Full Transcript for Warhammer 40K Lore: The Sons of Horus

--> 03:00.107 [SPEAKER_01]: small glass cases containing regimental insignia and campaign medals from wars, whose names had been forgotten by everyone except men like Hornon. 03:02.568 --> 03:23.132 [SPEAKER_01]: The fireplace had a hearth that was faced in stone, but the flames themselves were a hololithic projection of considerable sophistication, tongues of amber and gold that flickered and danced and cast shifting shadows across the ceiling, with a randomness that was almost indistinguishable from the real thing. 03:24.634 --> 03:30.921 [SPEAKER_01]: There was even a heating element concealed within the surround that radiated a gentle steady 03:31.525 --> 03:40.911 [SPEAKER_01]: And on cold evenings, Holland would pull his chair close to the hath, and let the warmth and the flickering light work their ancient magic upon his spirits. 03:43.135 --> 03:55.037 [SPEAKER_01]: He did so now, settling into the deep leather of his reading chair, with a sigh of a body that had been on its feet longer than it would have liked, and was grateful, at last, for the permission to stop. 03:56.099 --> 04:04.435 [SPEAKER_01]: The chair was old, its leather cracked and softened by years of use, into something that yielded to his weight, moulding itself around him. 04:04.415 --> 04:26.127 [SPEAKER_01]: A glass of warmed Amosec sat on the small table at his elbow, placed there by his steward, and the centre of it, rich and faintly sweet, with the smoky undertone that marked it as Cyprian stock, distilled in the shadow of hive spires that had been producing the stuff for longer than most planetary governments had existed. 04:27.189 --> 04:32.717 [SPEAKER_01]: The scent cold upward 04:32.697 --> 04:35.161 [SPEAKER_01]: that seemed in no hurry to reach the ceiling. 04:36.783 --> 04:39.468 [SPEAKER_01]: The cratesat opened on the floor beside his chair. 04:39.989 --> 04:43.314 [SPEAKER_01]: Its contents partially unpacked and spread across the reading table. 04:43.835 --> 04:52.208 [SPEAKER_01]: In a careful arrangement that would have looked like chaos to anyone who did not understand the particular logic of a collector at work. 04:52.188 --> 05:05.515 [SPEAKER_01]: The bulk of the Machinistate's military antiquities, the weapons, the armour fragments, the banners, remained in the hold, waiting for a more thorough examination when time and space permitted. 05:06.657 --> 05:12.188 [SPEAKER_01]: What Holland had brought to his quarters was the box of data slates, two dozen of them. 05:12.168 --> 05:17.621 [SPEAKER_01]: each one sealed in a thin protective sleeve of the kind used by archivists and dealers. 05:18.202 --> 05:22.633 [SPEAKER_01]: Who understood that the medium was often as valuable as the message it carried. 05:24.689 --> 05:29.955 [SPEAKER_01]: He had been working through them in no particular order, picking up one, skimming its contents. 05:30.736 --> 05:35.743 [SPEAKER_01]: A quarter-master's inventory, from an astro-militarum regiment, he had never heard of. 05:36.664 --> 05:41.229 [SPEAKER_01]: A partial after action report from a campaign, whose name meant nothing to him. 05:42.171 --> 05:52.283 [SPEAKER_01]: A manifest of supply is requisitioned by an expeditionary fleet that had been dust for 9,000 years, and setting it aside before reaching for the next. 05:53.123 --> 05:58.191 [SPEAKER_01]: Most of them were of the sort that one finds in any military estate of sufficient age. 05:58.972 --> 06:20.025 [SPEAKER_01]: The paperwork of Empire, the bureaucratic sediment that accumulates around the machinery of war, like barnacles on the hull of a ship, unremarkable in isolation, but possessed of a cumulative weight that could in the hands of a patient scholar be sifted and sorted and coaxed into revealing something of the age that had produced it. 06:22.739 --> 06:25.203 [SPEAKER_01]: It was the 17th day to slate that stopped him. 06:26.105 --> 06:32.877 [SPEAKER_01]: It was unmarked, no designation, no classification stamp, no indication of its contents or provenance. 06:33.779 --> 06:45.540 [SPEAKER_01]: And when he slotted it into the reader built into the arm of his chair, the screen that flickered to life displayed text in a hand, so old and so formal that his eyes needed a moment to adjust. 06:45.520 --> 06:53.202 [SPEAKER_01]: The way eyes need a moment to adjust when moving from a brightly lit room into one illuminated only by candlelight. 06:55.004 --> 07:02.715 [SPEAKER_01]: It was a history, a history of a space marine legion, the sixteenth, the one that had called itself the Lunar Wars. 07:03.396 --> 07:06.921 [SPEAKER_01]: In an age when that name was spoken with pride rather than horror. 07:07.582 --> 07:14.593 [SPEAKER_01]: Before the galaxy learned what those walls were truly capable of when the leash was cut and the hunger was let loose. 07:15.834 --> 07:21.703 [SPEAKER_01]: The data slate held no author's name, no date, no attribution of any kind. 07:21.683 --> 07:33.651 [SPEAKER_01]: as though whoever had compiled it had understood that the truth it contained was more important than the identity of the hand that it set it down, and that some records are meant to outlive the men who make them. 07:35.588 --> 07:37.250 [SPEAKER_01]: Horlain sat down his glass. 07:37.931 --> 07:48.363 [SPEAKER_01]: He had not taken a sip in some time he realised, and the Amosec had cooled in its cup, and the Krono on the mantle had ticked through the better part of an hour, without his noticing. 07:49.124 --> 07:59.115 [SPEAKER_01]: The fire, the imitation fire, though in that moment it seemed as real, and as warm as any fire that had ever burned, crackled softly in the 07:59.095 --> 08:17.340 [SPEAKER_01]: and the shadows gathered close around his chair, like old friends settling in for a long evening, and the ship hummed its deep and endless hum around him, and Aaron Horland, minor noble, collector of forgotten things, leaned forward in his chair and began to read. 08:21.775 --> 08:30.049

[SPEAKER_01]: There was a time, and it is important to remember this, however difficult the remembering may be, when the imperium of man was young. 08:31.090 --> 08:47.057 [SPEAKER_01]: Not new but genuinely young, the way a child is young, full of furious energy and blind conviction, stumbling forward into a universe, it did not yet understand, with the certainty that it could reshape that universe, according to its will. 08:47.037 --> 09:07.939 [SPEAKER_01]: The emperor had spent lifetimes unifying terror through blood and fire and the sheer undeniable weight of his vision, and now at last his gaze turned upward beyond the smoke-stained skies of humanity's cradle toward the stars that had once belonged to mankind and would belong to mankind again. 09:10.622 --> 09:16.588 [SPEAKER_01]: To fight this war of reclamation, this great crusade as later generations would come 09:17.058 --> 09:20.483 [SPEAKER_01]: He raised armies the likes of which the galaxy had never seen. 09:21.444 --> 09:27.732 [SPEAKER_01]: Some were drawn from the forces that had already bled and suffered in his name during the long unification wars. 09:28.574 --> 09:33.500 [SPEAKER_01]: Veteran soldiers who had earned their place in whatever grand future he was building. 09:34.662 --> 09:46.558 [SPEAKER_01]: Others came from among his former enemies, warriors whose nations and cultures had been broken beneath his will, and who now found themselves with nowhere left to go but forward. 09:46.538 --> 09:52.673 [SPEAKER_01]: into his service, carrying weapons for a cause they had not chosen, but could not refuse. 09:53.636 --> 10:04.362 [SPEAKER_01]: Together these millions of mortal soldiers would form the backbone of the Imperial Army, and they would fight and die across 10,000 worlds in the centuries to come. 10:06.282 --> 10:12.231 [SPEAKER_01]: But the mortal armies vast as they were represented only a fraction of the Emperor's design. 10:13.052 --> 10:16.677 [SPEAKER_01]: For alongside them, he had created something more extraordinary. 10:17.498 --> 10:29.235 [SPEAKER_01]: The space marine legions, 20 great brotherhoods of genetically enhanced human warriors, whose physical and mental capabilities, dwarf those of any ordinary man. 10:30.194 --> 10:34.743 [SPEAKER_01]: Each legion had been forged from the genetic template of a primarck. 10:35.464 --> 10:53.097 [SPEAKER_01]: One of 20 demigods sons, the emperor had fashioned in his secret laboratories, beneath them Himalazian mountains, sons who had been torn from him by the malicious currents of the warp and scattered across the stars before he could raise them at his side. 10:55.304 --> 11:00.613 [SPEAKER_01]: The legions carried the legacy of those absent-fathers in the very marrow of their bones. 11:01.535 --> 11:05.743 [SPEAKER_01]: Shaped by a voice they had never heard in ways they could not fully understand. 11:06.624 --> 11:12.655 [SPEAKER_01]: And each bore the echo of its primarx nature, like a melody, half remembered

from a dream. 11:16.145 --> 11:24.685 [SPEAKER_01]: The 16th legion was one such brotherhood, and the character it would come to bear was written into its foundations from the very beginning. 11:25.667 --> 11:35.149 [SPEAKER_01]: Its earliest recruits were drawn from terror, as all the first generation authorities were, but from a particular and unforgiving corner of that world. 11:35.129 --> 11:42.744 [SPEAKER_01]: The hunter clans of the Jutigran bowl and the teeming desperate slum warrants of the Sam Safian subplate. 11:43.546 --> 11:49.257 [SPEAKER_01]: Places were civilisation at one so thin that what remained was barely distinguishable from woodeners. 11:50.419 --> 11:57.373 [SPEAKER_01]: Life in those desolate margins had been a matter of perpetual conflict for as long as anyone could remember. 11:57.353 --> 12:07.043 [SPEAKER_01]: generation after generation of grinding violence that had stripped away everything soft and left behind only what was hard enough to endure. 12:08.643 --> 12:17.297 [SPEAKER_01]: The people who survived in such places did not do so through gentleness or the bonds of community, but through a fierce and jealous independence. 12:18.298 --> 12:24.248 [SPEAKER_01]: A ruthlessness that had been bred into them so deeply, it had become indistinguishable from instinct. 12:25.109 --> 12:35.646 [SPEAKER_01]: It was from this stock that the 16th was made, and the legion that grew from such roots bore the unmistakable marks of the soil that had nourished it. 12:35.626 --> 12:45.603 [SPEAKER_01]: the warriors of the 16th fought with an abrasive restless aggression that would become their most recognizable quality throughout the long years of the Great Crusade. 12:46.605 --> 13:00.148 [SPEAKER_01]: Not the cold and methodical way the characterised some of their brother legions, nor the wild, blood-madden frenzy that would come to define others, but something that lay between those extremes and partook of 13:02.609 --> 13:05.653 [SPEAKER_01]: They struck suddenly and with overwhelming force. 13:06.193 --> 13:25.697 [SPEAKER_01]: Their assaults delivered with such swiftness and ferocity that resistance shattered before it could properly form, and they were as likely to begin a war their enemies did not yet know they were fighting as they were to deliver the final killing blow in a conflict that had already ground on for months or years. 13:25.677 --> 13:36.875 [SPEAKER_01]: Those who witnessed such attacks would later say that the warriors of the 16th were already locked eye to eye with the foe before the thunder of their first volleys had faded from the air. 13:37.696 --> 13:43.045 [SPEAKER_01]: So quickly did they close the distance between the screaming sky and the blood soaked earth. 13:46.096 --> 13:59.138 [SPEAKER_01]: the warriors themselves were proud and unyielding, with little inclination toward humour or sentiment, and still less toward the mysticism and elaborate ritual that animated certain of their kingred legions.

