Luna Wolves (Sons of Horus)

The Luna Wolves were the XIV Space Marine Legion raised by the Emperor of Mankind on Terra at the dawn of the Great Crusade in the late 30th Millennium. After the Emperor discovered the Legion's Primarch Horus on the world of Cthonia, and gave him command of the Luna Wolves, Horus went on to lead the XIV Legion in earning thousands of battle honours over a span of 200 years of the Great Crusade. Few other Legions could match the listings of their achievements and of those that could few could rival the XIV for the brightness with which their victories shone. Spread across hundreds of expedition fleets and on countless battlefields they broke the enemies of the Imperium and pushed the Great Crusade forwards. The position of Horus as the Emperor's favoured son undoubtedly enhanced their triumphs. The Emperor fought alongside all of the Primarchs, and led all of the Legions at different times, but Horus and the Luna Wolves stood beside him for many of his greatest victories. From the beginning of the Great Crusade until the Emperor's return to Terra following the triumph of the Ullanor Crusade and the elevation of Horus to the esteemed rank of Warmaster and commander-in-chief of all the Emperor's vast armies. As the character of a Legion was an echo of their Primarch, so one can seethe flaw of the father in the pride of his sons.

The Wolves of Terra
In the time when the Emperor's eye first began to fall beyond Terra, he raised new armies to fight his Great Crusade. He drew these new troops in part from the forces that had already unified Terra during the Unification Wars of the late 30th Millennium, from willing Terran volunteers like those who comprised the XVI Space Marine Legion who were implanted with the gene-seed of their missing Primarch Horus like all the Astartes of the First Founding. These recruits were also drawn in part from the Emperor's subjugated enemies, and together they represented the first generation of Space Marines. Like most of the embryonic Space Marine Legions, the XVI Legion drew all of its first recruits from the Terran population. Though it is difficult to be certain based on the existing Imperial records from this lost time, there are indications that many of the XVI Legion’s early intake came from the hunter clans of the Jutigran Bowl and the Samsatian sub-plate slums. Perpetual conflict and the harshness of life on the desolate margins of Terran society had given these people the hard edge of ruthlessness and independence that would serve a Space Marine well.

The XVI Legion made war with abrasive aggression. Perhaps through the influence of their genetic heritage or the use the Emperor put them to, the Space Marines of the XVI Legion became synonymous with sudden and overwhelming shock assaults. To the XVI Legion fell the swift prosecution of battle and the bloody termination of campaigns. Their attacks were preemptive as often as they were part of an existing conflict, their forces either the first deadly threat unleashed by the Imperium or preserved to enact a final, killing blow. The First Pacification of Luna was perhaps the most famous of these early victories for the XVI Legion, but the breaking of the Coriolis Enclaves and the Five Winter left scars in the collective consciousness of Terran society that persist even now. In the Capridian Sinks, it is still common for traders and gamblers to refer to the Legion’s ancient number of sixteen as "the counting of the wolf."

It is said that the Astartes of the XVI Legion were unleashed to begin and end wars their enemies did not know they were even fighting. They would come out of the night or in the dawn, carried in the holds of Stormbirds and Storm Eagles, flanked by squadrons of escorting Lightning Crows. Those who witnessed such attacks say that the XVI Legion were fighting eye-to-eye with the enemy before the thunder of their first volley of missiles and shell-strikes had faded. The warriors who fought these battles were of a character wholly in keeping with their reputation. Proud, little given to humour or empathy, nor to mysticism or even the ritual of the military elite, they were a breed apart from the true human forces that had fought at their side. Their aggression was clear in their every action, but so was the strength of the control that held it in check, and the needs of that ancient age easily accommodated such a belligerent and cantankerous attitude.

At some time the notion of the Emperor sending his "wolves" to break intractable or potential enemies took root in the consciousness of the new-born Imperium, with the Pacification of Luna its apocryphal source. The XIV Legion embraced the epithet "Luna Wolves" with relish. The wolf's head became a common icon among them, the link being somewhat abstract, wolves themselves having been largely relegated to existence as gene-stock for bio-weapon beasts on Terra itself, and synonymous with controlled savagery. The wearing of pelts of such augmented canid predators increasingly marked field commanders and Legion officers. The XIV would not be the only Legion to bear such a title and embrace this imagery as their own, but they were the first.

Cthonia
The Luna Wolves were the first Space Marine Legion to begin recruiting from another world beyond Terra. In this case, the new pool of Aspirants was found amongst the adolescent human males drawn from the violent hive city gangs inhabiting an ancient Mining World called Cthonia. Cthonia was located in one of Terra's closest neighbouring star systems in the Segmentum Solar and was within reach of spacecraft that could travel at only sublight velocities before the invention of the Warp-Drive. As a result, Cthonia had been colonised, built upon, tunnelled and mined since the dawn of human interstellar space travel millennia before the beginning of the Dark Age of Technology. Due to this unusually long period of exploitation by Mankind, all of the world's natural resources had been stripped away and used up centuries before, and the ancient mining technology had long since been rediscovered and removed by the Tech-adepts of Mars. The planet that remained was largely useless and abandoned, completely riddled with catacombs, crumbling industrial plant and exhausted mine-workings.

