Editing Lions Rampant (section)

=History of the Lions Rampant=

==The Highland Raiders==
Founded in the waning years of the Terran Unification Wars, the IXth were drawn from the conquered peoples of Albyon and Franc, who made excellent stock for the nascent legions. They were drawn together and clad in livery of deep blue and slate grey. Dubbed the Highland Raiders, these marines formed the backbone of several expeditions into the galactic south and west.
The Raiders prosecuted their wars with a solemn stoicism that bordered on self destructive. Their manner of war was to march into the enemy supported by heavy armor to grind the foe down in a relentless advance. Their masters, while brilliant strategists, were callous and casually spent the lives of their men in pursuit of victory. This manner of war was brutal and bloody, yielding results at the cost of lives and glory.
For the first half of the Great Crusade the IXth fought in this fashion, marking brutal victories over renegade regimes such as the charnal lords of Voughry VI, or the alien domain of the Skrrt-ka. Other legions were granted great honors for their conquests, but the Raiders remained relatively unlauded for their dour suppression of the Emperor's foes. Their victories were neither decisive, nor glorious, and over the course of the crusade they became looked down upon by their brethren of other legions. With the primarch of the IXth absent after all others had been discovered, the Raiders sullenly accepted their fate as the lost children of the crusade.

==Remaking the IXth==
In the year 914.M30 the last of the primarchs was discovered on the world of Sommesgard. At this time the bulk of the Highland Raiders were engaged in the waning days of the reclamation of sub-sector Orridak from the technocratic league that held out against the Emperor's rule. They were not to be reunited with their primarch until five years later, after the fires of the brutal campaign had burned out. When the legion was gathered to join their genetic forbear, the meeting initial was joyless and cynical. Cromwald, the Lion of Sommesgard, was immediately seen as a parallel to the legion: a mutilated primarch for a mauled and discarded legion.
The dismal outlook was not easily shaken. It took every ounce of Cromwald's skill as an orator to sway the jaded hearts of his marines. His firebrand speech before the assembled legion slowly stirred a faint hope for the future, and despite the council of the eldest, most jaded astartes among their number the newly christened Lions warmed to the reformations Cromwald proposed.
The next five years saw Legion IX removed from the crusade as the core structure of the legion was remolded. Drills and wargames waged across the training world of Garripor, pitting legionnaires against one another, and against the harsh extremes of the Garriporic poles. The best and the brightest were marked by Cromwald for extensive training into the newly minted officer corps. Training under the primarch himself, they would become the masters of the legion's new order of battle, reshaped into a form reminiscent of the army structure of Sommesgard. As a final act of rebirth, Cromwald ordered a grand conscription of young boys, all children of the military forces on Sommesgard. They were an infusion of new blood into the legion and served as a final measure to distance the Lions from their ignoble past. With them came an influx of their homeworld's culture, which would change the character of the Lions at a fundamental level given time.

==The Fall==
The fall of the Lions Rampant is tied heavily to the downfall of their primarch. Cromwald's sickness claimed him, drove him to madness and brought him into the embrace of chaos. After the administrations of Aubrey the Grey, he returned to his legion changed and gathered the masters of the apothecarion to his flagship, the Indomitable Sovereign. The words exchanged in the meeting were never revealed outside the private chambers of the primarch; only four of the six chief apothecaries left the audience with their master alive after taking oaths of secrecy.
Their work began as they reached their parent divisions. Quietly laboratories were turned to blasphemous new research into the fields of biology and genetic manipulation. Their ultimate objective became the gene-seed of the legion and its workings. They toiled in secret to unlock its mysteries, and began to tamper with the manifest soul of the legion. The primarch's sickness began to spread as the fruits of their research were spread first to new recruits, then later to the veterans of the legion. Every legionnaire that came to the medicae for healing was infected by the black numbness that crippled Cromwald. With the aid of the Zealot's best experts in medicine the plague spread across the whole legion like wildfire, matched only by the spread of the "cure" brought by the faithful. Corruption ate at the heart of the Lions as more and more desperate marines turned to chaos to heal their affliction.

===The Culling===
Not every marine succumbed to the rot that festered at the legion's heart. The second division was largely inoculated against the blight by the clash against the greenskin menace of the Orlak Drift. Master Apothecary Sippeman died facing the Ork tides, leaving the proliferation of his dark research to stagnate. His apprentices continued their work, but progress was slowed by the clash against the alien hordes. The 2nd would be the most conflicted of the divisions in the face of the coming heresy, though they were not alone. Throughout the legion veteran marines unknowingly resisted the lure of chaos by evading the ministrations of their physicians. As heirs to the old stubbornness of the pre-primarch raiders, the holdouts persisted up until the coming heresy.
With time running out before the outbreak of war, Cromwald and his faithful could not wait for the sickness to claim the legion fully. To cleanse his ranks of the loyalists he orchestrated a silent campaign of assassination. Elements of his divisions he could not sway were given the most hazardous assignments to whittle away their strength. As the strength of the loyalists within his ranks diminished, the faithful began quietly murdering their brethren when they were vulnerable. In most cases these killings remained discreet, though across the 2nd and 4th divisions firefights broke out as secrecy gave way to hasty violence. The traitors were able to silence the loyalists and prevent word escaping to the Emperor, but the purges bled much of their strength for the initial stages of the heresy.

