those robotic legions which had once served Mankind, was one of the greatest causes of the Age of Strife. The so-called Cybernetic Revolt had seen entire systems wiped from existence as the unchecked scientific progress was turned back upon their creators. By the end of it, the Men of Iron had been exterminated, and all research into abominable intelligence was considered the greatest taboo by Mankind. Nonetheless, some relics of Old Night still persisted into the days of the Great Crusade, and it is perhaps a mark of how much the Emperor trusted, or perhaps his hubris, that some of these machine-minds were gifted to the First Legion.

Hidden from the righteous repugnance of the Martian Mechanicum, the Excindio were a class of killing machines like no other. Even after torturing and neutering their original Intelligences, after chaining them with countless protocols, their codes and algorithms remained bloodthirsty in the extreme, relishing in slaughtering flesh and iron alike. Such weapons had proven highly effective against many abominable xenos species, but were quickly disabled by the perfidious Rangda, who seemed more effective in fighting robotic foes than they were against Astartes.

Battered and broken after the events of the Rangdan Xenocides, the Excindio had been in disuse for decades. The worship of Chaos had seen alternative proposals to utilize daemons to exert control over the Abominable Intelligences, but such projects had been shelved due to lack of personnel. However, now with the quasi-heretekal tech-priests of Zhao-Arkhad under their control, such experiments could resume. Thus as the First Legion fleet returned north to join the other forces pressing against Bastion Omega, their holds became dens of nightmare, vile experiments binding daemon, iron, and Silica Animus together to create malignant killing machines of a type not seen since the darkest days of Old Night.

However, such abominations would not be ready for months to come, and so as the Dark Angels fought, they did so with the same tools they had always used. By this stage of the Heresy, the defensive network known as Bastion Omega had been reduced to three strongpoints, small clusters anchoring a line barely a few systems thick. The lynchpin was the Trisolian System, where the forces of the Warmaster contended with a traitor host under the command of Sigismund, First Captain of the Seventh Legion. To their south, Perturabo of Olympia oversaw a major thrust, repeatedly hammering multiple legions and Titan cohorts into the armored stronghold of the Beta-Garmon Cluster. In the north, the loyalists held tightly to fortress worlds situated on Warp-route chokepoints, defended by the tenacious Death Guard. Corswain's forces had played a vital role here in reducing loyalist strength on this front, joining the Thousand Sons in claiming the systems of Segmentum Obscurus, which lay near to their homeworld of Caliban.

However, the Seneschal himself was not with his forces during this time, for after claiming Zhao-Arkhad, Corswain had departed the fleet, journeying east to relay the Archtraitor's orders to the Crimson Fists. The Paladin instead accompanied Rogal Dorn aboard his mighty flagship Phalanx, observing to make sure the Lord of Inwit obeyed the Lion's orders. Thus while the Dark Angels clashed with the Space Wolves across multiple systems, Corswain and Dorn were busy gathering over half of the entire traitor force in preparation for the final great push to break Bastion Omega. By the time the Dark Angels joined their brethren, the mustering grounds were already nearly full, crowded by restless outriders of the White Scars, bitter Crimson Fists, bloodthirsty Flesh Tearers, Thousand Sons sorcerers, and some thirty trillion mortals from Traitor Army regiments. To cap off such a prodigious display of force came none other than Lion El'Jonson himself.

After his commanders had assembled, the Archtraitor announced their target to be none other than the Alpha Centauri System. To capture the world of Verzagen was of the utmost importance: firstly, it sat on a direct and stable Warp-route into the Solar System, meaning it was of great military value. The northern approaches were now firmly in traitor hands, but they lacked Warp-currents large enough to ferry their entire force at once, a deficiency Verzagen would help rectify. As a result of its position, it had been one of the first worlds ever settled by Humanity, and one of the first systems claimed in the Great Crusade. Seizing it would provide legitimacy to the Lion's empire, as well as resonate in the Warp, for the Dark Gods would reward their cause in exchange for the despair caused by seizing the vital fortress worlds that formed a significant lynchpin in Bastion Omega.

As such, Verzagen was sure to be heavily defended. However, El'Jonson had little interest in overseeing the minutiae of the campaign, for much of his attention was focused on marshaling the support of his patrons and ensuring they did not destroy his forces for their own amusement. Thus he quickly ceded control to Rogal Dorn, who eagerly accepted his new role, though Corswain couldn't help but notice Dorn's pleasure at their role reversal. As the traitor forces began their assault on Verzagen, the Dark Angels languished near the rear of the echelon assault, deprived of what the spiteful Dorn viewed as the position of honor. When the First Legion did finally make their assault, they were forced to slowly navigate through stellar debris fields of the triple star system, the ruins of multiple lines of defense.

As they neared Verzagen itself, their advance came under fire from above, where an ambushing lance of Space Wolves vessels smashed into the heart of their formation. Though outwardly calm, Paladin Corswain rejoiced on the inside, for he had long nurtured a grudge against the Sixth Legion. Long ago, during a campaign on the world of Dulan, Russ's men had obliterated an enemy vessel, not realizing an Dark Angels company of boarders was already inside. The loss of so many brothers had infuriated the Hound of Caliban, and now faced with a chance to exact his revenge, Corswain eagerly took the bait.

Heedless of risk, the Dark Angels pivoted to face their new foe, neglecting Verzagen entirely as Corswain roared out his orders to pursue. The loyalists made them pay dearly, unleashing hidden defenses to ambush the First Legion fleet, but Corswain did not care. The Space Wolves reaped a fearsome tally for each one of their own slain, even managing to board the Invincible Reason itself in a fruitless decapitation speartip to kill the Archtraitor. After weeks of fighting, the loyalists finally fell back, leaving their unburied dead strewn across the shattered defenses of Verzagen and its sister worlds. Tens of thousands of Dark Angels had perished with them, slaughtered in the airless void. However, El'Jonson cared little, for his prize had been won. In the south, Perturabo sent word Beta-Garmon was theirs, while Sigismund indicated the Warmaster was falling back from Trisolian to avoid being encircled. After considering his options, the Archtraitor called his brothers to his side, and within months, the entire traitor host gathered above Verzagen, upon which a vast fane had been erected.

The gods are angry at me. They resent the noctilith I line my armor with, wondering how I know of its properties to ward off the Immaterium. They recognize it as just one part of my refusal to drink of their poisoned chalice, and it infuriates them. If my brothers and I were to enter the Warp now, we would surely be dashed to pieces, for as ever, the Ruinous Powers give more heed to their pride than to their fear of my father. The Anathema, as they call him. As they will one day call me, for I am his truest echo.

No doubt that is why they seek to turn my flaws against me. Secrecy and distrust have become paranoia, for the minds of even my mortal brothers have been poisoned towards me. Toward each other. Dorn and Perturabo would destroy the galaxy to humble the other, to say nothing of what the living weapons the daemons pretending to be my brothers would do. I noticed Fulgrim has joined their ranks now, and I have a feeling I'll lose Magnus soon too. Part of me wishes to set these monsters loose, to allow these broken things to glut themselves in an orgy of destruction until nothing is left. But there's no guarantee they would succeed; knowing my brothers, they would probably destroy the ruins I so desperately require; knowing the gods, they would intentionally destroy my hopes to make me more reliant upon them.

Thus I must do what I had hoped to avoid: to give them a sacrifice. In blood I will pave the way and open the door. I will be Agamemnon, and give them what they think I value the most: my favored son. My Corswain, whom I have raised even above Luther. To betray him, to take his life in the name of the Ruinous Powers, is a bargain they can't help but accept. Little do they know of the things I have seen. What is the life of one Astartes, especially one who had thrown away so many of his brothers, my sons, in pursuit of pride. Nothing at all when compared to taking a step down the Golden Path. What does it matter to spit upon the oath between father and son, especially compared to the same one I have already spurned between myself and the Emperor? Little, if nothing. Nothing.

Why, then, do I still remember Corswain's expression as the Anathame opened his throat?

Siege of Terra: The Unforgiven

"I saw a beast rising… having seven heads…and his mouth as the mouth of a lion. And power was given to him over every tribe, and people, and tongue, and nation." Book of the Apocalypse, M1

As the ritual knife opened the throat of the Lion's favored son, the blade chipped and shattered, tumbling from the fane alongside the fountain of blood pouring down to mingle with the dried gore of tens of thousands of other Astartes upon the corpse-choked streets of Verzagen. Before the eyes of all the legions, a yawning rift in reality opened in the void above. Countless ships began to enter the Warp directly, not even bothering to make for the Mandeville Points due to the favor of the Ruinous Powers. The primarchs returned to their flagships, and soon the entire fleet had left the system. Their journey through the Warp was swift and uneventful, and the Lion utilized the time to track the positions and movements of his foes. Such a feat was done not through sorcery, as one might have expected, but through the use of an esoteric cogitator which combined archaeotech and ritual to display a symbolic depiction of the entire galaxy as reflected in the Empyrean.

