Evolution of the Space Marine
Evolution of the Space Marine
-From the Great Crusade to the Primaris
In this article I will attempt to discuss the history of the space marines with particular emphasis on the evolution of their transformation and recruitment processes over the course of the Imperium's history from the Unification wars to the Ultima Founding. Some of this discourse will touch on and summarize events that would require much lengthier discussion to cover in full but will be kept minimal to focus on the way these events affected the physical attribute sof the space marines over time.
The Unification War
The earliest super-human soldiers crafted by the Emperor for his great crusade were not the space marines or even the thunder warriors who predated them but in fact were the Legio Custodes. Golden armored giants wielding powered spears the Custodes were hand-crafted from infancy by the Emperor and his most learned adepts. Each was a singular creation of incredible strength and intelligence. More than just soldiers the Custodians were the Emperor's bodyguards, confidants, advisors and companions. Taller than any space marine and far deadlier, armed and armored with equipment surpassing anything available to the later astartes the Custodians are fearsome warriors on the battlefield but they were singularly unfit for the purpose of mass production and war on the scale the Unification would require.
Thus the Emperor created the Thunder Warriors. Each of the thunder warriors was a huge being of incredible strength, transformed from adolescent boys into super-human killing machines the thunder warriors stood almost as tall as the Custodians and were much stronger and tougher than even the astartes that would follow them. Armored in crude powered armor that would later come to be known as MKI Thunder Armor, this plate was grossly inferior to later marks of power armor for it only provided powered assistance to the upper body and did not feature a closed helm or many of the features of later armor such as magnetic boots or preysight lenses. Nevertheless thunder armor allowed the warriors of the thunder legion to withstand terrible punishment on the battlefields of wartorn Terra and combined with their immense strength and a deadly arsenal of dark age weaponry the thunder legions smashed the warlords of dark age Terra one after another.
Despite these successes the thunder legions were not to last. The creation process for the thunder warriors was effective but crude and the implants were prone to rapid degradation. Without the stabilizing factor of the gene-seed the thunder warrior implants suffered cancers, atrophy and degradation that killed or drove the deteriorating warrior mad. Where the Custodes are effectively immortal and the astartes have life-spans in the centuries a thunder warrior was good for only a few decades, if that. Because of this the thunder legions were never meant to last and the Emperor was already planning their replacements likely before the first thunder warrior ever took to the field of battle and those replacements would be the legiones astartes or the space marines.
The first legion of space marines would number only a few thousand warriors and would see it's first deployment as a second wave during the Battle of Mount Ararat. The battle would be the last for the thunder legions as the bulk of the remaining thunder warriors stormed the mountain and put the last great army of the Emperor's enemies to the sword at enormous cost. Against terrible odds the thunder legions prevailed and raised the lightning bolt banner of the Emperor over the mountain but instead of glory and renown the thunder warriors were met with the bolts and blades of the Custodes and the 1st Legion of the astartes who would later come to be known as the Dark Angels. The surviving thunder warriors were slaughtered to the last, though they put up a fierce resistance the disordered savagery of the thunder warriors could not contend with the implacable discipline of the astartes or the grace and skill of the Custodes. With the thunder legions having served their purpose and been eliminated the space marines rose to take their place. Another nineteen legions would be created, though at this early stage none would number more than a few thousand souls, though this would not be the case for long.
The Great Crusade
The earliest space marine legions were restricted in number by the facilities of Terra which were, at their best, only capable of handling a few thousand subjects at a time. Yet for the great crusade the Emperor envisioned he would require legions with warriors numbering in the hundreds of thousands. To get these warriors the Emperor would require the gene-looms of Luna and the skills of the Selenar Gene-Cults who controlled them. The Selenar were a cult of genetic engineers who had survived old night on the moon of Luna, the only stellar body orbiting Terra itself. From the Somnus Citadel the Selenar had defended themselves for millennia with armies of genetically engineered abominations, super-soldiers and killing machines slaved to the will of the gene-witches that created them. The Emperor attempted to gain the support of the Selenar through diplomacy but after multiple failed attempts he finally dispatched the bulk of the VII, XIII and XVIth Legions to pacify the Selenar and capture their facilities. The XVI legion served as the vanguard, rapidly disabling the power to the Somnus Citadel's defenses and opening the way for the VII and XIII Legions to storm the citadel and slaughter it's defenders. Within six hours of the first bolt being fired the genetically enhanced soldiers of the Selenar were annihilated and the citadel secured in the name of the Emperor.
