Editing House Accolon (section)

==History==
===Artur the Uniter===
In the centuries since the Heresy, the Knights of Accolon have become famed for their service to the Emperor during those dark times, and the martyrdom of their King at the very Climax of the Heresy on the soil of Terra Itself. And yet the Knights of Accolon were once a dozen fragmented Households on a world split by war, and it was only through the rise of a single individual who had the wisdom, the martial might and the knowledge to unite all the Knights of that world under her banner that the Household that would play such a part in the great war would come to be.

At the time that the Great Crusade first left the orbit of Sol to conquer the Galaxy, the many households of Cattegirn were at each other’s throats in the long winded series of wars that had split the planet ever since the fall of Old Night. The Planet had been cold, bleak but rich in metals, and many households of Knights had come into being from the goods of the earth. Additionally, the capacity to manufacture small numbers of Knights was maintained, which kept their numbers stable despite the casualties in battle after battle. As the Age of Strife erupted, refugees fleeing the catastrophes besetting countless worlds converged on Cattegirn, seeking a place to stay. Each of the many Households dealt with the crisis as they could, some welcoming the new arrivals with open arms while others sought to bar them. By the time the Age of Strife was in full swing there were several different groups of people living on Cattegirn, each with their own customs and beliefs. And as the populations grew, these came into conflict. The Histories of House Accolon do not name when the wars between these peoples and the Knight Houses that ruled them first began, but by M30 they had been going on for countless centuries. Technology had stagnated and Terra was a mythical homeland across the sea of Stars. Unity was a dead and distant dream harboured by very few Knights, and none could make those dreams a reality. None, that was until the head of a minor Knight Household ruling the Kingdom of Lorges named Artur Eld was born in 889 M29. He was bold and ambitious, and when he became a Knight one of his visions while sitting in the Throne Mechanicum was of all the Knights of Cattegirn bowing before him. With this vision still running through his head he decided that he would unite all of Cattegirn beneath his banner, the Dragon of Lorges. Artur Eld fought hard and won several small victories against neighbouring powers, establishing a power base and a following of loyal Knights, and then made preparations to bring war to all of Cattegirn.

It was at this time that his Knights set off on a quest to gain an advantage against their potential future foes. Cattegirn was rich in Archeotech brought by the refugees fleeing the rise of Old Night, and several of the lost Holdfasts of the Knight Houses were rumoured to have vast stores of technology from the golden age of Mankind’s empire. For over three years the Knights of Lorges searched, and finally deep in the northern wilds they found one of the lost Knight Holdfasts. Several relic Knights were recovered from their long slumbers and many new Knights brought into his Household, along with powerful weapons and upgrades that made his Knights an unstoppable force on the Battlefield. Thus armed, in 945 M29 he set off to end the Wars which ravaged Cattegirn.

Over the course of a dozen battles he vanquished a number of Knight Households, binding them to himself and incorporating their martial strength into his own host. This included the Battle of Guinnion, in which Artur led the storming of the breach and laid low the Knights of Ælfheah and the Battle of Meacredy where Sixty Knights clashed on the banks of a winding brook.

The Twelve Battles he fought led to the union of over half of all Cattegirn under his banner, from the Icebound Ocean to the Rockspine Peaks. He forged dozens of disparate Knight Households into one, which he named the Knights of Accolon after an old myth of Cattegirn about one of the heroes who founded the Colony on the planet. The other Households, fearful at his power soon united and made war against him, and he would spend the rest of his life trying to finish what he has started, and growing ever more fearful that he would die before all Cattegirn was united as one, leaving his heir with the difficult task of concluding his wars. Many feared that without an heir his death would lead to the collapse of his realm and the return to the eternal cycle of wars he was trying to end.
Seeing an opportunity, the powerful leader Wystan of Caercalarund who had grudgingly bent the knee to Eld after the Battle of Meacredy had his beautiful and ambitious daughter Myra try to seduce Artur. She failed, but still bore his child, who she named Medrat. This child would eventually try to undo all of Artur’s works.

