Dark Hosts

Dark Hosts

Dark Hosts armorial with Chapter icon; the ancient six-pointed Star of the Hexagrammaton printed white on a black field.

Dark Hosts Battle-Brother of the Host of Slayers.

## Space Marine Chapter

### **Allegiance**

Imperium of Man
(*Fidelitas Tenebrae*)

### **Successor of**

Dark Angels
(Lion El'Jonson lineage.)

### **Fortress-Monastery**

 *The High Halls* (Battle Barge; Flagship)

### **Specialty**

Combined Arms and Multi-Spectra Warfare, Extended Void Operations

### Successor Chapter(s)

N/A

The **Dark Hosts** are a Loyalist Successor Chapter of the Dark Angels. Created during an Unknown Founding, they were made up of particularly revanchist members of the Dark Angels Legion who sought to maintain the traditions of the Hexagrammaton and the duty of their Primarch Lion El'Jonson to scour the darkest corners of the galaxy of the most dangerous threats to the Imperium. The Dark Hosts are a calculating and relentless force that have been on crusade across the galaxy since their founding, highly trained and exceptionally equipped for a flexible approach to warfare to meet the challenge of their endless vigil. They wander from campaign to campaign across the stars as a grim reminder to the galaxy of the time when the Dark Angels were the Emperor's Exterminators.

## Chapter History

The creation of the *Codex Astartes* was a moment that reshaped the forces of the Imperium almost as much as the Horus Heresy that warranted its creation. It was a testament to the dedication and resilience of the Loyalist Astartes that had spent decades to centuries of warfare fighting within the mighty structure of the Legions to the more restricted and compartmentalized doctrines of the Codex. The continued survival of the Imperium of Man is due to both the organizational genius of Roboute Guilliman and the adaptability of the surviving Space Marine Legions.

With this in mind, one can hopefully understand the dilemma the Astartes that would create the Dark Hosts found themselves in. Outsiders might say they were simply nostalgic old soldiers, wary from centuries of war combined with the death of their world and Primarch. The founders of the Dark Hosts would say they were motivated by the highest of virtues; loyalty. Loyalty to the Imperium of Man they were created to serve and loyalty to the vision of their Primarch Lion El'Jonson, for how the Dark Angels were to serve the Imperium. The Hexagrammaton had been tested and fractured by the Horus Heresy and the Betrayal at Caliban, and now it was to endure the fracturing of the First Legion. A thousand space marines born from Caliban were at a crossroads, one that many other Astartes at this time period stood at. Some took up the Codex for the sake of the future, others rejected it to honour the past. The Dark Hosts were created to respect both.

The chapter would adhere to the core limitations of the *Codex Astartes*, only a thousand space marines and no more would ever be under the command of a single figure. However, they would radically organize their chapter within these restrictions to maintain and adhere to the traditions of the Hexagrammaton. The six wings of the Angelus Mortis were gone, the founders of the Dark Hosts recognized that the old might of the wings could not be maintained within the structure of a chapter instead of a full legion, but their knowledge and principles could be. So, the Six Hosts were created in their stead. The Deathwing became the Host of Slayers. The Ravenwing became the Host of Gales. The Stormwing became the Host of Tides. The Ironwing became the Host of Quakes. The Dreadwing became the Host of Graves. The Firewing became the Host of Ashes.

Thus, the Dark Hosts were born and declared an eternal crusade, similar to the Black Templars of Sigismund, to hunt and destroy the Imperium's foes while granting themselves distance and leeway to fight how they wished to fight. However, while the Dark Hosts did declare their crusade to grant themselves a degree of operational freedom to deviate from the *Codex* it was also an act of loyalty towards the Lion's designs for his sons. The Dark Hosts swore to never take up a true chapter planet, in memory of Caliban, and decided that their place would be the fringes of the galaxy where the light of the Astronomicon was faintest and great terrors abounded. The Halo Zone, the Eastern Fringe, the Ghoul Stars, the Maelstrom, the Veiled Region; these dark and wretched places and all between them would be their battlefield. The Dark Hosts began their first campaign from the Eye of Terror to the Ghoul Stars, to both punish the traitor Astartes as they fled and attempted to regroup around the Eye and to honour the history of the chapter as it was across the breadth of the galactic north that the Dark Angels under the Lion vanquished the dread and forbidden horrors of the Rangda.

For the first millennia of the chapter's existence, the Dark Hosts first crusade slowly but surely circumnavigated the galaxy, establishing some of the chapter's most ancient and honoured recruiting worlds amidst their purging of alien and daemonic horrors. Lighthouses in the darkness that would sustain many more future crusades. By the time the chapter had completed their first crusade and returned to the sectors around the Eye of Terror, another tradition was established although this one was purely accidental. The Dark Hosts had been so discreet in their methods of re-supply and sustained their manpower by recruiting from enclaves of human civilization beyond the Astronomicon, that after their first thousand years of crusade into the darkest void the chapter had been marked as extinct by the Administratum.

This was a source of pride to the dour and bloodied Dark Hosts, all of whom had only known a lifetime of crusade on the fringes of the galaxy and the traditions that had been passed down from the first generation of the Dark Hosts to themselves. A tradition that told them they were the successors of the First Legion, the Dark Angels, the Primus Angelis Mortis; the slayers of all the beasts that lived in the darkness where none could see. To have served an Imperium that thought them all dead, it was too perfect. So began the tradition, the dour Dark Hosts would allow themselves moments of celebration and revelry each and every time they learned the Imperium had marked the chapter for extinct. This tendency to be listed as lost or missing on their long crusades is also why, so the Dark Hosts claim, they are not listed as a 2nd Founding Chapter.

