Editing Lions Rampant (section)

==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.