Take your favorite fandoms with you and never miss a beat. ", "Seventeen?" "And the Emperor forbade us to speak of it again. Twice before in living memory such messages were delivered to the homeworld of a Legiones Astartes. The Emperor used these templates to create the first Space Marines by genetically enhancing His own Terran-born soldiers with the gene-seed derived from each Primarch's genome. In the novel Descent of Angels by Mitchel Scanlon, when Zahariel El'Zurias receives a history of Old Night by Brother-Librarian Israfael, he informs the young initiate that their Primarch Lion El'Jonson has nineteen brothers. This matter is further complicated by the fact that the size of the different Legions may vary based on source material or an author's lack of background information, which can result in conflicting numbers. The Second Founding divided the remaining 9 Loyalist Astartes Legions into units known as "Chapters" which were each about 1,000 Astartes strong after the events of the Horus Heresy in the early 31st Millennium. The process by which a new Founding's creation is approved by the Imperial government is mysterious and arcane, subject to solar decades or even standard centuries of planning before it is announced. Earlier, less ambiguous sources go so far as to say that information on the Lost Legions and primarchs was deleted following the Horus Heresy. He laughs, but it is a sad sound. Many Imperial savants since have come to believe that the drive to create larger Space Marine Legions at an accelerated speed played a prime role in the degradation of the sanity and psychological make-up of certain Legions and paved the way for the horror that was to come. The already extant Space Marine Chapters may also have a role in this process, though to what degree can vary greatly from Founding to Founding. Two other Legions, the IInd Legion and the XIth Legion and their Primarchs, were created by the Emperor, but nothing is known of what became of these Legions and their Primarchs and all data pertaining to them has been deleted from current Imperial records. The Alpha Legion is the Chaos Space Marine Traitor Legion about whom the least is known. Following his terrible wounding on the moon of the world of Davin by the Chaos weapon known as the Kinebrach Anathame, the Primarch Horus, in a Chaos-induced vision, apparently went back in time to the Emperor's gene-laboratory beneath the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains and saw the incubation capsule of Primarch XI before the primarchs were scattered through the Warp (the effect this has on the Lost Primarch is unknown). Warhammer 40k Wiki is a FANDOM Games Community. The Space Marine Legions born of this process were used to complete the Unification Wars on Terra and then to initiate the Great Crusade to reunite all of Mankind's scattered colony worlds across the galaxy. The Ist Legion was given the name Dark Angels by Lion El'Jonson, and the XIVth Legion, the Dusk Raiders, had their moniker changed to the Death Guard by Mortarion. Author Topic: Dark Angels - The first Legion - Thoughts (Read 3600 times) 0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic. It was the culmination of years of preparation by the Daemon Primarch Angron , favoured of Khorne , to re-unify the World Eaters after their shattering at the hands of Khârn the Betrayer after the Battle of Skalathrax . This cold logic, coupled with their inhuman strength and bearing, and the sheer dread they inflicted on friend and enemy alike, was to give the Space Marines one of their earliest appellations, and perhaps their most appropriate -- "the Angels of Death." As the Great Crusade continued the expansion of the nascent Imperium into the galaxy, the discovery of the Primarchs and their newly adopted homeworlds helped to stem an impending crisis that was not widely known at the time outside of the exalted ranks of the Imperium's ruling War Council: namely, the diminishing stability of the Astartes gene-seed itself through over-use and the increasing need for more Space Marines in the field.