By author Perfidious Albion
on alternatehistory.com
The Nineteenth Primarch: Nyx
Name: Appearance: Though not one of the tallest Primarchs—she is a bit shorter than Primarch average—Nyx is tough, well-built, broad-shouldered, and enormously muscular. She looks like she could bench-press a building, and, being a daughter of the Emperor, she probably actually could. In battle, Nyx's armour is the same as her Space Marines' armour except Primarch-sized. She has no taste for fancy finery. Her ranged weapon is an archaeotech silenced hypervelocity rifle that she found on one of her conquests for the Imperium. It can kill an Astartes from miles away in near-perfect silence. When in melee, though, no effective weapon is a quiet one. Bolters are high explosive; chainswords and chainaxes have their chattering teeth; and the whine of an activated Power Field is louder yet. In melee, then, she dispenses with subtlety and wields a mighty Power Mace so heavy that no Astartes could lift it and even some Primarchs would struggle. With characteristic bluntness and lack of care for pretty words, she named the Power Mace Chestbreaker: exactly what it does. Nyx wears her armour nearly all the time, with a reluctant and begrudging exception for sleeping. As such, people rarely see her face. When they do, it is craggy, like a granite mountain carved into the shape of a woman. She has brown eyes, chocolate-brown skin, and black hair which she keeps cropped shorter than most men's hair, let alone women's, so that it does not get in the way if she needs to put on her helmet in a hurry—characteristically choosing practicality against even the smallest concession to aesthetics. Talents and Personality: Most Primarchs are nimbler and faster than Nyx, and she is quite possibly the least psychically powerful Primarch in the Imperium. In raw physical strength, however, she is one of the strongest of all. She is also, perhaps, the least sociable, or one of the least. Nyx is not called the Silent Sentinel without cause. She is almost completely silent. Contrary to popular belief, she is not actually lacking a tongue. She does speak when she is needed to give orders to her Legion on the battlefield, albeit in monotone, terse sharp commands with as few words as necessary to convey the point. She does not, however, take part in the vast majority of conversations—not even with other Primarchs. She is not the sort to start arguments or pick fights. Nor are her thoughts obvious from her face or tone of voice. The face of the Grim Lady of the Imperium is expressionless and unreadable, the same no matter whether she is with rivals or friends, whether happy or sad, in peace or war, victory or defeat. As such, her thoughts and opinions are a mystery to those around her. Nyx is often thought cold, almost inhuman. That is not quite fair. It is true that she has waged many wars of the harshest sort, grim attritional battles that grind down armies into dust. But this has more to do with the talents of her Legion's speciality than a flaw in her character. She and her Legion wade through the bitterest of wars out of a real belief and hope for mankind. Her seeming coldness comes from a place of compassion. Nyx cares deeply about her fellow humans, and she brings them into the Imperium because she genuinely believes that uniting them is the best way—the only way that will work—to keep them safe. Only together can mankind survive against the horrors of a hostile universe. Nyx never leaves a planet she has newly brought into Compliance without sketching plans for how to construct useful infrastructure, regenerate its economy and rebuild it as more prosperous than it ever was before the Great Crusade. The Nineteenth Primarch is not a genius craftswoman of arcane artefacts and peerless individual weapons, like some Primarchs. She would not and could not forge an artisan blade that is a wonder of the galaxy. But she does have a talent for large-scale chemical and biological engineering, specifically terraforming, as she did to repair her own homeworld, Calianthe V. Nyx has a hatred of the idea of a 'Death World', for no world should be deathly to mankind. She takes it as a challenge to her superhuman intellect. As far as she is concerned, a Death World is just a planet that she has not finished repairing yet. The Grim Lady of the Imperium does not stay long on the planets she has conquered. She cannot. Such would be moral blindness: a small kindness to the humans here, at cost of a greater cruelty to humans out of sight. Her and her Legion's timely arrival at the next planet might mean the difference to millions of humans dead or alive. Yet she takes steps to rebuild what is lost, and to restore life and joy to planets where those seemed gone forever. The grim repute of 'the Queen of the Night' is thus… not false, but incomplete. If she is death, she is death like the felling of a dying old tree, that clears the way for new life underneath to soak up the light and grow tall and strong. Perhaps the greatest character-flaw in Nyx is her paranoia about being betrayed. She has never forgotten the betrayal on her homeworld. It has wormed its way into her psyche. She trusts her daughters. She trusts the Emperor her father. Other than that, she trusts very few people at all. Grim, quiet, unreadable in expression, and completely unwilling to do 'small talk', the Silent Sentinel is not the sort of person to form strong social bonds with other people. She has some relationships of dispassionate mutual respect, but few of any warmth. Homeworld: Calianthe V was once ruled by an opportunistic race of xenos known as the Va-tha-thu, living in human-built arcologies that rose like mountains over the landscape and oppressing the population of humans in the lowlands below. Today, free, Calianthe V is a planet on the mend. Great pumps and processors, arcane and ingenious technology of the Primarch's own design, work to extract the sulphurous toxic smog from the atmosphere, leaving clean nitrogen-oxygen air that can be breathed by mankind. The once-abandoned arcologies are being recolonised by the descendants of the species that built them. After the many tragedies that befell this world at xenos hands, the population of Calianthe V is healing, even booming. Someday soon it may again be the happy, healthy, urbanised, trillions-people-strong planet that it was before the Age of Strife came. The Black Nineteenth maintain a fortress-monastery on Calianthe V, which is theoretically, as per the law, their main Legion headquarters. It is not. It is a perfectly respectable fortress-monastery, a towering edifice of adamantium built into a black rock mountainside, but it is just one of many XIX Legion fortress-monasteries on many other worlds. The true main headquarters of the Black Nineteenth is the Gloriana-class battleship Emperor's Hammer. She goes wherever Nyx does. Psychic potential: Background: That was not the end of the Caliantheans' woes. Worse was yet to come. Centuries after the Age of Strife had begun, a xenos species called the Va-tha-thu descended upon the Calianthe star-system and indeed the whole Hylops Sector around it. As a species, the Va-tha-thu are superficially humanoid, in that they have two arms, two legs and one head with two eyes. However, it is only superficial. They are not mammals, or reptilians, or insectoid. They are far more alien than that. It is not that they have different DNA to humans; in truth they do not have DNA at all. Their bodies run on a different chemical code, totally alien to Terra-based life. They are silicon-based lifeforms, not carbon-based like us, and they don't have such a thing as male and female. They reproduce asexually: each individual splits and creates a clone of itself in a form of macro-mitosis. Nonetheless, when interacting with humans, the Va-tha-thu tend to present themselves as male, because, from their nonhuman perspective, they find that humans seem to see males as more intimidating. In the Golden Age of Technology, the Va-tha-thu were only an irritant: a parasitic, opportunistic raider-species that made a few attempts upon the borders of the Terran Federation and were soundly repulsed. They are not psykers, and their technology was far behind that of Golden-Age mankind. However, with interstellar trade severed, the artificial intelligences dismantled and 98% of their population gone, the humans of Calianthe V had no way of maintaining their previous technological level. They could not even sustain their anti-starship guns. Thus the Va-tha-thu easily overpowered the human defenders. They unleashed vicious chemical weapons against the miserable remnants of Calianthean mankind, to terraform the world into something more suitable for themselves. These weapons filled the upper air with sulphurous smog that was lethal to humans but pleasant to the xenos. Only near the ground was the air still breathable for oxygen-breathing species. Billions of Caliantheans were slaughtered, remorselessly—left choking to death from the poison in their lungs. The Va-tha-thu acted likewise on every other inhabited planet of the Hylops Sector: hundreds of worlds. The thick covering of interstellar dust in this star-forming region of space made it ideally suited to be a self-contained empire, hidden from sight by slower-than-light means. The survivors fled the towering arcologies and eked out a surly, miserable existence from the scraggly, infertile scrubland of the low-lying lands between them. It had once been a gorgeous fertile landscape, but the chemical weapons of the Va-tha-thu had not been without effect on the soil. The arcologies remained, rusting away, untended by the xenos who had not the talent to sustain them—dark towers several miles tall which loomed over the humans who had once inhabited them, like grim reminders of the past overshadowing the present. The Va-tha-thu settled in the deserted arcologies and ruled there as kings, collecting tribute from the helpless humans below via cruelty and extortion. Mostly this tribute came in the form of slaves, and mineral wealth mined from the planet by hard labour. The humans of the lowlands were an agricultural civilisation, but the Va-tha-thu had no use for human-edible food. It was this planet where the pod of the Nineteenth Primarch landed, when she was stolen from her father and cast randomly into the Warp by the whims of the Chaos Gods. The pod was found by two of the primitive humans who lived in the vast scrubland valleys between the arcologies. Tiptoeing, ever in fear of Va-tha-thu raids and slaughters, in superstitious dread, the human villagers opened up the pod. There they beheld with wonder an angelic girl, perfect in every way, sleepily blinking awake with beautiful brown eyes. The villagers, a mother and a father, decided to adopt the child for their own. Thus it could have been. The Nineteenth Primarch could have had a very different life. But the humans were not the only ones who had noticed something falling down from outer space. The Va-tha-thu did, too, with their satellite sensors. A-ko-li, the alien overlord of Calianthe V, sent a war-party to investigate. The Va-tha-thu warriors slew the child's would-have-been mother and father with cruel ease… …and were attacked in turn. Screaming with rage, the child, appearing no more than eight years old, wreaked havoc on the Va-tha-thu war-party. She leapt up to the chest height of the nine-foot-tall xenos and lashed out with a childish fist. That fist went straight through battle-plate and alien exoskeleton and ripped the shocked warrior's heart out from his chest. As she landed from that leap, the other Va-tha-thu overcame their shock and were raising their guns. She barrelled into the nearest one, knocking him over with her body as a battering ram. She picked him up by one slender, angular, inhumanly long leg and spun him around in a circle, using him as a club to knock his comrades-in-arms off their feet. After that, it was simple slaughter. Panting, the girl looked around. She stood alone in a field of scrubland, drenched from head to toe in cuprous blue blood. Thin, long-legged, angular-bodied aliens lay as corpses all around her. All had died at her bare hands. Her would-have-been parents lay dead too, murdered by the aliens' weapons. Young as she was, she instinctively understood that she could not stay here. The aliens/enemies/bad-people had been here. Now they were not. They were dead. More would come here, to find out why. She must not be here when that happened. And so the Nineteenth Primarch fled alone into the wilderness. There she dwelt, alone, for four years. The girl grew rapidly. In her first year since her pod fell out of the Warp, she grew from an apparent age of eight to fourteen. In another year she appeared twenty. One more year, and she reached her towering adult Primarch height. Wandering the lowlands of Calianthe V beyond the arcologies, she fed on the wormy fruits and meagre grains of the planet's weak, infertile soil, poisoned by the sulphurous clouds the Va-tha-thu had unleashed to terraform Calianthe V to something more to their liking. Whenever she saw Va-tha-thu war-parties, she killed them. Humans, however, she avoided. The girl had not forgotten the first day of her arrival on this planet. She had had parents, guardians, for a few precious hours. Then they had died. The xenos had come and killed them because of her. Racked with an emotion she did not yet recognise as guilt, the young Primarch believed