The Dark Hosts were not warriors with a legacy of perfect glory and accomplishment. The War of the Beast began during the midst of their second crusade across the galaxy, the Hosts belayed their campaigns to assist the dire situation within the Imperium, but their isolated nature found themselves cut off in a galaxy drowning under the rising tide of Greenskins. The chapter was almost consumed fighting a dozen desperate actions to fight off the Ork menace and enduring a number of significant defeats. By the time they had managed to regroup with several other chapters of the Unforgiven, the chapter was reduced to less than 300 Astartes, several Hosts and their sacred knowledge and experiences almost completely wiped out. As the chapter rebuilt their numbers with their chain of recruitment worlds, a new tradition was established to protect the accrued wisdom of the chapter; each Host would be paired with their most doctrinally similar other, to share information and traditions that would strengthen both and ensure that if one Host was ever destroyed it could be rebuilt with its knowledge and traditions intact by its partner Host.

Moreover, it was decided that the Imperium was not as invulnerable as initially perceived as this assumption had left the Dark Hosts unable to effectively respond to a great threat to the Imperium and almost destroyed the chapter. The Dark Hosts officially ended their second crusade and declared a third to meet the threats that dared to build their bulwarks in the light of the Astronomicon. When the third crusade was ended to regroup and resupply the Dark Hosts after two thousand years of campaigning, the fourth crusade would follow the old route of scouring the galactic fringes while the fifth would return to reinforce the declining Imperium. This would be the pattern of the Dark Hosts crusades afterward, to scour the darkness both without and within the dying Imperium of Man.

Of note, this is the actual point most imperial scholars believe the Dark Hosts were created, arguing that the 'third crusade' might be a misremembered reference to the 4th Founding in the aftermath of the War of the Beast. That the Dark Hosts' crusades within the imperium tend to last longer implies more experience in, say, recovering worlds lost after a period of catastrophe. It is believed that the 'fourth' crusade of the Dark Hosts was caused by revanchism and nostalgia that overcame the leadership of the chapter as they learned about their legacy and history. It is also possible that the chapter's veneration of the Dark Angels' history of slaying xenos could logically stem from the ruination brought upon the Imperium at the hands of the Orks and contributed to their crusade into the Halo Stars. After a thousand years of campaigning within the wretched Halo Zone, isolated from the imperium for so long, it would make sense for a chapter to misremember its history and come back with the delirious belief that it had always been crusading. Especially, given the chronology the Dark Hosts provide, if the chapter actually began their campaign around the warp-ridden Eye of Terror and then plunged themselves into the darkness of the Ghoul Stars. Such feats would test the limits of any chapter and perhaps even break them,

The Dark Hosts' third crusade lasted two thousand years shortly after the War of the Beast, contributing greatly to the time period often referred to as The Forging and ending during the beginning of the Nova Terra Interregnum. The Dark Hosts initially thought the Interregnum would be short lived when they began their fourth crusade into the Halo Zone, but after another millennium of crusading where most of Mankind feared to tread, the Dark Hosts found themselves shocked by the state of the Imperium they returned to once again. They found the Imperium more fractured than ever as the influence of the Ecclesiarchy had grown over the Senatorum Imperialis; the Ecclesiarchy itself was fractured between multiple sects, the Ur-Council of Nova-Terra remained, the Mechanicus was dealing with the fallout of the Moirae Schism, and the consequences of the infamous 21st Founding had created a gamut of deviant chapters rife with mutations. The fifth crusade of the Dark Hosts was launched with perhaps more passion than the third; worlds loyal to the Ur-Council were punished for their disloyalty to the Lords of Terra, aid was offered to the Mechanicus to put down the Moirae heretics, but most notably the Dark Hosts would oppose the growing influence of the Ecclesiarchy and the expansion of the Frateris Templar.

To the Dark Hosts, their duty was to preserve the Imperium of the Emperor, which meant loyalty to the regime on Terra, preserving the integrity of the Cult of Mars, and limiting the Ecclesiarchy as much as possible. This saw the Dark Hosts branded as heretics for a time during their fifth crusade, as the Ecclesiarchy grew in centralization and power it became wise to how often deployments of the Frateris Templar would disappear or suffer tragic accidents around the Dark Hosts. The only thing that saved the Dark Hosts from eternal condemnation was the self-destructive reign of Goge Vandire and the rise of Sebastian Thor. The fifth crusade of the Hosts continued well into the Age of Redemption as the Dark Hosts felt a debt to Sebastian Thor and enforced the Thorian Reforms in between their purgation campaigns of notable xenos threats. In order to recoup their logistical losses and guarantee themselves allies in the imperial bureaucracy, as well as foreseeing the need to expand their supply of equipment for increased independence from the corroding Imperium; much of the fifth crusade's final campaigns were spent cleansing xenos worlds and recovering artifacts for the Adeptus Mechanicus. Errands the Dark Hosts are loathe to remember, but record nonetheless for favours from the powerful cult of Mars.

The sixth crusade began in the midst of the Age of Redemption and ended in the middle of the Waning. The campaigns along the galactic edge had almost become routine to the Dark Hosts with the only developments of note being the increasing difficulty of campaigns around the Eye of Terror as the Ruinous powers had waxed while the Imperium waned. The Sixth crusade almost met its end several times to the hands of chaos, but enough survived to rebuild their forces through their recruitment worlds hidden amongst the galactic fringes. It had almost become a joke at this point among the Astartes of the Dark Hosts that their returns to the Imperium's core worlds to regroup and conduct their crusades across them always left them more shocked than in the darkness of the galactic edge. The campaigns of the seventh crusade were at times more dangerous than the fringe of the galaxy as the Imperium deteriorated between constant attacks from xenos and traitorous forces.

The Dark Hosts were reported as wiped out for the first time whilst campaigning within the Imperium's proper borders, no celebration was held when news of this misfiling arrived, just cold acceptance that the Dark Hosts had to redouble their efforts for an Imperium that was approaching the brink. As had become standard, the seventh crusade to consolidate the Imperium's holdings lasted twice as long as the preceding crusade on the fringe, with notable campaigns fought around the Maelstrom and other sectors around the resource rich galactic core. Again, several more campaigns were conducted at the behest of forge worlds to increase the Dark Hosts' stockpile of weapons and munitions to meet the growing tide of foes. The seventh crusade was a grim affair, if only because the Dark Hosts marched off to conduct the eighth crusade as the Time of Ending began. They had arrived to an Imperium approaching the brink and left an Imperium that was falling over the edge.