Although bitter and resentful at being suborned into the Emperor's service the Selenar nevertheless worked to expand the initial proto legions from armies of a few hundred to tens of thousands strong. Enough to finally begin the total pacification of the Sol system and then begin the Great Crusade to reconquer the stars in the name of the Emperor and the Imperium of man. In addition to the gene-cults the Emperor also gained the service of the Mechanicum of Mars, tech-worshiping priests and machine wrights capable of forging the weapons and warmachines the legions would require for the reconquest of the galaxy. First and foremost the Mechanicum was able to equip the legiones astartes with a new iteration of power armor, dubbed MKII Crusade armor this powered plate offered enhanced strength to both upper and lower body, as well as a fully enclosed and environmentally sealed environment with oxygen recycling, atmospheric filtering, magnetic boots, preysight lenses and inbuilt vox-link among other myriad enhancements. With this new armor space marines could fight in almost any environment including zero gravity, hard vacuum and even underwater. With the legions growing into proper armies of galactic conquest and equipped to withstand any battlefield no matter how hostile the Emperor could finally undertake the Great Crusade, a campaign which would last over two centuries and bring hundreds of thousands of worlds into the growing Imperium before it would all come crashing down with the treachery of fully half of the space marine legions.
The Horus Heresy
Many of the early space marine legions recruits came from very specifically selected populations from ancient Terra. Some neophytes were chosen for specific personality or genetic traits while others were selected from particular cultures. Why the Emperor did this is a mystery but it may be hypothesized that he had very specific roles in mind for each legion and their recruitment population was chosen to enhance or reinforce those roles within the proto legions. However over time the legions recruitment would largely transition to their newly discovered homeworlds. Before the creation of the legions the Emperor created twenty primarchs to lead them, demigods of incredible power and intellect these individuals were meant to be the generals of the legions but were stolen and cast through the warp, their gestation pods crash-landing on planets scattered far and wide across the galaxy. Each primarch would be heavily influenced by the world they found themselves on and the culture of the people that inhabited it. Most would grow to conquer these worlds and become their undisputed leaders, both feared and revered by the native populations. Upon their rediscovery by the roaming expeditionary fleets of the Great Crusade the Emperor would uplift these incredible beings and place them in command of the legions forged from their genetic material. With few exceptions the adopted homeworlds of the primarchs would become the new homeworlds of their legions and the populations of those worlds would become the primary recruitment source for each legion. While recruits continued to be raised and implanted on Terra and dispatched as reinforcements to the roaming legions these lessened in number over time.
All legions began to recruit their own aspirants and conduct the implantation and training of these aspirants themselves. The first legion to be made truly self-sufficient was the VI Legion Space Wolves, whose homeworld of Fenris was gifted a massive and singular fortress in the Fang and outfitted at the Emperor's direct decree with all of the technology and resources necessary to create their own space marines and forge their own weapons and armor entirely themselves. Eventually all legions would gain such self sufficiency but this would come at a cost, the Terran legionaries would become ostracized and distrusted in many legions. The Primarch Corvus Corax was so disgusted by the character of the Terran legionaries that he exiled most of them and the former Legion master, while the extremely high casualty rate and early self-sufficiency of the space wolves would mean that by the Scouring of Prospero the last of the old Terran legionaries, Heoroth Longfang, would be dead and gone. Many primarchs gave greater favor to warriors recruited from their adopted homeworlds and these warriors would rapidly rise to ranks of command within most legions. Despite outward appearances of unity there existed deep fractures in many legions that would lead to bloody conflict and disaster.