that her presence put people in danger. If she stayed away from them, they would be safe. For that sake, she lived alone, wandering the scrub-plains killing xenos and searching for berries and nuts to feed on. The Va-tha-thu often tried to hunt her, seeking to eradicate the Terror of the Lowlands that slaughtered their raiding parties. Bitter experience taught her to sleep at day-time and walk only at night, when her great height would attract less attention. She learnt how to move in the dark, relying on her non-sight senses and even seeing a bit, with what little starlight could penetrate the thick chemical clouds. And she learnt to move in utter silence. Va-tha-thu's hearing is far better than humans'. Make the slightest sound and they would hear her. And yet this would pass. The Nineteenth Primarch would not be alone forever. One day, the woman who had no name was foraging for berries in the bushes when she saw a dust-cloud in the distance. Ever-mindful of the threat of being seen, she rose up to investigate. Miles away, yet not beyond a Primarch's eagle-keen sight, a great war-party of the Va-tha-thu was hunting down thousands of humans of a dozen villages who had been hiding from Va-tha-thu slave-raids together. They tracked down the human slaves-to-be, tracing them to a dark system of underground caves. The woman did not of course know this. She just saw the Va-tha-thu enter the caves and disappear out of sight. Being no fool, she knew the danger to herself from there being so many Va-tha-thu at once. She also knew that they would be gathering for no good purpose. Nonetheless, curiosity won. Silent as a shadow, she followed. For the humans, the situation was desperate. The people of one village, seeing the Va-tha-thu approach, had fled their village and disappeared into the undergrowth. The Va-tha-thu had figuratively shrugged their shoulders and gone after the neighbouring villages, to bring their number of slaves up to quota. Their overlord A-ko-li would be displeased with them if they did not bring enough slaves for his thriving trade to other worlds. In the interstellar empire of the Va-tha-thu, the main sellable asset of Calianthe V, it being a former urban planet, was its people. The human villagers' ancestors had dredged a miserable living out of the soil on this planet over the past thousands of years of Va-tha-thu occupation. Miserable as it had been, they feared, correctly, that being taken offworld as slaves would be even worse. And so they had fled in terror from the cruel whips and serrated bullets of the Va-tha-thu. Many had perished along the way, cut down or simply starved. The villagers had been slowed down by their refusal to abandon their children and elderly along the road. The only folk abandoned were those too wounded to carry on. They had fled as far as they could, ever chased by these creatures out of nightmare. They had hoped that their entry to the caves would be undetected. It was not. Thus, here they were. They could run no further. All that they could do was fight. So they fought, and fought, and died. Died by the dozens, died by the hundreds. The Va-tha-thu were merciless. In the cave-system, many of the tunnels were too narrow to be walked upright. Everyone, human or xenos alike, had to crawl. And enemies might be lurking anywhere, at any moment. This was a great hindrance to the humans, yet it did not deter the Va-tha-thu. The xenos warriors could rely on their superb hearing to pick up the breathing of any enemies nearby. They had no need of sight. Deep in the caves, battle broke out between the war-party of xenos enslavers and the human villagers. It was more than three-thousand to just two-hundred. It was no contest at all. The war-party of Va-tha-thu were well-armed. The humans had nothing but their bravery and repurposed farming implements. With desperate courage, striving to protect their children from a hideous fate, the men and women of the villages struggled against the Va-tha-thu who cut them down with cruel and brutal blows… …until a miracle came. A whirlwind descended upon the Va-tha-thu: a black shadow, tall and terrible. As silent as the Va-tha-thu themselves, quick to move and quick to kill, the shadow slew in the perfect darkness of the caves. It slew aliens with stalactites; it slew them with their own weapons; and it slew them with its bare hands, which seemed to hold a terrible strength. For a time, the caves were filled with alien screams. Then there was silence. Footsteps sounded, heavy, heading out of the caves. The villagers had heard how silently the shadow could move in the battle. They knew that if they could hear it, it wanted them to hear it. And it had not, after all, harmed them. Trembling in terror, yet knowing this shadow had not proven itself an enemy, they followed. Blinking in the night under the light of the stars, for the first time they saw the shadow with their own eyes. It was a woman, her proportions shaped like a human, not a Va-tha-thu, but bigger. The muscles of her arms and legs were like tree-trunks; her broad-shouldered body was built like a brick house; her hands, with long uncut nails, were blue with cuprous alien blood. Where she had walked out of the caves, she had left a trail of blue blood and grey gore of the ripped-apart Va-tha-thu corpses she had slain. Eyes like dark chocolate regarded them with fascination—examining, as the villagers noticed, the contours of their own bodies, which were shaped similarly to hers. She had not seen her own kind before. She was much too big to be a woman of human kind, and yet it seemed impossible she was not human. She stood perfectly still and perfectly silent, poised like a predator ready to pounce, not trembling, but not hostile. Curious and unafraid. The villagers murmured among themselves, unsure of what to do. Yet it was clear enough that the giant woman was not an enemy. Eventually, in defiance of the village elders' caution, Ngozi, a brave young woman of eighteen, went boldly up to the giant and asked her her name. The giant said nothing. Ngozi asked other things, and others did too, following the bravery of her example. Still the giant did not reply. In not long a time, the villagers understood that this woman did not speak their language, nor any other, for she had grown up alone, far from civilisation. Giving up on communication, they went away. The giant followed, her huge feet padding silent in the night. From then on, the giant woman was their protector. They called her 'the Silent Sentinel', because she never spoke, and 'Nyx', a name both for the night itself and for a goddess of the night, for in the night she had protected them. The name and the title stuck as her own. For years Nyx wandered with the villagers, foraging for food and slaying xenos enemies that came upon them. She taught them how to move as she did—unseen, silent—so as to escape the slave-raids. Being a Primarch, her unmatched intelligence soon grasped their language. That, she found more of a curse than a blessing. They had questions for her: "Who are you? What's your name? Where did you come from? Why are you so big? Why can you do the things you can do? What are you?" She did not know the answers herself, and she wanted to know, yet also feared to, lest the answers be ones that would displease her. She knew she had come from a pod that landed from space—that much, she remembered—and the only things in space were the oppressors, xenos, like the Va-tha-thu. She could not bear to imagine herself as one of them or their creation. So she stayed silent about her origins, and indeed about aught else. She rarely, almost never spoke, and only in the presence of her close friends, of whom the closest was Ngozi. Not speaking was simpler. It meant not having to answer questions for which she had no answers, or at least, none of them good. Despite her silence and social reticence, there were many people who gathered around Nyx. Most of all it was the younger people, those who had not long known life before Nyx, the grinding years of despair and poverty, and saw in her the hope of a better future. Not only them, however. Many of their elders, too, were impressed by the stature and strength of the towering silent shadow who had saved them, that night. A brave circle of youths befriended Nyx and became her closest companions. These were four young women: bold, fearless Ngozi, quiet and reserved Nneka, wealthy merchant's daughter Adaego, sharp-tongued sharp-minded Ufuoma; and four young men: ever-laughing Adebayo, gentle giant Uduak, light-hearted Kayode, steely-eyed Chinua. Nyx's group did not stay a peaceful gathering forever. More villagers came to her, those fleeing the vicious slave-raids of the Va-tha-thu; and of course she would not turn them away. And so her following grew, and grew. As nomads they wandered the lowlands of Calianthe V. Nyx's friends did not like relying on her alone to defend them from the xenos warriors. They pressed upon her to train them how to fight. This did not please Nyx, but seeing the fervour of her friends, she relented and bowed to their will. So she taught them. They taught others, and she taught others, and others taught others. Soon Nyx's group were no longer refugees. They were an army. And that army sought to take the fight to the Va-tha-thu, to free all of Calianthe V from the yoke of the xenos. The Va-tha-thu had inhumanly excellent hearing, so Nyx taught her followers to move in the night without making a sound, as she did. In their first true battle as an army, Nyx's followers ambushed a Va-tha-thu war-party several hundred warriors strong, leading them into an ambush and then leaping out of the trees in the dead of the dark. Thus they brought the fight to close range, nullifying the advantage of the Va-tha-thu's superior ranged weapons: guns, rather than mere repurposed farming implements. The attack succeeded. Hundreds of Va-tha-thu were slain. The humans took their guns for their own. The Va-tha-thu sent another war-party to attack a nearby village to retaliate with collective punishment. The Va-tha-thu expected the human rebels to hide the villagers away, and indeed they had spies in the village for this purpose, so that, when the rebels appeared in the village to warn the villagers of their peril, the Va-tha-thu would see where the rebels were coming from. The Silent Sentinel defied their expectations. Against the odds, she and her followers launched a stunningly well-executed ambush against the new war-party, with the weapons they had taken from the previous war-party. Many were slain, but in the shock of the unforeseen assault, the new larger war-party were slain too, and the rebels seized their weapons and ammunition. Then the Va-tha-thu sent an even bigger war-party, too big to fight. At that, at last, Nyx's rebels evacuated the villagers. By then, though, they had enough weapons to equip a large and well-armed force. The time of mankind cowering in the dark was over, as Chinua declared in a fiery speech to the people of Calianthe V. It was time to fight.
Nyx, also known as the Grim Lady of the Imperium, the Silent Sentinel, and the Queen of the Night.
Many of the female Primarchs are called graceful or beautiful. Nobody would call Nyx that. She is built like a tank.
Nyx is grim, stoic, and utterly relentless. Give her a task and she will see it done, no matter if it takes a minute or a hundred years. Pain and hardship are ignored without complaint, driven through with gritted teeth and sheer determination. She is austere, eschewing beauty and comfort. Instead of such things, she is a creature of duty, devoted utterly to the good of the human race. She trusts the Emperor's judgement on what will best serve mankind above anyone else's, including her own. Nyx is not prideful.
Calianthe V, the fifth planet from the dwarf star Calianthe. The Calianthe star-system is only a few hundred light-years from Sol. Despite this closeness, it was only seen by Terran astronomers in the 4th millennium with the great space telescopes of that era, because it was a faint small star concealed by a star-forming region's thick interstellar dust. This isolation would lead to grave consequences for Calianthe V.
Like all Primarchs, Nyx has a certain inborn psychic presence. She can effortlessly command the room with charisma that is more than natural. A psyker trying to lift her telekinetically would fail to hold her. And no foe could penetrate her mind and read her thoughts… except the Emperor himself, he who could command an entire Space Marine Legion to kneel. And her wounds heal faster than ought to be possible, just like every other Primarch. That is all. She possesses no psychic potential other than that.
Calianthe V was once an urban planet where trillions of citizens lived happily in great graceful arcologies, each one miles tall, so as to preserve the natural beauty of the sprawling gorgeous landscapes in between. It was hit hard by the onset of Old Night. With the collapse of interstellar travel due to Warp Storms, the great fleets of starships that carried food every day to Calianthe V's trillions suddenly stopped dead. Trillions starved to death before the survivors managed to construct algal vaults that used the power of the star to photosynthesise enormous quantities of dull, tasteless mush, to sustain some small fraction of the planet's previous population. By then, the Calianthean population numbered in the tens of billions. Perhaps 2% of the original population had survived.
