Editing Black Legion (section)

==History==
[[File:Black_legion_chaos_marine_by_masteralighieri-d4cl5fy.jpg|240px|thumb|left|OK. Chainsword? Check. Bolter? Check. Power Armor maintained and ready? Check. Well, off to the next Black Cru...wait, what? [[Abaddon|He]] did what again? Against [[Creed|whom]]? <s>Awww fudge. Another crusade foiled</s> [[Gathering Storm|well, I guess we're going to Terra now!]]]]
===Pre-Heresy===
When they were still loyalists, they were known as the Luna Wolves. This epithet they earned during the pacification of [[Luna]], the first real battle of the Great Crusade. When the Selenar gene-cults conceded defeat, they asked the Emperor to "call off his wolves." They were the first legion to be reunited with their primarch when Horus was found on Cthonia, and thereafter recruited exclusively from their primarch's adopted homeworld. Under Horus' leadership, and often fighting directly alongside the Emperor, the XVI Legion won many victories and brought many worlds into compliance, earning the status of greatest and most powerful Legion during the [[Great Crusade]]. After the triumphant conclusion of the Ullanor Crusade, Horus was given the title of "Warmaster" by the Emperor. This gave him almost complete control of all the Space Marine Legions and the Imperial forces. He renamed his Legion the Sons of Horus, and ordered them to repaint their armour from grey-white to to a green, or maybe green-grey, colour scheme that no one seems to know how to paint properly. Forge World paint theirs a deep teal colour, but there are examples of green-grey, sea green, jade, and Wehrmacht-style feldgrau out there too. Some older art even takes the lazy approach and uses straight grey or steel, making them look like [[Iron Warriors]] with a fetish for eyes instead of chevrons.

===The Heresy===
After Horus was severely wounded by an anathame on Davin, he received visions from the Chaos gods who told him that the Emperor would cast him and his brother Primarchs aside once he had attained full godhood. After seemingly being easily convinced by them, Horus turned traitor. He corrupted half of his brother Primarchs, the majority of the Imperial army and half of the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]] to his side. He purged his legion of its loyalist elements at the [[Battle of Isstvan III]], sending thousands of his sons down to die. Unfortunately for him, this proved to be a waste of both time and lives that would have been better served striking for Terra, and was therefore arguably Horus' first mistake of the war. Isstvan III was followed by the [[Drop Site Massacre]] on Isstvan V, where the Sons of Horus, Death Guard, World Eaters, Emperor's Children, Iron Warriors, Night Lords, Word Bearers, and Alpha Legion all but exterminated the Iron Hands, Salamanders, and Raven Guard. After this, the Heresy began in earnest. As they so often had been during the Great Crusade, the Sons of Horus were the backbone of the traitor forces. They forced the Manachean Commonwealth and Coronid Deeps into Dark Compliance, seized the Knight World of Molech, burned the Forge World Ohmn-Mat, defeated Shadrak Meduson's Shattered Legions force at Arissak and the Aragna Chain, conquered the fortress world of Beta-Garmon, and all but annihilated the Space Wolves at the Battles of Trisolian and Yarant. The Legion didn't get everything its own way, however. A detachment sent to secure Rangdan weaponry from Advex-Mors was smashed and chased off by the Dark Angels tasked with guarding the xenos artifacts, losing 50 elite Justaerin Terminators and most of the artifacts they had hoped to recover. The Battle of Dwell proved that the Shattered Legions still had fight in them, for Horus was nearly assassinated at its climax. Their homeworld of Cthonia was besieged by the Imperial Fists, severing the pipeline of new recruits from that world and forcing the Sons of Horus to recruit from new worlds. By the Siege of Terra, however, the Sons of Horus believed themselves on the verge of victory. At this point, they were openly worshiping Horus and had big plans on ruling the galaxy. After Horus' defeat, the Sons and their followers fled to the Eye of Terror. Why did they do this instead of, you know, saying "Well Horus is dead but so is your Emperor" and continuing to attack the Imperial Palace where they might have won? Well, there are several reasons. A primarch dying tends to turn his legion from a coherent fighting force into a mob of nigh-suicidal berserkers, as can be seen with the Iron Hands, Blood Angels, and the White Scars (who snapped out of it because the Khan was only mostly dead). Moreover, [[Roboute Guilliman|Rowboat Girlyman]], the Dark Angels, whatever was left of the Space Wolves and Raven Guard, and the Blood Angels going through the Black Rage were hot on their heels (the Iron Hands and Salamanders were still scattered and couldn't do much to help, the Khan was in a coma, and the Scars and Fists were all but bled dry by their losses at the Siege); the whole reason Horus wanted to finish it decisively was to avoid this exact scenario. It of course didn’t help that many of their daemonic allies were banished back to the Warp, leaving them akin to a small, weedy child that had their trousers pulled down on the school playground. It also didn't help that by this point in the siege the Alpha Legion, Emperor's Children, and Iron Warriors had fucked off, the World Eaters were an uncontrollable mob, the Death Guard was in disarray after Mortarion's banishment, and there weren't enough Night Lords, Word Bearers, and Thousand Sons present to be of any consequence. The Sons were the only organized resistance left, their dad was dead, Abaddon was melting down, and every loyalist force in the segmentum was gunning for them.