The Great Crusade would end on the killing fields of Istvaan V when the traitor primarch Horus Lupercal would lure the Salamanders, Iron Hands and Raven Guard legions into a trap and annihilate the bulk of both the Salamanders and Raven Guard and slaughter the creme of the Iron Hands veterans along with the Primarch Ferrus Manus. Elsewhere the Blood Angels were lured to the Signus where they would nearly fall to the machinations of chaos and suffer terrible losses. The Space Wolves were tricked into assaulting the Thousand Sons homeworld and purging much of that legion while suffering significant casualties themselves. The Imperial Fists would face terrible losses at Phal and the Ultramarines would be betrayed and take horrible losses at Calth. The Dark Angels would be lured far out of position and engaged in a shadow campaign against the Night Lords throughout the Thramas sector and the White Scars would be tricked into a bitter civil war that would see nearly half the legion killed or sworn to fight to the death in atonement. Every loyalist legion would suffer catastrophic losses due to the machinations and treachery of Horus and his allies, bleeding the legions more terribly than any other campaign they had ever fought. Despite these per-meditated acts of sabotage and slaughter the traitor legions would not emerge from their treachery unscathed. Significant elements of the World Eaters, Emperor's Children, Death Guard and Sons of Horus would be purged on the battlefields of Istvaan III before the dropsite massacre and these purged legionaries would exact a heavy toll from their treacherous comrades in return. The Word Bearers who betrayed the Ultramarines at the Calth Muster would suffer tremendous casualties themselves and ultimately fail to crush the XIII legion as planned while the Night Lords would suffer enormous losses themselves and ultimately be driven from the Thramas sector in defeat. As the fires of the Horus Heresy spread across the galaxy every legion both loyalist and traitor would suffer catastrophic losses and be forced to turn to ever more desperate means to replenish their numbers.
First would be the Raven Guard, whose primarch Corvus Corax would journey to Terra and plead with the Emperor for the knowledge and means to replenish his legion's ranks. Gifted technology from the Emperor's own personal laboratories Corax would attempt to rapidly induct thousands of new warriors to replace the tens of thousands of sons he had lost on Isvaan V. Initially successful this process would be interrupted by Alpha Legion sabotage rendering many of the new warriors into devolved aberrations. Despite this setback Corax continued to replenish his legion's strength and employ these debased "Raptors" throughout the Horus Heresy and into the Scouring that followed. Ultimately Corax himself would execute the surviving raptors and disappear in the aftermath of the Heresy. The technology Corax brought from Terra would be at least partially stolen and salvaged by the Alpha Legion and given into the care of Fabius Bile, Chief Apothecary of the Emperor's Children legion. Fabius would go on to use this technology to rapidly induct fresh warriors into all of the traitor legions ranks.
On Terra the legions gathered to defend the throneworld against the traitor Horus, the Blood Angels, Imperial Fists and White Scars, would engage in their own rapid induction and training in an effort to produce as many warriors as possible for the defense. The defenders knew they would be facing the bulk of at least five traitor legions and would need every blade possible. The traitors similarly had suffered significant losses throughout the wars of the heresy and were rapidly replenishing their own ranks by any means available. The collective efforts of both loyalist and traitor alike to rapidly induct new troops would be referred to as Inductii recruitment. These inductii were in many ways inferior to the warriors that came before, their implantation rushed and dangerous and their training minimal. Many inductii, especially among the traitor legions, were created from chymeric gene-seed, their implants crafted from whatever genetic material could be salvaged from the bodies of the fallen, traitor and loyalist alike. These chymaera astartes were often physically and mentally unstable and regarded as little better than canon fodder by their erstwhile brothers. The Inductii would lack the extensive training regimes or battlefield experience of their older peers and their equipment would typically be inferior as well. Desperate for weapons and armor as much as fresh troops many legions resorted to stop-gap alternatives to existing armor templates including inferior materials, adamantium reinforcement studs in place of thicker ceramite, exposed auxiliary power cabling and less sophisticated internal systems. This inferior armor was allocated the designation MKV and came to be colloquially as "heresy" armor. The defenders of Terra had access to some early stocks of MKVI "Corvus" armor produced on Mars before the world fell to the traitor Fabricator General Kelbor Hal and produced the first examples of MKVII "Aquila" pattern armor before the siege of Terra. Of course the traitors gained many thousands of examples of MKVI armor of their own when they lifted the loyalists blockade of Mars and most of these suits would have wound up equipping the rapidly implanted inductii chapters of the traitor legions.