Over the next decade, guerrilla warfare spread across the surface of the planet Calianthe V. Many people joined the ranks of Nyx's rebellion. They did not penetrate the arcologies, the great towering spires stuffed full of guns and Va-tha-thu by the many thousands, for Nyx was no fool and knew not to attack the enemy at their concentrations of strength. Instead, they made the Va-tha-thu terrified to venture out into the lowlands below. Xenos losses in the lowlands, once in the dozens per year, rose immediately to the hundreds; then to the thousands; then, in years more, to the tens of thousands, and the hundreds of thousands. Nyx led the rebels to victory after victory. They cheered her to the skies and acclaimed her as their glorious leader, the Queen of the Night. Nyx accepted these accolades with her usual cold calm, her face as ever unreadable. And yet behind this stoicism lurked turmoil. For she still did not know her own origins, and feared that they lay more with the xenos of space whom she hated than with the humans of the planet whom she loved. The Queen of the Night's followers numbered in the millions. Virtually all the humans of Calianthe V rallied to her banner. With the training and captured Va-tha-thu guns that she distributed, they did not need her presence to win victories over the aliens anymore. Armed and trained, ordinary humans could kill Va-tha-thu whenever they dared to step outside the arcologies they had stolen from mankind. Nyx herself led her eight closest companions, who stayed always at her side, as she wandered across Calianthe V, taking part in the fight wherever she deemed she was needed most. It was a hard life—living on the run, bringing nothing but what you can carry, all hardships and no luxuries. (This formative experience shaped the austere, stoic attitude, disdainful of material possessions, of Nyx and her Legion that persists today.) Nonetheless, with Ngozi, Nneka, Adaego, Ufuoma, Adebayo, Uduak, Kayode and Chinua by her side, she was content. She would look back on those days as the happiest time of her life. The human rebels waged their war across the planet, slaying Va-tha-thu war-parties, stealing their weapons and turning them against the xenos. Under the Queen of the Night's peerless leadership, they struck and struck and struck again, taking bloody vengeance on any Va-tha-thu of Calianthe V who ventured out into the lowlands. Nine years after the day when Nyx saved those villagers and rejoined human civilisation, their triumph was near complete. The Va-tha-thu no longer dared to venture outside the arcologies. Those xenos who had once raided into the lowlands to terrorise the villagers with impunity now stayed trembling in their towers, fearing to take one step beyond the safety of their high walls. The arcologies, those mile-tall structures of human make, remained in Va-tha-thu hands. All the rest of the planet was liberated. The rebels may have hoped that the Va-tha-thu would then have fled their world. The value of the Calianthe system to the Va-tha-thu was as a source of slaves and mined ores. With the lowlands liberated, the aliens weren't getting either of those anymore. If they entertained such hopes, they were mistaken. The leader of the Va-tha-thu on Calianthe V was A-ko-li, an alien overlord of uncommon cunning and cruelty. It was he who had sent warriors to snatch the infant Primarch from her pod and slaughtered her would-have-been parents thirteen years ago, and it was he who now resolved upon his race's course. From the torture of captured rebel prisoners—Nyx never lost a skirmish, but this was a war for a whole planet, there were many battles fought thousands of miles away, beyond her sight—A-ko-li knew that this trouble had begun when the Silent Sentinel, this tall superhuman figure, had taken leadership of the human slave-race; that it was she who was behind the humans' recent successes, and she who led the rebellion. A-ko-li judged, astutely and probably correctly, that the rebellion lacked staying power. This was its lynchpin. Kill Nyx and the rebellion would fall apart. Oh, not immediately. The Va-tha-thu had engendered much hatred over the thousands of years they had ruled the Calianthe system. The rebellious slaves would not immediately back down or fall into infighting upon the death of their leader. They had seized most of the planet, and that had emboldened them beyond any previous slave rebellion. They would keep going, or try to. But their leader was the key distinguishing factor why this human rebellion was so much more successful than the previous ones. Without her genius and unrivalled combat prowess, the slave-species would be without its greatest advantage. It would take time to suppress them and retake control of the lowlands of the planet, but time was one commodity he had in abundance, for the Va-tha-thu's lifespans are many times the unaugmented human span. The Va-tha-thu were patient. Humans were not. That would be the key to his victory. Genius lies not in complexity. Only foolish minds believe that—seeing an excess of long words and thinking this must mean intelligence because they do not understand them. Genius lies in distilling the complex down to the simple, the crux. And A-ko-li perceived that the crux of the matter was this: Kill Nyx, and then the Va-tha-thu would have plenty of time to crush the slave-species back to their knees where they belong. And so there was to be no surrender. The war settled into a siege. All the lands in between were the humans' to rule, but they could not penetrate the high arcologies of the xenos. The high ground—space—belonged in alien hands. The starships of the Va-tha-thu unleashed fire and fury from orbit whenever humans were seen out in the open. Nyx's rebels may have ruled the ground. Indeed, aliens still did not dare venture outside the arcologies, lest the rebels deal them a grisly fate. But they still had to cower and hide, living and moving only in silence and in the night. For a year, this long siege persisted, as Nyx plotted how to take control of space or otherwise regain the initiative. A full-frontal attack on the arcologies was out of the question. The air in there was poisoned, or as the Va-tha-thu would consider it, terraformed: a sulphurous smog that was pleasant for the aliens to breathe and toxic to humans. Being straightforward of thought and disinclined to suicidal glorious charges, Nyx dismissed the idea of this. Instead, since attacks from space were the main problem, from the perspective of giving the Calianthean humans peaceful happy lives, she focused on that. Studying the rebel-captured Va-tha-thu guns, the Nineteenth Primarch put her intellect to work and drew up plans and schematics for larger versions of them, guns that could fire into orbit and destroy the starships, and construction facilities to build them when she could not build manufactora out in the open, lest they be destroyed. An uneasy stalemate held on the planet. A-ko-li seemed content to wait her out, it seemed. The Queen of the Night kept working, ceaseless in her belief that Calianthe V could have a better future. Nyx was working on a plan for a multi-gigaton particle beam in an artificial bunker in a cave-system deep underground when she heard a roar. The ceiling shook. Another roar, a bang, a crash, and hundreds of aliens came storming through the wall they had just blasted in.
Shocked as she was, Nyx remained a Primarch. She remained formidable. The surprise of the attack lasted only a moment. The Queen of the Night sprang to her feet and started killing. Her companions joined her, Ngozi howling out a war-cry, Ufuoma spitting venomous words at her foes, Adebayo's laughter turned to snarls of his hatred, even gentle Uduak roaring with rage. Nyx herself waded in the midst of her foes with a different mace in each hand, smashing through the tall slender-limbed aliens in a whirlwind of destruction and grace. Every movement of her arms dealt death, crushing heads and chests to smears of gore. She was impossibility made flesh. Her sheer brute strength was beyond what words can describe, and nothing of her size should be able to move that fast. And yet she did, by the peerless gene-craft of the Emperor. The Va-tha-thu in this place were no mean foes but mighty warriors, the elite of their kind, trained and practised over centuries of warfare to sharpen their skills. They stood against Nyx's rage and died for it. At long last, it was done. Panting, covered with so many wounds that her Primarch physiology was struggling to heal, Nyx stood alone atop a heap of corpses. Thousands of elite Va-tha-thu warriors lay in rotting piles of thin stick-like limbs, crowding out the bunker. It was not just alien corpses, though. Nneka gurgled blood and worse things, slashed messily through her intestines. A slash to the face gave a grim parody of Kayode's smile. Ufuoma had a mangled throat, never to speak her wise insights again. Adebayo's laughter had been silenced by a gunshot to the gut. Chinua's head had been turned to vapour, his speeches of hope and a better future forever silenced. Tall, mighty, gentle Uduak had been cut almost in half by a Va-tha-thu blade. And fearless Ngozi, Nyx's closest friend in the world, sat trembling over a Va-tha-thu corpse with a dozen gunshot wounds straight through her. Nyx rushed to Ngozi's side. Ngozi tried to speak—perhaps words of sisterly love, perhaps reassurance. No words came out of her mouth, however. Only blood did that. She breathed out, and the shuddery rise and fall of her chest fell silent, one last time. The Nineteenth Primarch stood very still, for a while. She did not weep or cry out in agony. She just stood there, very quiet, holding Ngozi's frail form in two huge tree-trunk-like arms. Footsteps sounded behind her. She did not bother to turn around. She had killed all the aliens. She knew who it must be. "Adaego," Nyx said, in a lifeless voice, to the last of her best friends and companions. The only one alive. The only one she had not failed. "Nyx," Adaego replied, levelly, and then she shot Nyx in the back. The Primarch roared with rage. She spun around and lunged for Adaego. She did not make it. She staggered, deadly toxins already running through her bloodstream. Nyx still did not give up. With herculean effort, she stood up and lunged again. This time she made it only a few metres before she stumbled and collapsed. She fell to the ground, gasping for breath. "Resilient," observed Adaego, with detached interest. "I expected that. They thought a few thousand warriors would manage to kill you. I told them they were wrong. I was right, of course." Nyx reeled. It did not take a Primarch's genius to understand what had happened, how the Va-tha-thu had found her here. Still she was stunned at the magnitude of the betrayal. Nyx croaked: "Why?" "Isn't it obvious?" said Adaego with contempt. "You were leading us into ruin. Before you came, humans were slaves, yes, but at least we had lives. We could live out in the open. We could see the sun, not just crawl like rats in the dark for fear of orbital bombardment." She shrugged. "When A-ko-li's men approached me, I had to agree. Believe me or not—I honestly don't care—but I'm not doing this for myself. This is for mankind." Nyx struggled to breathe. Still she spoke, in outrage: "We could… won. Taken… arc… olo…" "We were never going to take the arcologies. You never even tried," said Adaego. "I did have faith in you, you know, before that. Just like the others did. But you've failed, Nyx. You failed us all. And my father taught me not to throw more money at a failed effort." She started to walk away. "You're going to die here, you know," Adaego called over her shoulder. "That was never in doubt. The xenos could have just blown up the bunker from orbit, if they wanted to. They only did all this because they wanted your body intact, to show the rebels. This way they'll have it. They'll come and get you when you bleed out in a few hours." The thought of that—being displayed like a trophy, a macabre banner to demoralise her fellow rebels into submission—appalled Nyx even more than the prospect of a slow death. "Kill me," she called to her once-friend. "Not… hours. A mercy. You… coward." "Do you really think I'm stupid enough to fall for that?" said Adaego. "Come close enough to let you rip my head off just before you die? No thanks." She paused. "I'm sure you hate me for this. You should know—it's not half as much as I hate myself. Not for leaving you. For supporting you this long, as you've led mankind into ruin. You made us rats living in caves. I hope when you're in Hell you remember that." And with those last words of spite ringing in Nyx's ears, Adaego was gone.