13:59.719 --> 14:06.450 [SPEAKER_01]: They were not wantonly cruel, that particular darkness belonged to others who had earned it in the centuries ahead. 14:06.430 --> 14:20.248 [SPEAKER_01]: But neither did they trouble themselves with mercy, where mercy served no clear purpose, and there was about them always the bearing of men who had been shaped by hardship into something that no longer had any use for softness. 14:22.551 --> 14:33.585 [SPEAKER_01]: They were, in every way, that mattered, the children of the world that had made them, and they carried its lessons into every battle like a second set of armour, one beneath 14:34.477 --> 14:43.991 [SPEAKER_01]: And so, it was that somewhere in those early years of fire and conquest, a notion took hold in the collective imagination of the fledgling Imperium. 14:44.852 --> 14:55.067 [SPEAKER_01]: The idea that when a world proved too stubborn to be reasoned with, or too dangerous to be approached by lesser forces, the emperor would send his wars. 14:56.870 --> 15:11.655 [SPEAKER_01]: that the 16th were the blade he kept close at hand and drew only when the moment demanded something sharp and final and irrevocable, and that when they were unleashed there would be no negotiation and no reprieve. 15:12.637 --> 15:18.186 [SPEAKER_01]: Only the swift and terrible conclusion of whatever problem had called them forth. 15:18.166 --> 15:22.215 [SPEAKER_01]: The warriors of the 16th wore this reputation with pride. 15:23.177 --> 15:29.911 [SPEAKER_01]: They did not yet have a name for what they were, these warriors of the 16th, though the name was already waiting for them. 15:30.773 --> 15:35.162 [SPEAKER_01]: As names sometimes do, patient and inevitable as the dawn. 15:35.142 --> 15:42.954 [SPEAKER_01]: It would come to them soon enough, earned in blood and silence, on the pale surface of a world that had hung in terrace sky. 15:43.955 --> 15:50.966 [SPEAKER_01]: But the wolves were already abroad in the dark, and the galaxy was only just beginning to learn what their hunting meant. 15:55.192 --> 16:04.626 [SPEAKER_01]: The world that would give them their name had been watching over terrace since before humanity 16:05.703 --> 16:32.065 [SPEAKER_01]: Luna, the old moon, cradle of tides and ancient myths, had been a part of the human story for so long that it was easy to forget it had a story of its own, and that story by the time the Emperor turned his attention to it in the year 733 of the 30th millennium, had grown strange and secretive and deeply resistant to the idea of being told by anyone else. 16:34.728 --> 16:37.294 [SPEAKER_01]: The Selenna gene cults had made Luna their own. 16:37.876 --> 16:42.808 [SPEAKER_01]: They were old these cults, each clung to a different archetype of what it meant to be human. 16:43.570 --> 16:52.011 [SPEAKER_01]: Their members crafted and recrafted by the Selenna gene rights, according to formula that reached back to the dark age of technology. 16:51.991 --> 17:00.542

[SPEAKER_01]: resurrected in body again and again, as they sought to distill the purest expression of a single facet of the human spirit. 17:01.683 --> 17:11.375 [SPEAKER_01]: They were powerful, insular, and utterly uninterested in the Emperor's vision of a unified humanity, marching together toward a rational and secular future. 17:12.536 --> 17:20.226 [SPEAKER_01]: His envoys were met with silence, and when his silence gave way to threats, 17:21.775 --> 17:28.083 [SPEAKER_01]: and so, the Emperor, with that same quiet finality, ordered Luna taken by the sword. 17:29.445 --> 17:35.293 [SPEAKER_01]: Three of his newborn legions were given the task, the 7th, the 13th, and the 16th. 17:35.994 --> 17:43.243 [SPEAKER_01]: Brotherhoods that were in later years come to be known as the Imperial Fists, the Ultramarines, and the Luna Wolves. 17:44.168 --> 17:52.756 [SPEAKER_01]: The 16th was chosen to serve as the vanguard, and it brought its full strength to bear upon that ancient and stubborn world. 17:54.958 --> 18:05.588 [SPEAKER_01]: This created an act of war so swift and so precisely executed, that it would be remembered for millennia afterward, as the moment the great crusade truly began. 18:05.608 --> 18:12.555 [SPEAKER_01]: While the assault craft of the 7th and 13th drove toward Luna's surface in plain view, 18:12.535 --> 18:20.427 [SPEAKER_01]: During the attention of the Selenard offensive weapons that lashed out from emplacements, embedded deep in the moon's gray skin. 18:21.489 --> 18:26.096 [SPEAKER_01]: The warriors of the 16th did something altogether different. 18:26.116 --> 18:35.590 [SPEAKER_01]: They cut power to their assault craft and drifted through the void in absolute silence, dark shapes against the stars, falling toward their target. 18:37.426 --> 18:41.733 [SPEAKER_01]: The Selena defenses focused on the visible threat, never saw them coming. 18:42.614 --> 18:51.308 [SPEAKER_01]: The 16th struck like a blade drawn across an unsuspecting throat, and within six hours of the first shot being fired, Luna had fallen. 18:52.370 --> 18:57.358 [SPEAKER_01]: The gene cults broken and humbled and staring down the barrel of annihilation. 18:58.199 --> 19:01.468 [SPEAKER_01]: chose to bend the knee rather than be destroyed entirely. 19:01.508 --> 19:09.610 [SPEAKER_01]: Their surrender was transmitted to Tara, a single desperate plea for the Emperor to call off his walls. 19:12.121 --> 19:20.131 [SPEAKER_01]: The warriors of the 16th claim that name, and from that day forward, they were the Luna Wolves, and the Wolves' head became their icon. 19:21.152 --> 19:23.535 [SPEAKER_01]: It was an abstract connection, in truth. 19:24.456 --> 19:41.638 [SPEAKER_01]: The Terran animals, once known as Wolves, had been driven to near extinction millennia before, reduced to little more than Jean Stock, for engineered bioweapon beasts, and few if any 19:42.040 --> 19:48.655 [SPEAKER_01]: but the word itself had survived where the creature had not, carrying with it across the long centuries, a meaning. 19:49.476 --> 20:01.483 [SPEAKER_01]: The idea of controlled savagery of the pack hunter, the wearing of pelt's taken from canod predators, became the mark of the lunar wolf's field commanders and senior officers. 20:01.987 --> 20:11.678 [SPEAKER_01]: And though theirs would not be the last legion to wrap itself in wolf imagery, they were the first to claim it, and they bore it with a pride that brooked no rivals. 20:12.461 --> 20:15.270 [SPEAKER_01]: The Great Crusade had truly begun. 20:19.013 --> 20:25.046 [SPEAKER_01]: Every legion needed flesh, this was the simple and unavoidable truth of the great crusade. 20:25.727 --> 20:36.330 [SPEAKER_01]: That no matter how magnificent the warriors, no matter how brilliant the victories, the wars that lay ahead would consume Marines faster than terror alone could provide them. 20:36.310 --> 20:46.342 [SPEAKER_01]: and if the legions were to grow into the vast hosts that the emperor's grand design required, they would need to find new sources of recruitment among the stars. 20:47.343 --> 20:59.618 [SPEAKER_01]: The Lunar Wolves were the first to do so, and the world they found, or perhaps the world that had been waiting for them all along, patient and hollow and hungry, was called 21:02.602 --> 21:05.186 [SPEAKER_01]: It had been a mining world once, long ago. 21:05.907 --> 21:14.921 [SPEAKER_01]: Kathonia lay close to terror in the void, near enough that it had been reached by sub-light vessels in the earliest days of human interstellar expansion. 21:15.962 --> 21:29.082 [SPEAKER_01]: Melenia before the invention of the warp drive, and it had been colonized and built upon, and tunneled, and mined without pause or mercy, since the very dawn of mankind's reach toward the stars. 21:30.344 --> 21:45.754 [SPEAKER_01]: Generation after generation had bored deeper into its flesh, extracting every mineral and every awe and every scrap of useful material that the planet possessed, until at last there was simply nothing left to take. 21:48.097 --> 21:53.464 [SPEAKER_01]: The ancient machinery was rediscovered and stripped away by the tech priests of Mars. 21:54.285 --> 22:09.784 [SPEAKER_01]: And what remained was a world that had been hollowed out like a skull, picked clean by carrion birds, riddled from surface to core with catacombs, and crumbling industrial works, and exhausted mine shafts that led nowhere. 22:11.722 --> 22:28.768 [SPEAKER_01]: The population that clung to existence in those lightless tunnels and crumbling warrants had long since devolved into something ferro and desperate, a teeming multitude of gangs and kill clans, who fought one another for territory and scraps. 22:31.330 --> 22:35.855 [SPEAKER_01]: The Imperium looked upon this wretched spent world and saw a bounty. 22:37.096 --> 22:58.738 [SPEAKER_01]: Imperial recruitment squads descended upon Cathonia and harvested its gangers by the tens of thousands, pulling them from their

tunnels and chaining them together in the holes of prison shuttles, bound for the genome laboratories of Luna, where the conquered Selenar Jean writes, now labored in the service of the very power that had broken them. 22:58.718 --> 23:21.298 [SPEAKER_01]: Most of these Athonians were pressed into the Imperial Army as common soldiers, but the finest among them, the strongest, the quickest, the ones in whom the spark of something exceptional, burned behind eyes that had known only darkness, were set aside for a different and more terrible purpose. 23:21.318 --> 23:27.223 [SPEAKER_01]: On Luna, these chosen were unmayed and reforged as the space marines of the 16th 23:29.785 --> 23:30.646 [SPEAKER_01]: and they changed it. 23:31.588 --> 23:36.797 [SPEAKER_01]: Not through any conscious effort or deliberate design, but simply by being what they were. 23:37.498 --> 23:49.718 [SPEAKER_01]: By carrying into the ranks of the lunar walls, the customs and instincts and hard one wisdom of a thousand generations of survival in the most unforgiving environment imaginable. 23:49.698 --> 24:09.192 [SPEAKER_01]: The transformation was gradual, subtle in its particulars, but unmistakable in its totality, like the slow turning of a river that does not alter its course all at once, but arrives eventually at a destination quite different from the one it seemed to be heading toward. 24:09.172 --> 24:14.644 [SPEAKER_01]: The marks of Kathonian influence crept through the legion, like new roots through old soil. 24:15.686 --> 24:25.206 [SPEAKER_01]: The top knots in close-shaved mohawks, that Kathonian ganger headhunters wore, as marks of status, began to appear throughout the ranks. 24:25.186 --> 24:31.838 [SPEAKER_01]: adorning helms and scalps alike, acquired ritual to cold among the warriors. 24:32.620 --> 24:48.308 [SPEAKER_01]: When one was wounded in battle by a foe deemed worthy of respect, he would take a blade and score a deep scratch across the serumite of his helm, right over the eye socket, honouring the valour of the enemy who had marked him. 24:48.288 --> 24:57.886 [SPEAKER_01]: and the Kathonian word Ibethan, which in the tunnels of that dead world, had meant the cutting of a rival gang killers throat in single combat. 24:58.567 --> 25:03.597 [SPEAKER_01]: It became the common term among the Lunar Wolves for the successful completion of a campaign. 25:06.378 --> 25:25.517 [SPEAKER_01]: Perhaps most tellingly of all, the Kathonian understanding of leadership, in which authority flowed not from rank or title, but from personal charisma, from reputation earned through deeds rather than bestowed by decree, began to reshape the way the lunar wolves understood their own hierarchy. 25:25.936 --> 25:35.634 [SPEAKER_01]: A commander's standing within the legion came to depend as much upon the respect he commanded in the eyes of his brothers, as upon any formal position he might hold. 25:36.515 --> 25:44.991 [SPEAKER_01]: As though the ancient ways of the Kathonian gang lords had found new expression in the traditions of a force that span the stars. 25:46.658 --> 25:58.958 [SPEAKER_01]: As the Terenborn warriors who had formed the Legion's original core fell in battle over the long years of the Crusade, the character of the 16th that came ever more distinctly Athonian in its flavour. 26:00.000 --> 26:02.444 [SPEAKER_01]: And yet the Legion did not weaken with this change. 26:03.125 --> 26:10.337 [SPEAKER_01]: If anything, it grew more formidable, more ferocious, more certain of its own supremacy. 26:10.317 --> 26:20.067 [SPEAKER_01]: The ordered discipline of its terror and founders had fused with the savage street-honed instincts of Kathonia's sons, into something that was greater than either alone. 26:21.088 --> 26:26.214 [SPEAKER_01]: A blade forged from two different metals that proved stronger for the joining. 26:30.138 --> 26:40.088 [SPEAKER_01]: Of all the questions that haunt the history of the Imperian, few are as troubled or as 26:42.937 --> 26:50.187 [SPEAKER_01]: The Primarchs had been torn from the Emperor while they were still in their gestation capsules, scattered across the galaxy. 26:51.329 --> 27:07.932 [SPEAKER_01]: Each Primarch landed on a different world, and each grew to manhood, shaped by the circumstances of the place that found him, raised by wolves or by kings, or by the howling wilderness itself, forging legends on planets that had never heard of terror. 27:07.912 --> 27:12.826 [SPEAKER_01]: and did not know that the father who had made them was searching the stars for their return. 27:13.608 --> 27:15.453 [SPEAKER_01]: Horace was the first to be found. 27:16.396 --> 27:19.204 [SPEAKER_01]: On that much, every source agrees. 27:20.956 --> 27:39.859 [SPEAKER_01]: some accounts placed in Monkathonia, and these sources tell of a young primarch who thrived in the darkness of the tunnels, as all primarchs seem to thrive wherever fate deposited them, learning the arts of war and survival from the tech barbarian gangs who ruled the crumbling warrants. 27:42.556 --> 27:46.463 [SPEAKER_01]: The truth, if it can be called that, is that we do not know. 27:47.565 --> 28:02.893 [SPEAKER_01]: We know only that Horace was found young, far younger than most of his brothers would be when the Emperor's questing hand finally reached them on their distant worlds, and that for many long years he was the only son the Emperor had. 28:02.873 --> 28:12.283 [SPEAKER_01]: Not one among twenty, jostling for attention and approval, alongside brothers who are each brilliant and terrible in their own right. 28:13.485 --> 28:21.614 [SPEAKER_01]: But the only one singular, irreplaceable, the sole recipient of a father's full and undivided regard. 28:22.595 --> 28:28.341 [SPEAKER_01]: And the emperor, whatever else he was or was not, gave that regard generously. 28:30.953 --> 28:39.767 [SPEAKER_01]: There was a closeness between them that none of the other primax found later and raised far from terror