As expected, much of the map was choked with storms, produced from the colossal slaughters taking place as well as the conscious effort of the Thousand Sons. Though his sons had come as ordered, Magnus the Red had not been present at the muster on Verzagen, offering only a weak excuse about delaying loyalist reinforcements. Thus he, along with the remainder of his legion, appeared to be far to the east on the outskirts of the Ruinstorm, which still shrouded the realm of Ultramar from the wider galaxy. Within the Jewel of the East was Lorgar and his forces, no doubt striving to escape his cage, while in the south, the Raven Guard and Alpha Legion appeared to be making for Terra. Neither appeared to be much of a threat, though El'Jonson was certain that the loyalists would arrive at Terra before the end of the Siege. Within the Solar System itself, four brothers awaited the traitor's arrival, which even now breathed down upon their necks, for Perturabo and his forces were no doubt about to arrive.

While El'Jonson divined the future, his legion prepared themselves for combat. Though most of the legion, around forty thousand legionaries in total, were aboard the fleet escorting the Invincible Reason, the remaining third were accompanying the Lord of Iron as part of the initial assault, and among them was the new Legion Master of the Dark Angels. After the death of Corswain, the Dark Angels needed a new commander, and thus El'Jonson appointed Holguin, Master of the Deathwing, to fill the position. Holguin was a veteran among veterans, having survived all three Rangdan Xenocides, and his loyalty was beyond question, despite being a Terran. However, the Archtraitor had little need of a bodyguard since Molech, and so Holguin would serve more usefully watching over Perturabo, to ensure nothing went amiss before the arrival of the main fleet.

Thus the Master of the Deathwing accompanied the other traitor forces and true to his aggressive nature, Holguin's ships were part of the vanguard, emerging through the Khthonic Gate on the dimly-lit fringes of the Solar System. While El'Jonson remained undisturbed in his quarters, Holguin and his men fought a savage battle to seize the moons of Pluto from loyalist control. One by one, the moons of Pluto were seized, torn from the clutches of the Salamanders, who fought tooth and nail to hold on to them. However, even the sons of Vulkan proved to be no match for the savagery of the Excindio Battle-Automata, who were deployed in their entirety upon Pluto itself. Within several days, the icy dwarf planet and its satellites were taken, though not without significant losses, including all of the Excindio due to a strange wave of green light which had banished the daemons and significantly damaged the sorcerers.

While the Master of the Deathwing recuperated his losses, other Dark Angels were active throughout the Solar System. Zahariel El'Zurias, head of the Mystai, the First Legion sorcerers, and one of the Archtraitor's inner circle of trusted sons, accompanied the fleet of the Fifteenth Legion led by Aforgomon the Fatewoven as they made for the world of Jupiter. As thousands of Iron Warriors and Sons of Horus battled for control of the Jovian Shipyards, Zahariel and his allies moved unseen, preparing a foul ritual to rip reality asunder. Through use of ancient rituals from even before Old Night, they created hermetic circles across the greatest gas giant, and as the rest of the planets moved into harmonic alignment, the music of the spheres was unleashed. Zahariel and Aforgomon's sorcery accelerated the whorls of the Great Red Spot, creating a gaping chasm in the skein of reality in the shape of a great eye. The atrocity stretched wide, revealing a pupil as black as sin through which poured the countless ships of the traitor armada, including the Invincible Reason itself.

Upon his bridge, El'Jonson stared in silence as his plans inched ever closer to fruition. Before leaving Verzagen, he had recovered almost, but not all, of the shards of the Anathame. His final act before his ship entered the Solar System had been to join these shards, so recently anointed in Corswain's blood, into his Lion Sword, creating a weapon capable of harming even the Emperor. Now in the same system as the Anathema, the Archtraitor raised his Blade, and as he did so, he stretched forth his mental might, a black fist which smashed invisibly into the golden aura protecting the Throneworld. As the traitor armada forced its way past the Asteroid Belt and Mars, El'Jonson continued his psychic assault upon his father, aided all the while by the Ruinous Powers, who roared and cackled as the Master of Mankind was slowly weakened. However, the loyalist forces were far from finished, and as the Invincible Reason joined in the battle above Luna, she found herself confronted by her antithesis: the Imperator Somnium.

Imperator Somnium

Most scholars of Imperial history would have you believe that the magnificent Bucephelus was the Emperor's flagship, for it was the vessel which he utilized the most throughout the Great Crusade. However, this is only partially true. While indeed a mighty Battle Barge which ferried the Emperor across the stars, it was merely a section of the Master of Mankind's true chariot. The Imperator Somnium was a colossal vessel, as large as some orbital plates at fifty-five kilometers in length, dwarfing even Gloriana-class battleships in both size and firepower, and bristling with relics from the Dark Age of Technology, for the Emperor had always kept the best for himself. In Low Gothic, its name translates to 'the Emperor's Dream', and it was only in service to this dream that it was ever unleashed. Only in the most dire of battles, such as against the Rangda, was the Imperator Somnium unleashed, and no foe had ever survived an encounter with it.

As the two colossal flagships closed in on each other, the rest of the galaxy seemed to hold its breath. The Dream of Unity, the golden hope of all mankind, was a glorious dragon, whose radiance filled the void and inspired its allies as though it were the Emperor himself taking the field. Opposing it was the sleek black knight that was the Invincible Reason, a far younger, smaller, and swifter fighter that stepped up to fight, undaunted by her foe's age and size. Their battle was the Leonine Heresy in microcosm: a hopeful Dream against cold, merciless Reason, the light of a new dawn against the incarnated shadows of Old Night. In a one on one, it should have been no contest, for the Emperor's true flagship was far mightier, its guns more powerful than even the eldritch arsenal of the Lion's chariot. Even the Phalanx, Rogal Dorn's mighty space station that dwarfed either vessel, would not have been enough to overcome the Master of Mankind's flagship, even had its commander Archamus been bold enough to enter the battle.

Alas for the loyal sons of the Emperor, the Invincible Reason was not alone. As the two titans slugged it out, another black-hulled vessel smashed through their dueling ground: the Eternal Crusader. Seeking to maneuver closer to Luna and Selenar Gene-Labs contained thereupon, Sigismund's mighty battleship unleashed a treacherous attack of opportunity upon the Somnium. Like a serrated flensing dagger, her lances knifed into the ventral decks and engines of the Emperor's flagship, a deadly blow but far from mortal. However, any pretense of honor had now vanished, and like piranhas smelling blood in the water, the rest of the traitor armada swarmed, no longer hanging back in fear. The flagship gave a mighty account of herself, felling dozens of vessels which had once fought by her side during the Great Crusade, but it was a hopeless task. The Emperor's Dream died that day, alongside the last hopes the loyalists might have held of repelling the traitor armada. Her corpse, a giant amongst countless lesser dead, was then shunted aside unceremoniously, tugged away by the uncaring forces of gravity as the traitor armada took its place above the cradle of Mankind.

As the traitors began to pursue the last loyalist vessels as they fled the Throneworld, they were soon stopped in their tracks. Now that the void was theirs, the Archtraitor quickly issued orders, ensuring all his forces knew who was truly in charge. Though victory seemed all but in his grasp, the Lion knew full well that a stray shot could annihilate the ruins he sought. Thus the armies of Hell hung over the cradle of Humanity for over a month, only bombarding a select few targets such as the Palace's Aegis and anti-air defenses in order to clear a landing zone. All the while, the Archtraitor continued his spiritual war against his father, relying upon the powers of the Immaterium to weaken the barriers of reality. El'Jonson spoke multiple times to the Emperor, urging him to give in and return the fire of the gods stolen at Molech.

However, the Master of Mankind continued to resist, and thus the Siege progressed to the next stage. On the fifteenth of Tertius, the legionaries of eight legions began to land, countless drop pods filling the smog-choked skies of Terra to begin the assault. Around the Palace landed the Iron Warriors and Crimson Fists, along with their unwilling allies the White Scars and World Eaters, while the Thousand Sons, Blood Angels, Ultramarines, and Emperor's Children scattered across the globe in pursuit of their own desires. As expected, none of them landed anywhere near the empty dust bowl of Urartu, and based on the lack of defenses, it was clear the Praetorian of Terra had not expected anyone to. Thus the Dark Angels were able to quickly secure a base of operations, El'Jonson himself leading the way as he landed in force with nearly the entire legion.

"Then the heavens and the earth, and all that is in them, shall sing for joy over Babylon, for the destroyers shall come against them out of the north…" Prophecy of Yirmeyahu, Pre-M1

Once the region of Urartu was secured, the Dark Angels began to construct a keep. Though Astartes are primarily a weapon of war, they are nonetheless often quite exceptional at other pursuits; while the Fourth and Seventh Legions held the greatest reputations in regard to constructing fortifications, the sons of Caliban were no slouches in that regard. Soon the familiar tower engraved with angels of death and bunker annexes marking the constructions as a Fortress of Redemption began to rise over the empty dust plains, armored walls soaring high above the sub-crypts housing the garrison of legionaries. Such a mighty edification took weeks to complete, but the First Legion was far from idle, for both traitor and loyalist alike attempted to pry into the secrets of the fortress. However, both sets of invaders were quickly repulsed, and thus neither Sons of Horus nor Iron Warrior nor Alpha Legionnaire were able to enter the fortress.