Really makes you wonder what some of the other Legions were thinking when they blamed the Sons of Horus for losing the war when they barely fought at Terra, but such is the terrible powers of the Ret-Con I guess.

===Post-Heresy===
When the Traitors fled to the Eye of Terror, the blame game for the failure at Terra began. The Sons of Horus, being... well, the Sons of Horus took the brunt of this blame, proceeding to retreat to the world of Maeleum, where they built a fancy tomb for Horus's body and sat around feeling sorry for themselves. They didn’t even bother to select a new commander - after all, who could possibly succeed where Daddy failed? It also didn’t help that pretty much anyone competent died during the Heresy and Abaddon was nowhere to be found.

The bitterness between the Traitor Legions broke out into open war once the Emperor's Children decided they needed more slaves for their Slaaneshi-related [[/d/|shenanigans]]. Being the Legion that had ran away first at Terra, the Children began to raid other warbands for their slaves and resources, culminating with sacking Maeleum and taking the body of Horus (and Worldbreaker) for Fabius Bile's genetic experiments. Strangely enough the Iron Warriors and the Emperor’s Children themselves recieved no such scorn from the other traitors, despite the former largely abandoning the siege when Perturabo threw a shit-fit, and the latter spending most of the siege turning civilians into meth.

The former Justaerin captain Falkus Kibre, with the assistance of several other Chaos warbands, eventually managed to track down Abaddon and the ''[[Vengeful Spirit]]'' deep within the Eye of Terror, and told him about the theft and cloning of Horus. He knew all this allegedly in a "you found me because I wanted to be found" kind of way. Abaddon was planning on taking command of the Sons of Horus at this point, returning from his self-imposed exile of hunting monsters and thinking about who he is. His ultimate vision: creating a pan-Traitor Legions army with himself and the [[Cthonia|Cthonians]] as the head. This new force would be open to any traitor Marines, regardless of previous rivalries or Chaotic alignments, Slaanesh dude and Khorne dude calling each other bro, etc. Chaos Messiah then used the ''Vengeful Spirit'' to crush the Emperor's Children at the [[Battle of Harmony]], with Abaddon personally killing the clone of Horus with his own Talon in an act of symbolism and such.

Abaddon unified the Sons of Horus soon after and dubbed them the Black Legion. The black is either to show mourning for Horus, or segregation from him. Either way is fine. Possessed became huge in the Legion, although not without a rocky start, as daemons were pissed when Astartes would switch gods. Unaligned daemon beasts are probably the best way to go. The Sorcerers got a hold of this quickly enough and formed a regulated possessed guild known as The Tormented, not so open market anymore. Next they began boosting their numbers like crazy, made friends with other cool dudes that liked black armor and hated the Imperium, and curb stomped a Death Guard upstart company that was pirating Abaddon's intellectual property and graphic design work, largely ending the Slave Wars.

The new ADB novels indicate that the Black Legion is an open institution for anyone who is serious about waging the Long War against the Imperium (and not just raiding / pillaging / winning favour with the Chaos Gods / feeling sad about it) and is strong enough to prosper. The founding members came from a variety of different legions.

The Black Legion was the first to "come out" of the Eye of Terror (not counting those of the Night Lords, Word Bearers and the Alpha Legion who never went inside Slaanesh's pink folds) to assail the Imperium after the Great Scourging. In their first Black Crusade they killed Dorn allegedly, picked up goth Excalibur, and caused a number of the High Lords of Terra to get hemorrhoids from the butt clenching. After the Crusade the Black Legion broke up and the warbands did their own shit. Until the Second Black Crusade. Abaddon knows that his forces are not large enough or organized enough to break through the massive quantities of Imperial forces that stand between him and Terra, and thus plans to cause enough chaos (heh) to allow legions of daemons to enter realspace and overwhelm the defenders of the Imperium. This has received a mixed reception among the fanbase.

[[File:Black Legion.jpg|thumb|right|300px|A Black legionnaire in the thick of combat on Cadia. Why's there a head in his armpit?]]
Prior to Talon, there had only ever been five awesome members of the Black Legion: [[Horus Lupercal]], [[Araghast the Pillager]], [[Neroth]], [[Kain]], and [[Eliphas]] (who wasn't even originally from the Black Legion). And the middle two are kind of iffy on the cool factor. Neroth is a whiny bitch, but he makes up for it by shitting free doombolts. Kain knows better than to speak given most of Chaos' shitty Abaddon admiring script, which makes him cool. With the new fluff we've gained an impressive cast in the Black Legion's founders, taking in a former [[Iskandar Khayon|Thousand Sons sorcerer]], a [[Lheorvine Ukris|World Eaters Havoc]], an [[Telemachon Lyras|Emperor's Children swordmaster]] and a Fallen Angel.

Due to his massive [[Fail|fail]] factor, it was thought to be only a matter of time before someone overthrows Abaddon. We betted on Eliphas, a revived Araghast, or [[Huron Blackheart]]...probably Eliphas (it's in his name after all, Eliphas, the ''Inheritor'' of the Black Legion)...but still...BRING ARAGHAST BACK!