would ever quite manage to replicate. 28:40.909 --> 28:52.287 [SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor walked with Horace through the corridors of the Imperium and taught him as a father teaches a son, not just the mechanics of command or the geometry of war. 28:52.267 --> 29:01.360 [SPEAKER_01]: Though he taught those things too, but the deeper lessons, the ones that cannot be written down in any manual, or codified in any doctrine. 29:02.262 --> 29:05.887 [SPEAKER_01]: How to see the shape of a problem before it has fully formed. 29:06.788 --> 29:10.173 [SPEAKER_01]: How to read the hearts of men who do not wish to be read. 29:11.135 --> 29:20.248 [SPEAKER_01]: How to carry the weight of authority without being crushed beneath it, and how to wield power without being consumed 29:22.962 --> 29:27.487 [SPEAKER_01]: In time, the Emperor placed Horace in command of the 16th Legion. 29:28.288 --> 29:39.560 [SPEAKER_01]: His Legion, 10,000 warriors who had been built from his own genetic template, who carried his blood in their veins and bore the echo of his nature in every fiber of their being. 29:40.601 --> 29:44.966 [SPEAKER_01]: They were, in a sense, his sons, just as he was, the Emperor's son. 29:45.947 --> 29:51.973 [SPEAKER_01]: Together the Emperor and his most beloved son, set forth to reclaim the galaxy. 29:51.953 --> 30:02.834 [SPEAKER_01]: for 30 years they fought side by side, father and son united in purpose, as they forged the first great expansion of the young imperium across the stars. 30:04.176 --> 30:11.430 [SPEAKER_01]: 30 years of shared battles and shared victories and shared silences in the watches of the night between campaigns. 30:12.794 --> 30:22.520 [SPEAKER_01]: 30 years in which Horace was a son walking in his father's shadow and learning, with every step, to cast a shadow of his own. 30:23.704 --> 30:28.677 [SPEAKER_01]: It was, by all accounts, the happiest time of Horace Looper Cow's life. 30:28.943 --> 30:47.931 [SPEAKER_01]: The years before the other primax were found, before the rivalries and jelluses and wounded prides that would poison everything they touched, before the whispers began, and the trust began to crack, and the love between father and son became a weapon that could be turned against them both. 30:49.818 --> 31:06.939 [SPEAKER_01]: He loved the emperor, not as a soldier loves a commander, nor as a subject loves a king, but as a son loves a father, completely unreservedly, with a devotion so total that it left no room for doubt, and no defense against the pain that would come. 31:07.780 --> 31:11.404 [SPEAKER_01]: When that devotion was tested beyond its breaking point. 31:11.384 --> 31:12.846 [SPEAKER_01]: that breaking would come. 31:14.008 --> 31:22.582 [SPEAKER_01]: But it had not come yet, and in the golden years of the early crusade, when the stars themselves seemed to bend toward the light of the Emperor's vision. 31:23.523 --> 31:25.406 [SPEAKER_01]: It must have seemed as though it never would. 31:27.429 --> 31:34.320 [SPEAKER_01]: For 200 years, the lunar walls made war upon the galaxy, and the galaxy learned to give way before them. 31:37.270 --> 31:56.713 [SPEAKER_01]: It is difficult from the vantage point of our own age, an age of decline, and siege, and slow grinding entropy, where every victory is purchased at a cost that would have staggered the architects of the Imperiums' youth to comprehend what the great Crusade truly was. 31:56.693 --> 32:01.999 [SPEAKER_01]: Thousands of expedition reflits fanning outward from terror in every direction. 32:03.000 --> 32:11.951 [SPEAKER_01]: Each one carrying the emperor's light into the darkness that had swallowed humanity during the long nightmare of the age of strife. 32:11.971 --> 32:18.379 [SPEAKER_01]: Each one bearing the promise that mankind would be united once more, whether it wish to be or not. 32:19.600 --> 32:24.726 [SPEAKER_01]: And at the very forefront of that tide, more often than not, where the lunar 32:26.832 --> 32:34.746 [SPEAKER_01]: Their method of war had been refined over those two centuries into something that was as close to an art form, as violence can aspire to be. 32:34.786 --> 32:43.702 [SPEAKER_01]: Though it was an art whose beauty could only be appreciated from a very great distance, and preferably from behind very thick walls. 32:44.543 --> 32:51.135 [SPEAKER_01]: A star system targeted for imperial compliance would often fall to the lunar walls in a single engagement. 32:51.115 --> 33:05.378 [SPEAKER_01]: so swiftly and so decisively that the imperial army forces following in their wake would arrive to find little left to do, but catalogue the surrender and begin the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding. 33:07.012 --> 33:30.032 [SPEAKER_01]: The Lunar Wolves warships would cut in from the system's edge, in a spear formation that fragmented as it drove inward, splitting into dozens of smaller strike groups that fell upon planets and moons and orbital stations simultaneously, overwhelming the defender's ability to coordinate a response, before they had fully grasped that they were under attack at all. 33:30.451 --> 33:37.339 [SPEAKER_01]: orbital bombardment and mass drop assaults would shatter the enemy's strength and will to resist in a matter of hours. 33:38.160 --> 33:39.662 [SPEAKER_01]: And then the real killing began. 33:39.722 --> 33:49.573 [SPEAKER_01]: The close-quarters work, the room by room, and street-by-street savagery, at which the sons of Kathonia excelled above all others. 33:52.496 --> 33:53.197 [SPEAKER_01]: It was brutal. 33:54.058 --> 33:57.302 [SPEAKER_01]: It was, by any civilized measure, deeply in elegant, 33:57.974 --> 34:08.605 [SPEAKER_01]: But it was effective, and in an age where the Imperiums hunger for conquest far outstripped its patience for prolonged campaigns, effectiveness was the only currency that mattered. 34:09.626 --> 34:27.103 [SPEAKER_01]: The lunar wolves understood this, that wars were either brutal and short, or they

became long and wasteful, and that a war which dragged on for months or years consumed resources and lives that could have been spent opening the next front, liberating the next world. 34:27.083 --> 34:50.931 [SPEAKER_01]: pushing the light one more step into the dark, and so they made their wars short, and they made them brutal, and they moved on to the next campaign with barely a backward glance, leaving behind them a trail of conquered worlds and shattered enemies that stretched across the breadth of the galaxy, like the wake of some great vessel, cutting through a dark and endless sea. 34:52.615 --> 34:57.382 [SPEAKER_01]: Across tens of thousands of battles, the lunar wolves were rarely defeated. 34:58.243 --> 35:16.969 [SPEAKER_01]: In every mode of warfare they excelled, whether deployed as the spearhead of an assault involving entire star clusters, or as a single squad supporting a vast formation of mortal soldiers, and their reputation grew until it blazed so brightly among the space marines, that other legions. 35:16.949 --> 35:27.399 [SPEAKER_01]: even those who were normally hostile to the presence of their brother Space Marines, would actively request placement alongside the Lunar Wars and welcome it in return. 35:28.561 --> 35:43.075 [SPEAKER_01]: This was no small thing for the primax and their legions were proud in jealous of their own honours and the willingness of so many to seek out the company of the 16th spoke to something that went beyond mere professional respect. 35:46.058 --> 35:52.212 [SPEAKER_01]: Much of that reputation was, in truth, a reflection of the qualities of their primarch. 35:52.232 --> 35:57.925 [SPEAKER_01]: For no account of the lunar wolves' greatness can be separated from the greatness of Horus himself. 35:58.580 --> 36:06.992 [SPEAKER_01]: His record of victories was unequored among his brothers, his charisma was legendary, even among beings who were themselves living legends. 36:07.673 --> 36:15.765 [SPEAKER_01]: And his closeness to the Emperor lent him a stature that none of the other primarks could quite match, however much some of them might have wished to. 36:16.647 --> 36:25.600 [SPEAKER_01]: But what truly set Horace apart, what elevated him, from the most successful of the primarks, to something approaching the indispensable. 36:25.580 --> 36:33.328 [SPEAKER_01]: was his extraordinary ability to understand his brothers and to wield their individual strengths to their greatest effect. 36:34.827 --> 36:53.482 [SPEAKER_01]: Each primarck was a creature of extremes, brilliant in certain domains, and deeply flawed in others, and the art of commanding them was less like directing subordinates than like conducting an orchestra composed entirely of virtuosos, who each believed themselves to be the soloist. 36:54.484 --> 36:57.409 [SPEAKER_01]: Horace managed this feat effortlessly, 36:57.389 --> 37:07.905 [SPEAKER_01]: reading the character of each brother with an intuition that bordered on the supernatural, and placing each one where his particular gifts would shine most brightly. 37:09.691 --> 37:19.543 [SPEAKER_01]: Other primax commanded larger legions, or possessed deeper wells of esoteric knowledge, or excelled beyond Horus in certain narrow crafts of war. 37:20.344 --> 37:24.369 [SPEAKER_01]: But only Horus could hold every perspective in his mind simultaneously. 37:25.130 --> 37:35.563 [SPEAKER_01]: Could see the whole of the Crusade as a single vast and interconnected enterprise, and understand where each piece needed to be placed, for the whole to function. 37:37.855 --> 37:41.942 [SPEAKER_01]: even the most difficult and volatile of his brothers deferred to him. 37:43.024 --> 37:55.206 [SPEAKER_01]: Angron, the blood-maid primarch of the world eaters, whose rage was so vast and so consuming that it left room for almost nothing else, is known to have listened when Horus spoke. 37:55.186 --> 37:57.429 [SPEAKER_01]: not always and not happily. 37:58.450 --> 38:04.537 [SPEAKER_01]: But he listened, which was more than could be said for his interactions, with almost any other living being. 38:05.758 --> 38:22.358 [SPEAKER_01]: Conrad Kurz, the knight hunter, that tormented and terrifying creature who ruled through fear because he had never learned to rule through anything else, acknowledged Horace's authority, with something that might, in a more stable mind, have been called respect. 38:22.338 --> 38:38.794 [SPEAKER_01]: These were not men who gave their trust easily, if they gave it at all, and the fact that Horace could command their co-operation, where others could not spoke to a quality of leadership that transcended rank or title, or even the bonds of shared blood. 38:41.592 --> 38:43.435 [SPEAKER_01]: and the legion mirrored its lord. 38:44.336 --> 39:03.904 [SPEAKER_01]: The lunar wolves were brilliant because Horace was brilliant, charismatic because he was charismatic, confident because his confidence was vast enough to fill every warrior who bore his gene seed with the unshakable certainty that they were the finest fighting force the galaxy had ever produced. 39:03.884 --> 39:14.004 [SPEAKER_01]: They fought with his tactical instinct, flowing through them like a second heartbeat, and they carried his pride like a banner before them into every engagement. 39:14.926 --> 39:25.487 [SPEAKER_01]: And in the golden years of the great crusade that pride was justified a thousand times over by the victories they won, and the worlds they claimed in the Emperor's name. 39:27.307 --> 39:40.570 [SPEAKER_01]: but pride is a curious thing, for it where's two faces, one bright and noble, turn toward the light, and the other darker, turned inward, visible only to those who know where to look. 39:41.511 --> 39:47.762 [SPEAKER_01]: The pride of the lunar walls was the pride of sons who believed themselves worthy of their father's love. 39:47.742 --> 39:49.866 [SPEAKER_01]: and that belief made them magnificent. 39:50.788 --> 40:06.679