As Quartus turned into Quintus, the traitor forces began to breach the Outer Walls of the Palace, driving the defenders ever further back. Most of the First Legion, save for a chosen few companies, had returned to their ships by this time, save for the Mystai, who continued to oversee the rituals designed to weaken the Emperor's spiritual Aegis. Foul daemons from the depths of the Warp began to manifest upon the Throneworld, joining the other legions as they rampaged through the heart of the Emperor's domain. Their presence was a powerful distraction, hiding the movement of the First Legion agents who had slipped to prowl the inner sanctums. Even as the other traitor legions drew the attention of the Palace defenders, the Mystai's agents ransacked hallowed wings of the Palace, absconding with ancient relics and many of the tomes in the Halls of Leng, the Emperor's personal library. So too did they ferret away prisoners who were more useful to the Archtraitor alive than dead, both in the Palace and in other fortresses across Terra.

El'Jonson himself however remained secluded, pursuing his goals. As the weeks passed, layer after layer of rock and stone was stripped away, thirty thousand years of history carefully sorted through and discarded. It was not until Sextus that the first evidence of the Etemenanki ziggurat began to emerge, the tallest tip of an unimaginably ancient city and tower. Through weeks of nonstop study and excavation, Lion El'Jonson slowly uncovered the mysteries of the past. By the month of Sextus, he had all but uncovered the ruins of the Tower of Babel, whose bricks each held a single word of power, each one a single entry into an glossary of the language of creation that had been lost to time. Barely a handful still remained, the rest dust and ashes as a result of time or the Emperor's power. Translation was a painstaking process, for most were unrelated and/or useless, and required intensive cross-checking with other ancient tomes in the vast library El'Jonson had brought with him into the fortress.

Urartu. Iraq. Mesopotamia. Akkad. Babylon. This land has gone by many names over the millennia. It was the cradle of civilization, home to the first humans to look up into the stars and discover something more. It was they who saw through the veil of reality, and were forever changed by it. They saw the horrors which lurked beyond it. They saw the Dark King in Yellow and his ilk, and sought to seal them away through means of the fundamental language: Enuncia. Each word of power was recorded and inscribed upon a brick of clay, building a city of dust up and up as though they were going to pierce the heavens.

Of course, there were those who refused to countenance such a project. Humanity has always been split between those who stand for order, control, the settled city-folk, and those who come from the wilds, the chaotic shepherd-nomads. When I looked down upon Terra from the decks of the Invincible Reason, I felt so sure of my actions. I knew I was of the former, whereas my father was of the latter group, progression against reaction. I thought I knew the history, how millennia ago he and his allies, the nomads of Anatolia and beyond, had toppled the Tower so as to avoid anyone having absolute power over mankind, or at least anyone other than himself.

Now that I gaze upon these bricks, whose power I can feel just standing in their presence, I'm not so sure. I have let the galaxy burn just to create enough smoke to hide my path, but still so many of my brothers yet live, so many aspects of the Master of Mankind I have yet to understand. Still the Emperor's grip upon my soul remains, no matter how much the Primordial Annihilator attempts to hide it from me. I have gained power unimaginable, but all the ancient knowledge in the world is little comfort compared to knowing there is still so much left to do.

Lost in thought, the Archtraitor was almost taken unawares as he was in the process of returning to the excavation when he realized he was not alone. The maddened voices of the Chaos Gods, usually silenced, suddenly screamed out in warning and fury, and El'Jonson turned to behold one thought dead: Konrad Curze. For the first time he could remember, Lion El'Jonson was truly surprised. The Lord of the Night had not been seen since Thramas, years earlier, and the Archtraitor believed him slain when Corswain had plunged his blade into his back. The fact he was not only on Terra, but within the Lion's very sanctum, all without his foreknowledge, deeply troubled the Archtraitor. All this and more flashed through his mind in the split-second before Curze launched himself at him, lightning claws crackling as they swiped through the air.

Once more El'Jonson found himself on the defensive, each of Curze's blows gouging deep scars in his armor. His own swings seemed desultory in comparison, for in truth El'Jonson's attention was elsewhere. Without even having to reach out with his mind, the Lion could sense a titanic presence stirring: the Emperor had left the Golden Throne. As the Lion Sword met Mercy and Forgiveness, the pressure exerted by the Archtraitor began to wane for the first time since he had arrived in the Solar System. Now freed of his torment, the psychic might of the Master of Mankind began to equal, if not overpower, that of the Archtraitor. Seconds stretched into minutes as the Lion continued to battle with Curze, their contest growing now far more intense than the one upon Thramas, the rebellion balancing on a thread as the Emperor's transport carried him ever closer to the Fortress. It seemed the Master of Mankind was too canny to teleport; if he had, the Lord of Caliban could have redirected it instantaneously.

Running out of options and time, El'Jonson made his choice. The prospect of dueling both Curze and the Emperor was to invite defeat; thus the Lord of Caliban turned to desperate measures. The lies and promises of the Ruinous Powers whispered more loudly than ever, promising unlimited power in exchange for servitude, but the Lion still had one more card to play. While not as bad as giving his soul to Chaos, it was still one he had instead hoped to save in order to utilize it against the Master of Mankind. Reaching into the depths of his mind, Lion El'Jonson unleashed a single word of Enuncia, rewriting reality in an instant to give him the time he needed. Caught in the midst of a leap, Curze found himself hurled to the ground before he could react. In the frozen molasses of slowed time, El'Jonson walked forward, driving his blade through his brother's body to transfix him to the ground.

Even to the end, he was defiant. I recognized at once the origin of the golden stone he attempted to drive into my heart. Now I am vulnerable, or so it appears. Little did he know I had already gained the knowledge I sought in this place. As I removed his blindfold and removed the Fulgurite from my breastplate, my brother's soul slipped beyond the veil, and as it did, I felt the shard of the Emperor join the others, the ninth. Or actually the Tenth, I realized as I felt the energy contained in the Book of Magnus had transformed. It seemed the Crimson King had finally thrown away the rest of his freedom in exchange for power. Of course, I might end up no different if I can't defeat my father…

Thy Kingdom Come Undone: The End and the Death

"Beings that are gilded…they will later be known for frauds." Prophecy of Baruk, Pre-M1

As the Everchosen removed his murderous Blade from the slain body of his brother, a golden light entered the room, for the father of both had arrived. The Emperor's presence filled the rocky chamber, a tempest so heavy with grief and strain that it would have crushed any lesser being beneath it. However, his was not the only psychic thunderhead, for rising to meet it was a collection of squalls, the icy winds of the Lion mixed with the roiling cyclones of the Ruinous Powers who poured their energies into their champion. The Master of Mankind spared his fallen son a brief but tender glance, his sorrowful expression hardening into one of loathing as he regarded the architect of the Heresy. The Lion's expression remained neutral as the Anathema raised his shield and unlimbered his weapon, a mighty warhammer with a golden head and red handle that seemed more suited for a barbarian tribal warlord than the Master of Mankind. In response, the Archtraitor raised his dark blade, and the battle to decide the fate of the galaxy commenced.

An upswing of the hammer flowed into a ram with the shield. By virtue of his height and the reach of his weapon, to the ironclad defensive wall forged from purest auramite and adamantium, through the unparalleled experience of myriad years, the Master of Mankind was perhaps the most deadly combatant in the galaxy. Around and through the crumbling pillars he wove, every deflected blow serving to further wreck the ruins he had created in ancient times, while in the unreality of the Immaterium, he shone as an aureate supernova, banishing the shadowy nightmares which had haunted the galaxy for so long, inspiring his followers across an entire planet to new heights of heroism. He was glory and light and vengeance. Yet where his light touched the darkness, it faded, fading to a tarnished Silver before being swallowed up in the night. To those who sought to oppose him, he was oppression and tyranny, the manacles of a slaver and the ax of an executioner. To those who fought under the banner of the Lion, they saw him as the Carrion Lord over the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable, for he was Anathema to all their foul desires.

Rising to oppose him was inchoate resentment and Chaos untrammeled. The mightiest assault was met with equal force, the savagery of some great beast and the clinical precision of a machine, a Dark Angel who fought to win. Every blow was riposted and parried, and returned twofold, striking and withdrawing before striking again. Tens of thousands of years of experience were repelled by a bladework on a level beyond instinct: every fighting style change was met and overcome by a subconscious talent for battle. In the Immaterium, psychic tendrils of blackest night and raw madness empowered by Primordial Annihilation flowed out from the roiling tempest of the Warp to snuff out the golden light, to spread terror and fear to all that beheld it. The tides of the Deep Warp surged up to swamp the refulgent Anathema, sapping away at all mental defenses in an attempt to cause errors and missteps.

Bit by bit, Order began to recede as Chaos swelled to overtake it. The champion of civilization gave way to the unrestrained savagery of the nomad as Beast overcame Man. A mighty blow severed the head of the warhammer, and the shield became a shattered wreck. The Master of Mankind drew his sword, a magnificent Burning Blade, but it did little good, for there was none more talented with the sword than his traitorous son. With every strike, a new chunk of his once-pristine golden armor was flensed away, sliced and shaved off by precise strikes made with the intent to wound rather than kill. With each blow, the Lion swelled in power as the Emperor diminished. His might grew and grew, empowered by the energies of the Ruinous Powers as well as the lifeforce of his own father, a little more stolen with each strike. Soon the Master of Mankind began to bleed, his Burning Blade unable to ward off the mortal wounds dealt to him by his Firstborn. He fought to survive rather than to win, his heart softened by some lingering sentiment of emotion. With every blow, the Lion grew stronger, gorging on the Emperor's soul as each strike of the Lion Sword leeched away a little bit more of his power, splintering his mind and soul into shards infused with power and essence.

