Logos Historica Verita

The Logos Historica Verita is a small Imperial organisation of the reformed Imperium, created by the acting Lord Commander of the Imperium, Ultramarines Primarch Roboute Guilliman. It was the Primarch's intent to make a full and accurate accounting of the Imperium's fragmentary and often contradictory history which would inevitably help Mankind's advancement. For this task, he utilised individuals of an inquisitive and more liberal nature, and after training them personally, assigned them the daunting task of discovering, collating and cataloging thousands of years of human history that had been lost or was woefully inaccurate due to superstition, suppression or had been purposely obfuscated by the High Lords of Terra's need for iron control.

History
Not long after the Primarch's resurrection and assumption of command as the acting Lord Commander of the Imperium, Guilliman launched his Indomitus Crusade to help push back the encroaching Forces of Chaos that had been unleashed across the galaxy due to the formation of the Cicatrix Maledictum or Great Rift. When the demands of war retreated, the Primarch was not idle, for he worked tirelessly within his private chambers aboard his flagship, the Macragge's Honour within his scriptorium. Even after a century on from his rebirth, Guilliman had yet to grasp all the events of the last ten millennia since he fell at Thessala to the Daemon Primarch Fulgrim of the Emperor's Children. He was dismayed to find that much of humankind's history, like so much else based on reason, had fallen afoul of superstition, fanaticism and hearsay. If anything, the state of man's knowledge was worse than it was back after the Unification Wars, when the Emperor had unified Terra before the Great Crusade. Much of Terra's ancient history, painstakingly pieced together by the Remembrancers of Guilliman's own era, had been lost again.

Knowledge of the Immaterium's true nature had been suppressed, but intermittently, throughout Mankind's long and turbulent history. Even though it had become impossible to fully suppress the dire nature of the Warp, that had not stopped the Inquisition from trying, for knowledge of Daemons or the Ruinous Powers was strictly forbidden. Many innocents had paid the ultimate price for accidentally learning the truth of such matters. Even the Guilliman, the acting Imperial Regent himself, faced opposition from the Inquisition in his quest for knowledge. To oppose their puritanical redactionism, he had trained his own corps of historitors. Between campaigns, he sought out inquisitive minds, exactly the sort that had long been frowned upon, rescuing them from penal servitude and impending brain wipe. The first handful he had tutored himself, when time allowed. They in turn taught more, and more still. Each one was assessed by the Primarch personally. Those that passed were given the rank of historitor-investigatus. Those that failed to meet his exacting standards were given less taxing roles within the new organisation, as librarians, servants and assistants. From his reading, Guilliman had learnt that the brutal machinery of Imperial government was unkind to failures, yet another thing that saddened him about the present age. The Primarch had enough blood upon his conscience, and a much finer grasp of how to get the most out of his subjects. No life was wasted.

As the century since his rebirth wound on, the numbers of historitors grew from four, to eight, to sixteen, until by 100.M42, the Logos Historica Verita numbered five hundred operatives and a thousand support staff. Utilising long dead academic arts, they attempted the impossible: the construction of a reliable history of the Imperium. Against great odds, small cells of the Logos searched out ancient records. At their presentation of the Primarch's seal, forbidden vaults were opened and emptied, their contents copied and dispatched to Guilliman's crusade wherever it was. The Logos' work was a torturous, dangerous affair. Warzones engulfed half the galaxy, and his historitor teams sometimes disappeared into them without trace. Often, they were opposed. Still Guilliman would not be stopped.

The task of compiling a full and accurate accounting of the history of humankind was a monumental and nigh impossible task, compounded further by the fact that even the Imperial dating system was woefully inaccurate. As the Primarch digested thousands of years of history recorded upon every device conceivably employed by mankind, he had come to learn of the Chronostrife of Terra, a bitter, ongoing internal war within the Ordo Chronos over the Imperium's dating system. What he read made him despair. Not even his father's calendar had survived the millennia intact. During the Great Crusade and the Heresy, the standard dating system had provided some idea of the order of events over time, but like everything else the Emperor had created, the calendar had become degraded by both dogmatic adherence and thoughtless revisionism. Various rival dating systems had evolved from the Imperial Standard, making a true chronicle of the galaxy almost impossible to construct. By the five main factional variants, Guilliman calculated the current year to be anywhere between early M41 and a millennium later, and that was leaving out the numerous lesser, more heretical interpretations. Guilliman had been hoping to find a solution to the Imperium's tortured dating system; he had instead found there was none. Something else, then, that required his personal attention.