[SPEAKER_01]: But it also made them vulnerable, in ways that none of them could see, and none of them would have admitted if they could, to the possibility that that love might one day be withdrawn, or offered to another, or revealed to have been something less than what they had always believed it to be. 40:08.752 --> 40:15.184 [SPEAKER_01]: The floor was there, sleeping beneath the surface of all that glory like a crack in the foundation of a great cathedral. 40:16.106 --> 40:31.536 [SPEAKER_01]: Invisible to the eye, irrelevant to the daily business of worship and wonder, but present nonetheless, waiting with the patience of all inevitable things, for the moment when the weight above it would finally prove to great to bear. 40:31.516 --> 40:53.760 [SPEAKER_01]: That moment was still far off, but it was coming, as surely as winter follows the last warm days of autumn, and when it arrived, it would bring with it a reckoning that would shake the imperium to its foundations, and leave scars upon the face of the galaxy that 10,000 years would not be enough to hear. 40:57.436 --> 41:07.967 [SPEAKER_01]: Of all the victories won during the Great Crusade, and they numbered in the tens of thousands, a litany of conquests so vast that no single mind could hold its foremeasure. 41:09.028 --> 41:15.475 [SPEAKER_01]: One stands above the rest, its shadow falling across everything that came before, and everything that followed. 41:16.597 --> 41:27.308 [SPEAKER_01]: The Urlan or Crusade was the high watermark of humanity's greatest endeavor, the moment 41:27.288 --> 41:34.771 [SPEAKER_01]: And it is one of the great sorrows of history that the light of that triumph would prove to be not a dawn, but a sunset. 41:35.614 --> 41:40.369 [SPEAKER_01]: The last golden hour before a darkness that has not lifted since. 41:43.252 --> 41:51.040 [SPEAKER_01]: The Ork Empire centered upon the Urlanur system was the largest concentration of green skins the Imperium had ever encountered. 41:51.921 --> 42:09.158 [SPEAKER_01]: A sprawling Dominion ruled by the Overlord or like Uruk, from a fortress palace of such crude and brutal grandeur, that it seemed less like a structure built by hands, than like something that had grown from the earth itself, fared on violence and watered with blood. 42:09.830 --> 42:14.256 [SPEAKER_01]: The scale of the Imperial response was commensurate with the scale of the threat. 42:15.338 --> 42:35.247 [SPEAKER_01]: 100,000 space marines drawn from multiple regions, 8 million soldiers of the Imperial Army, thousands upon thousands of warships and their support vessels, and Armada so vast that it must have darkened the stars themselves as it gathered above that doomed and savage world. 42:35.227 --> 42:50.907 [SPEAKER_01]: It was, by any reckoning, the single greatest concentration of military force the Imperian had ever assembled, and at its spirit tip, as they had been at the spirit tip of so many campaigns before, were the lunar walls. 42:52.456 --> 43:07.984 [SPEAKER_01]: They drove into the heart of Orlach Warwick's fortress palace, like a blade thrust into the chest of a beast, fighting through corridors choked with green-skinned offenders, whose ferocities seemed only to intensify the deeper the estates penetrated. 43:07.964 --> 43:25.122 [SPEAKER_01]: At the height of the assault, Horace himself came face-to-face with the Ork overlord, a creature of staggering size and brutality, surrounded by a retinue of forty ork nobles, each one a killer of formidable reputation in its own right. 43:26.143 --> 43:32.149 [SPEAKER_01]: Horace carved through the retinue, with a fury that left no room for doubt about the outcome. 43:32.129 --> 43:47.758 [SPEAKER_01]: His lightning claws, reaping a harvest of alien flesh, until at last he stood before Urlach-Urach himself, and the overlord, for all his monstrous strength and savage cunning, proved no match for the primarch, who faced him. 43:49.207 --> 43:59.500 [SPEAKER_01]: Horus, crippled the creature, broke its massive body as a warrior who had been killing the enemies of mankind for longer than most civilisations had existed. 44:00.241 --> 44:14.218 [SPEAKER_01]: And then, in a gesture that was equal parts tactical brilliance and theatrical showmanship, he hefted the overlords shattered form above his head and hurled its screaming from the battlements of its own palace. 44:14.198 --> 44:20.185 [SPEAKER_01]: to four far below, among the horde of Orcs, still throwing themselves at the fortress walls. 44:23.128 --> 44:24.770 [SPEAKER_01]: The effect was instantaneous. 44:25.291 --> 44:35.763 [SPEAKER_01]: The sight of their warlord broken and cast down, sent a shockwave of panic through the green-skinned forces, that no amount of bellowed orders or crude discipline could contain. 44:36.804 --> 44:43.952 [SPEAKER_01]: And the tide of battle turned in a single decisive moment, from desperate struggle 44:43.932 --> 44:56.116 [SPEAKER_01]: The orcs broke and fled, only to find that the outer walls had already been breached by the lunar walls in circling forces, and what had been a battle became a route. 44:57.219 --> 45:00.405 [SPEAKER_01]: And what had been a route became an extermination. 45:02.731 --> 45:13.222 [SPEAKER_01]: And when it was over, when the last of the green-skinned resistance had been crushed, and the silence of victory had settled over the blood-soaked ruins of the overlords palace. 45:14.343 --> 45:21.151 [SPEAKER_01]: Horace found a single figure still standing in the chamber where the orc retinue had made its final stand. 45:22.172 --> 45:32.603 [SPEAKER_01]: Every other soul in that room, a star-tease and orc alike lay dead. 45:32.583 --> 45:49.680 [SPEAKER_01]: And in the center of that place stood, first capped in a baton of the first company, drenched in gore from helm to boot, surrounded by the crushed remains of the enemies he had killed alone, after his brothers had fallen around him. 45:52.462 --> 46:00.495

[SPEAKER_01]: In the aftermath of Ulnar, the emperor did something that none of his sons had anticipated, and few of them would ever fully forgive. 46:01.757 --> 46:14.757 [SPEAKER_01]: He announced his intention to return to Tara, to withdraw from the Great Crusade, that he had led for two centuries, and retreat to the Imperial Palace, to pursue a project whose nature he chose not to reveal. 46:14.737 --> 46:30.788 [SPEAKER_01]: not to his generals, not to his advisers, not even to his primax, those twenty sons who had bled and conquered and broken worlds in his name, and who had, perhaps naively, believed that they had earned his trust in all things. 46:31.910 --> 46:37.521 [SPEAKER_01]: In his place, he elevated Horace to the newly created rank of Warmaster. 46:37.501 --> 46:48.304 [SPEAKER_01]: Commander-in-Chief of all the Emperor's armies, invested with authority over every expeditionary fleet, and every primarque in the Imperium Service. 46:49.904 --> 46:53.130 [SPEAKER_01]: It was the greatest honor ever bestowed upon a mortal being. 46:54.071 --> 46:58.679 [SPEAKER_01]: And it came wrapped in a gift that was also, in its way, a wound. 46:59.982 --> 47:11.041 [SPEAKER_01]: The Empress suggested that the Luna Wolves be renamed the Suns of Horus, to honor their primax and equal achievements, and to mark his preeminent place among his brothers. 47:12.223 --> 47:13.465 [SPEAKER_01]: Horus refused. 47:14.896 --> 47:22.846 [SPEAKER_01]: It was a refusal of genuine concern, a rare moment of vulnerability from a being who wore confidence the way other men wore armor. 47:23.888 --> 47:25.830 [SPEAKER_01]: He did not wish to be set above his brothers. 47:26.391 --> 47:38.727 [SPEAKER_01]: He understood, with an instinct sharpened by two centuries of navigating the complex and often volatile relationships between 20 extraordinary and deeply proud demigods. 47:38.707 --> 47:47.467 [SPEAKER_01]: that to elevate himself so visibly would be to invite the very jealouses and resentments that he had spent his entire career working to contain. 47:48.709 --> 47:56.968 [SPEAKER_01]: The primax were not men who accepted subordination gracefully, and Horace knew, perhaps better than the Emperor himself. 47:56.948 --> 48:02.943 [SPEAKER_01]: who, for all his vast intelligence, sometimes seem to struggle with the simpler mechanics of human feeling. 48:03.684 --> 48:11.363 [SPEAKER_01]: That a title given to one son, at the expense of all the others, would leave bruises that might never fully heal. 48:14.077 --> 48:29.014 [SPEAKER_01]: and so, the lunar wars remained the lunar wars for a little while longer, and Horace accepted the burden of the war masters crown in a way that impressed even those brothers who harbored private reservations about the Emperor's choice. 48:29.365 --> 48:40.700 [SPEAKER_01]: He would carry that burden faithfully, and he would carry it well, and the crusade would continue under his command, with a vigour and a purpose that honored the

trust his father had placed in him. 48:41.662 --> 48:43.144 [SPEAKER_01]: But the Emperor was gone. 48:43.184 --> 48:50.514 [SPEAKER_01]: That was the truth that lay beneath all the ceremony, and the triumph, and the carefully chosen words of praise. 48:51.435 --> 48:52.977 [SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor had left, 48:52.957 --> 49:03.368 [SPEAKER_01]: and he had not explained why, and in the silence that his departure created, in the void where his presence and his guidance and his love had once been. 49:04.469 --> 49:06.752 [SPEAKER_01]: Something cold and quiet began to grow. 49:08.934 --> 49:21.327 [SPEAKER_01]: Not yet doubt, not yet resentment, but the space in which such things could take root, 49:24.968 --> 49:35.481 [SPEAKER_01]: It is a peculiar cruelty of history that the moment of Horace Lupa Cow's greatest elevation was also the moment when the first cracks appeared in the foundation of everything he had built. 49:36.422 --> 49:39.606 [SPEAKER_01]: Everything he believed in, and everything he was. 49:41.148 --> 49:46.815 [SPEAKER_01]: He could not have known this at the time, but looking back across the long and blooded centuries that followed. 49:47.676 --> 49:54.705 [SPEAKER_01]: One can trace the fault lines of the catastrophe to come right back to this single, 49:57.419 --> 50:06.875 [SPEAKER_01]: The title of Warmaster was an extraordinary honor, but the Emperor was gone, and the silence he left behind was louder than any proclamation. 50:07.997 --> 50:19.337 [SPEAKER_01]: He had returned to terror, and his sons would have to trust that whatever the master of mankind was doing behind those sealed doors was important enough to justify his absence from the galaxy. 50:19.738 --> 50:20.980 [SPEAKER_01]: He had promised to unite. 50:23.660 --> 50:28.829 [SPEAKER_01]: Trust, however, is a fragile thing, and it does not thrive in silence. 50:30.051 --> 50:32.194 [SPEAKER_01]: The primax had never been easy brothers. 50:32.915 --> 50:36.181 [SPEAKER_01]: The emperor's presence had served as a counterweight to their tensions. 50:36.922 --> 50:44.655 [SPEAKER_01]: A gravitational center, around which even the most volatile personalities could orbit without flying apart. 50:44.635 --> 50:59.590 [SPEAKER_01]: With that centre removed, the old jellacies and resentments that had always simmered beneath the surface began to rise, and the careful balance that Horace had spent his career maintaining grew harder and harder to hold. 51:00.802 --> 51:07.698 [SPEAKER_01]: and then came the Council of Terror, and whatever fragile equilibrium remained was shattered entirely. 51:08.961 --> 51:19.485 [SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor, from his seclusion, established a new ruling body, a council of mortal nobles and administrators, bureau cracks and politicians. 51:19.465 --> 51:31.450 [SPEAKER_01]: Meadowed women who had never held a sword, or led a charge, or bled on alien soil, and invested it with the authority to reshape the political administration of the Imperium. 51:33.134 --> 51:45.031 [SPEAKER_01]: New decrees flowed from terror like edicts from some distant and uncaring guard, imposing taxes and regulatory burdens upon the very worlds that the legions had fought and died to conquer. 51:46.232 --> 51:53.202 [SPEAKER_01]: Redistributing the spoils of a war that was still being waged by men, who had not been consulted about the redistribution. 51:53.182 --> 52:08.498 [SPEAKER_01]: The primax, who had conquered those worlds with their own hands, and the blood of their sons, found themselves answerable to mortal functionaries, who understood nothing of what it had cost to bring those worlds into the Emperor's light. 52:11.161 --> 52:22.092 [SPEAKER_01]: Horace disagreed with many of these decrees, and he was not alone in his disagreement, but where his brothers' objections were often loud and furious, and directed outward 52:23.253 --> 52:30.048 [SPEAKER_01]: Horace turned his frustration inward, and that inward turning was perhaps the most dangerous thing of all. 52:31.090 --> 52:33.475 [SPEAKER_01]: He did not rage against his father's decisions. 52:34.237 --> 52:42.595 [SPEAKER_01]: He did not rail against the injustice of being burdened with supreme command, while being denied the knowledge and the trust that should have accompanied it. 52:42.575 --> 52:56.731 [SPEAKER_01]: Instead, he absorbed the hurt quietly, the way strong men often do, and in the privacy of his own thoughts, he began to wonder whether the silence from terror was not just an oversight or a necessity, but a judgment. 52:57.732 --> 53:08.464 [SPEAKER_01]: Whether the Emperor's refusal to share his secrets meant that Horace had already failed in some way he could not perceive, had already fallen short of the standard his father expected. 53:08.444 --> 53:14.252 [SPEAKER_01]: had already proven himself unworthy of the love and trust that had once been given so freely. 53:16.173 --> 53:17.915 [SPEAKER_01]: It was not true, of course. 53:18.876 --> 53:23.181 [SPEAKER_01]: Or perhaps it was, in ways that neither father nor son fully understood. 53:24.302 --> 53:42.163 [SPEAKER_01]: The truth of what passed between the Emperor and his warm-aster in those final years before the fall is buried beneath layers of propaganda and counter-propaganda, so thick that even the most diligent scholar cannot be certain where the facts end and the mythology begins. 53:42.143 --> 53:56.558 [SPEAKER_01]: But what is certain is that Horus was wounded, not by any blade or weapon, but by the slow corrosive ache of a son who believes he has been abandoned by the father he devoted his life to pleasing. 53:59.407 --> 54:04.700 [SPEAKER_01]: and into that wound, as into all unintended wounds, something began to creep. 54:05.843 --> 54:15.627 [SPEAKER_01]: Not corruption, not yet, not the over touch of the powers that waited in the dark beyond the veil of reality, patient as spiders in their webs. 54:15.607 --> 54:24.146 [SPEAKER_01]: but something