It was a battle to determine the fate of the galaxy for the next ten thousand years. As such, it was not one that could be observed by mortals. The Dark Angels manning the fortification began to flee, overwhelmed by the titanic forces unleashed in the bowels of their fortress. They had suffered grievous losses at the hands of Konrad Curze and the Emperor, slaughtered in their hundreds in a futile attempt to keep them from their destined confrontation with the Lion. However, escape would not be so easy, for the Master of Mankind had not come alone. His favored Companions, sworn to never leave his side, had made the journey with him, leaping from their transports to unleash slaughter upon those who had despoiled the Throneworld. Their number was few, a scant dozens amongst thousands, for that was all that could be spared amidst the climax of the Palace Siege, now entering its endgame with the arrival of loyalist reinforcements.

By the time the last Custodian Companion fell, as the last Dark Angel escaped the empty plains of Urartu in a headlong flight back to their ships, the skies of Terra became a tumultuous mess of legion ships unleashing untold amounts of destruction upon each other. Unity was now long-dead as brother fired upon brother in a hateful frenzy as loyalists and traitors alike sought to utterly destroy one another. Down below, the battle of father and son entered the endgame as the Ruinous Powers howled and cackled at the sight of the fallen Anathema. The Lion had definitively gained the upper hand, sundering the Master of Mankind's body with countless wounds. Had he fought without restraint, without mercy, the results might have been different, but the Emperor's pity was his undoing. His pleas for reason and understanding were repulsed by scorn, for the Lion's dedication to his goals meant there was nothing he would not do to see them through to completion.

I stood above him, victorious in every sense. The majority of his soulfire, the power he had held onto after creating the Primarchs, was now mine. The mantle of the Dark King was wrapped around me, and I could tell the Ruinous Powers wanted me to finish him off, ready for me to take my father's place and join in the Great Game as he never had. Where my brothers might have gloated, I did not. I but asked him simple questions. How many Heresies had there been, I demanded. How many times must we tread this selfsame path?

In response, he cursed me with his dying breaths, an ironic inversion of the paternal blessings given by fathers to their sons in ancient times. In truth, it was a final hesitation on my part, and of course that's when it went wrong. Caught up in the moment, I had paid no attention to my surroundings. I was confident in my might, for no Custodian could hope to best me, no brother could hope to overcome me. How, and more importantly, why, then, did a mortal man make the attempt?

The first I knew of his presence was the piercing pain just above my heel. Turning around, I beheld a man dressed in the simple uniform of an Imperial Army trooper, unadorned save for a cord around his neck from which hung a wooden rood, while his hands were wrapped around a hilt whose blade was shard of the Anathame. Total shock filled my body: the Ruinous Powers had said nothing about this, no vision of the future had shown anything remotely resembling this. It was more by instinct than anything that I killed him, a flick of the wrist that held the Lion Sword, a blade larger than his entire body.

What madness possessed him to take up an Athame and journey through time and space to reach us? What Deity shone its favor upon him, had picked him rather than I, the Everchosen of the Pantheon of Chaos? I knew in that moment something had gone wrong, for I had not seen this in any of my visions. My father wasted no time, recognizing this as his last chance. As I turned to face him again, he unleashed one final attack to obliterate me from existence, body and soul, just as I had done to the mortal who had stabbed me.

As the dust settled, there remained no trace of the Lion. What had become of him was unknown, but seemed obvious to all his sons, for whether they were on Caliban or Terra, all could feel the loss of his presence as he vanished in the supernova that was the climax of the Siege. Thus they began to flee, abandoning Terra in a headlong flight through the gauntlet of loyalist reinforcements that were streaming into the Solar System. The fleet of the First fled back to the Caliban System, where they were astonished to find not a homeworld but a rift in space-time. Venturing through the rift, they discovered the Rock, the mobile fortress fashioned out of the rubble of their homeworld, where the rest of the legion had established their base.

Since then, the First Legion has kept a low profile. From what little the Inquisition has been able to gather on them, they have become errant Knights dispersed across the Materium and Immaterium, unable to maintain legion unity just like all the other traitors. However, their secrecy has remained intact, and thus what they hope to achieve is unknown. All that is certain is that they serve the Ruinous Powers, no doubt hoping that by carrying out countless dark schemes they will be able to propitiate their masters, whose wrath was kindled against them for their father's failure to destroy the Emperor. They have no single leader, and rumors abound of Dark Angels fighting amongst themselves, of victory in battle abandoned in favor of pursuing what appear to be their own brothers. However, as the 41st Millennium draws to a close, the Dark Angels grow ever more active, and some have suggested that the Dark Angels, like the other traitor legions, are preparing for the end of days.

Homeworld, Recruitment, and Gene-seed

It is difficult to overstate the turmoil caused by the Leonine Heresy. The tenuous order established by the Imperium during the Great Crusade had been almost entirely shattered. Many sectors still lay under the control of the traitors, who ruthlessly quashed any news of their defeat at the Siege of Terra on any world in their grasp, while the waning storms in the Warp continued to slow astropathic messages. Nor did the Imperium have any immediate desire to recount the tale of their near-destruction, and it was only long after the completion of the Scouring that the first scholars began to pen their accounts of the Heresy. Only through the efforts of the Council of Charon, that investigative body which met to uncover the reasons the Traitor Primarchs turned against their father, was the Lion definitively enshrined as the Archtraitor. Their findings, published right around a time of rapid growth in the Imperial Cult, enshrined El'Jonson as the chief among his brothers, the Nine Devils of the Outer Dark.

However, while the Imperium's peasantry knew of El'Jonson and how the Emperor defeated him, they did not know what had happened to his sons. A combination of time and propaganda did much to obscure the Dark Angels's role during the Leonine Heresy, for amongst the traitors, the sons of the Lion had done little during the Siege of Terra itself. Unfortunately for the galaxy though, the Dark Angels continued to survive. In the wake of Caliban's destruction, the First Legion forces present had consolidated around their legion headquarters, the castle of Aldurukh, which was transformed into the command center of a mobile star-fortress spanning across dozens of asteroids. In place of a forested Death World, there now existed a collection of asteroids, wreathed in shimmering force fields known as the Gorgon's Aegis that crackle with potent energies. The largest of these is formed from a continental chunk larger than any Imperial starship, greater than even the legendary Phalanx, and is capable of laying waste to entire fleets at a time.

However, their fortress would be quickly eliminated by the vengeful forces of the Scouring if it remained in realspace. Thus the Dark Angels cannibalized every resource at their disposal in order to construct planetary engines, thus allowing the Angelicasta to enter the Warp at will. Command of the Rock's movement is the responsibility of a single Astartes, known as the Master of the Rock, a role filled by one of the legion's techmarines. However, this position is far from glorious, for the machine-spirits of the Rock are temperamental indeed, steeped in the influence of the Ruinous Powers, and to control them is a full-time job. Thus the Master of the Forge is physically entombed into the control nave, wired into the cogitator banks and unable to leave or even move. There he remains until he dies, slowly devoured by the ancient technology until the day he dies, when his bones are unceremoniously brushed aside and his mechanical implants taken to be used on his successor.

A vast collection of fortresses, the Rock contains many facilities designed to serve as the successor to the Angelicasta. These fortresses sit atop the largest asteroid, built into the side of the former mountain range which houses all the facilities necessary to legion operations, including multiple docking ports capable of holding entire fleets. An expansive network of tunnels known as the Galleria Apscondael crisscross beneath the plain rocky exterior, for only small portions of towers and retractable doors of hangar bays are visible from the exterior. Its defenses are potent indeed, for the First Legion has maintained the relics of the Dark Age granted them so long ago, and have only become more deadly over the years as Chaotic corruption seeps further in. All of this is but the upper layers, for only the most powerful are able to access the lower depths of the restricted sections.

Descending into the darkness of the restricted sections, one finds the apothecariums where new recruits are transformed into Astartes. As the First Legion, the gene-seed of the Dark Angels is remarkably pure, still of the highest quality and without any obvious defects or missing organs. Perhaps the sole flaw in the First Legion is their tendency towards aloofness and secrecy, as well as a tight, almost obsessive singular focus. For example, where Guilliman and his sons excel at focusing on many tasks at once, El'Jonson and his Dark Angels are the opposite, focusing on one thing extremely well, which made them good fighters and even better hunters. However, how much of that comes down to gene-seed compared to training is unknown. What is known is that the Dark Angels are far from immune to the mutative energies of Chaos, and thus the random and debilitative corruptions of the Ruinous Powers have been recorded many times. What standards the legion uses to gauge its potential recruits is unknown, for they rarely leave survivors, but they must exist, for the First continues to plague the galaxy to this day. Others claim the Dark Angels have ceased recruiting entirely, refusing to induct legionaries from any other world besides Caliban. Such scholars claim the size of the First is simply due to taking fewer casualties than their allies during the Siege of Terra.

In the deepest chambers of the Rock, through the Nameless Gate down the Angelis Stair lies the Enginarium. These esoteric machines power the Rock with ancient technology hailing from the era of the Unification Wars. Only the most experienced techmarines of the First Legion are permitted access inside, for at the heart of it lies the xenos artifact known as the Tuchulcha Engine. It is unknown how this temperamental device ended up embedded in the Rock, but the Dark Angels have put it to good use, for it is what allows them to enter the wormways created by the flight of the Ouroboros, another of the Triumvirate Engines. This device allows them to enter and exit the Warp at will, always able to return to the hunt once whatever foul quest they are currently undertaking has completed. However, equally deep in the Rock past the Stair of Shadows lies the dungeons known as the Screaming Cells, where the First Legion keeps those unfortunates it captures as prisoners. None have ever escaped, not even daemons, for the Cells are guarded by the Interrogator-Chaplains.

