Cult of the Reborn

The Cult of the Reborn was a religious cult that grew up around the early IX Legion of Space Marines during the final years of the Unification Wars on Terra that created the Imperium of Man. The Cult of the Reborn was eventually destroyed by the Astartes of the IX Legion itself when the Emperor declared the establishment of the atheistic doctrine of the Imperial Truth.

History
During the Unification Wars, Wherever the IX Legion made camp, pilgrims followed, a vast throng of the forgotten and the twisted that often far outnumbered the warriors of the Legion. They came to cast off the lumpen forms that had been their burden and curse, the legacy of disease and genetic mutation granted them by Old Night, to bay and shout at the IX Legion that they might be chosen to be reborn as transhuman Astartes, cleansed of their defects and made whole in the sight of the Emperor. They came to pass through blood and torment, and be reborn as angels of the new Emperor.

At first these gatherings were little more than mobs of desperate wanderers, but as the crowds grew, the "Red Brothers" began to appear among their number. Robed in crimson they sang the praises of the IX Legion from afar, collecting the cast-off fragments of armour and stray shell casings the Legiones Astartes left behind as relics.

They wove a shell of religion and mysticism around the Emperor's angels, indoctrinating those that came to seek redemption and bringing order to the mobs. They preached a bloody creed of sacrifice and blood, offered up to the red-handed angels they worshipped, that they might join them in an eternity of war. Such a heady dream was to prove a potent lure, profiting Legion and cult both.

For a time, they became indispensable to the nascent Legion, herding the faithful and growing fat from tithes and bribes from those they preached to. Though the warriors of the IX Legion looked upon them with disinterest, the Red Brothers used their influence and wealth to rule the pilgrim hordes that trailed the Legion and to decide who would be presented to the Legion Apothecaries for advanced medicae treatment of their ills.

Yet their time was limited, for in the last days of the wars of Unification, the Emperor Himself decreed the Imperial Truth, denouncing superstition of all breeds. In the end, the silken-canopied caravans of the Red Brothers were burned by the hands of the IX Legion themselves, as they turned their guns upon the priests and their devotees with callous indifference, for the Unification Wars had bred in their hearts a cold and grim demeanour, and a casual disregard for suffering and death.