quieter and in some ways more insidious, a bitterness that had no specific target and no clear cause. 54:24.988 --> 54:32.485 [SPEAKER_01]: A resentment that grew not from any single act of betrayal, but from the accumulated weight of a thousand small silences. 54:32.465 --> 54:44.224 [SPEAKER_01]: A thousand unanswered questions, a thousand moments when a word of reassurance or explanation from terror might have healed what was beginning to break and did not come. 54:45.185 --> 54:59.248 [SPEAKER_01]: The seeds were in the soil now, and though no one could yet see what they would grow into, the roots were already reaching downward, and the ground beneath the greatest commander, the imperium had ever known, was already beginning to shift. 55:03.295 --> 55:15.071 [SPEAKER_01]: There are moments in history upon which everything turns, moments that seem in hindsight, so heavy with consequence that one wonders how the world did not crack beneath their weight at the time. 55:16.413 --> 55:26.687 [SPEAKER_01]: The fall of Horace Lupa Cal was such a moment, and it did not come as a thunderbolt from a clear sky, as the simplified tellings would have us believe. 55:26.667 --> 55:33.525 [SPEAKER_01]: but as the final step in a long and quiet descent that had been prepared for him by hands, he trusted. 55:33.565 --> 55:36.233 [SPEAKER_01]: Along a path he could not see. 55:37.235 --> 55:43.191 [SPEAKER_01]: Towards a destination that he would not have chosen, had he understood where he was being led. 55:45.010 --> 55:47.654 [SPEAKER_01]: But that is the nature of the deepest betrayals. 55:48.615 --> 55:50.097 [SPEAKER_01]: They do not announce themselves. 55:50.638 --> 55:52.881 [SPEAKER_01]: They arrive wearing the faces of friends. 55:54.183 --> 56:04.538 [SPEAKER_01]: To understand what happened on Daven, one must first understand what had been happening in the shadows for a very long time before the lunar wolves ever returned to that world. 56:04.518 --> 56:16.452 [SPEAKER_01]: And that means understanding, logger or relian, primarch of the seventeenth legion, the word bearers, and the wound that the emperor had dealt him, that would not heal. 56:18.288 --> 56:27.440 [SPEAKER_01]: Loga had come from caucus, a world defined by religious devotion, so deep and so fervent, that it shaped every aspect of its civilization. 56:28.361 --> 56:33.007 [SPEAKER_01]: And from the moment the Emperor found him, Loga had worshipped his father as a guard. 56:34.008 --> 56:47.485 [SPEAKER_01]: Not metaphorically, not as a figure of speech or an expression of filial loyalty, but literally and completely, with a sincerity that was as total as it was in the Emperor's eyes unforgivable. 56:47.465 --> 56:50.468 [SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor despised organised religion. 56:51.189 --> 57:01.398 [SPEAKER_01]: He had spent lifetimes fighting against the superstition and fanaticism that he believed had done more to retard humanity's progress than any external threat. 57:01.418 --> 57:15.632 [SPEAKER_01]: And he had codified that belief into the founding philosophy of his imperium, the imperial truth, which held that science, reason and rational inquiry, 57:15.612 --> 57:19.800 [SPEAKER_01]: and that God's will lies told by the fearful to the credulous. 57:22.143 --> 57:24.947 [SPEAKER_01]: Logar did not merely disagree with this philosophy. 57:25.568 --> 57:26.690 [SPEAKER_01]: He could not comprehend it. 57:27.391 --> 57:35.524 [SPEAKER_01]: He had built his entire identity, his entire understanding of his place in the universe, upon the certainty that the Emperor was divine. 57:36.306 --> 57:46.041 [SPEAKER_01]: And he had spread that certainty to every world, his legion conquered, raising tempos, and establishing cults of worship, wherever the word bearers marched. 57:46.021 --> 57:55.756 [SPEAKER_01]: When the emperor finally lost patience with this, when he ordered the ultramarines to raise the city of Korah, the word bearer's proudest achievement. 57:56.637 --> 58:06.492 [SPEAKER_01]: To the ground as an object lesson in the consequences of disobedience and forced loga and his entire legion to kneel in the ashes of their life's work. 58:07.494 --> 58:10.859 [SPEAKER_01]: The humiliation did not teach loga to abandon his faith. 58:11.580 --> 58:14.104 [SPEAKER_01]: It taught him to seek guards who would welcome it. 58:16.463 --> 58:17.344 [SPEAKER_01]: and he found them. 58:18.446 --> 58:33.088 [SPEAKER_01]: In the warp, in the screaming darkness beyond the veil of reality, Lord God discovered entities who were everything the Emperor refused to be, beings of unimaginable power, who not only accepted worship, but hunger for it. 58:33.068 --> 58:42.977 [SPEAKER_01]: who promised their devotees not the cold rationalism of the imperial truth, but the intoxicating certainty of genuine divine purpose. 58:42.997 --> 58:48.302 [SPEAKER_01]: The chaos gods embrace lorgar with open arms, and lorgar embrace them in return. 58:49.203 --> 59:03.075 [SPEAKER_01]: And in the decades that followed, the word bearers were slowly corrupted from within, until nearly the entire 59:05.114 --> 59:13.346 [SPEAKER_01]: It was Lorgar and his first chaplain Eribus, who were tasked by their new gods with the corruption of Horus, the greatest prize in the galaxy. 59:14.027 --> 59:19.275 [SPEAKER_01]: The warmaster himself, the Emperor's most beloved son, turned against his father. 59:20.237 --> 59:24.844 [SPEAKER_01]: The plan was patient and intricate, and built upon a foundation of genuine care. 59:25.565 --> 59:30.953 [SPEAKER_01]: For Eribus had studied Horus and understood the wounds that the warmaster carried in his heart. 59:30.933 --> 59:40.925 [SPEAKER_01]: And he knew that the sureest way to turn a good man toward darkness was not to offer him evil, but to offer him answers to the questions that were already tormenting him. 59:42.187 --> 59:44.149 [SPEAKER_01]: The warrior lodges were their first tool. 59:44.890 --> 59:59.488

[SPEAKER_01]: The lunar wolves had adopted the institution of warrior lodges, during their first visit to the farewell world of Daven, 60 years before, simple fraternities of warriors, secretive in nature, but fraternal in purpose. 59:59.468 --> 01:00:05.235 [SPEAKER_01]: Where brothers could speak freely outside the constraints of rank and protocol. 01:00:07.438 --> 01:00:27.703 [SPEAKER_01]: Inocuous in their origins, these lodges provided loga and aerobus with exactly the mechanism they needed, a network of trust and secrecy that could be quietly subverted, a channel through which influence could flow without attracting the attention of those who might have 01:00:30.974 --> 01:00:40.525 [SPEAKER_01]: The second tool was a weapon, and the manner of its acquisition reveals much about the calculated patience of the conspirators who sought the war master's soul. 01:00:41.626 --> 01:00:57.464 [SPEAKER_01]: The Kinnabrak Anatham was a blade of extraordinary properties, a weapon of sentient metal, forged by Xenos metallurgists, using techniques so dangerous, that even their own allies among the interex civilization had forbidden them. 01:00:58.505 --> 01:01:00.087 [SPEAKER_01]: It was a tailored weapon. 01:01:00.067 --> 01:01:05.953 [SPEAKER_01]: a blade that could be attuned to a specific target, and would become that target's perfect nemesis. 01:01:06.834 --> 01:01:11.959 [SPEAKER_01]: Utility inimical to the very molecular structure of the being it was chosen to destroy. 01:01:12.679 --> 01:01:29.736 [SPEAKER_01]: It resided in the Hall of Devices on the intersex world of xenobia, a museum of dangerous artefacts, and it was from there that Aerobus stole it during what should have been a peaceful diplomatic meeting 01:01:32.298 --> 01:01:43.289 [SPEAKER_01]: Eribus sabotaged the negotiations, triggered a war between the Imperium and the Interex to cover his theft, and spirited the blade away to the place where it would be needed. 01:01:44.330 --> 01:01:46.392 [SPEAKER_01]: That place was Daven's Moon. 01:01:46.412 --> 01:01:58.204 [SPEAKER_01]: 60 years after the Lunar Wolves had first brought Daven into Imperial Compliance, Eribus whispered in the war master's ear that the world required his attention once more. 01:01:59.888 --> 01:02:16.311 [SPEAKER_01]: The planetary governor, Yugen Temba, a former Imperial Army commander, whom Horace himself had left behind to Shepard Davin into the light of the Imperial Truth, had reportedly turned from the Emperor's service and needed to be brought to heal. 01:02:16.291 --> 01:02:27.086 [SPEAKER_01]: It was a minor matter beneath the attention of a warmaster, but Eribus knew which strings to pull, and which words to speak, and Horace returned to Devon. 01:02:28.168 --> 01:02:31.252 [SPEAKER_01]: What he found on the moon was something out of nightmare. 01:02:32.233 --> 01:02:42.147 [SPEAKER_01]: Tember and his entire garrison had been claimed by the plague God Nergor, transformed into bloated rotting mockaries of the soldiers they had once been. 01:02:42.127 --> 01:02:52.542 [SPEAKER_01]: The dead rose from the swamps, as shambling horrors, reanimated by the power of the chaos guard, and hurled in waves against the imperial forces. 01:02:54.631 --> 01:03:02.525 [SPEAKER_01]: The lunar wolves cut them down without hesitation, but the true horror waited deeper within the wreckage of timbers grounded flagship. 01:03:03.526 --> 01:03:15.627 [SPEAKER_01]: Where the former governor had been twisted into something monstrous, swollen with the blessings of his new master, wielding a blade that gleamed with a malevolence that had nothing to do with its physical edge. 01:03:17.328 --> 01:03:18.110 [SPEAKER_01]: the Anatomy. 01:03:19.312 --> 01:03:26.225 [SPEAKER_01]: Placed in Tembo's corrupted hands by Eribus, chosen specifically for the target, it was meant to destroy. 01:03:27.468 --> 01:03:37.227 [SPEAKER_01]: Horace fought the creature in the rotting bowels of that ruined ship, and by all accounts, it was a battle unlike any the Primark had faced before. 01:03:37.207 --> 01:03:58.303 [SPEAKER_01]: The corrupted governor moved with a speed and skill that his mortal body had never possessed in life, guided by the dark intelligence of the weapon he carried, and though Horace was the greater warrior in every way, the anathom had been made for him, crafted and consecrated and aimed at him. 01:04:00.022 --> 01:04:05.294 [SPEAKER_01]: When it found his flesh, biting deep into his shoulder, where his armor had been torn away. 01:04:06.096 --> 01:04:15.617 [SPEAKER_01]: The wounded left was a doorway, and through it poured a poison that no apothecary skill could identify, and no imperial science could cure. 01:04:18.719 --> 01:04:29.013 [SPEAKER_01]: The warmaster fell, the greatest of the Emperor's sons, the undefeated commander of a million victories, collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut. 01:04:30.135 --> 01:04:36.303 [SPEAKER_01]: And his legion found themselves facing something that all their strength and all their fury could not fight. 01:04:37.405 --> 01:04:41.250 [SPEAKER_01]: Horrously dying, and nothing they did could stop it. 01:04:41.230 --> 01:04:49.783 [SPEAKER_01]: and the desperation that gripped the lunar wolves in those hours was of a kind that goes beyond grief into something closer to existential terror. 01:04:50.504 --> 01:05:03.584 [SPEAKER_01]: For if Horace could fall, if even the warmaster could be brought low, then what certainty remained in a universe that suddenly seemed very much darker and more hostile than it had the day before. 01:05:04.385 --> 01:05:08.892 [SPEAKER_01]: It was into this desperation 01:05:10.964 --> 01:05:27.387 [SPEAKER_01]: At the first chaplains urging, the warrior-loj brothers among the lunar wars agreed to allow a group of divinite shamans to attempt what imperial medicine could not, to heal the warmaster through the rituals of their native tradition. 01:05:27.805 --> 01:05:34.294