Where the previous astartes had been carefully implanted over a matter of years and underwent extensive training the inductii were implanted in a matter of months and the bulk of their training and tactical instruction conducted with the aggressive use of hypno-indoctrination machines that could rapidly in-load vast quantities of information directly into the minds of the young aspirants. Of course the rejection rate of implants under these conditions was much higher than previous generations of aspirants and hypno-indoctrination is a dangerous procedure in itself that could result in terminal madness of aspirants subjected to it. Nevertheless these measures were critically necessary to transform, train and equip the thousands of fresh warriors every legion desperately needed for the apocalyptic and merciless wars of the heresy.
Post Heresy to the Fall of Cadia
In the aftermath of the Horus Heresy the legions would never be the same again. Sanguinius had perished and with him serious questions were raised about the viability of the IX legion. The primarchs had provided a constant supply of fresh genetic material for the creation of new gene-seed and the implantation of fresh astartes. Although these implants could be harvested and each space marine slowly matured two such implants and could thus conceivably be replaced by two fresh warriors the stability of this generational replacement method over long periods was questionable. Moreover the inductii method of recruitment and implantation would become the standard for the astartes moving forward, the indulgence of a lengthy and careful transformation process was no longer feasible, every warrior that could be made was desperately needed for the wars the Imperium would face in the centuries and millennia to come. Roboute Guilliman, appointed Lord Commander of the Imperium, would ultimately break the loyalist legions down into smaller chapters, limiting their strength to a thousand warriors each and dividing the rest of the Imperium's armed forces all to ensure that no one individual could command the massive combined arms expeditionary fleets of the Great Crusade ever again and thus limit the damage any one renegade could do. Chapters would be responsible for their own induction and implantation of recruits and manage their own carefully cultivated stocks of genetic material. Over time all of the loyalist primarchs would be killed or disappear leaving the Imperium without fresh sources of gene-seed. To counter this small amounts of the gene-seed of each chapter would be tithed to the Mechanicus for the purpose of ensuring purity and stockpiling for the creation of future chapters. This is something the Imperium would do every few centuries in massive efforts known as "foundings" with at least twenty six foundings known to have occurred before the opening of the Great Rift.
Over time the fear of genetic degeneration among the chapters would come to be realized in ways both large and small. The Space Wolves legion was only ever able to create one successor chapter, the Wolf Brothers, whose battle-brothers succumbed rapidly to mutation and degeneration when removed from the very specific genetically distinct recruitment population of Fenris. Purged from existence the Wolf Brothers would be the Space Wolves last attempt to expand their ranks with additional chapters. The Imperial Fists would over time lose the function of two of their nineteen implants, the betcher's gland and the sus-an membrane. These losses would stain every successor chapter of the legion as well and remove the ability of the Sons of Dorn to spit acid or enter suspended life-sustaining hibernation in the event of catastrophic injury. Even though many other primogenitor chapters and their gene-lines showed little or no obvious degeneration the overall stability of all gene-lines suffered, especially compared to the Ultramarines. By the end of the forty-first millennium over seventy-percent of all space marine chapters were descended from the Ultramarines gene-seed. This is possibly because the Ultramarines legion came through the Heresy with a much more stable recruitment base than the other legions and with many more surviving warriors and thus spawned a significantly larger number of initial successor chapters than any other legion. Over time these chapters would produce more gene-seed for the tithe to Mars and thus provide the genetic basis for more successor chapters and so on and so forth. It is also possible that there is something about the gene-seed of Roboute Guilliman that is simply more stable than that of the other gene-lines.