Horus Lupercal
Horus, the true Primarch of the Luna Wolves, was the first of the Primarchs to be recovered by the Emperor, having been cast in his gestation capsule through the Warp much closer to Terra than the others by the Ruinous Powers, and he was found at a much younger age. Whereas the early history of many Primarchs is extensively if unevenly documented, the same cannot be said of Horus. Contradiction and omission tarnishes all accounts of Horus' formative years. It is clear that the Emperor did find Horus and also that he took command of the XIV Legion early in the Great Crusade. Beyond these manifest facts agreement between sources is decidedly lacking, some even placing Horus on Cthonia as a foundling. Like many of his brethren, these sources say that the young Primarch thrived in Cthonia's harsh environment, learning his first lessons in war and killing from Cthonia's tech-barbarian kill-gangs. Another source claims that Horus returned to Terra itself. It is said that Horus grew at the Emperor's side, learning from his father even as they took back the Sol System and forged the alliances between techno-barbarian nations and with the Mechanicus of Mars that created the Imperium of Man. Other highly creditable claims state that the Emperor found Horus, the first of his lost sons, but neither source specifies where, or the location of this finding. Surrounded in millennia of myths and allegory, the truth of Horus' origins will more than likely never be known. As a result, Horus was for many standard years the Emperor's only son, and there was a great affinity between them. The Emperor spent much time with his protege, teaching and encouraging him. Horus was soon placed in command of the XVI Legion, which he renamed the Luna Wolves -- 10,000 Astartes created from his own genetic code. With these superhuman warriors to lead, Horus accompanied the Emperor for the first thirty years of the Great Crusade that had begun in ca. 800.M30, and together they forged the initial expansion of the young Imperium of Man.

A Human Harvest
By the time the Great Crusade began in circa 800.M30, Cthonia's mines were long spent, but it had a resource that the new Imperium needed more than metals and jewels: hardened fighters and born survivors in their millions; a lean and hungry race of killers with no illusions about the horrors of the universe. Cthonia, relatively close to Terra in the void, and with whom some minor intermittent contact had been maintained even through the Age of Strife, had its murderous and strife-torn population marked by one of the first Expeditionary Fleets to leave the Sol System. To fuel the growth of the early Space Marine Legions, the Imperium took full advantage of the bounty that Cthonia provided. At the time of the First Founding, Cthonia helped provide the necessary flesh for the gene-wrights of Luna to fuel the growth of the Legiones Astartes. One report talks of so-called Imperial "recruitment squads" harvesting tens of thousands of Cthonian gangers and shipping them away, chained together in the holds of prison-shuttles, to the geno-laboratories of Luna. The majority were impressed troopers for the Crusade's Imperial Army regiment, but the finest specimens were taken for induction into the XIV Legion, later named the Luna Wolves when Horus took command of it. On Luna these chosen sons of Cthonia were reborn as the superhuman Astartes of the XIV Legion. It was more common for the first Space Marine Aspirants to be volunteers from Terra, and later, after the rediscovery of the Primarchs, from Feral or Feudal Worlds, however after the usual hypno-psychological indoctrination process, the Luna Wolves created from the men of Cthonia emerged as excellent and ferociously powerful Space Marines.

A Legion Reborn
With the induction of the genestock from Cthonia, the XIV Legion was remade, perhaps even without conscious thought. For the Terran Space Marines, their new brothers brought with them their own customs, attitudes and modes of thought, and ingrained inheritances of a thousand generations of callous violence and the ruthless pursuit of survival that the indoctrination practices of the time could modify and perhaps suppress but not erase, and after all, perhaps that was the point. As the Terrans fell in battle their voices and the more ordered military traditions they had been trained in became fewer and fainter. The marks of change were many and subtle, not overwriting entirely but bringing unique character to what had gone before. Examples of this change came slowly. Topknots and mohawks as sported by the Cthonian gang head-hunters became common throughout the ranks as armour and personal decoration. Blooding in battle to honour a worthy foe was marked often by a scratch across a helm's eye socket. Perhaps most tellingly, the Cthonian word for cutting the throat of an enemy gang-killer in a single combat "Aebathan" became a common term in the ranks to describe the completion of a campaign, and the personal charisma and reputation became a feature commanders, as if the ways of the Cthonian gang lords stained their understanding of leadership, and this applied none more so than their Primarch Horus whose cult of personality was universal within the Legion.

The character of the Luna Wolves in battle did not change, if anything it seemed to have become stronger over time. The Legion strove to maintain the flexibility to allow them to fight any war or enemy they might encounter on their own terms, but where possible the application of sudden and overwhelming force was their favoured form of attack, and that of their Primarch. As a doctrine this became bound up with a savage ferocity born of Cthonian blood, and wielded with ferocious intelligence and the matchless tactical instinct of their Primarch. Star system would often fall to the Legion in a single engagement: warships would cut in from the system's edge, forming a spear formation that would break into many smaller blade tips to strike at planets, moons and space stations. Orbital bombardment and simultaneous mass orbital drops would break the enemy's strength and will to resist. Tactical threats were systematically identified, isolated, outflanked, encircled and destroyed with merciless precision and close-quarter savagery which spoke of apex pack predators splitting a herd and gutting its members with lightning fury. The Imperial armies that followed in the Luna Wolves' wake often had little to do but scrape suddenly compliant worlds clean of the leavings of battle.