Interrogator-Chaplains

Long ago, during the glory days of the Great Crusade, the organization known as the Chaplaincy was established by the Word Bearers as part of a reeducation initiative. Like all legions, the Dark Angels adapted the Chaplains and adapted them to their own needs. Thus as the Lion began to carry out his plans, the Interrogator-Chaplains were at his right hand, carrying his commands wherever he sent them. They quickly became some of the most devoted servants of Chaos, learning the esoteric lore of the Ruinous Powers from the tomes of Luther. During the Leonine Heresy, they were led by an Astartes named Nemiel, who was directly responsible for the corruption of the Blood Angels to the worship of Khorne. However, Nemiel fell during the Scouring, slaughtered by Nassir Amit the Flesh-Tearer, and after the disappearance of the Lion, they were left without a master.

Since then, the Interrogator-Chaplains have played the role of kingmaker in the First Legion. It is they who maintain the ruthless secrecy of the Dark Angels, even amongst their own ranks, and those Grandmasters who threaten to call too much attention to the First are dealt with by them. In their possession is a list with the names of all the Unsullied, whom they hunt for relentlessly. Each Unsullied they capture is subjected to horrific torture in order to corrupt them into renouncing their vows to the Emperor, an act for which they earn a Black Pearl. However, such occurrences are rare, and even the greatest of these grim warriors has only ever amassed ten in total.

As of M41, they are led by High Interrogator Sapphon, the Finder of Secrets. Though he is not the oldest or cruelest among their ranks, a role which is filled by the utterly insane legionary known as Asmodai, Sapphon has maintained his rank due to his unusually-high level of charisma, more akin to a son of Guilliman rather than the Lion. Over the millennia, the number of Unsullied found has gradually decreased, and it is unknown how many still remain. However, Sapphon refuses to stop the hunt, for his sole purpose in life is to find their leader, Astelan the Wandered, who continues to elude the grasp of the Dark Angels while thwarting their ambitions at every turn.

The position of the Rock is constantly changing. Part of this is due to the legion's secretive nature, for it becomes much harder to attack the Rock if its position is constantly changing. Pursuit of the Ouroboros has led the Rock across the galaxy as it passes through the strange tunnels created in the wake of the Triumvirate Engine. Only the Tuchulcha enables them to even enter these passages, which never last for long and often collapse back into the trackless Immaterium shortly after the Rock passes through. Occasionally their homeworld emerges into realspace, arriving far beyond the typical Mandeville Points in blatant disregard of the laws of physics in order to support their forces in pursuit of some secret agenda. Such times often portend the destruction of whatever world they arrive over, for the Dark Angels are not wont to leave witnesses. It is unknown what the First seeks to gain by capturing the Ouroboros, or if they even have a means of doing so, but should they ever succeed, it would surely spell doom for the galaxy.

Combat Doctrines and Organization

Whatever the case, the First Legion remains highly regimented and organized. In place of the splintered warbands present in many other traitor legions, the Dark Angels remain a cohesive whole, still centered around the command structures established by Lion El'Jonson so long ago. However, they are rarely assembled together on the Rock, instead preferring to wage their own campaigns in scattered fleets across the galaxy. As with all things related to the First Legion, this is done in the name of secrecy, both from their enemies and from other forces of the legion. However, while individual goals may differ, their overarching strategy remains the same, something that is made all the more remarkable by the fact they have no actual legion master.

As secretive as ever, this particular truth of the First Legion is one known only to a select few, for it originates in the distant past and concerns one of the most hidden and deepest parts of the Rock. After the Lion was vanquished by the Emperor upon Terra, the remaining commanders of the First Legion quickly fled in defeat. Most of the senior commanders present were slain in this headlong retreat, and by the time the legion mustered again, the highest ranking officer present was Farith Redloss, who before a series of battlefield promotions during the Solar War had been but a squire underneath Legion Master Holguin. Now in charge of the First Legion, Redloss had returned to Caliban expecting to have to contest this role with Luther. The Grandmaster of Caliban was perhaps the only other legionary who could challenge his claim, for his rank and seniority, combined with the favor bestowed on him by the Ruinous Powers, were unmatched by any other commander.

With the presumed death of the primarch, the Grandmaster should have been a natural successor, for it was he who had Caliban in ages long past. However, as Redloss and his men soon learned, Luther was far from in a position to lead his brothers. During the destruction of Caliban, he had been engaged in a vicious duel against Astelan, leader of the Unsullied, who had interrupted his ritual. When the power he had summoned slipped the reins, the backlash was catastrophic, shattering the planet and dealing a far worse fate to Luther himself. The Watchers in the Dark, long the defenders of Caliban, had slipped unseen into Aldurukh, and when the time was right, activated the potent defenses of the Tower of Angels. Dozens of Luther's soldiers, caught in the midst of its eldritch power, were turned to stone, while time itself calcified around the Grandmaster itself, slowly draining away in fits and bursts.

Luther was thus effectively trapped in a stasis field, unable to move or perceive the passage of time, and when his lieutenants discovered this, they realized the opportunity they faced. They quickly swore loyalty to Redloss the Dreadbringer, who appointed himself as Supreme Grandmaster, Keeper of the Truth, and formed a council of Grandmasters as his advisors so as to diminish Luther's title and claim should he ever escape. As the centuries passed and the Rock was built up, the tower of the Angelicasta which housed the time-locked battlefield was quickly overshadowed, becoming the heart of the fortress's labyrinthine dungeons. A vast oubliette was built around his cell, slowly leeching away the power containing Luther in order to help power the Rock's planetary engines as well as possibly free him. However, over time this goal became more and more secondary as Luther was slowly forgotten, tended to only by Interrogator-Chaplains, who continue to maintain a watch over the Grandmaster. On occasion he is temporarily freed from his temporal prison, ranting out crazed prophecies about the Ouroboros and his foster-son which are quickly written down by the Interrogators in hopes of gleaning its secrets.

However, few are holding their breath for this eventuality, for should he ever escape, Luther would most likely be executed for his failures. His ambition and pride are antithetical to the secretive sons of the Lion, who trace their lineage to him rather than Luther's Order. Even Redloss is regarded more favorably, for despite his shameful death at the hands of the Unsullied in M33, the Council of Grandmasters he established continued to keep the legion intact. This Council, now known as the Knights of the Round, is the direct descendant of the system of Voted-Lieutenants established by the Lion himself during the Great Crusade, which itself evolved from the structure of the Hexagrammaton after being influenced by the tenets of the Order on Caliban. Thus there are six Grandmasters, one for each of the Wings, along with a Supreme Grandmaster who acts as a tiebreaker. Beneath each of these exists multiple Masters, who are each responsible for a company and all the warriors that entails.

Cypher

The identity of the Space Marine known only as Cypher is perhaps one of the galaxy's biggest mysteries, no small feat in a legion such as the First. Wrapped in shadows, Cypher is a cloaked legionary armed with twin pistols, which he wields with unparalleled skill. He most often seems to show up from nowhere, bringing only death and destruction in his wake before vanishing once again. However, he himself rarely perpetrates any of these atrocities: rather, they are carried out by those attempting to apprehend him, both Chaotic and Imperial forces alike. His true motives remain unknown, but he does not seem aligned to the Ruinous Powers, for the paranoid rants of Luther have painted him as a threat to the First Legion due to the secrets he holds. The various Supreme Grandmasters of the First Legion have alternately attempted to capture or slay him, but have yet been unsuccessful, and he has slain more than a few of them in turn over the millennia. None have been able to uncover his true identity, for there have been multiple legionaries bearing that title. However, the greatest mystery surrounding Cypher is undoubtedly how he came to possess the Lion Sword, the blade of the Archtraitor, though he has never wielded the massive blade in combat.

The primary role of the Supreme Grandmasters of the First Legion is to keep their companies from tearing each other apart. While their various forces may appear to work towards the same goal, the truth is the First Legion are still the servants of Chaos, and as such, are far from united. The Dark Angels are split into dozens of warbands like every other legion, each of which pay allegiance to one of the Hexagrammaton, the Six Wings of the First Legion. These wings each specialize in a particular facet of war, and are as follows: the Deathwing, Ravenwing, Dreadwing, Ironwing, Stormwing, and Firewing. Each of these Wings pursues its own agenda, and the various warbands will not hesitate to slaughter each other over resources or in pursuit of their own agenda. The first three of these Wings are known as the Inner Circle, for they alone know the truth of the Unsullied, whereas the Ironwing and Stormwing remain largely unaware their loyal brothers still exist. The Firewing are not part of the Inner Circle, but as experts at intelligence warfare, it is all but certain they know as well.