Even so by the forty-first millennium the loyalist chapters were often denigrated by the surviving traitor legionaries as weak-blooded mongrels compared to the legionaries of old. While this is perhaps simple antipathy there does appear to be some truth in these statements. Chaos marines do often appear larger and stronger than their loyalist cousins. This could of course simply be the result of warp corruption and mutation from long exposure to the malignant energies of the Eye of Terror where most of these traitor legionaries dwell but it could also be the result of the gradual deterioration of loyalist gene-seed after hundreds of generations. Modern loyalist space marines were copies of copies of copies and slowly minor mutations and degradation in the gene-seed would most definitely stack up and have a deleterious effect.
The Imperium made several attempts to reverse this degradation or improve upon the gene-seed of the loyalist chapters but all of these attempts ended in disaster. The disastrous "cursed" 21st Founding. The chapters produced from this founding are speculated to have been made with chymaeric gene-seed, possibly even taken from traitor legion gene-stocks preserved on Mars. Every chapter produced by this founding fell rapidly to degeneration, mutation or suffered some calamity. The Black Dragons chapter rapidly suffered mutations of the ossmodula implant that saw select battle-brothers of the chapter grow "bone" blades from their forearms and foreheads. The Blood Gorgons chapter suffered multiple debilitating mutations and was declared Excommunicate Traitoris a mere six decades after founding. The Flame Falcons burst into flame in battle and were declared excommunicate and wiped out by the Inquisition shortly after founding. The Fire Hawks fortress monastery was lost in the warp with all hands and some believe the Legion of the Damned are the ever burning remains of the Fire Hawks battle brothers lost in the warp returned to reap vengeance on the Emperor's enemies. The Lamenters chapter is infamous for it's many disasters and tragedies that have kept the chapter on the brink of extinction for centuries and the Minotaurs appear to be the personal lapdogs of the High Lord of the Administratum for some mysterious reason.
For a time the Space Wolves also attempted to study the flaws in their own gene-seed and purify them but these efforts were destroyed and abandoned after the Thousand Sons invasion of Fenris in the thirty-second millennium.
Ultimately the slow degradation of the loyalist chapters would only be brought to a sudden and shocking halt and reversal by the return of the Avenging Son, the Primarch Roboute Guilliman and the unveiling of a plan ten thousand years in the making.
The Ultima Founding and the Primaris Space Marines
The Imperium would face it's darkest hour in the twilight of the forty-first millennium when the armies of the traitor legions would flood out of the Cadian Gate in a 13th Black Crusade and unleash apocalyptic destruction on the Imperium's defenders. Despite fighting the traitor legions and the vast armies of chaos to a near standstill and destroying the blackstone fortress Abaddon the Despoiler had tried to use to destroy Cadia the gate would ultimately fall when the traitors pushed the wreckage of the enormous blackstone fortress into Cadia itself, ripping the planet asunder and destroying the Necron pylons that had dotted the surface. The already badly damaged pylon network, having been systematically targeted in each of the twelve preceding black crusades, would collapse entirely allowing the energies of the warp to flood out into realspace from the Eye of Terror and flood across the stars in a great tear that would split the galaxy in two. Known as the Great Rift this massive warp storm would split the Imperium into two and blind half of the galaxy to the astronomicon.
Despite this horrific blow to the galaxy all was not entirely lost. Archmagos Bellisarius Cawl and the living Saint Celestine survived the fall of Cadia, escaping into the webway with the assistance of the newly formed Ynnari sect of the Aeldari race. With the guidance of Yvraine the surviving loyalists were brought to Macragge, homeworld of the Ultramarines chapter and resting place of the mortally wounded primarch Roboute Guilliman. Pricked in the neck by the deadly blade of the Anathema by the traitor primarch Fulgrim thousands of years ago the primarch of the Ultramarines had been saved from certain death only by his entombment within a stasis field that forever locked him moments from his own demise. For all of that time Bellisarius Cawl had worked on forging a suit of armor that could preserve Guilliman's life, sustaining him against the life-ending poisons of the anathema blade so long as he wore it but the Archmagos' great work had remained incomplete. The Ynnari high priestess Yvraine would aide the Archmagos in his work and together they would fight their way to the resting place of Guilliman against the forces of the traitor legions that had attacked Macragge in an effort to prevent this very resurrection. Despite the efforts of the great enemy Yvraine and Cawl would succeed in reviving the Avenging Son and he would take to the field of battle immediately, driving the traitors from Macragge. Arisen and made aware of the terrible threats facing the Imperium the revived primarch would immediately embark on a crusade to reach Terra itself so that he might meet with the Emperor himself and decide on a course of action to save the Imperium.