What came next, Nyx does not speak of. Alone, bleeding from many wounds, near to death, the Nineteenth Primarch crawled through the caves. She sought an exit other than the ones she knew, for Adaego knew those too, and that meant the Va-tha-thu also knew. In the perfect darkness she squeezed her bloodied body through cramped tunnels, with nothing to guide her way out. Near-dead, bleeding out, without food or water, without map, without light, alone in the dark, she nearly died. She should have died. But the Emperor's gene-craft was beyond comparison, and so, perhaps, was Nyx's hatred. She wanted to survive. Not just to live—that felt almost secondary. To spite Adaego. She wanted Adaego's head ripped off, and she wanted to be the one to do it. Nyx spent thirty days in those caves, without food or water, without fresh air, without binding for her wounds. Somehow, in an extraordinary feat of endurance and determination, she survived. After those thirty days, she burst into the light of the stars by a secondary entrance, far from the one she had used. And she set about finding her followers. She did, of course, and the human rebels of Calianthe V—who had feared the worst—were overjoyed to be united with their leader once more. Ever after, though, Nyx was a darker figure. Hatred burnt behind her eyes and lust for vengeance in the knife-shape of her smile. Touches of the old optimism, the hope for a better future for mankind, still stayed alive, but she rarely spoke of them. It was hard to hold on to faith in mankind after what Adaego had done. She made sure every human man, woman and child on the planet knew Adaego's name and face and infamy. She was less trusting too. Prior to the betrayal, Nyx had been closest to her eight companions, but she had still spoken, sometimes, with others, and let them into an outer circle of friends. Now she was a solitary woman, untrusting of outsiders, keeping her movements secret, never sharing her battle-plans except at the last moment and only to those who most needed to know, lest she be again betrayed. With grim determination, Nyx set to work undoing the last obstacles to the rebellion. Inspired by the gas-masks that the Va-tha-thu wore when they wandered the lowlands of Calianthe V in the nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, she designed a gas-mask and rebreather system with the opposite purpose: not to simulate Va-tha-thu air in a human-friendly atmosphere, but to simulate human-breathable air in the sulphurous atmosphere preferred by the Va-tha-thu. It took her months to finish the design—sturdy, reliable—and the rest of the year to ramp up production in her secret foundries in underground caves, far from orbital bombardment, to spread those gas-masks to humans across the planet. But she did it. It is perhaps worth considering the magnitude of this accomplishment, in a culture which, before her, had been medieval. Though not a mechanical genius by the standards of the Primarchs, Nyx's mind is still superhuman. Equipped with these systems, the human rebels started storming Calianthe V's arcologies. Casualties were immense, owing to the heavy guns of the xenos. But the humans had guns too, and they had numbers, and they were no longer thwarted by the unbreathable atmosphere. The Va-tha-thu's greatest advantage had been extinguished. The attackers did not move in as a massed host, to avoid orbital bombardment. They approached in small groups, moving at night, often in tunnels underground, and only emerged when they were too close to the arcology for the xenos to target them from orbit, lest they also destroy their own people, too. The attackers struck. Arcology after arcology fell to the humans. The rebels commandeered the arcologies' xenos-made defensive guns to keep the Va-tha-thu's starships from destroying them once they had lost. In each arcology that fell, the Queen of the Night sought Adaego, but she was not there. At last, only one arcology stood against her: Arc-3-Beta, the tallest of them all. This was the towering spire of A-ko-li, the alien overlord of Calianthe V. It was sixteen years since Nyx had landed on Calianthe V, twelve since she had joined with human civilisation, and two since she had been betrayed. Nyx knew Adaego waited there. So did A-ko-li. Around this last arcology, the human armies gathered. No longer did they need to hide from orbital bombardment. They had enough heavy anti-starship guns taken from the previous conquests that they need not fear enemy starships in the skies. High were their hopes, and grim was their determination. They had almost liberated their planet. They had come very, very close. This one last struggle remained, and then they would have peace. But A-ko-li, being no fool, understood the danger he was in, and in his cunning he launched one last desperate throw of the dice. He devised a chemical weapon that made the air even more toxic than it had been before. No longer was it pleasant for the Va-tha-thu and unpleasant for humans. Now it would kill anybody, of virtually any species imaginable. He gave gas-mask and rebreather systems to his people. The Va-tha-thu's systems would be able to endure it. The human rebels', built by a more primitive technological base, he hoped would not. The first human assault on Arc-3-Beta failed, with heavy casualties. As the human armies licked their wounds and considered their next moves, a figure appeared on the top of the arcology, miles high, so high up that he was just a tiny dot. From that figure rang out—enormously magnified—a voice that every Calianthean recognised from previous broadcasts of xenos propaganda, promising rewards for collaborators, punishment for rebels and suchlike. The voice of A-ko-li. Ignoring the other human rebels, A-ko-li spoke directly to Nyx. He congratulated her on her successes thus far against him, but said she could go this far and no further. Desiring to avoid further bloodshed (he claimed), he made her one final offer. There need not be a bloody battle. Instead, he proposed a challenge. Nyx was to climb Arc-3-Beta. That close to the walls, it would not be possible to fire on her with the heavy guns (the sort that would swat hostile starships out of the sky), and lesser guns would scarcely harm her, so she would know he could not break his word. He was waiting here at the top. If she could not reach him past the toxic miasma his machines were spewing, she must agree, she would leave this place and disperse her armies; allow the Va-tha-thu of Arc-3-Beta to live in peace. If she did reach him, he would surrender to her, in person, in return for his people's permission to leave this world unharmed. Nyx (with equipment to amplify her own voice) asked why she would accept a deal like that. It had no downside for him: if he won, he lived; if he lost, he lived. A-ko-li replied that he would not. If she won the challenge, he, he promised, would stay behind, and she could do whatever she pleased with him. The guarantee of safe passage offworld was only for the rest of his people. And he would have one other prisoner with him. A human voice was heard, shouting and begging for mercy, alongside the harsh, accented voices of the xenos. Adaego's. The Queen of the Night declared she accepted A-ko-li's challenge. A-ko-li said, satisfied, "Then our deal is done." Once the magnified voices fell silent, her advisers protested against this. Nyx would hear no objections. Coldly, she explained that she was not deluded as to the likelihood of A-ko-li dishonouring the deal and she was not overtaken by lust for vengeance. If A-ko-li broke his word, the only one who died would be her. Hardly a crippling loss. It would have been, earlier in the rebellion, but not now. If that happened, the human armies would fight the battle and seize Arc-3-Beta, just as they would have done without this bargain. But if A-ko-li kept his word, they could seize the arcology without the hideous casualties they would have to take if they took it normally. The best-case scenario was excellent; and the worst-case scenario, for mankind rather than for her, was no different to what would happen if she rejected the bargain anyway. Therefore, taking the deal was simply the rational choice. And yet one last obstacle interposed itself. The very night before the challenge, there was fire in the sky. A great fleet blasted the xenos starships into motes of dust, and sent a shuttle to the ground, from which emerged a thousand armoured warriors clutching Guardian Spears and one who seemed to shine with golden light. The arrival of the strangers from the stars brought much excitement among the armies of the Calianthean human rebellion, being both obviously human and obviously technologically advanced. Swiftly their leader was honoured in the one request he made, which was that he be brought before the Queen of the Night. Nyx, who had dwelt so long in darkness, was almost blinded by this stranger's golden radiance. He pronounced her his daughter, named himself the Emperor of Mankind, and offered her his help, if she would accept it. The golden stranger bade her reject A-ko-li's offer, for the alien was treacherous. The golden stranger had mighty warriors in his service, or so he claimed. He was her father and her lord, and he would assist her in liberating Calianthe V. Nyx was divided. Long she had coveted the answers to the questions the villagers asked: "Who are you? What's your name? Where did you come from? Why are you so big? Why can you do the things you can do? What are you?" The golden stranger gave her answers, and better answers than she had hoped or dreamt. She had feared that she must come from xenos, the enemy, the oppressors, for she knew she had come from the stars, and it was only they who travelled among the stars. Now the golden stranger showed her this was not so. Humans could travel among the stars, too. And she sensed an undeniable likeness in the golden stranger. He was the first she had seen who reminded her of herself. It seemed… not impossible… that all was indeed as he claimed. He was her father, he the lord of all mankind. That was why she was different: it was a good difference. She was not a monster of alien making who, by aiding the human species, had turned against her own kind. And yet she could not quite believe it. The Nyx of before Adaego's betrayal would have accepted the golden stranger at once. The Nyx of afterward was doubtful. What he spoke of looked too good to be true, and when things look too good to be true, they usually are. Nyx was not blind to the fact that he was telling her everything she wanted to hear. That, in and of itself, made her suspicious. He might be lying to her for some malign purpose. Put simply—after Ngozi's death, Nyx was not the sort of person who would trust a golden stranger telling her everything she wanted to hear. And so Nyx rejected the Emperor's offer of aid. Pridefully she declared to her followers that the people of Calianthe V would liberate their homeworld by themselves. They needed no outsider who would promise aid and deliver only enslavement. Subconsciously, perhaps, there was another element to it: an adolescent's instinct to impress her father. She wanted to prove herself to the golden stranger. For Calianthe was a star near to Sol, by the astronomical scale of galactic distances. Nyx was one of the earliest Primarchs to be rediscovered by their father. She had long been an adult in body, for Primarchs grow quickly indeed, but she was still sixteen years old. The golden stranger then uttered a challenge to Nyx—to the astonishment of the surrounding humans, who had never seen someone so openly defy their Queen of the Night. If she succeeded in A-ko-li's challenge, he would acknowledge her overlordship of this planet. He would leave, and never return again. If she failed, she would kneel to him as her liege and her father. This pricked Nyx's pride, and she declared angrily that she would not fail. The golden stranger made no reply. He left. Alone, the Silent Sentinel climbed up Arc-3-Beta. A-ko-li kept his word, it seemed, for his arcology's guns did not fire at her. The toxic gas of A-ko-li's chemical weapon smeared her senses. A-ko-li's weapon was not just toxic chemicals, not just the sulphurous, volcanic air of the planet the Va-tha-thu called home, but something else, something she could not understand. Her eyes watered. Her limbs shook. Her grip on the arcology's walls faltered. Her hearts beat faster, struggling to keep her alive. And yet she kept climbing, stubborn, persistent. She had conquered A-ko-li's previous challenge, when he had had Adaego shoot her in the back with poison and she had had to crawl out of the caves. She would conquer this. The golden stranger would regret his arrogance. There was no enemy that she could not endure. And so she endured. The toxic smog grew so terrible that she could scarcely breathe, for all her Primarch physiology. Her fingers and toes turned from healthy dark brown to white, then yellow, then green. Yet still she climbed, onward, ever-onward. At last she made it to the top of the arcology, gasping laboured breaths of sulphurous air. Her body, weak from poison, collapsed onto Arc-3-Beta's roof with a demeanour of exhausted triumph. She had made it. She demanded of the lone Va-tha-thu whom she could see through blurry, watery eyes that he must adhere to his end of the bargain. Silently she also prepared herself for a fight, fingers curling around her weapons; for Nyx was not such a fool as to believe that A-ko-li would certainly keep his word. The Va-tha-thu neither answered, nor attacked. Nyx stood up, gasping short shuddery breaths. She looked upon the Va-tha-thu in front of her. He backed away, terrified. The way he walked and held himself carried none of Calianthe V's alien overlord's cold confidence. In a wheedling, whining voice, he begged her not to hurt him. It was not A-ko-li. It had never been A-ko-li. A-ko-li had never been here at the top of Arc-3-Beta. The magnified voice had been his, true, but it had come from a sound-system. The figure she had seen—only a blur, miles above, too far for his features to be made out—had not been the overlord of Calianthe V. It had been this dupe. Nyx had told her followers that, no matter how this challenge went, she won. She had been wrong. She had been tricked and deceived. She was going to die, here and now, of this poison gas; the aliens would present her body to her followers, proving the poison had been her end, she had not endured the challenge; and the alien overlord had never been here to be found. She could not win. There had never been the possibility. The challenge had been rigged against her from the start. Understanding this, perceiving the treachery of the xenos, did nothing for the poison in Nyx's veins. She was dying. The mocking laughter of A-ko-li rang out, loud and clear, from the same sound-system as earlier. "Poor fool," he said. "And to think, you actually trusted me." The dark air, swimming with sulphur and cyanide and something worse, something unnatural, forced itself down Nyx's throat. She no longer had the strength to struggle against it… …and then there was light. Swift as the wind, a pod slammed into the roof of Arc-3-Beta's highest spire, and out from it stepped a figure shining like the sun. In a golden blaze the dark, toxic miasma was banished away. Nyx gasped grateful breaths of clean fresh air. Suddenly she could breathe again. The Va-tha-thu scuttled away. The golden stranger drew a flaming sword and severed the xenos's head. A-ko-li screeched orders over the sound-system in a panic. Dozens of Va-tha-thu warriors popped up on the roof of Arc-3-Beta, all of them heavily armed. The golden stranger simply gestured. A whooshing noise, like a gust of wind, and all of the aliens were thrust off their feet, off the top of the arcology. With a wailing noise, rapidly receding, they fell miles to their doom. The golden stranger flicked his wrist. A great metal chunk of the ceiling—it must have weighed a tonne—was ripped out of its foundations. There, underneath, Nyx saw her quarry: the real A-ko-li, perched comfortably where he had thought that she would never see him. "Mercy," gibbered A-ko-li, the tyrant's last terrified moments occupied by a cry for that which he had never granted his billions of human victims. "Mercy…" The glowing golden godly figure spoke a single, hateful word: "You." Then the flaming sword went down. The tyrant of Calianthe fell dead to the ground, cut in two in a single contemptuous stroke. Nyx felt dazed. It had all happened so fast. One moment she had been lying, near to death, tricked and duped by the treacherous xenos. It was over. The next… well… it was over. Just not the way it had been about to be. "Child," said the glowing golden figure, bright like the stars, bright like the sun. It bent down over her. "Are you well?" For once, the Silent Sentinel wished to speak and could not. Her throat felt like a hive of wasps was nesting in it. She could not answer. The Emperor of Mankind took his child in his arms.