The eighth crusade of the Hosts was a humbling experience as the terrors of the intergalactic darkness reminded the scions of the Lion of the importance of their duty. More Necron tomb worlds than ever erupted into life across the galaxy, the fangs of the Great Devourer sunk into a thousand worlds, and the forces of Chaos pierced the veil of reality more often than ever before. To say nothing of the opportunistic foes from the treacherous Aeldari, fledging T'au, and the relentless Orks that took full advantage of the Imperium's decline. The Dark Hosts dedicated most of their efforts during the eighth crusade against Necron incursions and Tyranid splinter fleets. The Dark Hosts saw that it was the purpose of the scions of El'Jonson to scour the greatest dangers of the alien threat and so the Dark Hosts sought to test their mettle as the successors of the Hexagrammaton against these new and terrible foes. It was a period of tremendous struggle and yet renewed purpose as the Dark Hosts battled against horrors ancient beyond comprehension, vast beyond imagining, and mostly unknown to their historical records and tactics built upon millennia of experience. The end was upon the Imperium, perhaps, but the Dark Hosts would march into the darkness fulfilling their purpose. There was a cold comfort in that.

The eighth crusade was ended just as the Dark Hosts had travelled through several warzones of the post-Tyranid eastern fringe of the galaxy. After long campaigns of fighting within the shadow of the warp created by the Tyranids, the Dark Hosts had been ignorant of the building up of the 13th Black Crusade. By the time the leadership of the Hosts had received reports, the destruction of Cadia had been set and the Great Rift had split the galaxy in half. The Dark Hosts found themselves on the side of what would be titled Imperium Nihilus. The eighth crusade was officially ended and a ninth crusade declared to return to Terra, as the darkening of the Astronomicon took priority over all else. The march to Terra proved almost impossible as navigating the immaterium had become all the more treacherous and the Dark Hosts found hundreds of worlds in need of aid and their resources only capable of saving dozens. Yet, the Dark Hosts responded to as many calls to aid as they could on their path to Terra. Not because they were heroic protectors or wished to make a valiant last stand, but because they were the sons of the Lion and never left a foe unscathed. Imperial worlds deemed to be lost causes were razed by the battle-brothers of the Hosts to deny their fall to enemy hands, and what few worlds that would be saved were then left behind by the black-clad astartes without any notification. Mostly, the Dark Hosts would contribute enough to blunt an enemy offensive and leave the world in a stalemate, the priority was to reach Terra as quickly as possible while giving as little ground as possible to the Imperium's foes. At least, that was their intent.

The Dark Hosts made little progress to Terra as they conducted campaign after campaign to stave off the rampant daemonic and xenos forces swarming Imperium Nihilus. This belligerence ironically saved the chapter as actually braving the Great Rift without knowledge of the few stable locations through it would have been practically suicide. When the Supreme Grandmaster of the Dark Angels issued a call to all of the Unforgiven to muster at the Rock, the Dark Hosts were unable to reach their brothers in a timely manner. The Dark Hosts were still fighting their way to the Rock when the Indomitus Crusade emerged through the rift to relieve the beleaguered Imperium Nihilus. The ninth crusade was abruptly ended, as the Dark Hosts joined the fleet of Roboute Guilliman on his campaign to Baal and later to regroup with their fellow Unforgiven at the Rock. The briefest crusade of the Dark Hosts, but quite possibly their most defining as a chapter of relentless scions of the First Legion.

The Dark Hosts chapter entered the era of the Dark Imperium at yet another crossroads of history. The bureaucratic nightmare stemming from the Hosts multiple reported extinctions and disappearances resulted in the Dark Hosts not being recipients to any Primaris reinforcements, for they had been assumed long gone and strategically irrelevant. However, the chapter was gifted with the technology to allow their Astartes to cross the Rubicon Primaris due to their joining with the Indomitus Crusade and the edicts of Roboute Guilliman. The Primaris Marines were initially viewed with mistrust, but the Dark Hosts prided themselves on pragmatism and experience, as well as the strength of their martial traditions to adjust when needed while not sacrificing their core tenets. New aspirants to the chapter were inducted with Primaris geneseed and officers of the chapter underwent procedures to become Primaris marines themselves.

The Dark Hosts suffered many losses during the creation of the Great Rift and now stand in an era where half of the Imperium is practically lost. The Masters of the Host came to a most controversial decision, one that may see the chapter held in esteem or woefully scorned. The Dark Hosts travelled to their recruitment worlds built up by millennia of crusading and began intaking a massive volume of aspirants to restore their numbers; many worlds had been lost to time and the horrors of the galactic edge, but just as many survived even to the time of ending. As it stands, the Dark Hosts still march with a force of roughly one thousand battle ready Astartes, but now their crusade fleet is followed by a train of logistical ships sustaining and transporting a sizeable number of reserve recruits that can replace battlefield losses as quickly as possible for a Space Marine chapter. This is not an opportunistic accumulation of power, however, but a calculated decision to allow the chapter's survival in its current course. The Dark Hosts have declared their tenth crusade and say it will last until Imperium Nihilus is free of the taint of chaos and xenos or until the Dark Hosts are completely and utterly spent. The scores of fresh aspirants, even with the improvements of Primaris geneseed and weaponry, are barely keeping up with the attrition rates of this tenth and most bloody crusade. The old ways of the Dark Hosts, the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the Six Hosts of the Six Wings, shall now be tested more than ever before.