[SPEAKER_01]: These shamans were in truth, a coven of chaos contests, who had been active on Daven for centuries. 01:05:34.894 --> 01:05:43.406 [SPEAKER_01]: Practitioners of rights that drew their power from the very entities that had orchestrated horuses wounding in the first place. 01:05:43.426 --> 01:05:45.048 [SPEAKER_01]: The Lunar Wolves did not know this. 01:05:45.568 --> 01:05:51.917 [SPEAKER_01]: They knew only that their father was dying, and that someone was offering a chance, however slim, to save him. 01:05:52.818 --> 01:05:55.922 [SPEAKER_01]: And in the arithmetic of desperation, that was enough. 01:05:58.788 --> 01:06:04.053 [SPEAKER_01]: What happened in the temple of the serpent lodge exists beyond the reach of ordinary language. 01:06:04.854 --> 01:06:22.973 [SPEAKER_01]: For it took place not in the material world, but in the spaces between, in the screaming shifting on reality of the immaterial, where thought becomes substance and emotion becomes landscape, and the laws that govern the physical universe hold no authority. 01:06:22.953 --> 01:06:31.322 [SPEAKER_01]: Horace's soul was drawn from his broken body and cast into the warp, and there unmoured from everything that had ever anchored him. 01:06:32.084 --> 01:06:33.469 [SPEAKER_01]: He was shown a vision. 01:06:35.373 --> 01:06:46.788 [SPEAKER_01]: He saw the future, or rather, he saw a future, one among many possible tomorrow's, though the distinction would not be made clear to him until it was too late. 01:06:46.808 --> 01:06:56.681 [SPEAKER_01]: He saw the imperium of man as a rotting theocracy, a cathedral of suffering and superstition built upon the bones of everything the imperial truth had stood for. 01:06:57.722 --> 01:07:03.169 [SPEAKER_01]: He saw the emperor in throne as a god, and worshiped by the mindless masses. 01:07:03.149 --> 01:07:12.868 [SPEAKER_01]: and he saw statues raised to his brother Primax in attitudes of divine reverence, but nowhere in that grim vision did he see himself. 01:07:14.090 --> 01:07:23.368 [SPEAKER_01]: He had been erased, written out of the story, forgotten by the very civilisation, he had spent two centuries building and defending. 01:07:25.424 --> 01:07:32.756 [SPEAKER_01]: The chaos guards presented themselves, not as the architects of the nightmare he was witnessing, but as its victims. 01:07:33.818 --> 01:07:48.343 [SPEAKER_01]: They told him that the emperor had bargained with them once, long ago, trading promises for the power he needed to create the primax, and that he had betrayed that bargain, as he betrayed all things that ceased to be useful to him. 01:07:48.323 --> 01:08:02.210 [SPEAKER_01]: They told Horace that his father had never truly loved him, that the primax were not sons, but tools, instruments crafted for a purpose, and destined to be discarded, once that purpose was fulfilled. 01:08:03.232 --> 01:08:08.442 [SPEAKER_01]: They whispered to every wound the warmaster carried, every silence from terror. 01:08:08.422 --> 01:08:19.560 [SPEAKER_01]: Every unanswered question, every moment of doubt that had accumulated over the long and lonely years since the Emperor's withdrawal, and they offered him a bargain. 01:08:20.422 --> 01:08:23.747 [SPEAKER_01]: Give us the Emperor, and we will give you the Galaxy. 01:08:26.562 --> 01:08:29.127 [SPEAKER_01]: There was one voice that spoke against the darkness. 01:08:30.088 --> 01:08:46.377 [SPEAKER_01]: Magnus the Red, primarch of the thousand sons, sorcerer and scholar, who had perceived through his own formidable psychic gifts, what was being done to his brother, and had projected his consciousness across the vast distances of the warp to intervene. 01:08:46.357 --> 01:09:07.656 [SPEAKER_01]: Magnus told Horace the truth that the vision was only one possible future among many, that the powers whispering in his ear were manipulators and deceivers, that the path they were offering led not to liberation, but to chains more terrible than anything the emperor had ever imposed. 01:09:07.636 --> 01:09:19.114 [SPEAKER_01]: Magnus begged his brother to resist, to hold fast to the bones of loyalty that had sustained him through two centuries of war, to remember who he was and what he had fought for. 01:09:20.697 --> 01:09:25.322 [SPEAKER_01]: But Magnus was asking Horus to trust in a father who had not trusted him. 01:09:26.263 --> 01:09:30.088 [SPEAKER_01]: To have faith in a bond that felt as though it had already been broken. 01:09:31.129 --> 01:09:39.078 [SPEAKER_01]: To choose loyalty to a distant and silent emperor, over the immediate and overwhelming evidence of his own wounded heart. 01:09:40.159 --> 01:09:49.810 [SPEAKER_01]: And Horus, for all his brilliance, for all his greatness, for all the qualities that had made him the finest commander, humanity had ever produced. 01:09:49.790 --> 01:10:09.418 [SPEAKER_01]: was in the end, a being shaped by love, and love that has been wounded badly enough can become something unrecognizable, can curdle into resentment, can harden into hatred, can convince itself that the only way to survive the pain of abandonment is to become the one who abandons. 01:10:11.035 --> 01:10:12.878 [SPEAKER_01]: Horus accepted the bargain. 01:10:14.080 --> 01:10:29.685 [SPEAKER_01]: He opened himself to the chaos gods and let their power flood through him, filling the hollow places that his father's silence had carved, and in that moment the warmaster of the Imperium died, and something else was born in his place. 01:10:32.787 --> 01:10:42.021 [SPEAKER_01]: He emerged from the temple healed, his wound closed, his strength restored, and to those who had kept watch outside, it must have seemed like a miracle. 01:10:42.782 --> 01:10:46.928 [SPEAKER_01]: Like the answer to a plea that they had not dared believe would be heard. 01:10:47.709 --> 01:10:50.373 [SPEAKER_01]: They did not see the change in him, not at first. 01:10:50.974 --> 01:10:53.357 [SPEAKER_01]: They saw only that their

father had returned to them. 01:10:54.118 --> 01:11:02.170 [SPEAKER_01]: Whole and strong and full of purpose, and they wept with relief and gratitude, and 01:11:02.150 --> 01:11:05.038 [SPEAKER_01]: not even in the darkest hours of his illness. 01:11:06.824 --> 01:11:27.012 [SPEAKER_01]: They could not have known what that purpose had become, or what it would cost them, or that the father they loved had already begun the long walk toward a betrayal that would burn the galaxy from end to end, and leave scars upon the face of the Imperium that 10,000 years would not be enough to heal. 01:11:28.213 --> 01:11:35.143 [SPEAKER_01]: The warm-aster had fallen, and the wolves, faithful to the last, would follow him into 01:11:38.988 --> 01:11:44.022 [SPEAKER_01]: There is a particular kind of cruelty that only those who love us are capable of inflicting. 01:11:44.744 --> 01:11:49.517 [SPEAKER_01]: For only they know us well enough to understand precisely where the blade will cut the deepest. 01:11:50.239 --> 01:11:54.010 [SPEAKER_01]: Strangers can wound us, and enemies can destroy us. 01:11:53.990 --> 01:12:02.165 [SPEAKER_01]: but it is the betrayal of those we trusted, those we fought beside and bled beside, and would have died for without a moment's hesitation. 01:12:03.026 --> 01:12:07.134 [SPEAKER_01]: That leaves the kind of scar, no amount of time can fully heal. 01:12:07.995 --> 01:12:11.762 [SPEAKER_01]: What happened on Istvan 3 was such a betrayal. 01:12:11.742 --> 01:12:25.819 [SPEAKER_01]: and though the galaxy would soon learn to measure its horrors on scales that dwarfed even this atrocity, there was an intimacy to the killing at the Coral City that sets it apart from the vast and impersonal carnage that followed. 01:12:27.250 --> 01:12:31.395 [SPEAKER_01]: The pretence was elegant, as the most effective lies so often are. 01:12:32.236 --> 01:12:47.976 [SPEAKER_01]: The planetary governor of East Van 3, a man named Vardis Pral, had fallen to the corrupting influence of the Chaos God's Slaanesh, and had declared his world's independence from the Imperium, in defiance of his oaths of fealty. 01:12:47.956 --> 01:12:57.866 [SPEAKER_01]: The Council of Terror charged Horace with the retaking of the world, and to any outside observer, the warm-aster's response would have appeared entirely appropriate. 01:12:58.827 --> 01:13:13.002 [SPEAKER_01]: He assembled the forces of his foremost trusted legions, the sons of Horace, the world eaters, the death guard, and the emperor's children, and he prepared to bring Istvan three back into compliance. 01:13:14.753 --> 01:13:17.858 [SPEAKER_01]: But Horus was not preparing a campaign of compliance. 01:13:18.599 --> 01:13:20.582 [SPEAKER_01]: He was preparing an execution. 01:13:21.664 --> 01:13:31.480 [SPEAKER_01]: Within each of the four legions that had pledged themselves to his rebellion, they remained elements whose loyalty to the Emperor ran too deep to be subverted. 01:13:31.460 --> 01:13:48.186 [SPEAKER_01]: Warriors who would not turn could not be bought or persuaded or frightened into abandoning their oaths, men whose devotion to the Imperium had been forged in a furnace that even the war masters considerable powers of manipulation could not crack. 01:13:50.663 --> 01:14:07.923 [SPEAKER_01]: Many of these were Terenborn, space marines who had been recruited by the Emperor himself before the primax were found, whose bond with the master of mankind was personal and direct, in a way that later generations of Legion-born warriors could not fully share. 01:14:08.964 --> 01:14:20.097 [SPEAKER_01]: They represented perhaps a third of each legions total strength, and they were a problem 01:14:23.131 --> 01:14:25.935 [SPEAKER_01]: His solution was as ruthless as it was efficient. 01:14:26.856 --> 01:14:45.443 [SPEAKER_01]: Under the guise of the Istvann 3 compliance action, Horace identified every known loyalist element within his four legions, and deployed them to the planet's surface, sending them down to prosecute the war against prowess forces with no indication that anything was a miss. 01:14:46.874 --> 01:14:53.924 [SPEAKER_01]: They fought brilliantly, storming the planetary capital with all of the skill that their training and their pride demanded. 01:14:53.944 --> 01:14:59.692 [SPEAKER_01]: And when it last the city fell, and the loyalists stood victorious amid the ruins. 01:15:00.433 --> 01:15:07.583 [SPEAKER_01]: Their reward came not in the form of triumph or commendation, but in the form of a reign of death, falling from the sky. 01:15:09.284 --> 01:15:29.914 [SPEAKER_01]: virus bombs, hundreds of them, launched from the war masters orbiting fleet, each one carrying a payload of the life-eater virus, a biological weapon of such unspeakable potency that it dissolved living tissue on contact, reducing every organic thing it touched to a slurry of decaying matter. 01:15:31.176 --> 01:15:34.701 [SPEAKER_01]: A 12 billion civilians died almost instantly. 01:15:34.681 --> 01:15:50.346 [SPEAKER_01]: an entire world's population snuffed out in the time it takes to draw a breath, and the psychic shockwave of so many souls perishing at once, screamed through the warp with such force that it briefly obscured even the astronomical. 01:15:51.228 --> 01:15:58.680 [SPEAKER_01]: That great beacon of the Emperor's will that guided every ship in the Imperium through the darkness between the stars. 01:16:01.208 --> 01:16:16.829 [SPEAKER_01]: The loyalists on the surface should have died with them, and they would have, had it not been for a single act of desperate courage that stands as one of the most extraordinary moments of individual heroism in the entire history of the heresy. 01:16:17.971 --> 01:16:29.747 [SPEAKER_01]: Captain Saw tarvots of the Emperor's children had been aboard his legions flagship when he discovered what was about to happen, and in the minutes remaining before the bombardment began. 01:16:29.727 --> 01:16:39.313

[SPEAKER_01]: he seized a transport craft and flew down through the fire and the fury of the descending warheads to warn as many of his brothers as he could reach. 01:16:40.376 --> 01:16:41.880 [SPEAKER_01]: Not all heard the warning. 01:16:43.784 --> 01:16:46.508 [SPEAKER_01]: not all who heard it found shelter in time. 01:16:47.410 --> 01:16:55.503 [SPEAKER_01]: But enough did, enough sons of four different legions, men who had been told by their own fathers that they were no longer wanted. 01:16:56.624 --> 01:17:03.295 [SPEAKER_01]: Survive the initial bombardment, to mount a defense that would defy every expectation of those who had tried to kill them. 01:17:05.013 --> 01:17:09.682 [SPEAKER_01]: in the shattered ruins of the city, in the chemical stench of a world stripped of life. 01:17:10.443 --> 01:17:17.035 [SPEAKER_01]: The loyalist rallied under the command of men, who had already been marked for death, and refused to accept the sentence. 01:17:17.637 --> 01:17:26.413 [SPEAKER_01]: Garveo Locan of the Suns of Horrors, acquired and principled captain, whose devotion to the ideals of the Imperium, 01:17:26.393 --> 01:17:31.182 [SPEAKER_01]: had always sat uneasily alongside his legions increasingly cathonian character. 01:17:32.325 --> 01:17:46.933 [SPEAKER_01]: Taric Torgadhan, also of the sons of Horus, whose warmth and sadonic humour had made him one of the most beloved officers in the legion, and whose loyalty to the Emperor had never been in question, not even for a moment. 01:17:48.888 --> 01:17:53.954 [SPEAKER_01]: Salt harvets himself, who had risked everything to give his brothers the chance to fight. 01:17:55.135 --> 01:18:12.735 [SPEAKER_01]: Together they organized what should have been impossible, a coherent discipline resistance against the full might of four traitor legions, waged from the rubble of a dead city on a poisoned world with no hope of reinforcement and no possibility of victory. 01:18:16.006 --> 01:18:33.728 [SPEAKER_01]: For three months they hound, three months of desperate, grinding close quarters, fighting against brothers who knew their tactics and their weaknesses and their habits, who had trained beside them and broken bread with them and shared the same gene fathers blood. 01:18:33.708 --> 01:18:43.405 [SPEAKER_01]: Three months in which every sunrise brought fresh assaults and every sunset was purchased with the lives of men who knew they were going to die and fought anyway. 01:18:44.267 --> 01:18:50.738 [SPEAKER_01]: Not because they believed they could win, but because surrender was simply not a concept their souls could accommodate. 01:18:52.507 --> 01:18:55.172 [SPEAKER_01]: It was Angron, who broke the stalemate. 01:18:56.074 --> 01:19:14.211 [SPEAKER_01]: In the end, Angron, the primarch of the world eaters, whose patients had never been more than a thin veneer over a bottomless ocean of rage, who hurled himself at the planet's surface at the head of 50 companies of his own traitor marines, because the killing was taking too long. 01:19:14.191 --> 01:19:22.686 [SPEAKER_01]: Horus, furious at the disruption to his plans, but pragmatic enough to recognise an opportunity when it was thrust upon him. 01:19:23.527 --> 01:19:34.005 [SPEAKER_01]: Re-enforced and gruns assault with troops from the remaining three traitor legions, and the noose around the loyalists' throats began at last to Titan. 01:19:35.622 --> 01:19:47.796 [SPEAKER_01]: It was during these final days that the Warmaster sent two of his most trusted captains to deal with a matter that was, for all its strategic insignificance, deeply and terribly personal. 01:19:48.877 --> 01:20:01.191 [SPEAKER_01]: A badden and horrors, axi-man, the full moon and the half moon of the monival, the inner circle of four captains who had served as the Warmaster's closest advisors and dearest companions. 01:20:01.171 --> 01:20:07.618 [SPEAKER_01]: We're dispatched to find and kill their former brothers, Garveyl-Lokin and Taric-Togadna. 01:20:08.700 --> 01:20:10.782 [SPEAKER_01]: The new moon and the gibbus moon. 01:20:11.983 --> 01:20:25.018 [SPEAKER_01]: The other half of a bond that had once been the soul of the Legion, a brotherhood of four men who had balanced each other's strengths and tempered each other's weaknesses and served together with a closeness. 01:20:27.749 --> 01:20:36.460 [SPEAKER_01]: Aximant found Targaden, what passed between them before the end is not recorded in detail, and perhaps that is a mercy. 01:20:37.501 --> 01:20:47.614 [SPEAKER_01]: What is known is that Aximant killed him, bedded him, with a single stroke, severing the life of a man who had been his brother in everything but blood. 01:20:49.197 --> 01:21:01.511 [SPEAKER_01]: One wonders what Togadan's face looked like in that final moment, whether it held anger or sorrow, or that characteristic sardonic warmth that had defined him, even in the darkest hours. 01:21:02.772 --> 01:21:16.588 [SPEAKER_01]: One wonders what Axiomant felt as the blade fell, and whether the thing that looked back at him from his brother's eyes, in that last instant, was something he would spend the rest of his long and bitter existence trying to forget. 01:21:19.083 --> 01:21:27.816 [SPEAKER_01]: Aberdon sought Logan and found him, and the two fought in the collapsing ruins of a building that seemed determined to bury them both. 01:21:28.998 --> 01:21:33.344 [SPEAKER_01]: Aberdon was the stronger, the more savage, the more committed to the killing. 01:21:34.286 --> 01:21:48.567 [SPEAKER_01]: But the building fell before the work was finished, and when the dust settled and the rubble was still, it was a baton who walked away, and Logan who was buried beneath the stones of a dead city on a dead world. 01:21:48.547 --> 01:21:49.148 [SPEAKER_01]: for dead. 01:21:50.991 --> 01:21:51.792 [SPEAKER_01]: He survived. 01:21:52.333 --> 01:21:58.442 [SPEAKER_01]: Garveyl Locan survived, though he would not be the same man when he finally clawed