Supported by hundreds of space marines from dozens of different chapters that had survived the fall of Cadia and been brought to Macragge by Yvraine the primarch Guilliman would lose his flagship the Macragge's Honor to the Red Corsairs but would make it to Terra by means of the webway and emerge from a previously undiscovered webway gate on the surface of Luna. There Guilliman would face the traitor primarch Magnus in battle and fight alongside the Gray Knights before journeying on to Terra itself and meeting with his father. No sooner had he done this than a vast army of Khornate Daemons would manifest on the surface of Terra as part of a chaos scheme likely thousands of years in the making and launch a nearly unstoppable assault on the Imperial palace. The Legio Custodes would deploy en-masse to meet this threat but even they would likely have failed without the intervention of Guilliman and his surviving Terran crusade veterans. In the aftermath of the siege of the palace it seemed like all may be lost and the Imperium would fall but Guilliman had not come to the throneworld for one purpose alone. The Armor of Fate he now wore was not the only project Guilliman had commissioned from Cawl. With the primarch's long awaited authorization the Archmagos Dominus unveiled his greatest work, the Primaris Space Marines.
In addition to the new implants Cawl claimed to have "cured" the debilitating gene-flaws in a number of different primogenitor lines. The missing implants of the sons of Dorn were restored, the Black Rage of the Blood Angels was claimed to be cured as was the Curse of the Wulfen in the Space Wolves. The latter two claims have been frequently called into question with some Blood Angels still falling to the Black Rage and the wulfen curse still plaguing the Space Wolves to some extent it is nevertheless the case that both curses appear significantly lessened in the primaris marines. More importantly the genetic instability of the Space Wolves gene-line appears to have been cured and the chapter is now able to recruit and transform aspirants from populations other than Fenris as well as spawn multiple successor chapters. While seventy percent of the firstborn chapters descended from the Ultramarines genetic stock the Primaris marines were recruited equally from all nine loyalist gene-lines and stood at equal numbers at their unveiling. Bellisarius Cawl did not stop at creating new warriors but crafted for them an entirely new suite of weapons, armor and warmachines fit for these new and improved adeptus astartes. Heavy bolt rifles, mkX power armor, anti-grav tanks and armored personnel carriers and more were available to the primaris marines at their inception and the knowledge and schematics of these technologies creation went with them.
With legions of fresh space marines at his command Roboute Guilliman launched the Indomitus Crusade. Multiple vast fleets were gathered and launched in waves from Terra into the Imperium Sanctus, as the near side of the Great Rift has come to be called, with the ultimate aim of reconquering the Imperium Nihilus. The initial primaris warriors of the Indomitus Crusade were organized much as the legions of old and referred to as the Unnumbered Sons. As the crusade progressed however these initial primaris warriors were broken off and deployed as chapters or sent to reinforce existing chapters. Guilliman did not want to appear as a legion builder in defiance of his own Codex Astartes dictates and so moved quickly to disband and disperse the primaris marines across the galaxy. The act of dispersing many of the primaris marines as newly founded chapters was dubbed the "Ultima Founding." Some of these new chapters would take on the names and heraldry of chapters annihilated before or during the opening of the Great Rift such as the Scythes of the Emperor and the Soul Drinkers. These new chapters would have to build their own identities without any firstborn of those chapters to instruct them in the culture or unique battle doctrines and dogma that had guided them in the past. Most of the Ultima chapters however would not be given old names and heraldry but would be given entirely new identities and permitted to forge their own distinct identities and traditions. Some of these would come from the homeworlds these chapters would be given while others would be formed by the experiences and demeanor of the founding battle-brothers. Some would cleave closely to the traditions of their primogenitors while others would diverge wildly from their forebears.