## Notable Campaigns

* **The Six-Pointed Conflagration. M31**: The first campaign recorded in the chapter's history, supposedly at the dawn of their first crusade. Mythological in tone and details, the Dark Hosts claim the first Masters of the Hosts did battle with several champions and warbands of the traitor astartes around the Eye of Terror, leading to a final assault that saw key redoubts of the traitor legions shattered at the cost of the lives of the First Masters. A subject of much scrutiny due to the doubts of the chapter's claimed origins as members of the 2nd Founding. Tales such as this are not uncommon from the period immediately after the Horus Heresy and the subsequent Scouring. The power of the traitor legions had been largely broken and required centuries to rebuild, a dedicated crusade by any ancient chapter could have accomplished what the Dark Hosts claim. There are even ancient reports of a battle barge that resembles The High Halls, referred to in the document as "The [File Corrupted] Halls" that belonged to one of the chapters of the Unforgiven operating for a prolonged duration around the Eye of Terror at the time period the Conflagration would have transpired in. However, many relics such as battle barges have outlived the chapters that first fielded them. In fact, the Dark Hosts' claim of traitor redoubts being destroyed at the cost of the chapter's founding leadership could be a misremembered annihilation of the actual chapter that fought this battle. That the Six-Pointed Conflagration was the first crusade fought by astartes aboard The High Halls, but not necessarily by the Dark Hosts. Then, centuries later, the battle barge was likely recovered by the Imperium and gifted to a new founding of Dark Angel successors. Hence the presence of the campaign in the battle barge's and thus Dark Hosts' records. Regardless, the campaign is studied by many aspirants of the Dark Hosts as the mythological story does go into great detail on the tactics and organization utilized by the Dark Hosts to battle the varied warbands that made the Eye of Terror their home. The historical legitimacy of the campaign can be called into question, but as a tactical treatise the tale is surprisingly educational for something possibly based on somewhat fictional events.
* **The Extermination of The Mal'dr Bio-Artisans. M31**: Another battle from the Dark Hosts alleged first crusade, but more detailed and told with little to no embellishment than earlier stories. Lending some credence that the Dark Hosts may be older than largely believed. The Dark Hosts had encountered a sub-sector on the frontier of Imperial space where four agri-worlds had been invaded by a unique form of xenos invasion, the worlds had been bombarded by massive capsules akin to an Ork Rok, but instead of greenskin hordes singular and massive biological creatures emerged and began to slaughter the inhabitants. The Host of Quakes took up the task of reclaiming these besieged agri-worlds for the Imperium, as the loss of so many food production centers could collapse the Imperium's hold on the entire sub-sector. Initially, the Host of Quakes dropped their entire force onto the closest agri-world, hoping to annihilate the beasts one planet at a time. The Quakes would pick a highly defensible location and fortify the position with concealed bunkers and prepare the ground with traps meant to kill infantry upscaled to harm massive beasts. The Host of Quakes would then harass the beasts with tank squadrons and lure the horde to the picked ground, there the beasts would be entangled in the great traps and slaughtered by the fire of concealed artillery. This worked perfectly for the first world, but upon the second agri-world the beasts changed tactics, the mighty hordes devolved into roving packs that covered the planet too well to intensively prepare elaborate defenses necessary to slaughter the entire infestation. The hit-and-run tactics to lure them into smaller killing fields were ignored by the beasts, who continued to rampage and slaughter the human populace regardless. The xeno titans had seemingly learned how their kin were slain by the Quakes and adapted accordingly. Instead, for the second agri-world, the Host of Quakes prepared its entire tank fleet and took to the planet as a roving steel fist. The splintered packs more easily overcome by the concentrated firepower and speed of the Host's mighty tank fleet, the Quakes did not rest for even a day, least the beasts use the time to regroup, using drop pods carrying supplies for rapid refueling and rearmament as they pursued their great quarry at best possible speeds. After several months of grueling pursuit, the beasts had been cleansed on the second world. On the third world, the Quakes expected another shift in behavior, but the massive horrors seemed to act the same as before, the Master of the Host assumed their tactical disposition on the second world was a fluke and deployed for another massed tank assault. This assumption of bestial stupidity and instinct was how the Host of Quakes was lured into an ambush whilst pursuing a pack of titans, as suddenly multiple packs converged upon the massed tank fleet from several directions. The Host of Quakes barely broke through the encirclement of monsters and regrouped in orbit. The Master of the Host acknowledged his foes were not just mighty, but intelligent to match, luring his astartes and himself into a trap. Such a foe demanded unconventional tactics. The tank formations of the Quakes were divided into scores of nimble hunter-killer squadrons and deployed across the planet to avoid a concentrated ambush as before. The tank squadrons would select and harass a pack of beasts by closing in and focusing their fire on a single monster until it perished or was severely wounded and withdrawing before the rest of the pack or others closed upon them. Then, another tank squadron would approach from a different vector and repeat the process. Once a pack was singled out for annihilation, the astartes would not give it any moment of rest, launching armoured strike after strike until the pack was reduced to manageable numbers for a sweeping assault to wipe them out. The beasts again grew wise to the efforts of the Host of Quakes, and soon began launching counter attacks with the fastest of their kin, some even capable of flight, to chase down and pick apart the tank squadrons as they had been. The Host of Quakes adapted their methods once more, dedicating reserve hunter-killer squadrons to counter the intercepting forces as a duelist would parry an opportunistic thrust. This mobile and high intensity warfare of astarte tanks against titanic monsters in an epic game of cat and mouse would rage upon the third and fourth of the agri-worlds for several decades before the Host of Quakes would claim final victory over the fourth agri-world. However, the truly killing blow would be dealt by the Host of Ashes, who had traced the origin of the capsules containing the great monsters to an alien civilization in the Halo Zone; the Mal'dr Bio-Artisans. They had targeted the agri-worlds in the hopes of turning them into nutrition production centers for their armies of vat-grown titans and controlled their armies through trained psykers in their home system, allowing for the monsters' grasp of tactics and strategy. The Host of Ashes launched a daring series of raids into the research centers and discovered how to control their bio-titans. With but a whisper, the librarians of the Ashes turned the Bio-Artisans' beasts against them and their civilization was torn asunder.