==Eve of Damnation==

On the eve of the Heresy, the IXth legion stood at almost 130,000 strong. Quietly they had been building their strength to lend to Hektor's ambitions. To his banner they brought several fleets of swift and brutal warships, large formations of highly skilled rapid assault troops, and a respectable array of auxiliary forces upon which the Lion could draw. Among these stood an army of the mechanized Cramalthian Dragoons, and the swift knights of House Borgias. These troops had fought alongside the Lions across several campaigns, and had long proven themselves skilled allies in the high-speed warfare Cromwald's children pursued. These forces and more rallied around the five great divisions of the IXth to await their orders.
The betrayals at Istvaan and Ostium marked the beginning of the long march. Crom had already briefed the marshals commanding his forces; each was intimately familiar with their targets and forces. First came the Keldim sector, marked as the start of a long and bloody harvest of imperial space. Across it and other sectors rapid campaigns were waged to feed the warmaster's rebellion. Shipyards and armories offered a surplus of captured weapons, and subjugated populations were conscripted, pressed to labor, or sacrificed to the dark gods. The first months of the long march saw Hektor's forces gifted a rallying point. At Keldim his troops could resupply and prepare for future conquests.
Cromwald could not linger to savor his victory. The warmaster's grand campaign required decisive action, lest the Emperor's defenders rally to match their foe force for force. Mustering his legion he plunged headlong into a protracted campaign to pave the road to Terra. At his side stood Merrill, the bloody primarch of the Iron Rangers. With their combined forces they plowed forward in a twin-pronged assault into the flat-footed loyalists. Those who did not surrender or convert were ruthlessly slaughtered. For the first year of the war it seemed as if they were to march unopposed. 

===The Warpath===

It was not until the Silver Cataphracts rose to meet the aggression head on that the wave of steel and madness was checked. At Troupo III Alexandri's finest clashed with the Lions Rampant in what would be remembered as one of the largest armored battles of the heresy. The brilliant maneuvers of the Lions 5th division were matched by the stubborn tenacity of the Cataphracts as they battled for the fuel-rich sands of the scorched planet. In the end the world was reduced to a barren wasteland; Alexandri's strategy of denial robbed the Lions of the infrastructure needed to harvest the material wealth of the system. This became the template for a long and bitter clash of legions. The Cataphracts waged a calculated withdrawal to bleed and slow the traitor advance. They defended what could be evacuated to their massing of troops on Terra, and fought to demolish what could not. Meanwhile the Lions pushed to capture war assets for their allies, using Merrill's hunters to decapitate enemy resistance while the swift riders pushed to outpace the loyalist soldiers. The campaign would leave its scars on all legions involved; warbands drawn from the Lions' gene-seed would celebrate the destruction of a Silver Cataphract successor for millennia to come.

==Clash of Gods==

==The Turning Tide==

===Flight===
With so many fresh legionaries mustering at Terra, there could be no option but to escape the inevitable scouring of the galaxy. Most of his brethren fled north, to the Eye of Terror. Cromwald's pride would not allow him to be so easily trapped and caged by the loyalist march. He commanded his legion to flee east, into the far reaches of Ultima Segmentum. They would split, giving the loyalist hounds more rabbits to chase than they could catch. Much of his legion would be lost, but the Lions would not be exterminated or confined so long as the war could continue.
Each division struck its path to the eastern fringe, trusting in their swift vessels to ferry them to safety. That which could not keep up was left behind to fight and stall the loyalists for as long as possible. Hundreds of thousands of auxilia troops found themselves abandoned by their masters and left to be slaughtered by the vengeful legionaries of the loyalist scouring. The titans that accompanied the IXth were similarly cast aside; there simply was no means of maintaining such powerful and complex machines during the flight. Many of the Legio Martyax (the Man-Eaters) were destroyed as they fled to the maelstrom for safety, leaving a grudge against the Lions that would last for thousands of years to come.
Despite casting off the slower Mechanicum and auxilia battlegroups, the Lions did not escape unbloodied. In a bitter stand at Hundis the entirety of the 4th division was surrounded and isolated by a joint strike force of both Silver Cataphracts and Void Angels. The Lions fought tooth and nail, but could not stand against the combined might of their former brethren. Hundis was reduced to a cinder once the last of the Lions' fleet had been destroyed, leaving a barren rock surrounded by burnt out husks. Other battles were waged in smaller scale as battalions were hounded by the vengeful Imperials. Alexandri himself commanded the destruction of the infamous Lionhearts, and in doing so avenged the Cataphracts' defeat at the agri-world of Sepnoy Terius some fifteen years before.
In all, the Lions lost roughly half of the legion. When they finally reached the relative safety of the galactic rim to regroup Cromwald held command over a single reinforced division, stripped of much of its supporting forces.

==Frontier, Conquest==
With the Scouring ended, the Lions begin to move. Acting as a twisted parody of their efforts in the Great Crusade, they begin to raid the fringe systems of the outermost sectors of Imperial space. Originally treated as a minor threat, it is not until they begin to conquer systems aggressively that their low priority begins to scale up. In the meantime, they subjugate worlds in the name of Slaanesh, and Cromwald ascends to daemonhood for the debasement of whole populations billions strong. 

==Downfall==
A crusade is put together to push back the tide of darkness sweeping along the outer edge of Imperial space, backed by numerous chapters of Astartes and regiments of Imperial Guard. In the end the conquest was too ambitious; the Lions are defeated, scattered and their primarch banished to the warp. As a legion the Lions are no more; they scatter and break up into warbands, many finding refuge in the immaterium. It is a blow they never fully recover from, even on the great black crusades.