Many more primaris marines were dispatched to reinforce existing chapters, most of which had suffered significant casualties and were in desperate need of reinforcements. Most chapters accepted these reinforcements gratefully though others were more skeptical. It would take time for more distrusting chapters such as the Flesh Eaters, Black Templars and Dark Angels to accept these new marines into their ranks but the necessity of war in the wake of the Great Rift made refusing the primaris marines a foolish prospect indeed.
To bring reinforcements to existing embattled chapters and gift them the technology and resources to create their own primaris marines Guilliman dispatched the Torchbearer fleets. These fleets roamed far ahead of the Indomitus Crusade fleets, each headed by small detachments of Custodians bearing the writ of the Emperor to the astartes chapters. Technically independent of any authority but the Emperor the chapters of the Adeptus Astartes could have been fiercely opposed to such borderline heretical technology and alterations of the Emperor's own blessed craft. The presence of the Custodians was meant to convey the will of the Emperor to these chapters and make it all but impossible for even the most steadfastly stubborn of the firstborn to refuse the Primaris marines. In the main this plan worked almost flawlessly and countless embattled chapters across both the Imperium Sanctus and Imperium Nihilus received primaris reinforcements or at least the means to create their own primaris. These much needed reinforcements would allow even the most battle ravaged chapters to rapidly regain their strength and fight on in defense of the Imperium. These reinforcements would also prove the unforeseen salvation of the entire gene-line of Sanguinius for the Blood Angels and nearly all of their surviving successor chapters had gathered on the chapter homeworld of Baal to defend it against a full-scale Tyranid invasion. In the fighting many of the Blood Angels successors had fallen to the last and others had been left with nothing but a few dozen warriors left to their name. Chapter Master Dante of the Blood Angels had believed his time of reckoning had finally come and had suffered near fatal injuries in single combat against the Swarmlord, the terrible intelligence coordinating the Tyranid war efforts. Instead of death however Dante awoke to salvation as the Indomitus Crusade fleets scoured the xenos from the skies and chapters of Primaris marines rained down from orbit to purge the remaining bio-monsters from the cursed earth of Baal. The Unnumbered Sons of Sanguinius were rapidly dispersed to reinforce all of the remaining Blood Angels successors and reconstitute those that had fallen entirely. Within a matter of days the sons of Sanguinius had gone from facing total extinction to standing in numbers not seen in millennia. Dante himself would live and be given command of the entire Imeprial war effort in the Imperium Nihilus, a role the war weary chapter master definitely did not ask for but would rise to meet. Ultimately Dante would cross the Rubicon Primaris and become more vital and powerful than he ever had before.
Knowing that many chapters might want to deny the Primaris marines the chapter master of the Ultramarines, Marneus Calgar, was the first to attempt to cross the Rubicon Primaris and in surviving the process proved that the firstborn could themselves embrace the primaris implants and become greater than they had before. In time most of the chapter masters of the primogenitor chapters would similarly cross the rubicon primaris including Dante, Azrael, Helbrecht, Ragnar, Shrike and many others.
For the first time in ten thousand years the technological and genetic decline of the space marines has not just been halted but reversed and improved upon. Replete with new weapons and warmachines and with bodies larger and more powerful than ever before the loyalist chapters have embarked on the greatest campaign of reconquest the Imperium has seen since the Great Crusade and across the galaxy have thrown the armies of chaos and the reaving xenos back on every front. Whether this technological resurgence will continue or whether stagnation and degradation will set in once more remains to be seen. The response from the traitor legions has also yet to fully coallesce and it may only be a matter of time before nefarious figures like Fabius Bile reverse engineer the primaris implants for the improvement of the traitor legions own enhanced physiques. Perhaps before such a dark turn of events can transpire however we may see the first traitor primaris as the call of chaos remains strong and the primaris marines were trained by the doctrines of unity and denial of the warp leaving them naive and vulnerable to threats the firstborn chapters have learned to fight over centuries of bitter conflict. Political conflict or warp corruption may begin to turn primaris against the Imperium and what that might mean for the Indomitus Crusade and the Imperium has yet to be seen.
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