* **The War of the Beast. M32**: If records are to be believed, a grim campaign for the Dark Hosts. Unaware of the full scope of the situation the Imperium found itself in due to having been on crusade in or around the Halo Zone, the Dark Hosts began a counter-assault upon what it thought was a particularly troublesome Ork WAAAGH. This soon devolved into a desperate defense of what worlds the Dark Hosts managed to liberate from the green deluge and then a fighting retreat to link up with Imperial forces. Saved by regrouping with other chapters of the Unforgiven, the Dark Hosts were marred by the Orks and played a minor role in the events that followed throughout the war. By the end of the conflict, the Dark Hosts had to dedicate a full century scavenging their equipment from desolate battlefields and restoring their numbers to nominal strength. Much of the Dark Hosts doctrine on each Host becoming familiar with the traditions and methods of one other and a commitment to crusade within the borders of the Imperium after crusades launched into the fringes were established after this conflict. The former to mitigate the loss of experience and wisdom from the annihilation or near-annihilation of a particular Host and the latter to ensure the Dark Hosts are not caught as flat footed by crises within and throughout the Imperium proper.
* **The Stemming of the Green Tide. M32**: The nickname of the Dark Hosts 3rd Crusade, and what some scholars would argue to be their first actual crusade. In the aftermath of the 4th Founding, as the Imperium recovered from The War of the Beast, the Dark Hosts led several campaigns into Ork held worlds. The Host of Slayers and Host of Ashes won much renown during these campaigns as their emphasis on small, but strategically significant surgical strikes were key to targeting and annihilating the command structures of the Orks and sending their armies into disarray for annihilation by the other Hosts. Many of the battles recorded, however, cannot be verified and the records of the Dark Hosts are deliberately vague. It is elaborated that the Dark Hosts waged their military campaigns alongside an information suppression campaign, as tales of a chapter of astartes slaying scores of Ork warlords would likely galvanize the greenskins to launch more WAAAGHS! to battle such a foe and thus make the strategy self-defeating. Other chapters argue this is simply a cheap excuse by the Dark Hosts to pad their histories with unearned glories and project their image as a vaunted chapter of the 2nd Founding and not of the 4th Founding.
* **The Liberation of Sub-Sector Meroysh. M33**: A famous campaign that saw the Dark Hosts relieve a sub-sector in the Segmentum Tempestus beleaguered by the whims of an Aeldari craftworld, burned by the wrath of an Ork WAAAGH, and pillaged by a warband of traitor astartes. The Aeldari were launching punitive raids onto agri-worlds in the area due to the recent colonization of a Maiden World to strain the food supplies of the garrison and weaken them for an Aeldari counter-attack on the Maiden World. The sub-sector's most populous hive world was being assaulted by the armies of an Ork Warboss who sought to use the planet's populace as slave labour and machinery to provide the materials for future conquests. A chaos warband was also launching raids, but these were targeted at naval yards to expand the warband's armada with captured imperial ships. Due to the urgency of the situation and pressures put on local forces and garrisons, the Dark Hosts grouped themselves into three strike forces to handle the issues separately and with utmost speed. The Hosts of Tides and Graves would launch a raid onto the craftworld, the Hosts of Gales and Quakes would blunt the Ork offensives, and the Hosts of Slayers and Ashes would conduct a counter-insurgency operation against the traitor warband. The raid on the craftworld was tactically simple, but strategically brilliant; The Host of Graves deployed with full heavy weapon kits, their close-fire support teams being filled in by the steadfast tactical and assault squadrons of the Host of Tides. Most of the chapter fleet was committed to the raid, after deploying the other Hosts to their respective warzones, in order to breach the comprehensive defenses of the craftworld to allow the raid. Once on board, the two Hosts had two duties, the Graves were to inflict as much damage as possible to the infrastructure and armies of the craftworld within the allotted timeframe of four hours and the Tides were to safeguard the Graves during said timeframe. The raid began the way the Host of Tides would prefer it, a battleline established around the initial landing zone as Tide tactical marines and assault squadrons fended off the Aeldari infantry detachments and the Graves fired upon their vehicles and larger constructs with their heavy weapon squadrons behind the Tides. The battle turned into a chaotic bedlam as the Host of Graves conducted their usual operations of scattering task forces to probe the enemy lines and force openings into their rear echelons, with the Host of Tides moving large sweeping infantry formations to screen Aeldari forces attempting to intercept the heavy weapon squadrons. One taskforce managed to force an opening towards the craftworld's dome of crystal seers and soon the Host of Graves moved all of their forces to besiege the dome while the Tides held back the Aeldari counter-attacks and interdictions. Just as surface damage was done to the dome proper, the Dark Hosts, in a rare display of restraint, pulled their forces back ahead of schedule and withdrew from the craftworld. The assault was intended to be a warning, sufficient damage to stun the prideful Aeldari but not enough to stoke their arrogant ire; an unspoken ultimatum that if the craftworld did not cease and desist its raids upon Imperial holdings, the Dark Hosts would return in force to inflict more permanent damage. The craftworld shifted course out of the sub-sector and raids on local agri-worlds ceased. A rare display of diplomacy, of a sorts, by the Dark Hosts towards xenos. The Orks would not be as lucky, the Hosts of Gales and Quakes deploying in a configuration of speeders and fighter craft and a fleet of armoured vehicles, respectively, to launch multiple rapid assaults upon the Ork hordes. The Host of Gales would probe defenses and misdirect the Orks, while the Host of Quakes would exploit the opening with deep armoured thrusts to destroy strategically important objectives and then withdraw back to Imperial lines. The Ork hordes, initially holding half of the planet when the Dark Hosts arrived, were forced to pull back to a quarter of