his way free of that grave. 01:21:59.243 --> 01:22:03.469 [SPEAKER_01]: And the story of what became of him afterward is a tale for another time. 01:22:04.831 --> 01:22:08.817 [SPEAKER_01]: What matters here in the telling of the Lunar Wolves tragedy, 01:22:08.797 --> 01:22:11.881 [SPEAKER_01]: is that he was alive to witness what came next. 01:22:12.702 --> 01:22:21.093 [SPEAKER_01]: The final orbital bombardment that Horace ordered when the last pockets of loyalist resistance had been penned into their final defenses. 01:22:21.914 --> 01:22:30.585 [SPEAKER_01]: The storms of fire that fell from the sky and reduced the city and everything within it to ash and memory and silence. 01:22:33.434 --> 01:22:35.899 [SPEAKER_01]: The purge was complete. 01:22:35.919 --> 01:22:46.660 [SPEAKER_01]: The last voices of conscience within the traitor legions had been silenced, buried beneath rubble, or burned to nothing, by the cold light of warships that had once been their home. 01:22:47.922 --> 01:22:53.974 [SPEAKER_01]: The sons of Horus, the world eaters, the deathguard, the emperor's children. 01:22:53.954 --> 01:23:00.047 [SPEAKER_01]: They belonged wholly to the warmaster now, scoured clean of descent, united in treachery. 01:23:00.648 --> 01:23:07.643 [SPEAKER_01]: Ready to march upon the galaxy, they had spent two centuries building, and tear it apart with the same hands that had built it. 01:23:09.513 --> 01:23:17.346 [SPEAKER_01]: and in the silence that followed the bombardment in the drifting ash, and the chemical haze of a world that had been murdered twice over. 01:23:18.427 --> 01:23:26.420 [SPEAKER_01]: One could almost hear the echo of words spoken in a different age, by a different horrors, over the gold dipped skull of a different traitor. 01:23:27.462 --> 01:23:29.225 [SPEAKER_01]: So perished all traitors. 01:23:30.227 --> 01:23:34.153 [SPEAKER_01]: The irony, one suspects, was lost on no one. 01:23:37.897 --> 01:23:53.542 [SPEAKER_01]: When word of the atrocity at East Van 3 reached terror, carried across the stars by the battered frigate Eisenstein and the desperate testimony of battle captain Nathaniel Garo of the Death Guard, one of the few loyalists to escape the system alive. 01:23:54.443 --> 01:24:00.192 [SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor's response was swift and by every reasonable measure overwhelming. 01:24:00.172 --> 01:24:18.982 [SPEAKER_01]: 7-4 legions of space marines were dispatched to the István system to bring the warmaster to account for his treachery, a force of such staggering magnitude that it should have been sufficient to crush any rebellion, however well-led, however deeply entrenched. 01:24:20.124 --> 01:24:22.568 [SPEAKER_01]: It should have been enough, it was not 01:24:25.467 --> 01:24:41.552 [SPEAKER_01]: For Horus had anticipated this response, had in truth been counting on it, and the trap he had prepared at East Van V was as elegantly conceived and as mercilessly executed as anything in his long and brilliant career of warfare. 01:24:42.983 --> 01:24:46.307 [SPEAKER_01]: of the seven legions that descended upon the warmaster's position. 01:24:47.188 --> 01:24:49.530 [SPEAKER_01]: Only three were truly loyal to the Emperor. 01:24:50.331 --> 01:24:59.781 [SPEAKER_01]: The Iron Hands led by Ferris Manus, whose cold fury at his brothers Betrayal, burned with an intensity that overwrote all caution. 01:25:00.803 --> 01:25:07.590 [SPEAKER_01]: The Salamanders led by Vulcan, that most compassionate and most steadfast of primax. 01:25:07.570 --> 01:25:17.364 [SPEAKER_01]: and the raven guard, led by Korax, whose mastery of stealth and rapid assault made him one of the finest tactical minds among the primax. 01:25:19.087 --> 01:25:30.523 [SPEAKER_01]: These three legions form the first wave of the attack, hurling themselves at the traitor positions with all the righteous wrath of warriors who had been betrayed by those they once called brothers. 01:25:32.360 --> 01:25:42.961 [SPEAKER_01]: They fought magnificently, they fought with the desperate courage of men who understood that the fate of the Imperium itself might rest upon the outcome of this single battle. 01:25:43.843 --> 01:25:52.039 [SPEAKER_01]: And for a time, a brief, shining, agonizing time, it seemed as though their fury might carry the day. 01:25:52.019 --> 01:26:04.313 [SPEAKER_01]: The traitor lines buckled under the ferocity of the assault, and the loyalists pressed forward with every passing hour, and then the reserves arrived, and the world ended. 01:26:07.417 --> 01:26:19.191 [SPEAKER_01]: The four legions that comprise the second wave, the iron warriors, the alpha legion, the wordbearers, and the nightlords had been counted among the emperor's loyal son. 01:26:20.403 --> 01:26:25.834 [SPEAKER_01]: They descended upon Istvan V, with their banners flying, and their weapons ready. 01:26:26.736 --> 01:26:37.618 [SPEAKER_01]: And the loyalists on the ground must have felt for one brief moment, the surge of hope that comes when reinforcements appear on the horizon of a desperate battle. 01:26:37.598 --> 01:26:41.446 [SPEAKER_01]: That hope died in the time it takes a heart to beat. 01:26:42.348 --> 01:26:45.855 [SPEAKER_01]: For the reserves did not turn their weapons upon the traitors. 01:26:47.097 --> 01:26:52.789 [SPEAKER_01]: They turned them upon the loyalists and what had been a hard fought battle became a slaughter. 01:26:54.473 --> 01:27:01.994 [SPEAKER_01]: caught between two fires, a sailed from the front by enemies they had expected, and from behind by brothers they had trusted. 01:27:02.716 --> 01:27:09.495 [SPEAKER_01]: The iron hands, the salamanders, and the raven guard, were very nearly annihilated. 01:27:09.475 --> 01:27:15.382 [SPEAKER_01]: Ferris Manus fell on that field, his head taken from his shoulders by the blade of full grim. 01:27:16.343 --> 01:27:20.888 [SPEAKER_01]: His closest brother, among the primax, the one he had loved best. 01:27:21.789 --> 01:27:31.641

[SPEAKER_01]: And if there is a single image that captures the essence of the horrorous heresy in all its intimate and devastating cruelty, it is perhaps that one. 01:27:32.542 --> 01:27:39.330 [SPEAKER_01]: A brother's sword finding a brother's neck guided by a hand 01:27:40.475 --> 01:27:48.525 [SPEAKER_01]: Vulkan and Korak survived, though both were grievously wounded in body and spirit, and the remnants of their shattered legions. 01:27:49.546 --> 01:28:08.490 [SPEAKER_01]: Several thousand survivors from each were once there had been tens of thousands, escaped the killing ground through desperate rear guard actions that cost still more lives, and left the three loyalist legions too decimated to play any significant further role in the defense of the Imperium. 01:28:11.390 --> 01:28:21.579 [SPEAKER_01]: The trap had worked in a single engagement, Horace had neutralized three entire legions and revealed the full terrible scope of his conspiracy. 01:28:22.402 --> 01:28:26.614 [SPEAKER_01]: Not four legions in rebellion, but nine, fully half 01:28:26.594 --> 01:28:31.182 [SPEAKER_01]: the space marines, turned against the emperor they had been created to serve. 01:28:32.264 --> 01:28:42.342 [SPEAKER_01]: And the treachery did not end with the space marines, for the warrior lodges and the slow poison of corruption had spread far beyond the primax and their sons. 01:28:42.828 --> 01:28:45.334 [SPEAKER_01]: The Imperial Army was split nearly in half. 01:28:46.217 --> 01:28:58.508 [SPEAKER_01]: Regiment turning upon regiment, fleet upon fleet, soldiers who had shared bivouax and battlefields, now staring at one another across the barrels of weapons, they had once carried side-by-side. 01:29:00.293 --> 01:29:14.072 [SPEAKER_01]: the titan legions of the mechanicum, the god machines whose very footsteps shook the earth, were equally divided, loyalist and traitor engines, squaring off across worlds that had never imagined such horror could find them. 01:29:14.873 --> 01:29:25.187 [SPEAKER_01]: Barely a single world in the imperium was left untouched, as the flames of civil war spread from system to system and sector to sector. 01:29:25.167 --> 01:29:34.401 [SPEAKER_01]: consuming everything in their path, with the veracity of a fire that has found, at last, fuel enough to burn without limit. 01:29:36.119 --> 01:29:40.867 [SPEAKER_01]: The horrors heresy had begun in earnest, and the galaxy would never be the same. 01:29:41.909 --> 01:29:48.160 [SPEAKER_01]: For seven years, seven long grinding blood soaked years, the imperium tore itself apart. 01:29:49.282 --> 01:29:59.140 [SPEAKER_01]: It was the most terrible conflict in the history of mankind, a war fought not between strangers but between brothers, between fathers and sons. 01:29:59.120 --> 01:30:06.970 [SPEAKER_01]: between men and women who had built a civilization together and now labored with equal further to pull it down. 01:30:07.608 --> 01:30:20.822 [SPEAKER_01]: Billions died, billions upon billions, on thousands of worlds, in battles whose names would become bywords for horror, and whose scars would mark the face of the galaxy for 10,000 years to come. 01:30:21.903 --> 01:30:35.657 [SPEAKER_01]: Systems burned, cultures that had survived the age of strife only to be brought into the Emperor's light were extinguished in the crossfire of a war they had never asked for, and could not hope to survive. 01:30:35.637 --> 01:30:39.083 [SPEAKER_01]: and through it all, relentless and inexorable. 01:30:39.845 --> 01:30:49.282 [SPEAKER_01]: The traitor legions advanced toward terror, toward the emperor, toward the reckoning that Horace had been promised in the fever visions of the serpent lodge. 01:30:52.148 --> 01:30:58.860 [SPEAKER_01]: The wolves were coming home, and this time they were coming not to defend the fold, but to devour it. 01:31:02.806 --> 01:31:17.167 [SPEAKER_01]: And at the end of those seven years, as the loyalist legions not already committed to the defense of terror, raced through the tortured currents of the warp in a desperate bid to reach mankind's cradle, before it was too late. 01:31:18.008 --> 01:31:31.969 [SPEAKER_01]: The traitor fleets gathered above the world where it had all begun, where the emperor had first raised his eyes to the stars, and dared 01:31:36.067 --> 01:31:37.148 [SPEAKER_01]: the siege of terror. 01:31:38.110 --> 01:32:00.100 [SPEAKER_01]: The traitor legions fell upon the planet, millions of corrupted space marines and mortal soldiers and demonic entities, pouring from the sky like a plague of iron and malice, and the defenders, the loyal sons and daughters of the Imperium, who had chosen to stand between the darkness and the world that had given humanity its start. 01:32:00.080 --> 01:32:11.423 [SPEAKER_01]: Met them with everything they had, and held on with bleeding fingers while the walls cracked and the ground shook, and the sky itself seemed to tear apart above them. 01:32:14.086 --> 01:32:18.572 [SPEAKER_01]: The Imperial Palace was besieged and in time breached. 01:32:19.573 --> 01:32:28.243 [SPEAKER_01]: Walls that had been built to endure until the end of the universe were broken open by weapons that should never have been turned against them. 01:32:29.185 --> 01:32:40.819 [SPEAKER_01]: And through those breaches poured the armies of the warmaster, howling with the borrowed fury of gods who had waited in the dark since before humanity was born for precisely this moment. 01:32:41.761 --> 01:32:56.592 [SPEAKER_01]: The fighting within the palace was brutal, room by room, corridor by corridor, shrine by shrine, loyalist and traitor, locked together in a deathgrip that neither side could break, and neither side would relinquish. 01:32:57.274 --> 01:33:00.360 [SPEAKER_01]: The stones beneath their feet slick with blood. 01:33:02.281 --> 01:33:11.519 [SPEAKER_01]: And then, at the last, when the walls were failing and the defenders were dying, and it seemed as though the darkness