Nyx would not remember much of what happened after that, that day. But Arc-3-Beta fell. That much was for certain. The Emperor's warriors descended from the sky and purged the xenos from the artifice of man. She woke up in a bed aboard the Bucephelus, with golden warriors and some of her own people gathered around her. Soon indeed she returned to Calianthe V, where she passed judgement on Adaego the traitor. Nyx ripped her head off with her bare hands—the very fate Adaego had spoken of, that day. Nyx had promised herself she would. She was the sort to keep a promise. One other promise she made, this day, was to the Emperor. Nyx gathered all the people of her rebel army on Calianthe V, and she told them of A-ko-li's treachery, which of course outraged them. But the Queen of the Night emphasised not only the vileness of A-ko-li. She spoke, also, of her own stupidity. She had been a fool to trust the xenos. The Emperor had urged her not to. He had been right. No xenos was to be trusted. She had been prideful. Pride was folly. She begged forgiveness for the 'sin' of that pride. She would not make that mistake again. In public, with eyes of all upon her, she knelt before the Emperor of Mankind. She acknowledged him as her father. She declared that he had not only created her life but also saved her life, and slain the alien who had ruled over Calianthe V for so long. She spoke of how the Calianthean people were just one part of a greater whole, the human people. And all mankind had fallen. All mankind had been separated, and much of it oppressed by xenos like the Va-tha-thu. This must be remedied. There, on that day, on her knees, on Calianthean soil, she swore her eternal fealty to the Emperor of Mankind: "Until the stars themselves die." That pledge has been well-remembered by her Legion ever-after. Alongside the Emperor, Nyx went to Terra to be taught of the galaxy, the Great Crusade, the Imperium, its tools and ways of war. Being a Primarch, she mastered every lesson. In a matter of months the Emperor deemed her ready and granted her command of her gene-daughters the XIX Legion. At the time, the XIX Legion were famed for attritional warfare, grinding down the enemy under assault of superheavy tanks and heavily armoured infantry. There was much that Nyx approved of, though it was not a form of warfare familiar to her. Endurance was a quality she prized highly and her daughters clearly possessed it in spades, even if they did not demonstrate it the same way she did. She would learn her daughters' way of war and master it. The XIX Legion were not known, however, for sneak-attacks, silent motion or night-fighting: skills Nyx had learnt since her childhood striking at the Va-tha-thu on Calianthe V. They were not a disappointment to her, but they were not a miraculous duplicate of the same way of war their Primarch had learnt on the homeworld she had perchance landed on. Gene-mother and daughters had much to learn from one another. Many of Nyx's followers from Calianthe V (those of the right age and gender) took her gene-seed and became Astartes of the XIX Legion. It was not just they who changed. The Terran-born Astartes were taught the ways of war that Nyx had learnt on Calianthe V, just as they themselves taught Nyx and her fellow Caliantheans the ways they knew. Bold, upfront approach was replaced with silent stalking, unseen in the night. Gaudy red and gold armour was cast aside, for unadorned black. Unlike other Primarchs, Nyx did not come up with a special name for her Legion, the 'Heralds of Glory' or 'Lions of Battle' or some such vain, frivolous nonsense. In time, the XIX Legion would come to be known for their colours: 'the Black Nineteenth'. After that period of adjustment, the first post-reunification campaign of the Black Nineteenth was in the Hylops Sector. The Va-tha-thu were an FTL-capable species. They had not limited themselves to only the Calianthe system. The whole Hylops Sector, the many star-systems surrounding the Calianthe system, had also known the oppression of the Va-tha-thu. In a wave of black-clad fury, Nyx's daughters purged the Hylops Sector of the vile xenos who had bedevilled their Primarch's childhood. And once victory was theirs, all the Hylops Sector's inhabited planets became Black Nineteenth recruiting worlds. This series of victories, much quicker and easier than the years-long struggle for the liberation of her homeworld, and the gratitude of the sector's enslaved humans to the Astartes crystallised in Nyx's mind a conviction about the fundamental righteousness of the Great Crusade and the Imperium. The second time Nyx ever met the Emperor, a shining golden giant appeared as if by miracle and saved her life. This is the foundation-stone on which was built a loyalty total, unconditional and absolute. That loyalty is not religious fanaticism—the Emperor told her he was not a god and she believed him—but rather a simple faith that the ancient psyker knows what he is doing and is doing the right thing. She knows perfectly well of the Emperor's sometime cruelties; her brother Ozymandias is testament enough to that. However, she trusts that when the Emperor is cruel, it is for the sake of a greater kindness: he would sacrifice one world to save ten others, if he could not save them all. He is never cruel without reason. Being ancient beyond compare and possessed of powers that others can only dream of, the Emperor finds it difficult to relate to other people—a fault in her father that she empathises with, for she has the same fault herself. She trusts, though, that everything he does, he does for the sake of the human species. Some Primarchs have accused Nyx that her faith in the Emperor is too simple, too black-and-white: a childish faith in a parent. The Silent Sentinel is not the sort to argue. If she were, though, she would accuse them of unwarranted pride, overestimating their own wisdom like petulant teenagers convinced that they know everything best. The Primarchs are just a few hundred years old—practically infants, from the point of view of immortality, and all the Primarchs are immortals. The Emperor has been guardian of mankind for more than thirty-thousand years. And yet some of the Primarchs believe that they know what is best for mankind better than the Emperor. Another consequence of that golden appearance on Calianthe V is that Nyx is one of the most pro-psyker of Primarchs, though she is not a psyker herself. Unlike some, she does not ignore the fact that the Emperor is psychic, indeed the most powerful psyker the galaxy has ever seen. Her instinctive association of psykers is with the shining golden figure who came and saved her life. Because of this, she used to be so pro-psyker that the Emperor had to take his daughter aside and warn her, quietly, of the existence of daemons and Warp-corruption. This knowledge cooled her ardour. She still believes that psychic powers can be used for good, but they must be used carefully and responsibly. Nyx has been with the Emperor almost since the beginning: she was the second-earliest Primarch to be found, a mere sixteen years after the Primarchs' scattering. Despite this, the other Primarchs barely know her at all. The Silent Sentinel remains aloof because she does not trust her cogenitors. (The Emperor is 'Father' to her, certainly, but the other Primarchs are 'cogenitors', not 'brothers and sisters'. Nyx has been heard to remark that Ngozi of Calianthe V was "more a sister to me than any of them".) There are only a few Primarchs whose loyalty Nyx trusts. Many, she deems potentially disloyal to Emperor and Imperium. There are several different reasons that make the Grim Lady of the Imperium doubt the loyalty of her cogenitors. Some Primarchs have built empires-within-an-empire for themselves. The Emperor created his genetically engineered supersoldiers to serve mankind, not rule it. To Nyx, any Legion that takes power over planets outside its Legion homeworld is violating the Emperor's purpose. The Black Nineteenth, who are ascetic and austere, see those Legions as power-hungry and selfish at best, and perhaps even disloyal to the Emperor's dream. Other Primarchs are aberrantly friendly to xenos, worst of all the depraved Eldar. Nyx has a particular hatred of the Eldar, ever since she learnt from her father the real reason why the torment of Old Night came upon mankind. Certainly, there was the war against the artificial intelligences remembered by primitive later humans as the Men of Iron. But mankind won that war. Mankind survived; the AIs didn't. The real fatal blow was the onset of Warp Storms which tore apart the network of starships which kept the Terran Federation together. Mankind was too specialised to endure the severing of interstellar travel. Urban planets starved for lack of food from Agri-Worlds. Agri-Worlds lost the advanced technology they relied on, provided by the manufacturing capacity of urban planets. And the reason why those Warp Storms existed? The Eldar creating a Chaos God. (The Emperor did not tell the Primarchs of the existence of the Chaos Gods and Nyx was no exception. He just said that the Eldar's hedonistic activities were the reason for the Warp Storms of the Age of Strife… which is true, albeit incomplete. Those Warp Storms were heralds of Slaanesh's upcoming birth, disappearing when the god was finally born and the Eye of Terror ripped open in its full awful glory.) This hatred should not be exaggerated. The Black Nineteenth do not go and pick fights with Eldar. They fight who, when and where the Emperor commands. They do their duty, that is all. But it is fair to say they take particular satisfaction whenever duty pushes them up against the Eldar. Then they can repay a small fraction of the blood-debt that is owed to the Eldar: five-thousand years of human suffering and agony, caused by the Eldar's depraved deeds. The most disgusting and untrustworthy Primarchs of all, in Nyx's eyes, are those who have shown discontent or disbelief in the fact that the Great Crusade is necessary and righteous. For example, those who are squeamish about bringing reluctant planets into Imperial Compliance. Nyx's background on Calianthe V has given her the ironclad belief that mankind must be united, or else it will go extinct due to the perils of a hostile universe. All over the galaxy, humans are attacked or enslaved by xenos. If a human planet selfishly chooses to stand aside from that, prioritising itself and its independence instead of contributing to the Great Crusade to liberate its fellow humans, then the humans under attack will fall, and then the xenos will attack more, and more will fall, and so on. Everyone will be doomed. Mankind has just this one chance to survive to fill the power-vacuum post-Fall of the Eldar before someone else does, and mankind will be enslaved or extinct. Those humans who do not want to have the species seize that chance might as well be cheerleading for slavery and extinction. Such people are traitors to mankind, just like Adaego of Calianthe V—a name and face that Nyx will never forget. Of course, Nyx does not suspect all equally. About some Primarchs, she has had some doubts but only small ones; she thinks they will probably stay true to their oaths to the Emperor. Others she deems totally disloyal and would be unsurprised to receive an Imperial summons to crush their treason any minute. Yet if rumours are to be believed, paranoia and traumatic memories of treason on her homeworld might not be the only reasons for Nyx's mistrust of her kin. The preferred melee weapon of the Black Nineteenth is a Power Mace, a weapon much like the XIX Legion itself: blunt, heavy, ugly, battering the enemy to death or submission. Maces do not have the speed or lightness of swords. They are not suited to fast-moving chases or elegant, dance-like contests of skill. However, they are much better than swords at killing an enemy right through heavy armour, with high-momentum, chest-crushing blows. This is curious, since the Imperium's xenos foes usually have armour lighter and weaker than the Power Armour of the Space Marines. Swords are more than sufficient against such foes. Orks' armour is sometimes, rarely, good enough to merit that (the quality is very variable), but the Orkish gestalt psychic field tends to make their WAAAAGH!-hosts fall apart if their warboss is slain, so an ideal strategy against them is a high-speed shock strike. That description fits many Legions, not coincidentally, for the Emperor was well aware that there are plenty of Orks in the galaxy. Yet shock warfare is not the warfare of the Black Nineteenth. They are not designed to specialise against an enemy best-handled by decapitation attacks. The enemy the Black Nineteenth are most optimised to fight is not Orks. It is not other xenos, un-Compliant humans, Abominable Intelligences or the horrors of the Warp. It is other Space Marines. None of this optimisation is due to the changes which Nyx of Calianthe V introduced to her Legion: mainly, a new focus on stealthy approach in the night to ambush the enemy when the attack begins. It was already there in the pre-reunification XIX Legion as the Emperor built it. Which means the Emperor designed a Space Marine Legion specifically to kill other Space Marine Legions. Some whisper that this has already happened; the Queen of the Night has led her Astartes to kill traitors of their own kind. No doubt these are just wild rumours. There are no records of such a campaign anywhere in the histories of the Imperium. Rumours or not, though, it does not take a superhuman intellect to figure out what opponent the Black Nineteenth was designed for. The Black Nineteenth are not liked by the other Legiones Astartes. Space Marines of ultra-loyalist Legions hold for them a quiet, distant respect—that is the warmest relation they have with other Legions. More common are fear, mislike and resentment.