===A clash of Heirs===
Artur took to wife Gwenythh, the daughter of Syal of Ghent, Queen Regent one of the most powerful of the remaining Knight Households that had refused to bow, the Knights of Nidhoggr. Bringing them into the fold was well worth the marriage, but the two parties ended up growing fond of one another and their marriage was unusually happy for one of political convenience. Four years after their marriage in 879 M30, she gave birth to the long-awaited heir. But instead of the expected son, it was a daughter, who was named Arturia after her father.

At her nativity, Artur decided to not publicly announce Arturia's birth or gender, fearing his subjects would never accept a woman as a legitimate ruler. He decided that as she was his child she would also be his heir, regardless of her sex. In one of the hardest decisions of his life Artur came to the realization that his daughter had to grow up away from him to keep her safe from his many enemies. So her death was faked and she was sent to live with the most loyal of Artur’s Knights, the young, brave and strong Dux Uktar, the son of one of his great enemies and a child of the foreign Seaxe people from the western ocean who Artur had defeated early in his campaigns. Uktar, a noble and dutiful man if still wedded to the culture of his people became her foster father. Uktar raised her as his own alongside his two sons, Kai and Shrike. He taught her to ride and fight and shoot and hunt, had her educated on chivalry and academics, and had a suit of armour forged for her to wear. He did not treat her as a woman, but as a warrior and a knight. Great hopes were placed upon her, and as she grew she looked to become a King as wise and great as her father, one who would be able to finish his task and bring unity to all Cattegirn.

All these hopes were dashed when Myra’s spies found out about Arturia, and sensing her time had come she publicly unveiled Medrat and brought him to Artur’s Capital, the Knight Holdfast of Rockerid. Shocked, he tried his best upon meeting his Bastard son, but would not budge on the issue of succession. His hidden daughter would rule after him, not some bastard son.
Many of his knights were confused and shocked, for Artur had no children after the death of his previous child over a decade before. Here was one who could take up his cause and lead the Knights of Accolon to their final victory, and the King was refusing him?
Furious, and spurred on by his mother, Medrat had Artur poisoned and took his throne, claiming as his father’s only son he was the only heir. Many of Artur’s knights now rallied to the new king and swore to stand with him for the final war to reclaim Cattegirn.
Uktar, upon hearing the news was tortured. He had grown to love Arturia as a true father, and did not want any harm to come to her. However he did not want the foul Medrat to rule, And after a year of Medrat’s tyrannical rule, when the foes of House Accolon won several victories and the dream of unity was growing ever more dim reluctantly he revealed all to Arturia, and asked her to take up her father’s banner and stop her bastard brother’s reign.

Arturia, despite being young, and unprepared, was courageous, determined and had a strong sense of justice and duty, and to prove that she was her father’s daughter went alone to search for a Knight of her own, seeking one of the ancient Holdfasts as her father had done before his own rise to power. What she found was the mythical Iron Hall buried in the Rockspine Mountains, the first Knight Holdfast established on the planet in the ancient times and long since forgotten and thought of as a Valhalla-like place to the Knights of Cattegirn. Alone she rode in and came out with Caliburn, a mighty Knight mount of power beyond that of any other that obeyed her despite her lack of implants. This proved that she was machine-touched, and truly the heir to Artur Eld. Raising her father’s banner above the Iron Hall, she led the last of her father’s loyal knights to face those who had sided with Medrat. For two years she fought many battles against both Medraut and her father’s old enemies, always at the forefront, always taking the burdens upon herself, with her brothers at her side. Many Knights who disliked Medrat sided with her, including the great knights Gawyne and Bedieve, two of her father’s foremost servants.

She met up with and slew Medrat in a great battle near Lake Camaln, and when his followers laid down their arms turned on the league of enemy Knight Households, defeating them one by one over the course of two years until all of Cattegirn answered to her. Her father’s dream had been made real and the Knight World was one.

===Kings and Emperors===
Barely five years later in 900 M30, as rebuilding was still underway, mining operations were expanding and King Arturia was still healing the wounds of Cattegirn’s long wars, the old scanners that still watched the empty skies suddenly found hundreds of signals coming from the stars. The King mobilised her Knights and made ready in case of a challenge from the heavens. But what came was a golden hulled dropship, landing before the assembled host of Knights, and what emerged was a living god clad in gold, and beside him a scale-clad demigod.