First and foremost of the Hexagrammaton is the Deathwing. Originally deriving from the First Great Company, the Deathwing once served as the bodyguards and companions of the Primarch, for they fought exclusively in terminator armor. Even in the 41st Millennium, when even loyalist legions struggle to muster an entire company in such priceless relics, let alone traitor legions who lack any real resupply, the Deathwing continue to outfit tens of thousands of Astartes in these mighty relic suits. Their expertise focuses entirely on melee combat, and there are few forces more skilled than them at boarding actions. Their stubborn natures are legendary, and it is this refusal to divulge secrets which has long led the Interrogator-Chaplains to favor them above others in attempts to seize the title of Supreme Grandmaster.

The Deathwing are perhaps the most relentless hunters of the Unsullied, and their leader, Grandmaster Belial, who is one of the greatest swordsmen in the legion's history, for he is a relentless perfectionist. His origins are a mystery: some claim him to be incredibly young, barely a few centuries old, while others claim him to be a veteran of the Great Crusade, for he wields the Sword of Silence, one of five ancient obsidian power swords known as the Heavenfall Blades. These relics are carried only by the most senior officers, including the three Grandmasters of the Deathwing, the Ravenwing, and the Dreadwing. The fourth is carried by Luther, and is thus trapped within his stasis field, while the Fifth is suspected to be the blade of the Archtraitor himself, now carried by the renegade known as Cypher. Belial's sworn mission as Grandmaster of the Deathwing is to recover the Lion Sword, a task he is determined to accomplish at any cost, for it would be a source of great shame should anyone else capture Cypher. So fervent are the legionaries under his command it is rumored that within their terminator armor lies nothing but skeletons, driven to serve Belial and keep his secrets even beyond the grave.

The second of the Hexagrammaton, and the closest rivals of the Deathwing, are the Ravenwing. On paper the Second Great Company, the Ravenwing have taken the opposite approach, focusing entirely on speed. Their origins lie both in the mounted knights of Caliban, as well as search and destroy formations of the nomadic war clans of Terra itself that date back even before the Great Crusade, a far quicker method of war that requires much greater aggression and risk than that of the Deathwing. The Ravenwing came into their own during the Rangdan Xenocides, when the migratory hosts of the Rangda had to be met with great urgency lest they infest and corrupt a new world with their viral ecosystems. As one might expect, their forces are filled with mobile troops, often mounted on bikes. However, more than a few have been spotted riding daemonic cavalry, though whether this is a specialized unit or simply a gift of the Ruinous Powers is unknown.

Operating at high speeds and serving as the vanguard of the First Legion is a risky business. It is for this reason that there have been far more Grandmasters of the Ravenwing slain than those of the Deathwing, and their current leader, Sammael, Master of the Hunt, is the 348th of that title. It is the Ravenwing who most often clash with the Imperium, for they are almost on the move as often as the White Scars as they hunt from system to system, relentlessly seeking out rumors of the Fallen and causing havoc. Sammael has led dozens of different Grand Hunts against Imperial, Chaotic, and Xenotic foes, claiming trophies to honor the Archtraitor's memory which he has mounted on his relic jetbike, an ancient artifact named Corvex. The Ravenwing possess hundreds of anti-gravitic vehicles and skimmers, for they are one of the few Chaotic forces to have retained such mighty weapons, and chief among this arsenal are the relics known as the Darkshrouds.

Ravenwing Darkshroud

Perhaps the most potent and least understood weapon in the arsenal of the Ravenwing is the Darkshroud. On the surface, the Darkshroud appears unremarkable save for the fact that it is a land speeder in service to a Traitor Legion as opposed to the far more common usage by the loyalist legions. However, up close the difference immediately becomes visible, for mounted on the back is a large stone statue of a hooded angel inside of a reliquary. These statues are said to have been taken from the ruins of the Angelicasta after the destruction of Caliban, and some whisper that they are the fossilized remnants of Luther's assistants who were petrified after his ritual went awry.

Whatever the case, these idols are what earned the Darkshroud its name, for when imbued with psychic energy, they release a shadowy field that shields the speeder from all but the most grievous harm. This defensive capability combined with the insane speeds at which the Ravenwing are accustomed to operating means these crafts are all but impossible to hit, let alone destroy. Though less than a dozen of these speeders exist, their legendary prowess has inspired other Ravenwing to mount similar idols atop their own speeders, the so-called Vengeance variant of land speeder. These lesser imitations create no fields of darkness, instead opting to mount a plasma storm battery, but they do inspire dread in those that gaze upon them, for the high speed at which these craft jink means few can be certain whether they face one of the original Darkshrouds or merely an imposter.

The final main faction of the Hexagrammaton is the Dreadwing. Where the Deathwing live for melee combat in the heart of a Zone Mortalis, and the Ravenwing zoom by in a roar of thrusters and engines, the Dreadwing prefer to deal death from afar through judicious use of heavy firepower. Their origins lie in the dark days of the Rangdan Xenocides, when the horrific xenotic abominations threatened to undo the Dark Angels. Where other legions had destroyer squadrons and moritat agents, the First unleashed entire companies armed with esoteric weaponry hailing from the Dark Age of Technology. Led by a Voted-Lieutenant who bore the honorific of Dreadbringer, many Supreme Grandmasters have hailed from this branch of the Hexagrammaton, including Farith Redloss, who led the legion in the days after the Siege of Terra. Their fearsome reputation comes from more than just their name, for where they walked, no living thing survived. Even the mightiest Slaugth war-forms, whose foot soldiers were more than a match physically for a Primarch, let alone an Astartes, were annihilated from afar by potent beams of energy cutting them down without mercy.

The weapons of the Dreadwing are varied and potent. Greatest among their number are the Eskatons, those warriors who have commanded their brethren in the destruction of an entire world. The Eskatons hail from a variety of backgrounds, from techmarines utilizing ancient relics, to unbound sorcerers who unleash eldritch abominations from another reality, to more than a few apothecaries, for those who save lives often know how best to snuff it out. The most common unit in a Dreadwing warband are the Interemptors, humorless brutes armed with plasma burners that unleash torrents of raw starfire along with a burst of radiation in doses lethal even to an Astartes after a few decades. Those who become sufficiently skilled with such weapons are often promoted to the rank of Naufragia, where they are gifted with terminator armor designed to better withstand the primal energies released by their guns, for the Deathwing are not the only group to possess these ancient suits.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of the Dreadwing is their small numbers compared to the biker hordes of the Ravenwing or the living shield-walls of the Deathwing. To counteract this, the Dreadwing often ally with the other factions of the Hexagrammaton, most often the Stormwing or the Ironwing. The Stormwing has always been the largest faction, for among their ranks are counted the bulk of the legion's line infantry. Most of the Unsullied came from the ranks of the Stormwing, for the Terran legionaries had never truly been trusted enough to be initiated into the inner circles of the Lion's councils, though the Inner Circle and the Interrogator-Chaplains makes sure the Stormwing remain unaware of the blight on their honor. Most sorcerers of the First Legion hail from this Wing, though more than a few of them have either ascended to join the Inner Circle or were executed after accidently learning of the existence of the Unsullied.

The Ironwing meanwhile, as their name suggests, concern themselves with maintaining the legion's fleet and war engines. It is they who provide the technical expertise to operate tanks, often utilizing methods not countenanced by the Mechanicum. All Techmarines and Warpsmiths of the First Legion hail from the Ironwing, and it is they who operated the legendary Excindio Battle-Automata. They have forged many accords with Vashtorr the Arkifane, utilizing his daemon engines from the Forge of Souls to wreak great havoc. The techmarines of the Ironwing often serve as alliance-brokers, for they are permitted to move freely about the warbands of the Inner Circle to repair their war machines and are thus trusted by nearly all of the paranoid sons of the Lion. The Stormwing and Ironwing most often ally with the Dreadwing to counterbalance the ambitions of the Deathwing and Ravenwing, though on occasion they reverse this support if it suits their interests.

The final wing of the Hexagrammaton on the other hand is not like these previous five, for they are by far the smallest and most esoteric of the entire First Legion. The Firewing are perhaps the most dangerous of all, for they are a branch of subtle killers, murderers in the dark who seek the total destruction of their enemies without them even knowing it. They move in the shadows, carrying out assassinations, sabotage, and espionage on a scale rivaled only by the Alpha Legion. Many Firewing agents have infiltrated the other Wings, such as the Deathwing or Dreadwing, carrying out their own schemes in the process, and some even hailed from Terra, for they had been carrying out the Emperor's commands long before the Firewing was ever officially organized. More than a few Firewing were part of Astelan's rebellion against Luther, the so-called Enigmati, who hide their true identities from traitors and loyalists alike as they continue to carry out Astelan's will, though even they have not seen him in millennia.

The schemes of the Firewing are highly convoluted, and often at odds with any conventional logic. They seemingly kill at random, though never without purpose, and their internal factions, aside from the group loyal to Astelan, have remained a secret from not only the rest of the legion, but from the Imperium itself. The Firewing have acted many times in the past to destabilize the Emperor's domains, most notably during the Nova Terra Interregnum, where no less than the Chaos Lord Griffayn the Spearcast, Voted-Lieutenant of the entire Firewing, was involved in aiding the secessionist Ur-Council in their attempts to sunder the Imperium. Oftentimes they sell the information they have gathered to the Deathwing or Ravenwing, pointing them in the direction of the Unsullied in exchange for resources to carry out yet more heinous schemes in the future. Many companies of the Alpha Legion have spent centuries attempting to undo and subvert the efforts of the Firewing, to varying degrees of success.