The XIX Legion: the Black Nineteenth
Name: Insignia and Appearance: The symbol of the Black Nineteenth—not displayed on their armour, only displayed on banners for when they are ordered to attend Imperial parades—is a sword piercing down through a Va-tha-thu skull. Gene-seed Status: Nyx's is not the pickiest gene-seed of the Legiones Astartes. As long as an Aspirant is female, of the right age, of the right body shape and in the top 1-2% of the female bell-curve for physical fitness, strength and musculature, she is reasonably likely to survive. Any planet with a population in the billions ought to have many thousands of candidates who could become Astartes if the Legion deemed them worthy of that honour. The exception is psykers. Any psyker implanted with Nyx's gene-seed suffers catastrophic organ rejection and ultimately death. Nyx herself is just so non-psychic (by Primarchical standards) her gene-seed does not fit well with psykers. Every Space Marine of the XIX Legion develops black hair and dark brown skin, just like Nyx's, no matter what her original ethnicity was. Such superficial changes are of no concern to the Imperium, however. Legionary Assets: The flagship of Primarch and Legion is the Gloriana-class battleship Emperor's Hammer. Other starship names include Emperor's Vengeance, Emperor's Fist and Emperor's Wrath. Every battleship of the XIX Legion has a name honouring the Emperor thus. Legion Organisation: —A squad is of 10 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Sergeant. —A platoon is of 30 Space Marines. Its leader is ranked Sister-Sergeant; she is simply the senior-most of the three Sister-Sergeants in the platoon. This partition exists to make it easier to coordinate between the levels of squads and the much higher level of companies. —A company is of 120 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Captain, comprising four platoons of the same type. —A battalion is of 360 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Commandant. —A chapter is of about 1,500 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Commander. Typically formed of several battalions plus support elements, such as the chapter's aerospacecraft and artillery. Unlike smaller formations, a chapter is usually combined-arms. —A brigade is of about 5,000 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Brigadier. —A legation is of about 15,000 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Legate. A legation is the smallest force that might be tasked with a full planetary conquest. —A march is of about 45,000 Space Marines, led by a Sister-Marshal. This is the largest subdivision, under the full Legion. The Legion usually operates in marches which operate separately from each other, albeit in roughly the same region of the galaxy so that they can gather together as a Legion quickly, if required. A Sister-Marshal commands a full Expeditionary Fleet, and most of the time, she might as well be an independent commander in the Great Crusade. Special units: The Black Guard—These are the personal companions and bodyguards of the Queen of the Night. The Black Guard always stands 480 strong, comprising four companies. It is replenished from the rest of the Legion if it ever falls below 480. Membership of the Black Guard is only handed out to the most proficient and accomplished Astartes in the Legion and is highly coveted. The Commandant-General of the Black Guard is considered more prestigious than a conventional Sister-Commander or even a Sister-Brigadier, despite commanding far fewer battle-sisters. By nature of her role, she is always close to the Primarch. Part of the reason why the Duel-Theatres are so often frequented is that the Commandant-General of the Black Guard often visits there, and she chooses new members from those who have proven themselves the best of the best. The Deathhammers and the Nightstalkers—These are roles within the XIX Legion, not formations. Nightstalkers are the infiltration troops of the XIX Legion: silent killers who sneak up on an enemy unseen in the dead of night. Then, when all is ready, they launch brutal surprise attacks to take out high-value enemy positions, such as artillery, staging areas, ammunition depots, and even enemy commanders. Deathhammers are armoured troops, approaching in heavy armoured personnel carriers once the Nightstalkers have done their work to set up the offensive. These are not separate formations. Rather, being a Deathhammer or a Nightstalker is simply a duty that is handed out as is needed at the time. The same woman might be a Deathhammer in one battle and a Nightstalker in the next. Expertise and Combat Doctrine: The Black Nineteenth's doctrine marries heavy armour and heavy weapons to silent, unseen approaches. Nyx's mortal followers on Calianthe V ambushed the xenos warriors of the Va-tha-thu. That tradition has been passed down to her Astartes followers in the stars. Every daughter of the Queen of the Night is trained to be able to move in shockingly complete silence, despite the great weight and size of a Space Marine in extra-thick Power Armour. And every one has excellent night-vision gear, designed by the Primarch herself. The XIX Legion are not capable of hit-and-run attacks. They do not have the speed for it. They excel, however, at sneaking up on an enemy to attack from an unexpected direction, especially at night-time. The Black Nineteenth approach an enemy, silent and unseen. When in position, they reveal themselves and the killing starts. Because of this doctrine, an infantry battle-sister of the Black Nineteenth does most of her fighting up-close. A typical Black Nineteenth planetary assault looks like this: First of all, a shadowcloaked starship approaches the planet, unseen by the enemy. Squads of black-armoured infiltrators, known among the Legion as Nightstalkers, are dropped off by dark, fast-moving stealth aerospacecraft—quick, high drops that only a Space Marine could survive. They sneak up in the dead of night, silent and unseen, until it's time for the Silence-Breaking: a simultaneous surprise attack by every Nightstalker at once on the enemy's artillery guns, ammunition depots and troop staging areas, usually with liberal use of high explosives. Often, enemy commanders are assassinated with sniper-rifles in the Silence-Breaking, throwing the enemy into chaos and confusion. Sometimes the entire Black Nineteenth force takes a Nightstalker role. Sometimes, when it is judged unlikely or unwise for the whole force to infiltrate, there is a main force, called the Deathhammers, who are held back behind the Nightstalker infiltrators until the Silence-Breaking happens, at which point the Deathhammers moves in. If the Nightstalkers have accomplished their missions, the enemy should be reeling from a shocking burst of violence against numerous key points in their defence, making them unable to respond effectively to the arrival of the Deathhammers… although the battle-sisters of the Deathhammers are clad in heavy armour and make use of well-armoured personnel carrier vehicles, just in case this does not work. This first blow should be the decisive blow that determines the course of the battle. The shock-stroke of the Silence-Breaking materialising out of the darkness should leave the enemy paralysed. From then on, the enemy should be stuck on the back foot ever after, reacting and not acting. They should have no opportunity to get back the initiative. As soon as the Silence-Breaking is over, the enemy should be put under relentless pressure through brutal, offensive, attritional warfare. The Black Nineteenth grind down the reeling remnants of the enemy until there are no enemies left. All have died or surrendered. Sometimes, Nightstalkers who have carried out their mission in the Silence-Breaking find themselves so far from the rest of the force that they must hold out for hours before their battle-sisters can reach them. These vicious stands have high casualty rates, if the XIX Legion are up against opponents who pose a realistic threat to Space Marines. Being a Nightstalker is dangerous work. Stranded Nightstalkers are not, however, abandoned by their battle-sisters. The rest of the Legion does try to catch up with them as soon as it can. Of course, Black Nineteenth ground forces act differently if they believe they are unable to approach undetected. Under those circ*mstances, they adopt more conventional measures. On the defensive, the Black Nineteenth fight with selfless, relentless determination, holding out no matter the privations of the siege. They are well-suited to last stands. Often, some of the battle-sisters will sneak out against the besieging force and launch surprise-attacks against key targets in the manner of the Nightstalkers—a sudden, coordinated attack, simultaneously blowing up a large number of enemy artillery guns and ammunition depots and assassinating enemy commanders. If numbers permit, the Black Nineteenth will then sortie out and counter-attack, breaking the siege. If the imbalance of numbers is too great for counter-attacks to be successful, the Black Nineteenth do not throw lives away with fruitless counter-attacks piecemeal. They fight on from their fortresses, grim and untiring, until friendly forces can come to relieve them. Stubborn endurance in the face of pain is deemed in the XIX Legion one of the two virtues worthy of highest respect. (The other is loyalty, undying and absolute.) Accordingly, fallen battle-sisters entombed in Dreadnoughts so that they can continue to fight for Emperor and Imperium are common. Such is not mandatory of course. Injured battle-sisters have every right to retire if they wish. However, virtually every battle-sister in such circ*mstances does not so wish. She chooses to keep fighting. The XIX Legion also specialises in resisting and counteracting chemical and biological weapons. They do not use them themselves. On the contrary, Nyx's upbringing has given her a hatred of those weapons and all who use them, and whenever she confronts a foe who does such a thing, the Black Nineteenth will crush them with more-than-usual mercilessness. In void warfare, the Legion has a like-minded philosophy to planet-surface warfare: heavy armour and stealthy approach. Every Strike Cruiser and Battle Barge in the war-fleet of the Black Nineteenth is equipped with a peculiar adaptation of Void Shield technology known as shadowcloaking. This inverts the Void Shield so that its Warp bubble faces the opposite direction: instead of protecting the inside by repulsing projectiles and radiation which come from outside, it 'protects' the outside from anything coming from inside. Any form of radiation from outside the Warp bubble reaches one edge of the bubble and comes out the other side, as if there was nothing in between. This is a supremely effective piece of stealth technology: the shadowcloaked starship is cut off from the rest of realspace, invisible to eyes and all technological senses, at every wavelength in existence. Shadowcloaking technology comes with three disadvantages. First, a starship cannot accelerate or decelerate while it is shadowcloaked. The enormous charged-particle emissions of a starship engine from inside the inverted Warp bubble would almost instantly overpower the shadowcloak, bursting the bubble and thus exposing the shadowcloaked starship to unfriendly eyes. So it cannot use its engines. It must keep moving in the same speed in a straight line. Secondly, for the same reason, a starship cannot fire while it is shadowcloaked. Thirdly and finally, a starship which is using an inverted Void Shield (a shadowcloak) cannot use a normal Void Shield at the same time, or else they would cancel each other out and neither of them would do anything. If the shadowcloak is turned on, the Void Shield is turned off. Because of this, Black Nineteenth starships are given much heavier armour than usual for Imperial starships of their class and size, so they are not helpless glass cannons when their shadowcloaks are turned on. That, in turn, makes them slower. When their shadowcloaks are turned off, XIX Legion starships' Void Shields work just as well as anyone else's. In fleet battles, the battleships of the Black Nineteenth are extremely formidable: superheavy armour and Void Shields. They can soak up a colossal amount of firepower without taking crippling damage, and keep firing all the while. Lighter-armoured starships are faster, but the best sublight speed that can be achieved is still nothing compared to las-weapons which travel at the speed of light or relativistic weapons which