the planet's surface in order to shore up their defenses and solidify their lines against the astartes' operations. The Hosts then switched roles, the Quakes conducting siege operations spearheaded by mechanized infantry formations to breach the Ork lines and allow the Gales to exploit the gaps in the lines and thrust dozens of biker and assault squadrons into the rear echelons to disrupt the Ork lines of supplies and communications. The Orks were soon pushed back to a single hive city as their lines collapsed under the logistical strain. The Host of Tides and Host of Graves then arrived with most of the chapter fleet from the raid on the craftworld to support the Ork campaign. The Gales let half of their manpower to supplement the Tides as they joined the Quakes and Graves in besieging the final hiveworld. However, it would by a squadron of Gale-Knights that truly marked the defeat of the Ork threat. As the Warboss realized his untenable position, he attempted to withdraw to his flagship in orbit battling the imperial orbital garrison and the chapter fleet. The Host of Gales deployed several squadrons mounted within fighter craft to pursue the Warboss's shuttle and escort craft as he made his way into orbit. As the escorts peeled off to engage the bulk of the Gales air forces, a squadron of Gale-Knights maintained pursuit, firing several pot-shots at the Warboss's transport. Panicking, the Warboss ordered his flagship to fire upon the Gale-Knights and open the shuttle doors. It was then the true target of the Gale-Knights was made vulnerable, flying directly behind the Warboss's craft to avoid the flagships point defense batteries, the fighter crafts raced ahead of the Warboss at the last second and delivered a critical payload into the opened and unshielded shuttle bay of the Ork flagship. The Warboss would survive the conflagration of his ship and then armada, but his power had been broken and reports are certain he was assassinated by an enterprising Nob shortly after his ignominious defeat. The Host of Slayers and Host of Ashes had taken their strike cruisers from the chapter fleet to conduct a series of counter-operations against the traitor warbands. The Ashes had lent half of their manpower to the Slayers, consigning themselves to a supporting and intelligence-gathering role for the task. Where the traitor astartes expected vulnerable ports or at worst garrisons of mere mortals, they found the blades of the Sword-Companions and the guns of the Shield-Companions spread throughout the naval yards and two strike cruisers capable of rapidly redeploying their forces. While this was not enough to destroy the cunning and ruthless traitors, it was enough to buy time for the rest of the chapter to neutralize the Ork and Aeldari threat and converge on the traitors. Seeing the writing on the wall after hearing of the defeat of the Ork armada, the warband ceased its raids and withdrew from the sub-sector with Imperial Navy assets hot on their heels. Seeing the sub-sector secured, albeit with not as much xeno or traitor casualties inflicted as they would have liked, the Dark Hosts regrouped and moved on to the next sub-sector in their eternal crusades. Nevertheless, the story on how the Dark Hosts repelled elements from three of the most formidable forces that regularly challenge the Imperium's dominance spread around the sector. While many of the chapter's glories that predate this campaign can be questioned, this campaign marked the Dark Hosts among their peers as a worthy military force amongst the adeptus astartes.
* **The Cleansing of The Qward Stars. M34**: The Qward stars are several systems somewhere east of the Ultima Segmentum, partially within the Halo Zone and partially within traversable space. They were ruled by a burgeoning empire known as the Tcaham Sorcerer-Kings who demonstrated a frightening ability to control almost any living being they came into contact with through a mixture of arcane practices. With a gesture by their most gifted Dominators, the battle-brothers of the Dark Hosts could be turned against each other by the wretched beings. After a number of failed engagements, most of the chapter's progress was the librarians and apothecaries finding a way to break the mind-control, but the cure required at least a month of palliative care and provided little immunity to subsequent domination by the Sorcerer-Kings. Some tactics were mildly effective, engaging the Tcaham at great speeds or ranges to eliminate them before they could react bore some effectiveness, but any prolonged battle was doomed to fail. As such, a two-pronged strategy was devised, the Hosts of Tides and Quakes would lend half of their manpower to the speed and heavy-weapon focused Hosts of Gales and Graves. The supplemented Gales and Graves would continue military campaigns to keep the Tcaham Sorcerer-Kings distracted with a new foe at their borders. Meanwhile, the Host of Slayers would lend their manpower to the Host of Ashes to increase infiltration and information-gathering operations to find an unconventional solution to the problem. After several years of protracted warfare and espionage, it was discovered that the Sorcerer-Kings were as fractious as they were powerful; the capability of each citizen to enslave any living creature with a weaker will resulting body of governance based on a complex and ever-shifting hierarchy of authority detailed from the highest Dominators to the lowest Acolytes. The Host of Ashes orchestrated a number of assassinations and sabotages that destabilized Tcaham society and plunged them into a civil war, their unbridled power making them confident enough to think they could afford such a conflict with space marines at their doorstep. This allowed the Host of Ashes to kidnap several Dominators weakened and vulnerable by their rivals to allow the Apothecaries, Librarians, and Tech-Priests of the chapter to study them in-depth and understand their profane methods of enslavement. Eventually, a method to repel their mental dominations was found and the Dark Hosts attacked the divided empire of Sorcerer-Kings with renewed vigour. Caught off guard due to their civil war and assumption that no such resistance to their methods could exist, the Tcaham Sorcerer-Kings were reduced to a foul memory in the annals of the Dark Hosts.