The Emperor Himself had come to Cattegirn, along with his son, the lord of the XVI Legion, [[Aubrey The Grey]].

To this day questions are asked as to why the Emperor Himself, at this time still prosecuting the Great Crusade alongside his Sons and heading back to Terra to take charge of Imperial forces opposing the Ruavu Grun, would deliberately seek out and land upon an obscure Knight World far from the most vital war zones of the time. Some say that Cattegirn’s Archeotech haul included relics of the Dark Age of Technology that the Emperor wished to obtain first rather than the Mechanicum, others that even then he saw the potential in the young King of Cattegirn and wanted her in his armies. The truth will likely never be known, but what is known is that the King of Cattegirn and the Emperor of Mankind met and spoke in private, and when they were done the King announced that from that day forth she and all her subjects would be servants of the Emperor, riding and fighting at His command for the unity of all men, not just those of Cattegirn. 

In a somewhat-friendly honour duel she fought with Aubrey after calling him the Emperor's Squire, and became the first human mortal to fight him to a standstill. After the fight she bestowed one of her swords and a crown to the Lord of the Sixteenth and swore friendship with him. A week later she would leave Cattegirn along with over half her Knights, joining the Emperor’s own 1st Expeditionary Fleet where for five years she would fight alongside the Custodians and the chosen warriors of the Imperial Army, before leaving and beginning a long period of service alongside many of the Astartes Legions starting with the Eternal Zealots before moving on, gaining battle honours by the dozen as they sought out the harshest warzones to test their mettle against the worst of mankind's opponents.

One by one Questoris detachments of Knights would leave Cattegirn to serve in the Great Crusade, until a bare skeleton force was left behind to train future Knights. But as battle honours and trophies began to filter back, all of the people of Cattegirn began to celebrate the exploits of their chosen warriors as they fought at the bleeding edge of the Emperor’s war of unity, just as they had fought in their King’s war for unity. Regular shipments of Knight Armours from several Forgeworlds periodically came in as part of the Emperor’s own promises to the King of Cattegirn, which allowed the world to remain independent of the wider Mechanicum to the distaste of many within the Order of Mars.

The Knights of Accolon fought at the forefront of many battles, fighting with honour and fury and gaining many accolades from the forces they fought alongside. The close ties between the King and [[Aubrey The Grey]] were well known during the decade they fought alongside one another, but he was far from alone. No less a person then Primarch [[Arelex]] praised the charge of Thegn Yvain during the Vogsphere Compliance, while a banner of House Accolon is known to have hung in the victory chamber of the Resolve, the Flagship of the [[Void Angels Legion]]. Though that banner represented a less then noble victory, when over a tenth of the Household including disastrously Uktar himself was destroyed during the Igwen Compliance due to the foolish bravery of one of the most famed Knights in the Household, the outsider Abdul Al-Sherar, known as "The White Knight". His exile would prove to be fateful, not only for the Househoild but also for the Void Angels in the years to come.

The fame of House Accolon brought them many enemies though, and other Knight Households routinely commented negatively on the fact that the head of House Accolon was a female in defiance of most knightly traditions, which led to much ill feeling between them and occasional bouts of violence.

===The Altar of Sacrifice===
The foremost Knight Household Detachment comprising two dozen Knights were resupplying at the Forgeworld of Mezoa after the end of the war against the dregs of Ullanor when the news of the disturbances in the Isstvan Sector came to light. Arturia did not hesitate to order a full Household Detachment of seven Knights under the command of one of her foremost Thegns, Thegn Esclabor to join the assault against the Traitors on Isstvan. Soon news came through of the Warmaster’s treachery and the butchering of no less then four loyal legions, and at this the King swore that she and her Knights would stand against the traitorous Warmaster and fight and die to deny him his victory, and that is just what the Knights of Accolon did.