travel at speeds almost as high as it. (Warp speed is not nothing, but human technology is not good enough for battle-manoeuvring Warp jumps to be achievable. That is true not just for the Imperium. Even in the Golden Age of Technology, mankind has never reached such technological heights as that. Warp jumps are only used to travel the vast distances between star-systems.) No starship can manoeuvre fast enough to dodge light. Sublight speed is, thus, of little use in a fleet battle. Even the fastest starship cannot outrun a heavy battleship's Lances, beams of slaying light. Such battles in the void are contests of armour-plating, shield strength and firepower. As such, the starships of the XIX Legion excel at fleet battles, delivering troops to a hostile planet without an enemy noticing, and surprise ambushes. Legion Weaknesses: They are somewhat deficient in armoured warfare compared to other Legions. The Black Nineteenth's standard tactics involve sneaking up on the enemy and then suddenly attacking from up close. Their Deathhammers use plenty of armoured personnel carriers, and they have plenty of aerospacecraft, specialising in stealthy insertion of troops, but the Legion does not have many tanks or Titans. Black Nineteenth Astartes excel in melee combat. They are less talented in ranged combat, except for sniping (Nightstalkers often use sniper-rifles). The Black Nineteenth have no Librarians. This is not because they are anti-psyker. However, the Grim Lady of the Imperium is one of the psychically weakest of the Primarchs. Something about her gene-seed does not take well to psykers. As such, the XIX Legion is not the best at dealing with the horrors of the Warp, unless accompanied by other allied Imperial forces such as the Sisters of Silence. In void warfare, the Black Nineteenth's starships are tough, heavily armoured, and slow. They will not catch fast, lightly armoured raiders such as Eldar vessels unless they are secretly lying in wait, shadowcloaked, close enough to the place where the raiders arrive. A war-fleet of the Queen of the Night's Legion is the Emperor's hammer: complete overwhelming force, in just one place at just one time. Beliefs and Practices: The heart of the Black Nineteenth is duty, uncompromising and absolute. They do not practise art, music, theatre, literature or mathematics. Besides war, they do not seem to have any recreation at all. Their quarters are spartan; their armour, undecorated; their walls, colourless; their lives, austere. When not in action, they are usually to be found drilling, keeping sharp the razor edge of their skill for when they are sent to war again. One of Nyx's brothers remarked that she is the least human of the Primarchs: "a dour, joyless figure, knowing nothing but death and duty." This is perhaps not entirely fair. The Grim Lady of the Imperium frowns upon frivolity, that much is true, but there is one game that has become popular among the XIX Legion: the Dark Hunts. In the earliest days of the Black Nineteenth, when they had only just met their Primarch, the Terran-born XIX Legion Astartes came to Calianthe V where they were taught the stealth skills that Nyx saw as indispensable for her Legion. These teachings have been passed down to every generation of the Black Nineteenth ever since: moving across terrain, unseen and silent; setting up ambushes; infiltration in the night. Seeing the importance Nyx places on these skills, the whole Legion pride themselves on perfecting them and proving to their gene-mother that they are worthy of her regard. Originally teaching, this has since evolved into a sport. Whenever a large number of Black Nineteenth Astartes are gathered and are not on active duty, especially if they are from different chapters, they engage in a friendly competition. Two squads or companies of the Black Nineteenth disappear into the wilderness—sometimes with their Power Armour on, sometimes with night-vision gear, and sometimes not—with each side starting miles apart from the other, and they hunt each other down. Not lethally, of course. The winner is the first side to see the other, whereupon they raise a cry "HO!" to show that they have seen. However, simply to see the other side in a Dark Hunt is considered a bare victory, scarcely better than losing. Better is to announce your spotting of the other side when you are in a position to ambush them. The better your position to attack, the more impressive the victory. Best of all would be to cry "HO!" when you are in a perfect position: for example, on a ridge overlooking the other side's position out in the open, where you can shoot at them at will and then retreat behind good cover and shoot at them again whenever you wish to. Such extreme victories are rare, of course. It would be very embarrassing to a squad or company of Nyx's daughters if the other side bested them so thoroughly. Every battle-sister of the Black Nineteenth is trained to watch in the dark, to move silent and unseen, and to check the vulnerabilities of her position. This is part of what makes the game so entertaining: if you attempt a more audacious victory by moving closer or to a better attack-point, you put yourself at higher risk of losing by being seen. These Dark Hunts are the favoured recreation of the XIX Legion, although, as with virtually everything about the Black Nineteenth, they are kept secret from the other Legions. Alongside the Dark Hunts, the other great pastime of the Black Nineteenth is duelling. Every Black Nineteenth starship, from mighty Battle Barges to tiny stealth frigates, possesses a Duel-Theatre, where battle-sisters are constantly testing their skills against one another, and their comrades watch and learn from their expertise. These Duel-Theatres are never empty. Thus the Astartes of the Black Nineteenth are always sharpening the razor edge of their skill. Every generation of battle-sisters should be better than the last. Recruitment and Discipline: Recruiting only from the Hylops Sector helps ensure the right attitude to xenos—the right attitude according to Nyx being, of course, absolute uncompromising determination to annihilate xenos from the galaxy. A handy side-effect is that it also ensures devotion to Nyx, who liberated Calianthe V herself and led the Black Nineteenth to liberate the rest of the Hylops Sector in their first campaign at her side. The people of the Hylops Sector admire their Silent Sentinel and revere her. Hylopians have a reputation in the rest of the Imperium for being standoffish and secretive. Like their idol, they do not trust outsiders easily. They are especially suspicious of any outsiders asking questions about Nyx. This means that outsiders know very little about Nyx's life and history. Promising young women from every inhabited planet in the Hylops Sector are recruited into the Legion. On every such planet, the Black Nineteenth have built a fortress-monastery. All of these fortress-monasteries follow the same pattern: huge structures of starship-armour-grade adamantium, in the wilderness far from any major cities, and built into the sides of mountains for additional protection. For Aspirants to the XIX Legion, the first trial is to reach the fortress-monastery in the first place. There is a reason every Black Nineteenth fortress-monastery is located in the wilderness. Young women who volunteer are dropped off about a hundred miles away, provided with a sword and a pistol with just six rounds and no new ammunition, and wished good luck. This trial is known as the Wandering. Aspirants who survive come out of it with skills that are valued by Nyx from her years of guerrilla warfare on Calianthe V: resourcefulness, survival, austerity, night-walking, and grim endurance. Aspirants must hunt for themselves for food and water. Those who panic and use up their ammunition too quickly will not make it through. The Wandering rewards cold stoicism, not trigger-happy hotheads. They must have the willingness to kill; any who cannot bring herself to kill an animal with her sword has no future as a Space Marine. They must also survive temperature, which is usually extreme. The Black Nineteenth build their fortress-monasteries in snowy wastes or scorching deserts. For navigation, the Aspirants are not given a compass; they are simply taught the local star-charts by maps, which are taken away before the Wandering begins. This means that they only have direction when they are at night. Either they learn to walk at night, or else have excellent memories for the stars, or they get hopelessly lost in daytime. The Wandering is not quite as heartless as it sounds. There are satellites in geostationary orbit above, and every Aspirant in the Wandering is granted a vox device to signal them. An Aspirant who calls on the satellites will be airlifted to safety, or if she is deemed likely to die, she will be airlifted even without signalling. Those, however, have failed the test, and they will never be permitted to apply again. After the Wandering weans out the unworthy, there are numerous further tests and training sessions of a more conventional sort. These resemble the training of any other Legion, except for the special lessons on wilderness survival and moving unseen and silent. In the XIX Legion, both reward and punishment are collective, not individual. This incentivises deep bonds of sisterhood and solidarity between the Aspirant young women. When punishment is necessary, when a battle-sister or Aspirant is accused of a misdeed, the Legion relies on these bonds of sisterhood and solidarity. Either an individual admits her misdeed herself, or every single person in the group suffers the same punishment as would be given to the guilty individual. Usually, ashamed, the individual will admit it. If not—and this is far more common among Aspirants than battle-sisters—she will become a social pariah, hated by her peers, and is highly unlikely to become a full battle-sister. In any case, disciplinary requirements are rare among adult battle-sisters. Space Marines of the Black Nineteenth are quiet, stoic, dedicated to the group ahead of individuals, and focused on their duty. Characters of Interest: Hadiza, Marshal of the Second March—One of the first Caliantheans to be inducted into the XIX Legion, Hadiza was a follower of Nyx in the rebellion against A-ko-li and the Va-tha-thu on Calianthe V. She lost her parents and both her two brothers in the struggle. All that was left to her in life was the struggle, and she became one of its most fanatical loyalists. She served under Nyx in the battle at Arc-3-Beta itself. When the last Va-tha-thu on Calianthe V fell, Hadiza was inspired by Nyx's speech of the virtue and necessity of the Imperium. Lacking anything to tie her to her homeworld, Hadiza took the Queen of the Night's gene-seed and followed her into the stars. Early in her career as a Space Marine, she distinguished herself during the purging of the Hylops Sector of the Va-tha-thu menace. She swiftly rose to the rank of Sister-Sergeant, then Sister-Captain, then Sister-Commandant. Fearless in battle, utterly self-sacrificial, bold, leading from the front, even more austere and disdainful of personal possessions than most of the Black Nineteenth, and fanatically dedicated to her Primarch, Sister-Marshal Hadiza is seen as an exemplar of what the Legion aspires to be. Ayodele, Commandant-General of the Black Guard—Born not on Calianthe V but on one of the star-systems around it, Ayodele was a child liberated from Va-tha-thu slavery in the Hylops Sector campaigns of the Legion. She may indeed be of Calianthean blood, however, given the massive number of slaves who were exported from that once-urbanised planet to the surrounding star-systems by the xenos overlords during the millennia of the Age of Strife. Ayodele saw the black-armoured warriors liberate her world and immediately decided she wanted to be one of them. Training hard, passing the Wandering and other trials with flying colours, she got her wish. Ayodele is known as one of the best duellists in a Legion of duellists, where Duel-Theatres occupy a large fraction of everyone's day. Very, very few Astartes in the Legiones Astartes could hope to best her one-on-one. No elegant sword for her; she fights with a Power Mace, designed to crush the chests and skulls of foes even if they are wearing heavy armour, such as the Power Armour of a Space Marine… or, less distastefully, that of an Ork. Several mighty Ork Warbosses have fallen to her mace. It is with her duelling skill that she caught the eye of the then Commandant-General of the Black