* **The Purgation of The Altkarath System. M34**: The Altharath System is a trinary star system found on the outskirts between the Segmentums Tempestus and Ultima. The stars exhibited an unusually high amount of radiation, which likely explained the highly corruptive xenos threat upon the worlds of the system. The surface of the planets and asteroids were covered in a flesh-like fungi, how it spread to multiple celestial bodies in the system is unknown. What is known is that a rogue trader visited the world, took a sample of the fungus, and then the alien creature broke containment and assimilated everyone aboard the ship into its mass. The squadron of the Host of Slayers boarded the ship and found the spiteful flesh creatures fused to consoles and vital systems, piloting the vessel to the nearest imperial world on the ship's star charts to feed. The Slayers barely made it off the ship alive, as the fungi could not breach their terminator armour, it then morphed into a dazzling array of bio-forms and assaulted the terminator squadron to force a breach in their sealed armour. After neutralizing the threat, the Dark Hosts traced the ship to its point of origin and found the infested horror that was the Altkarath System. It was feared that an exterminatus bombardment could result in sending thousands of pieces of debris carrying the fungal-flesh scattered across several sectors. As such, the Dark Hosts would lightly bombard, relatively speaking, the surface of each planet and land the six Hosts planetside to conduct a thorough purgation of every nook and cranny. After a decade of extermination, the system was cleansed of all signs of the xenos life-form, but to certain the Dark Hosts set up warning beacons to ward away future visitors and planned to visit the system again on a later crusade to check if the life form returned to the surfaces of the star system's worlds. The last of such cautionary observations transpired around M38 and the barren system still showed no signs of life.
* **The Subjugation of Shihah. M35**: The planetary leadership of the strategically important industrial world of Shihah declare independence from the Imperium amidst the chaos caused by the Ur-Council of Nova-Terra. The Host of Quakes is quick to respond, with a rapid assault on the capital city before their full forces could be mustered. Tanks and artillery swiftly blow apart fortifications and weapon emplacements as breacher squadrons storm the city proper in brutal hand-to-hand fighting. To ensure a full decapitation of planetary leadership, the Master of Quakes orders a full purgation of the entire city. Afterwards, the Host of Quakes scatters from the city in a series of tank-based flying columns that raid and destroy as many armouries, lines of communication and transportation, and arms production manufactorums as they can within the span of a few months. The Host of Quakes then depart the world as swiftly as they arrived, leaving the defenders in disarray and woefully underprepared for local Imperial reclaimation forces that arrive a year later and easily sweep rebel forces and restore Imperial rulership over the planet.
* **The Shadow Battle of Al-Khal. M35**: The Dark Hosts took a strong position in support of Terra during the Nova-Terra Interregnum, but held strong misgivings towards the growing strength of the Ecclesiarchy. The Dark Hosts moved to aid faith militant forces in besieging the Ur-Council aligned world of Al-Khal, but the Host of Ashes were absent as the rest made planetfall, deploying squadrons to instead sabotage the communications equipment of the local orbital platforms and transport ships. When the forces of the Ur-Council were destroyed, the Dark Hosts quickly turned their guns and blades upon the forces of the Ecclesiarchy. The Dark Hosts fleet did the same to the transport ships and orbital platforms above the planet. The Dark Hosts made haste to leave the system and assist Astra Militarum forces several sectors away, to distance themselves from the scene of utter slaughter. To this day, very few outside the Dark Hosts have any inkling of the chapter's involvement in the slaughter of both Nova-Terra and Ecclesiarchy forces. Even fellow chapters of the Unforgiven are told that the Dark Hosts merely found elements of the Fallen among the Ecclesiarchy and Ur-Council armies and took the appropriate course of action.
* **The Glorious Redemptions. M36**: After Sebastian Thor deposed the tyrannical Goge Vandire and implemented his reforms upon the Ecclesiarchy, the Dark Hosts offered themselves more often than not to campaigns against any who rebelled against the Thorian reforms. While holding some misgivings towards the Ecclesiarchy's continued existence and power, the Dark Hosts could settle for the lesdser evil. Having accrued much experience in combating the fiercely devoted and frighteningly well trained and equipped Frateris Templar in several battles waged in secret, the Dark Hosts were able to make significant contributions against the forces that resisted Sebastian Thor. Several of these battles were waged in typical Dark Host fashion, with Vandire revanchists raising banners of rebellion and the dissident priests crushed by unnamed and dark armoured astartes by the time Imperial reinforcements arrived.
* **The Purgation of Algranak. M36**: One of the quests taken up by the Dark Hosts in exchange for favours from the Adeptus Mechanicus, as the Dark Hosts sought to deepen their operational independence with an expanded armoury. Bizarre readings were detected by the tech-priests on the dead world of Algranak, interpreted to be the result of technological artefacts within the planet. The Host of Ashes sent a detachment of ten operatives to verify the report, only one managed to send a message back of a severe xenos presence on the planet. What followed was a twenty year long campaign on the surface of the planet and later beneath to neutralize the unknown foe. Much of the war had been prolonged due to the loss of half of the chapter and the Masters of the Hosts sending a taskforce to their recruitment worlds to rebuild their lost numbers while the rest continued the battle. What ensued was a myriad of warfare techniques and methods to keep the foe off balance and preserve the chapter's strength; armoured campaigns spearheaded by the Host of Quakes gave way to probing assaults and raids conducted by the Host of Gales which in turn led to surgical strikes by the Hosts of Slayers and Ashes and the odd pitched battle conducted by the Hosts of Tides and Graves. Such a strategy of warfare was only possible due to the chapter's esoteric method of organization and vast stores of equipment held in reserve, allowing members of one Host to offer personnel to reinforce and strengthen the operations of another Host and vice-versa. The Dark Hosts committed themselves to the battle so fiercely because a team of Eyes-In-The-Dark operatives had found reason to believe that the xenos foe had assets elsewhere in the sector and if the foe was allowed to consolidate their position and mobilize their forces off-world, dozens of systems would be lost. Ten years into the campaign, the Dark Hosts were forced to withdraw from the surface and continue their war in a combination of battles in Algranak's orbit and raids on key surface positions to limit the mobilization of enemy space-capable assets. Reinforcements arrived on the fifteenth year, with a large contingent of fully fledged former aspirants and the survivors of the task force sent to muster and train them. Flush with reinforcements and experienced gained by bloody battles, the leadership of the chapter committed to preparations for a daring assault. The foe seemed to operate from vast bunkers and factories placed underneath the planet surface and key command personnel and infrastructure was located within several of these underground complexes. After several years of raids and naval engagements, the command nodes of