The Horus Heresy

The Dark Angels were the first of the Emperor's Space Marine Legions, and in their earliest incarnation fought as the personal army of the Master of Humanity. Unyielding, technologically capable, ruthless and insular, the Dark Angels at the time of the Horus Heresy were a powerful and highly independent Legion, used to operating on its own to conduct large scale campaigns and compliance actions.

The Iron Warriors were the grim, cold-hearted masters of the science of war among the Space Marines, the exemplars of strength and discipline turned exclusively to the systematic destruction of an enemy. The Legion was commanded by its Primarch Perturabo as an extension of his own mind and body, the will of each Legionary utterly sublimated to his conception of victory. More so than in any other Legion, the life of each warrior was secondary to his duty, as much a resource to be expended in the relentless calculus of war as bolt shell or lascannon charge.

Since the days of the VI^th Legion's inception on Terra, it has remained a Legion apart from its fellows, its origins shrouded as it garnered a fearsome reputation for its warriors' prowess as a shock-assault force as well as tireless pursuers and a peerless hunter-killer force. Unexpected violence was the Legion's calling card, its campaigns unsubtle, but brutally swift. Like their latter-day namesakes, the wolves of old Terra, its warriors' assaults are calculated exercises in ferocity, aimed to tear and rend until the foe lies in ruins or is driven to its death.

The Legionaries of the Imperial Fists, sons of the Primarch Rogal Dorn, were known as the stoic praetorians of Terra, faultlessly loyal, disciplined and methodical, and renowned as masters of assault and defence, fleet warfare and void combat. As the Imperium expanded ever outwards, so the crusaders of the Imperial Fists were to be found at the leading edge of the advance. In the wake of victory, the Imperial Fists would construct mighty fortresses that were as much garrisons against rebellion as they were beacons of Unification, ensuring that the work of the Great Crusade would stand eternal.

Even before the Dropsite Massacre, the Night Lords Legion was in many eyes already renegade in all but name. Having devoted themselves to the arts of terror and punishment in the service of the Emperor, they became a byword for fear itself during the Great Crusade, and the mere rumour of their approach was enough to send entire planets into panicked surrender. The Legion's Primarch, Konrad Curze, was the master of such terrifying surprise assaults and brutal punitive campaigns - a macabre figure obsessed with death and judgment.

In battle, the Blood Angels Legion was the incarnation of the Emperor's wrath upon those who rejected the gift of Unity. Led by their angelic Primarch Sanguinius, their coming was nothing less than apocalyptic judgement delivered upon the guilty from on high.

The Iron Hands were among the most technologically adept and remorseless of the Space Marine Legions. Under their Primarch Ferrus Manus, they were the brutal and unstoppable lords of the engines of war, wielding weapons and armoured tanks with the skill a master swordsman might a blade. Proud and relentless, the Legion fought for many years at the forefront of the Great Crusade, and won victories uncounted, though many labelled them as callous and as inhuman as the machines they employed with such devastating skill.

Of all the Space Marine Legions in the Emperor's service, the World Eaters were among the most feared; savage conquerors who neither knew nor gave quarter in battle. With their Primarch Angron at their head, they grew ever closer to becoming true monsters; butchers and madmen whose fury was fuelled by bloodshed, and was such that no sane warrior would stand willingly against them.

The Death Guard Legion were stalwart and implacable fighters, warriors who had made a specialty both of endurance under the harshest of circumstances and of overcoming the most nightmarish and inhospitable of war zones. Their name became a byword for unflinching determination and triumph through bloody, gruelling attrition when all else failed, and as a Legion they were key to some of the most difficult victories and arduous campaigns of the Great Crusade.

The Thousand Sons were born of capricious fate and have ever walked a precarious path between duty and damnation. The nascent Legion was spared destruction by the discovery of its Primarch, the one-eyed giant Magnus the Red. Only by Magnus' devotion to his newly-found sons, his vast intellect and his mastery of the arcane was the Legion saved.

Once a Legion whose loyalty to the Emperor and fanaticism were absolute, the Word Bearers were the foremost iconoclasts of the Great Crusade, tearing down false idols and scourging worlds of aberrant cults and xenos taint. But its master, the Primarch Lorgar, eventually fell into the error of leading his Legion and those they conquered into worshipping the Emperor as a god, requiring their brutal censure. In the aftermath of this punishment, although the Legion appeared to return to the path set out for them, secretly malice and resentment festered in the Word Bearers' hearts and they would fall prey to the machinations of the fell powers of the Warp, becoming a poisonous canker at the heart of the Imperium.

The Space Marines of the Salamanders Legion were the lords of fire and forge, they were masters of artifice and possessed of a fearsome and impregnable sense of honour and duty. Unyielding defenders of humanity on one hand and uncompromising destroyers of all who stood against them on the other, they embodied the ideals of the Great Crusade and its goals, bearing any toil and sacrifice in order to achieve victory.

The Raven Guard Legion were quick to exact justice and retribution upon the tyrant and the oppressor by striking from the shadows with lightning speed and shocking strength. The annals of the Great Crusade told few tales of the deeds the Legion enacted, for they and their Primarch, Corax, ever shunned the glare of adulation and the trappings of glory. Though able to engage in any sphere of warfare, the Raven Guard Legion favoured the tactics of patience, guile and subtlety, relying on unmatched skill in reconnaissance and infiltration in order to identify their foe's weakest point and then rapidly strike at it with precisely applied force.

Of all of the Legiones Astartes, the least is known for certain of the Alpha Legion, a force shrouded in mystery, deceit and myth. What was known was that the warriors of the Alpha Legion were the unsurpassed masters of misdirection and guile in warfare.