Guard, such as to gain entry to that coveted organisation, and then the eye of the Primarch herself. When the aforesaid Commandant-General of the Black Guard died, Sister-Captain Ayodele was chosen by the Queen of the Night to replace her. As one of the youngest of the Legion's high and prestigious officers—albeit still old, compared to the average battle-sister—Commandant-General Ayodele looks up to her Primarch with particularly high respect (one might say hero-worship). She has never really stopped feeling thrilled at being part of the same organisation as the black-armoured heroines who liberated her homeworld from the xenos monsters. Still, the Commandant-General is a truly fearsome warrior and guardian of Nyx, and under her relentless drilling and uncompromisingly high standards the Black Guard have grown ever-deadlier. Ayodele sharpens their personal combat skills to a deadly fine edge. Ekundayo, Equerry to the Primarch—Ekundayo was one of the first Caliantheans to meet the Silent Sentinel, the villagers whom Nyx rescued from the Va-tha-thu down in the caves and who gave her her name. Ekundayo was only two years old at the time, but still, it gives her a personal connection to Nyx that has not wavered. She grew up with the rebellion. She was there from the start. She wept with Nyx when Nyx bore word of the death of Ngozi. Compared to the Equerries of other Primarchs, Ekundayo is not, perhaps, close to Nyx. Certainly she is not as close as Ngozi would have been, had she lived. Still, she is undoubtedly closer to Nyx than any other soul living: the innermost of the outer circle, when the inner circle has been destroyed by the calamity of Adaego's treachery. Ekundayo joined the Black Nineteenth as a teenager, following Nyx into the stars. She is a fierce warrior, but no more than is usual for an Astartes of the Black Nineteenth. What makes her truly special is how closely she understands Nyx. She counsels her in private, including on the subject of the Queen of the Night's fears about the loyalty or lack thereof of her fellow Primarchs, and she often speaks for her in public. Ekundayo has grown accustomed to being the voice of the Silent Sentinel whose own voice is rarely heard. She has a touch more political delicacy than her ever blunt-spoken Primarch. Battle-cry: "For the Emperor!" " 'TIL THE STARS THEMSELVES DIE." Legionary History: The human Agri-World of Pelope IV, recently re-found by the Imperium, was suffering severe overpopulation, too many mouths to feed, because in the Age of Strife it had been cut off from nearby urban worlds by the Warp Storms of Slaanesh's ongoing birth. When an Imperial fleet discovered an uninhabited planet in the nearby Amaranthus system, the desperate and grateful governor of Pelope IV sent millions of his people to make a home there, so that they could have something to eat. The Eldar of Craftworld Biel-tan took this as an intolerable offence. They saw Amaranthus II as an Eldar Maiden World, even though there was not a single Eldar living there and they hadn't bothered to tell anyone that the planet was theirs. The Craftworld Eldar descended upon the hapless human farmers and massacred every single one: every man, woman and child. The Pelopeans called for help. The XIX Legion answered. The Imperium pretended to send another colonisation fleet to the Amaranthus system. When the starving, underfed Pelopean farmers started setting up their pitiful little farms, the Eldar came to massacre them again… and that was when 50,000 black-armoured Space Marines burst out of the night. The Eldar murderers were repaid in their own currency by the Third March of the Black Nineteenth. Spy-satellite pict-casts of the arrogant xenos's arrival narrowed down the Webway gate's location to somewhere in an underground cave-system. So the Black Nineteenth obliterated the entire cave-system, more than a hundred square miles melted down to the bedrock, with the awesome firepower of the battleship Emperor's Fist. The weapon was not nuclear, of course. It was just a rock… a rock travelling at 90% the speed of light, fired by the battleship's Thunderbolt Cannon. That way, there was no radioactive decay to poison the planet for the future. Thus the murdered farmers were avenged, and the people of Pelope IV were saved from starvation through overpopulation. —The Carina Nebula campaign 8,500 light-years from the Sol system, the Carina Nebula is a star-forming region full of enormous, brilliant-bright stars and dark clouds of dust and gas around them. Though large, it is not home to as many people as its volume of space would suggest. Not many planets remain inhabitable in the face of the punishing irradiating environment of the supermassive stars, only those shielded by helpful clouds of dust well-positioned to block the barrage of X-rays and extreme ultraviolet light. To bring this spectacular and beautiful region of space into Imperial Compliance, the Emperor sent the Black Nineteenth. Imperial historians have found this campaign slightly puzzling, because the Carina Nebula is not too far away from Sol. (8,500 light-years might sound like a lot. The diameter of the galaxy is more like 90,000 light-years.) It seems strange that the Carina Nebula was not brought to Imperial Compliance earlier. The surrounding sectors of space have been recorded as Compliant Imperial a hundred years before. The Carina Nebula really should have been part of the Imperium by then. Still, the Emperor directs the Great Crusade with peerless wisdom. There must be a good reason why the Carina Nebula was not already Imperial-ruled. Perhaps he delayed the nebula's conquest because he knew of the deadly xenos threat within, that which the Black Nineteenth would later slay. In any case, Nyx and her entire Legion were sent to wage war against the perfidious xenos who infested the Carina Nebula. The name of this xenos species is lost to history. They must have been exceptionally dangerous, for Nyx went in with 210,000 Astartes. She came out with only 130,000. The Queen of the Night came before the Emperor, who was on the Bucephelus heading off to fight an Ork WAAAAGH! at the time, and she knelt at the foot of his throne. Terse as ever, a woman of few words, she said: "It is done." The Emperor praised her and her daughters, then they went to fight elsewhere. That is all the Black Nineteenth have ever said about the Carina Nebula campaign and the xenos enemy they defeated in it. Of course, this is just their customary modesty and hatred of glory-seeking boastfulness. There is no reason other than that.
Formally, none. The stoic Nyx disdains pointless boasts and grand gestures. They are simply the XIX Legion. "The Nineteenth" is all that they ever call themselves. Informally, and ubiquitously, people call them "the Black Nineteenth".
The XIX Legion's Power Armour is all black, without trim, without symbols, without finery. Matte black such as does not gleam or glitter. There are no special markings of rank or the commemoration of victories. Like their Primarch, they care nothing for aesthetics. It is simply the most practical colouring for the Legion's favoured tactic of sneaking up on the enemy, silent, in the night.
Nyx's gene-seed has a high rejection rate, but in a fairly predictable way, so it is possible to avoid excessive numbers of rejections by picking the right kind of candidates. The Primarch herself is built like a tank: not tall, but strong, broad-shouldered and immensely muscular. Her gene-seed only bonds to women who are built the same way. A slender waif has no chance of surviving the procedure. A broad-shouldered muscle-bound woman has a pretty good shot.
150,000 Space Marines. It would be higher, were it not that the Legion is frequently sent to demanding, attritional wars which other Legions would not endure. Recently, their numbers sank from 210,000 to 130,000 in the mysterious Carina Nebula campaign.
The Black Nineteenth are organised as follows:
The most famous trait of the Black Nineteenth is dogged endurance. In accord with this philosophy, Astartes of the XIX Legion wear thicker Power Armour than those of other Legions. The Black Nineteenth can wade grimly through a weight of fire that would send any other Legion scattering, fleeing for their lives.
The Black Nineteenth's unusually thick Power Armour has its disadvantages: they have a reputation as slow, lumbering warriors which is not unearned. They are not good at the kind of fast attack or shock-and-awe that other Legions are known for.
The Black Nineteenth are stoics. They live ascetic, monastic lives. Right from the Aspirant stage, their culture requires that they be austere and utterly unselfish. There are no personal possessions. Everything that belongs to one, belongs to the group. There is no personal pride, there is pride in the achievements of the Legion. Your sisters' achievements are just as much yours as your own achievements, and yours are theirs too. Anyone boasting of personal glory becomes a social pariah, detested and looked down on by her battle-sisters, and may even be demoted for behaviour unbecoming of a daughter of Nyx. Or, far more likely to do such a thing, she is an Aspirant and she will not be granted the privilege of becoming a daughter of Nyx in the first place. Selfish individual pride is anathema to the stern, stoic culture of the XIX Legion.
The Black Nineteenth recruit from Calianthe V and the rest of the Hylops Sector, but nowhere else. The Queen of the Night is not one of those Primarchs who are possessive or exclusive of their homeworlds. Her allegiance, and her Legion's, is to the whole of mankind. The reason her gene-daughters do not recruit from the whole of mankind is that she is also paranoid in the extreme. Ever since Adaego's betrayal, Nyx has found it hard to trust people. She sees traitors in every shadow. She finds it easier to trust the people of the Hylops Sector, who also knew the terror, cruelty and helplessness of Va-tha-thu occupation, as she did. The Hylops Sector is defined as the region of space which used to be ruled by the Va-tha-thu xenos, though it has been given a human name rather than the indignity of being called the Former Va-tha-thu Sector. Nyx named it herself, after Claudia Hylops, a Sister-Marshal of the XIX Legion who died during the campaign to liberate the sector from the Va-tha-thu yoke.
Aurelia Lemuri, Marshal of the First March—A nobleborn daughter of Terra, Lemuri served in the XIX Legion before even Nyx did. She took part in some of the Imperium's earliest conflicts after the Unification Wars, and rose to the rank of Legion Master before Nyx was found by the Emperor. Upon that rediscovery, Legion Master Lemuri gave way to her Primarch, without resentment or complaint. But Nyx was not the sort to be threatened in ego and toss her predecessor aside. She kept Lemuri in a position of high rank and prestige and often listened to her advice. Considering pride to be sinful ever since her mistake in trusting A-ko-li on Calianthe V, Nyx was not above seeking the help of those more experienced than her in Astartes warfare… though only those in her own Legion, of course, given her typical mistrust of outsiders. Where other Primarchs have been eager to remake their Legions in their own image and distrustful of those Terran-born Space Marines who are often more loyal to the Emperor than to their Primarch, Nyx has taken the opposite approach. Terran-born Space Marines who were high in rank have remained high in rank. Those born away from Terra have had the opportunity to rise too, of course, but that has been as the Legion has expanded, not due to any mass replacement of Terran-born Astartes with those born on the homeworld of their Primarch. A few hundred years after Nyx's finding, many of the Legion's highest ranks are still Terran-born. Sister-Marshal Lemuri is a rather cautious commander by the standards of Astartes, in keeping with the attritional approach that still holds strong in the Black Nineteenth today and utterly dominated it before the stealth influence brought by their Primarch. In council, Sister-Marshal Lemuri often plays naysmith to the bolder suggestions of Hylopian-born Astartes, questioning and testing their plausibility. Nyx, not one for flattery, appreciates this immensely.
The Black Nineteenth do not speak when they are stalking in the night. However, when the moment of the Silence-Breaking comes, when bolters bark and chainswords snarl, silence is impossible. Their battle-cry, then, is a call-and-response, harking back to Nyx's own famous words to her father:
—The Salvation of Amaranthus II