As a result of their secrecy and isolation, the Dark Angels have comparatively few allies. Most of this is due to the fact the warbands are scattered across the galaxy, rarely entering the Warp save for the times they seek to return to the Rock. The other main reason for this is by choice, for their goals, selfish as are all Traitor Legions, often clash with the aims of other Heretic Astartes. Of the legions which the Dark Angels were responsible for corrupting, perhaps the most frequent allies are the Black Templars. During the Leonine Heresy, Sigismund took orders from the Archtraitor himself, and while the Destroyer no longer bows to anyone, god or man, he has long accepted alliances and partnerships with those whose goals of shattering the Imperium align with his own. The First Legion often takes advantage of the chaos unleashed by the Destroyer's Black Crusades in order to carry out their own agendas, hidden in the shadows cast by the systems set ablaze by the wrath of the Templars.

Aside from the Black Templars, the Dark Angels work most often with the Emperor's Children, whose desires to seed rot and despair are rarely at cross-purposes with the more enigmatic goals of the Dark Angels. Similar alliances of convenience occasionally occur with the Ultramarines, who too seek to utilize the Black Crusades for their own ends, but such relations are neutral at best and often fraught with mistrust, for there are few more fickle than the servants of Slaanesh. However, the relations between the Dark Angels only deteriorate from there. The White Scars rarely interact with them, for while most have renounced their past, those that have survived since the Heresy often despise the sons of the Lion whom they see as having sold them out to the Ultramarines. Meanwhile, the cold logic of the Iron Warriors means few are unwilling to form a partnership with a legion as secretive as the First. It is this same reticence that creates discord with the Thousand Sons, whose schemes to acquire knowledge and power form a natural antithesis. Perhaps the worst relations of any Traitor Legions exist between the Dark Angels on one hand and the Blood Angels and War Hounds on the other. Both the Ninth and Twelfth Legions absolutely despise the First for their actions during the Leonine Heresy, and have maintained a burning hatred for the sons of Caliban for their father's actions.

There are few recorded interactions between the Dark Angels and xenos, save for a notable exception with the Aeldari. The Children of the Stars, long renowned in their skill in divining the future, often discover the hidden plots of the Dark Angels long before anyone else. As they are the sworn foes of Chaos, the warhosts of the Craftworlds have undone the schemes of the First Legion on more than a few instances, and many disasters have no doubt been averted by their interventions. At other times their Farseers will alert Imperial forces to such hidden activity, and while such xenos can never truly be trusted, such portents are often too dire to ignore. However, oftentimes the Imperium is not alerted to the presence of the Dark Angels until it is far too late. The First Legion has not lost any of their technological prowess that they were gifted by the Emperor so long ago, and their ships excel in arriving unannounced, hidden by both conventional means and from the divination of seers.

There exists a lasting grudge between the First and Eighth Legions, a result of both the Thramas Crusade and of El'Jonson killing Curze during the Siege of Terra. Likewise, the Inquisition is constantly vigilant regarding rumors of Dark Angels activity, for they greatly desire to uncover what motivates these traitors to act in such strange and secretive ways. However, the greatest enemy of the Dark Angels is themselves. Even during the Great Crusade, the operations of the legion were overseen directly by Lion El'Jonson, whose upbringing left him all but incapable of trusting others. The proverb of the right hand not knowing what left was doing was taken to the extreme in the First, whose companies often operated in the same warzones without knowing their brothers were even present, let alone what objectives they had been assigned. Thus it was all but inevitable that the Dark Angels would splinter, riven into factions based on which of the Six Hosts of the Angels of Death they hailed from. The Deathwing, Ravenwing, and Dreadwing each represent mighty forces in their own right, but without the Lion to bind them together, they remain fractured and opposed to each other.

Beliefs and Warcry

However, the saying that they are their own greatest enemy can be construed in another manner, for there is one thing that unifies the Dark Angels like no other: the Unsullied. The existence of loyalist sons of the Lion is perhaps the legion's greatest secret, and one that invokes their fury like no other. Astelan the First of the First and his wayward brothers were initially thought to be destroyed in the wake of Luther's ritual which shattered Caliban, but as the centuries passed, rumors and sightings of robed Astartes in sable armor began to occur. It was this possibility that first turned the Dark Angels away from their pursuit of the Ouroboros, and during the tumult of the First Black Crusade, they discovered the first of the Unsullied. At first they believed it to be an isolated incident, but as more began to appear, the Dark Angels turned their full attention toward the matter, thus beginning the Forgotten Wars.

As the centuries passed and more and more Unsullied were captured, the First Legion realized they were apprehending far more legionaries than Astelan's forces had ever had. Many Unsullied had never even been on Caliban, nurturing a hatred for a primarch they had never met. They in turn had inspired mortals to follow their lead, entire civilizations who hatefully saw the Archtraitor and his sons as daemons incarnate. It soon became apparent Astelan was inducting new legionaries to replace the fallen, and due to the temporal chaos unleashed by Luther, they were appearing across time and space. This represented an existential threat to the paranoid Dark Angels, for aside from the shame represented by brothers loyal to the False Emperor, Astelan knew many of the legion's secrets. Thus the First Legion began the Quest, swearing to never rest until they had destroyed every last trace of Astelan the Wandered and his deluded followers.

This Quest has become the central and overriding belief of the First Legion. As a Dark Angel rises through the ranks and proves his worth and discretion, he is inducted into new circles of trust, permitted ever-greater access to knowledge about the legion and its many secrets. Such initiation rites are often performed on a grand scale, as entire warbands bring their fleet on a pilgrimage into the Eye of Terror, following the same path their primarch did so long ago. Those who fail such tests are executed in the eyes of all as a warning, while those who successfully command such expeditions are initiated still further. Only the so-called Inner Circle, those who have proven their worth time and time again are permitted to know that it is the Unsullied that they are hunting. The paranoia of the Dark Angels means knowledge of their unfallen brethren represent an existential threat, and mutual suspicion has seen more than one warband turn on their allies to hide their agenda, for all Dark Angels believe that the ends always justify the means.

Thus for ten thousand years, the Dark Angels have carried out this Quest with an unshakable grim resolve. Only a handful of individuals outside of the First Legion even know it exists, for the secrecy of the Dark Angels means most have no clue as to their location, let alone their goals. So dedicated are they to keep the Quest hidden that all legionaries of the First have fail-safes implanted in their armor, detonating with great force shortly after their deaths to ensure no knowledge can be recovered from their bodies. Such fanatic paranoia has been embedded in their legion culture since the day they found their primarch, and they ruthlessly seek to destroy any who would seek to uncover their schemes. Thus while they have never found Astelan, or at least, none have survived to report finding him, he remains their top priority due to the danger he represents. The only other target to rival the First's obsession of the Wandered is Cypher, for while Astelan's goals are somewhat known, nothing is known of Cypher's intentions. His possession of the Lion Sword also represents a grave insult to the sons of the Lion, who greatly desire to capture all relics of their long-lost father.

Azrael, the Angel Who Laughs

Few loyalist Astartes are known for their sense of humor, let alone the Traitor Legions. However, there is one notable exception among the Dark Angels: 'Supreme' Grandmaster Azrael. Recruited from a feral world, Azrael led an unremarkable career as a sergeant in the Stormwing until an assault on the Shrine World of Darkmor. After slaughtering the defenders with ease, for no less than six chapters led by Supreme Grandmaster Naberius had joined in, the Dark Angels found themselves trapped by sudden Warp storms, whereupon they were assaulted by daemons. The treacherous warpspawn slaughtered entire companies, delaying the First Legion long enough for a strike force of Night Lords led by Legion Master Gendor Skraivok to descend upon them as the storms cleared.

As the Night Lords closed in, the Dark Angels began to grow desperate, some more so than others. Determined to ensure his survival, Azrael had agreed to undergo a dangerous ritual, whereby Grandmaster Ezekiel bound a Daemon of Slaanesh known as Azazel into his body, soul, and name, fusing the two in an desperate experiment that yielded unexpected results. Driven insane by the maddened whispers of the daemon, Azrael began to howl with laughter, killing Legion Master Skraivok in single combat before leading his men in a mad dash back to their ships. Gifted with uncanny charisma by the daemon conjoined to him, Azrael quickly cemented his authority over the survivors on the journey back to the Rock.

Once there, Azrael demanded to be named Supreme Grandmaster in place of the deceased Naberius. However, recognizing his obvious insanity, the Knights of the Round refused to grant Azrael the honor he craved, and attempted to kill him, though they proved unable to best the Half-Daemon. In response, he named himself Supreme Grandmaster anyway, gathering a warband unto himself, which he named the Star Phantoms, and stole the ancient relic blade known as the Sword of Secrets before fleeing aboard the Invincible Reason. From his pilfered flagship, the Angel Who Laughs has continued to plague the galaxy for millennia, carrying out maddened schemes in pursuit of his own goals entirely separate from the rest of his brothers. The Inner Circle has been forced to give up naming a new Supreme Grandmaster, for every time they do so, Azrael has arrived shortly after to execute his would-be usurper in the midst of some battle.