might truly swallow everything. 01:33:12.481 --> 01:33:14.625 [SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor did what only he could do. 01:33:14.645 --> 01:33:20.998 [SPEAKER_01]: He went to face his son, the details of what happened aboard the vengeful spirit. 01:33:20.978 --> 01:33:34.657 [SPEAKER_01]: Horace's great battlebarge in those final and world-shaping moments are shrouded in accounts so contradictory and so layered with myth and propaganda that the unvarnished truth may never be known. 01:33:35.638 --> 01:33:41.807 [SPEAKER_01]: What is known, what every source agrees upon regardless of its allegiance or its agenda, is this. 01:33:42.828 --> 01:33:50.158 [SPEAKER_01]: The Emperor of mankind and Horace Lupakao, father and son, creator and creation. 01:33:50.138 --> 01:34:01.701 [SPEAKER_01]: The two most powerful beings the human species had ever produced, met for the last time in a confrontation that would determine the fate of the galaxy for the next 10,000 years. 01:34:04.364 --> 01:34:06.326 [SPEAKER_01]: and the emperor killed his son. 01:34:07.588 --> 01:34:11.392 [SPEAKER_01]: He killed him with the full and terrible force of his psychic might. 01:34:12.294 --> 01:34:24.909 [SPEAKER_01]: A blast of power so immense and so utterly without restraint that it did not merely end Horace's life, but annihilated something deeper, burned away whatever remained of the man he had been. 01:34:25.730 --> 01:34:34.320 [SPEAKER_01]: Scoured the chaos from his soul, with a light so fierce that nothing, not even the 01:34:34.300 --> 01:34:54.992 [SPEAKER_01]: Horace Lupacau, Wormaster, Primearch of the 16th Legion, the brightest and most beloved of the Emperor's sons, died on the deck of his own flagship, and with his death the rebellion that had consumed the galaxy for seven years, lost its heart and its purpose, and its animating will. 01:34:56.643 --> 01:34:58.545 [SPEAKER_01]: the emperor was mortally wounded. 01:34:59.266 --> 01:35:04.633 [SPEAKER_01]: His body so catastrophically damaged that no art of medicine or science could restore it. 01:35:05.434 --> 01:35:11.722 [SPEAKER_01]: And he was carried back to the imperial palace and set upon the arcane mechanisms of the golden throne. 01:35:12.664 --> 01:35:16.489 [SPEAKER_01]: That ancient device that had been built for another purpose entirely. 01:35:17.410 --> 01:35:25.300 [SPEAKER_01]: Now repurposed as a life support system for a being who was no longer truly alive, 01:35:28.030 --> 01:35:33.899 [SPEAKER_01]: For the sons of Horus, the death of their primarch was a blow from which the legion would never truly recover. 01:35:34.700 --> 01:35:41.951 [SPEAKER_01]: Horus had been everything to them, father and commander, and the living embodiment of everything they believe themselves to be. 01:35:42.932 --> 01:35:57.514 [SPEAKER_01]: And his death left avoid in the center of their existence, that nothing and no one could feel. 01:35:57.494 --> 01:36:09.169 [SPEAKER_01]: And in the chaos and carnage of the traitor retreat, the sons of Horus fought their way clear of the sole system, with their primarx body clutched in their arms like a holy relic. 01:36:10.111 --> 01:36:19.603 [SPEAKER_01]: The last and most precious thing they possessed, in a universe that had suddenly become very cold, and very empty, and very dark. 01:36:21.541 --> 01:36:32.931 [SPEAKER_01]: They fled to the eye of terror, a great wound in the fabric of reality, where the warp and the material universe split together in an eternal maelstrom of madness and mutation. 01:36:34.052 --> 01:36:50.367 [SPEAKER_01]: And they carried their dead father with them into the dark, and the galaxy they left behind was burning, and the imperium they had helped to build was broken, and the dream that had sustained them through two centuries of war and conquest was ashes in their mouths. 01:36:53.823 --> 01:37:03.126 [SPEAKER_01]: deep within the eye of terror, the remnants of the 16th Legion established themselves upon a demon world that served a double purpose. 01:37:03.146 --> 01:37:11.106 [SPEAKER_01]: A fortress from which they could strike at the Imperium, they had failed to conquer, and a tomb for the Primark, they had failed to save. 01:37:12.655 --> 01:37:17.960 [SPEAKER_01]: They laid Horace's body at the heart of their stronghold, like a relic enshrined in a cathedral. 01:37:18.781 --> 01:37:26.768 [SPEAKER_01]: And around it, they built the rituals and routines of a new existence that bore no resemblance to the glorious life they had known before. 01:37:27.749 --> 01:37:30.972 [SPEAKER_01]: A life of aimless fury and creeping despair. 01:37:31.793 --> 01:37:42.443 [SPEAKER_01]: Of warriors who had once been the finest fighting force in the galaxy, reduced to squabbling 01:37:44.060 --> 01:37:55.612 [SPEAKER_01]: Without Horace, the Legion floundered, the command structure that had functioned so brilliantly under his charismatic leadership fractured along the fault lines that his presence had always papered over. 01:37:56.392 --> 01:38:09.105 [SPEAKER_01]: And the old Kathonian instincts, the ganglord mentality, the cult of personal reputation, the savage competition for dominance that had once been tempered by the primarx unifying will. 01:38:09.760 --> 01:38:13.625 [SPEAKER_01]: re-asserted themselves with avengers that tore the legion apart from within. 01:38:13.665 --> 01:38:35.633 [SPEAKER_01]: In their desperation, the sons of Horus sought power, wherever it could be found, turning to each of the chaos guards in succession, caughting demonic possession, and accepting the evermore costly blessings of the warp in a frantic search for the strength to survive in a universe that no longer had any use for them. 01:38:38.144 --> 01:38:43.350 [SPEAKER_01]: And all the while, the other traitor legions circled like scavengers around a wounded beast. 01:38:44.031 --> 01:39:03.493 [SPEAKER_01]: For the brief unity that the dark gods had imposed upon their worshipers during the heresy had

dissolved back into the natural state of chaos, which is to say, into rivalry and spite, and the endless cannibalistic competition of predators who recognize no loyalty beyond their own hunger. 01:39:04.351 --> 01:39:26.190 [SPEAKER_01]: The Legion Wars, as this period of savagery came to be known, saw the sons of Horus, assailed by the very allies who had marched beside them to the walls of the Imperial Palace, and the coolest blow of all came from the Emperor's children, who struck at the heart of what the sons of Horus held most sacred 01:39:28.347 --> 01:39:32.933 [SPEAKER_01]: They stole the body of Horace from the depths of his tomb and spirited it away. 01:39:33.794 --> 01:39:52.380 [SPEAKER_01]: And the whispers spoke of intentions, so grotesque, that even in the morally bankrupt depths of the eye of terror, they provoked revulsion, plans to clone the dead primar, to grow a new wallmaster from the flesh of the old, to resurrect by profane science, what the emperor had destroyed. 01:39:54.200 --> 01:39:59.848 [SPEAKER_01]: It was a baton who answered the call, that no one else in the Legion had the strength or the will to answer. 01:40:00.950 --> 01:40:21.540 [SPEAKER_01]: A baton, the first captain, the last warrior standing in the overlords chamber at Ulernor, the man who had sought to kill Garviol Loken in the ruins of the Coral City, the full moon of a mourn of all that had been shattered, along with everything else the Legion had once held dear. 01:40:21.520 --> 01:40:26.406 [SPEAKER_01]: He had been conspicuous in his absence during the worst of the legions decline. 01:40:27.327 --> 01:40:42.887 [SPEAKER_01]: We're drawing from command while his brothers tore themselves apart, and there were many who believed he had simply given up, that even the indomitable will of the first captain had finally broken beneath the weight of all that had been lost. 01:40:45.736 --> 01:40:46.377 [SPEAKER_01]: They were wrong. 01:40:46.898 --> 01:40:48.201 [SPEAKER_01]: A badden had not broken. 01:40:48.241 --> 01:40:57.738 [SPEAKER_01]: He had been waiting, with the same patience that had kept him on his feet in that blood-soaked chamber on Ulernor when every other warrior had fallen. 01:40:58.700 --> 01:41:02.968 [SPEAKER_01]: For the moment when his legion needed him badly enough to follow, where he led. 01:41:04.045 --> 01:41:05.627 [SPEAKER_01]: That moment had arrived. 01:41:06.468 --> 01:41:11.815 [SPEAKER_01]: He struck at the Emperor's children, and he recovered what remained of his primeark stolen body. 01:41:12.696 --> 01:41:17.002 [SPEAKER_01]: And then, he did something that shocked even those who thought they understood him. 01:41:18.004 --> 01:41:18.644 [SPEAKER_01]: He destroyed it. 01:41:19.125 --> 01:41:28.197 [SPEAKER_01]: He burned the flesh of Horace Lupacau, reduced the mortal remains of the greatest primeark who had ever lived to ash and memory. 01:41:28.177 --> 01:41:33.952 [SPEAKER_01]: and in doing so, he severed the last thread that bound the legion to its past. 01:41:33.972 --> 01:41:42.996 [SPEAKER_01]: The last fragile hope that what had been lost might somehow be restored, that the father might return and make everything whole again. 01:41:45.372 --> 01:41:49.643 [SPEAKER_01]: It was an act of extraordinary courage and extraordinary cruelty. 01:41:50.766 --> 01:41:55.919 [SPEAKER_01]: And it was exactly what the Legion needed, though many of them would never forgive him for it. 01:41:56.921 --> 01:42:01.272 [SPEAKER_01]: After this, the warriors of the sons of Horus painted their armor black. 01:42:01.657 --> 01:42:10.846 [SPEAKER_01]: not the sea-green they had warned since their renaming, not the pale grey white of the lunar wolves that some among them still remembered with a longing. 01:42:11.867 --> 01:42:13.869 [SPEAKER_01]: They mourn for horrors who was gone. 01:42:14.750 --> 01:42:18.534 [SPEAKER_01]: They mourn for the dream of galactic conquest that had died with him. 01:42:19.495 --> 01:42:26.702 [SPEAKER_01]: They mourn for what they had been and what they had become, and the vast and unbridgable distance between those two things. 01:42:29.602 --> 01:42:42.215 [SPEAKER_01]: And when the morning was done, or rather, when it had been transmuted from paralysing grief into something harder and colder and more useful, the legion changed its name for the last time. 01:42:43.516 --> 01:42:51.485 [SPEAKER_01]: They were no longer the lunar wars, they were no longer the sons of Horus, for Horus was dead and his sons had failed him. 01:42:52.806 --> 01:42:57.651 [SPEAKER_01]: And the name had become a monument to defeat rather 01:42:57.631 --> 01:43:05.038 [SPEAKER_01]: They were the black legion now, and the blackness of their armour was both a mark of sorrow and a declaration of intent. 01:43:06.920 --> 01:43:13.987 [SPEAKER_01]: A badden, once first captain, now claimed the title that his primarke had held, Warmaster of Chaos. 01:43:14.948 --> 01:43:27.300 [SPEAKER_01]: It was a title that carried with it the weight of a legacy drenched in blood and failure, and 10,000 broken promises, and a badden bore with an 01:43:27.280 --> 01:43:29.988 [SPEAKER_01]: He would succeed where his primarch had failed. 01:43:30.710 --> 01:43:32.815 [SPEAKER_01]: He would bring the Imperium to its knees. 01:43:33.477 --> 01:43:42.302 [SPEAKER_01]: He would see the false emperor, torn from his golden throne, and the galaxy remained in the image of the dark gods who had given him purpose. 01:43:44.746 --> 01:43:56.464 [SPEAKER_01]: and on the lips of the Black Legion, as they gathered beneath Abadon's banner and prepared to unleash the first of the terrible Black Crusades that would torment the Imperium for the next ten millennia. 01:43:57.566 --> 01:44:08.063 [SPEAKER_01]: The words of Horace Lupicau, echoed like a prayer spoken in a language that the speaker no longer fully understands, but cannot bring himself to abandon. 01:44:09.385 --> 01:44:10.787 [SPEAKER_01]: Let the galaxy burn.