Editing The Entombed (section)

==Origins: Warriors of the Inner Dark==

The history of the Space Marines began with the Sacred Band, twenty squads of ten Astartes each. These warriors were deployed in battle to test their worth and prove the rightness of the Emperor's Space Marine Project. The men who would form Sixth Squad had been recruited from Diffumi, where Judge-Cults dedicated to gods of death had long resisted Imperial rule. Raised from birth to see death as merely a transition-point akin to becoming an adult, the warriors of Diffumi were notorious for their reckless courage - a quality that would be tempered but never entirely eliminated in the Sixth Squad and the Legion that would grow from it. In accordance with their rituals of transition, the ten members of the Sixth Squad disposed of their birth names on completing their training and joining the Emperor's Space Marines. The Sergeant of the Sixth Squad called himself Vinea, and his brothers were Tormenta, Sambuca, Petrary, Onger, Ballstra, Ludgar, Hellepoli, Springalt and Couillard.

The Sixth's coolness in danger, even by the standards of the Space Marines, had impressed [[Hektor Cincinnatus]]. While he did not call on them to spearhead his assaults (saving this duty for the First), Hektor called on the Sixth to carry the fight to Merican warriors holed up in tight quarters, committing them push after push against the desperate defenders of the last few boltholes in the underbelly of both Noveau Yourk and San Angeles Hives.

While won in dirty places, these dirty victories were highly respected. The Sixth tended to be standoffish and preferred their own company, but their record of tackling difficult tasks efficiently and without complaint permitted a certain eccentricity. Only in hindsight would rumors spread that their constant sorties into the dark underhives were an attempt to have the entire squad destroyed, with the darkest of whispers suggesting that the [[San Angelus Incident]] was aimed at the Sixth Squad, not the [[Void Angels|Fifth]].