Though only the Star Phantoms recognize Azrael's claim to the title of Supreme Grandmaster, it must be said that he has at least some claim to it, for he has seemingly done the impossible: unifying forces from all Six Hosts of the Angels of Death within a single warband, including many powerful Astartes in their own right such as Grandmaster Ezekiel, Company Master Lazarus, and more than a few Interrogator-Chaplains such as Asmodai. The Star Phantoms wear ash white armor, and continue to utilize the same weapons and formation as the rest of the Dark Angels. The Half-Daemon and his men have most recently been spotted upon the Planet of the Sorcerers, though what business he has with the Sons of Magnus only he knows.

The Dark Angels have a complicated relationship with Chaos and the Ruinous Powers. Despite their role as the first legion to fall to Chaos, the Dark Angels are far from being the favored servants of the Ruinous Powers. This is primarily due to the fact the jealous Chaos Gods each prefer their own chosen legion to the detriment of all others. However, this displeasure is amplified toward the Dark Angels due to the indifference they showed during the Siege of Terra. Where the other legions were unleashing slaughter in mayhem in the name of Chaos, either explicitly in cases such as the Blood Angels or implicitly in those legions not aligned to a particular Ruinous Power, the Dark Angels remained isolated in their fortress for most of the Siege. Without El'Jonson to intercede on their behalf, the wrath of the Primordial Annihilator was turned upon the Dark Angels as they fled. Thus many legionaries were forced to turn to Chaos in order to save themselves, bargains which still haunt countless Astartes even now ten thousand years later.

This fact holds true for not only El'Jonson's traitorous sons, but his loyalist sons as well. Hurled through the Warp after the destruction of Caliban, many of the Unsullied were trapped in a realm where time held little meaning. Though most rejected the lies of the Ruinous Powers, having learned firsthand of their horrors at the hands of Luther and his followers, their souls nonetheless had been touched by the Warp. As the centuries passed and more and more turned up on isolated backwaters, bereft of their companions and brothers, there were those in whom the rot began to fester. Some began to believe the lies whispered in their dreams, while others began to utilize more and more dubious means to oppose their traitorous kin. One example of this is the Daemon Prince known as Marbas, who, after falling in with some War Hounds, embraced their mysterious patron, shedding his mortality in exchange for the power to fight Chaos. Now bearing the leonine visage of a Calibanite Great Beast atop a suit of ancient armor, Marbas's very existence is designed to mock the Dark Angels, and has even crossed blades with Sammael, Grandmaster of the Ravenwing. He is likewise anathema to the rest of the Unsullied, who see him as no different than the other monsters of the First Legion they are sworn to oppose.

As such, the rate of visible Chaos corruption is highly variable amongst the First Legion. The oldest Astartes, those who have survived since the days of the Heresy, are those who have upheld their end of the bargains they made with daemonic entities. Were it not for their father's allegiance to the Ruinous Powers, one would be tempted to classify them as Renegades rather than Heretic Astartes. Many of the leaders of the Hexagrammaton tend to reject working with daemons as they draw too much attention their way, for the presence of black-armored Astartes is far less conspicuous than the unnatural horrors of the Immaterium. In contrast, those Astartes who have been created since then, those who form the lower ranks and are uninitiated into the Inner Circle, are far more likely to have bargained away their souls. Oftentimes this takes the form of deals with the various Ruinous Powers in exchange for unnatural vigor, while at other times, their souls have been bargained away, sold by their commanders who seek to empower themselves.

In place of the overwhelming devotion to the Ruinous Powers, many legionaries of the Inner Circle have turned their focus toward the Lore of the Triumvirate Engines. Knowledge of the Engines is among the most tightly controlled information in the galaxy, for such secrets are granted only by ascending through the ranks of the First Legion. Legends tell of a serpentine nightmare sundered, whose three parts, when united, would form a creature capable of burrowing through time and space in a way unseen since. Only the eldest and most powerful sons of Caliban are permitted to learn that one of these Engines, the Tuchulcha, currently resides in the Heart of the Rock, or that another, the Ouroboros, is what the Rock constantly pursues. What exactly the third of the Triumvirate actually is, let alone its location, seems unknown to even the Dark Angels, but many believe that the Lion knew it. Thus the First Legion constantly analyzes their father's actions, each legionary hoping to be the one to uncover his secrets in order to hold that above their brothers. They are perhaps the only legion which lost their father to have still held true to his legacy, a marked contrast to others such as the White Scars, War Hounds, or even Raven Guard, which all underwent drastic changes in the years following their primarch's demise.

In similar fashion, the armor of the Dark Angels has remained the same since the days of the Great Crusade and Leonine Heresy. Their primary color is black, which is offset by heraldic symbols which signify rank or levels of initiation. The main exception to this is the bone-white armor of the Deathwing, who alone of the Hexagrammaton utilize such drastically different colors. Many legionaries choose to obscure their armor with robes, a holdover from the knightly orders of Caliban which comes in a variety of forms indicating the level of initiation they have reached. As mentioned before, this black livery often aids them in remaining undetected on Imperial worlds, often passing themselves off as Raven Guard or Iron Hands, two legions who also wear black armor, as few mortals will know enough about Astartes to tell the different, let alone work up the courage to inquire into their business.

In order to differentiate themselves from their traitor kin, the Unsullied have adopted their own colors, a deep green. This choice in paint was originally adopted on Caliban, where it aided them in remaining undetected in the dark forests of the Death World. So too did they change their symbols. Traitor Dark Angels often bedeck their armor with the six-pointed star of the Hexagrammaton or the eight-pointed star of Chaos, and each wing has its own particular insignia. The Inner Circle of the Dark Angels combines all of these, a rarely-seen symbol showing a winged sword atop the wheel of Chaos at whose center is a hooded skull. The Unsullied have thus opted for the opposite path, for while they are far from unified, they seem to instinctively choose more plain symbols, often a plain sword with wings painted in white to show their purity.

The Dark Angels prefer not to utilize war-cries, for those tend to draw unwanted attention toward their identity. They believe it serves little purpose, as they fully intend to not only leave no survivors but to ensure there is little trace they were ever there. In the case of the Ravenwing, they are often moving too fast for any onlookers to make any sense of what they might choose to say. The Deathwing on the other hand chooses silence to signify their utter mercilessness and indifference to who they fight, while those of the Dreadwing prefer to fight from such distances that none would hear them speak even if they did. The sole exception is when the Dark Angels find themselves facing the Unsullied. Here they utilize but one war-cry: "Repent! For tomorrow you die!"

The Burning Blade struck my back, the third and final curse issuing from my father's mouth in the same instant I unleashed Enuncia once more through clenched teeth. It was an act of pure desperation: such might was not meant to be released again so soon, for the fundamental nature of the universe dislikes being invoked so casually. Rather than time freezing as it had against Konrad, it splintered. My spirit was torn from my body, which was obliterated by the Emperor's Sword. In that moment, the Emperor's hold over my soul was destroyed, for his attack was intended to eradicate every part of his creation. In that moment, I became untethered from his designs: the shard of himself he had embedded in me was sundered, and by virtue of the ability granted to me by the Primordial Annihilator, my power and lifeforce was imbued in the talisman I had left behind: the Heavenfall, an amalgamation of my Lion Sword, the Athame, and the Burning Blade .

With one final effort, I hurled my sword through space and time. As expected, the Triumvirate Engines took notice, the result of a bargain I had not yet made. They redirected it, sent it through a forested realm of hidden pathways back to the world which raised me. It was there, amidst the ruins of Caliban, that I was reborn. A son of my bloodline took up my blade, and in that moment, I subsumed him, sending his spirit and identity back to that moment on Terra to be obliterated in my place. I took up my blade once more, the Lion Sword seeming far larger now that my body was that of an Astartes rather than a primarch, my burden lightened by the knowledge that the future is not preordained.

Since that day, I have guided my sons in secret, for not even they know of my true nature. I walk through the shadowed paths, passing through the arboreal realm as I gather my strength in preparation for the end of the cycle, when I will assume my true form once more. Upon my back is my Sword, which I will unsheath when the time comes. Until then, I will remain hidden, and to that end, I have gone by many names: the Cowled Giant, the Unforgiving Knight, the Hunter of Hunters. I am the Voice of the Emperor and the Warmaster, the Thrice-Cursed Truest Echo, and the Lord of the Fallen. Once I was Lion El'Jonson, and one day I will be again. Until then though, I am Cypher.

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A/N: Just over one and a half years of work have come to this, the final main entry in the tale of the Leonine Heresy. When I started, I could never have imagined how much the story would blossom as I wrote it. It's a bit bittersweet finally revealing so many of these mysteries, some of which even I did not know the answers to until I sat down and wrote it. Perhaps my biggest regret is this particular index, by far the largest I've written, is only 39k~ words; a part of me was hoping to reach 40k words for this 40k story.

However, the tale of the Archtraitor Lion El'Jonson and the galaxy he helped ruin do not end here. There are more secrets to uncover, more lives to be snuffed out in this grimdark galaxy, and more relics to obtain. The universe of the Leonine Heresy shall continue: next month, I plan to upload Index Astartes: Grey Knights, so I hope you all will return to learn what Malcador the Sigillite and his warriors have been up to.

Finally, I would just like to say thanks to everyone who has stuck around through this, from my beta reader who spent many a night listening to me read the same paragraphs over and over until they sounded right, to all of you, who have stumbled upon my story and stuck around for reasons of your own. As always, please leave comments, notes, suggestions, what you did and didn't like, etc. Thank you once more.

Sharrowkyn, out.