The order went out that all Household detachments were to seek out and fight the traitors wherever they may be, though the many Knight detachments were scattered across the stars, and soon Household detachments of Accolon flocked to their nearest traitor warzones to fight. On a dozen warzones across the Imperium the Knights of Accolon fought and died to deny the traitors their victory. Some of these battles were the great and famous like Zhuko V and Rosskar. Other battles have been lost in the fog of war. In every case the Household fought till the end, and one by one they died. By the time of the Siege of Terra, almost all of the Knights not on Terra were dead, and the Siege of Terra would see all the rest fall, including the King of Cattegirn herself, who gave her life to try and hold back the tide of traitors and defeat the cursed First Traitor Aubrey Himself. When the Heresy was over the Household was all but extinct with only three Knights remaining. The shattered remnants now faced an uncertain future.

===When the King comes back===
Though the Imperium owed the Knights of Accolon a great debt, the Household was so ravaged the Household was considered beyond saving. What was worse, with the loss of the King the glue that had bound all of Cattegirn together was gone, and in the years following the Rebellion the United Kingdom of Cattegirn began to come apart, and lords and dukes clashed with one another. Soon Cattegirn was reduced to Five Kingdoms, all in sporadic conflict with one another. The chance of warriors from these five being able to come together under the Banner of the Knights of Accolon was remote.

But the new head of the Household, Thegn Bedieve "Diademed" was a wise and canny ruler. Already the new Imperial Faith was beginning to take shape across the Imperium, though fighting repression from the Supreme Commander of the Imperium, [[Gaspard Lumey]] of the Void Angels. And that cult revered many Saints of the God-Emperor, and one of those Saints was the 'Blade of Terra', the Knight King of Cattegirn who had fallen crossing blades with the First Traitor and now the Saint of Knights.

Bedieve made contact with some among the faith, and granted them the right to raise a Temple to the Saint of Knights on Cattegirn itself. It soon became a place of pilgrimage, defended by the Knights and protected from persecution from the outside. The tithes gathered from the faithful gave the Knights a source of income to rebuild their shattered forces, and agitation from the Imperial Faith helped to muster support for the Household. The newly-formed Adeptus Mechanicus began to provide replacement Knight Suits from Forges as far afield as Al-Sherar, Dieseleum and even Sacred Mars itself.

Though Cattegirn was fractured, the Nobles of the Five Kingdoms were still eager to send their sons to join the Knights of Accolon. Though tensions ran beneath the surface, and the entire Household was no longer as united as it had been in Arturia's day, the flow of recruits began once again and the Knights began to fill out their Knight Suits. Finally the Household was brought back from the brink of extinction, a debt the Knights would hold to in the centuries to come.

===The Beast and the First of the White Knights===
The Household had come back from the brink, but could still only muster fifty Knights by mid-M32, not even a quarter of the strength they once held. The Household was content to slowly rebuild themselves and ignore the Wider Imperium when fate overtook them once again. A young woman named Edith Swanneck came to the gates of the Iron Hall, claiming that she had had a vision of the long-lost King, commanding her to lead the Knights against a vast Ork Warlord who was bringing war to the Imperium. That was the first the Knights heard of this threat, and they dismissed it out of hand, returning Edith to her family. Twice more she came to the Iron Hall, and twice more she was turned away. But then news began to trickle through from Pilgrims seeking sanctuary on Cattegirn, speaking of a mighty Ork host that was bringing ruin to the Imperium and even threatened Terra itself.

===The Return of the Snake===

The Traitor Legions had been gone for centuries, disappeared into the Eye of Terror and largely forgotten by the Imperium. After the Beast had ravaged the Imperium, mankind had other foes to fear and other enemies to fight. But the Traiotrs were not destroyed, and united by one styled as the new Warmaster, they returned from the depths of the Eye. Tens of thousands of veterans supported by Daemons, Traitor Guard and Cultists swarmed out of the Eye and began to set light to the Imperium. And the new Warmaster had the support of many of the Daemon Primarchs of the Traitor Legions, among them the one known as First Traitor and the Snake Lord, Aubrey the Grey.

The Knights of Accolon had suffered heavily fighting the Beast and were once again rebuilding, but a young man, Theodric of Hwippa saw visions of the Snake Lord and the Lost King, and he came forth as the second of the White Knights, donning the suit Edith Swanneck had rode into battle against the Beast. The news that Aubrey the Grey had returned immediately spurred the Knights of Accolon into action, and under Theodric the Knights rode out in full force, sixty Knight suits heading for Segmentum Obscuras and revenge against Aubrey the Grey.