the enemy had been identified and targeted for annihilation. Tasks forces, each made up of personnel from all of the Hosts to handle the multi-stage attacks on the heavily fortified command bunkers. The Hosts of Quakes and Gales would perform the initial breaches with their respective siege and assault infantry squadrons, the Hosts of Tides and Graves would dig in and hold off enemy reinforcements from closing up the breaches, and finally the Hosts of Slayers and Ashes would penetrate deep into the bunkers and destroy the enemy command network and eliminate key personnel. Not all of the task forces met success, but those that did regrouped their forces and repeated the process until the command network of the enemy was thoroughly destroyed and their forces scattered and easy pickings for elimination conducted by kill teams of the Host of Ashes and Host of Graves. After decades of war, the Dark Hosts contacted the Adeptus Mechanicus that the artifacts on the planet were secured for extraction. The chapter quickly replenished its material losses with aid from the grateful tech-priests, but also requested that details of their assistance be omitted to preserve the chapter's secrecy. As such, few specifics are known of who or what the Dark Hosts fought, save the tactics and traditions borne in defeating this horrifying foe.
* **The Avenging of Bishun. M37**: Bishun was a recruiting world for the Dark Hosts with one of the chapter's dreadnoughts defending the ancient chapter keep. It is not uncommon for the Dark Hosts to find their chapter keeps in ruins and in need of rebuilding, they leave minimal garrisons and do not invest much infrastructure into the death worlds they find for recruitment. Often, the keep is rebuilt, a Great Hunt is held if the human population remains, and the Dark Hosts move on. On Bishun, the chapter keep was found in ruins, but the human population had vanished, and the dreadnought was still partially alive. The Dark Hosts were informed by their undead battle-brother that Bishun had been plundered for slaves by a particular Drukhari Kabal, the Malicious Kiss. The Masters of the Hosts were quick to act, a task force of 200 astartes composed of elements from each of the Hosts was assembled and dispatched to find and annihilate the Kabal responsible. The task force searched for a hundred years, bargaining with Aeldari Corsairs, Asuryani Farseers, and Harlequin Troup Masters; although most of these diplomatic situations could be more accurately called hostage situations due to the bellicose nature of the Dark Hosts. Eventually, the task force found that the Kabal was raiding another death world for slaves and specimens. The task force set itself to a bold and bloody strategy. The elements of the Host of Slayers boarded the ships of the Kabal's fleet, sabotaging systems and preoccupying the Drukhari crews in bloody close quarters combat engagements. The Slayers knew they would be overwhelmed by the fleet and ferocious Drukhari, but they knew they would die to serve a greater purpose, as the disruptions they caused allowed the task force to annihilate the Kabal's fleet, destroying many ships with Slayers still inside them fighting against their occupants. Planet side, the elements of the Host of Gales engaged in a hit-and-run campaign mirroring the tactics of the Drukhari raiders, again they soon found themselves overrun by the Drukhari who specialized in such warfare to an unparalleled degree, and once again it was a self-sacrificial trap as the elements of the Hosts of Graves and Quakes took up firing positions overlooking the engagements and riddled the ground with heavy weapons fire. This was not a battle of tactics or wits, but furious and bloody revenge. The surviving Drukhari, some even resuscitated by the apothecaries, were tortured for a month's worth of time. Several battle-honours within the chapter that had been virtually extinct within the chapter for centuries were earned by veterans of this campaign, such as 'Flayer of Souls,' earned by forcing battle hardened and inhuman xenos to beg for mercy, and 'Jester of Malice,' earned by wounding many enemies into incapacity for interrogation instead of death. When honour and revenge were sated, the Dark Hosts destroyed every trace of the Drukhari to deny any resurrection from the Haemonculi and left several auto-vox systems playing their recorded screams on a loop broadcast across the system.
* **WAAAGH SKY-BREAKA! M38**: Orks on the fringes of the Ultima Segmentum rally behind Warboss Thunda-Throwa, whose penchant for combined assaults of artillery and airborne units inspired the name of his WAAAGH. A number of systems fall by the time the Host of Tides arrives to provide aid, with an entire sub-sector on the verge of being overrun. The Master of Tides applies a unique strategy of attacking worlds in the rear echelon of the Ork conquests. While the Host lacks the means to take entire worlds on its own in a quick enough manner to hamper the Ork supply lines, the Host of Tides meet the Orks on the field of battle and quickly leave after devastating whatever Ork forces that are willing to face them beyond the walls of planetside fortifications. As Orks gather around centers of conflict, a few months of these bleeding campaigns result in Orks abandoning positions on the frontline of their conquest and travelling to their backwater worlds to face the Host of Tides. After a year of baiting and bleeding the Orks, the Host of Tides orchestrate a final stand on the three moons of Omikrork Major. The Master of Tides has his warriors set up tectonic charges on each of the moons and scatters his fleet assets as the Ork surround and assault the moons. After a week of battle, the charges are detonated, turning the moons into giant shrapnel bombs that devastate the Ork fleet. Roughly half of the Host of Tides and most of their equipment survived the battle thanks to their sus-an membranes allowing them to survive in the vacuum of space and their regrouped fleet assets using the chaos caused by the destroyed moons to bypass the shattered Ork fleet to retrieve their assets floating amidst the debris. Surviving Ork forces, assuming the Host of Tides destroyed, return to the frontlines of the WAAAGH, but enough time had been bought by the temporary reduction of Ork numbers on the front for reinforcements from the Astra Militarum to arrive and stabilize the front. The WAAAGH would lose momentum and fracture between rival warlords ten years later.
* **The Cleaving of Tsolh. M39**: The prosperous world of Tsolh falls under the gaze of the ruinous powers. The Host of Slayers respond to initial calls for aid as swiftly as they are able, recognizing the early reports as a daemonic threat, but find half the planet lost by their arrival. Wasting no time, the Host quickly deploys its terminator squads across the planet to assist in scores of rearguard and delaying actions to allow the PDF time and resources to regroup. As the fell energies of chaos make orbital maneuvers increasingly difficult, the terminator squadrons switch to land raiders to rapidly transport their warriors from one crisis zone to the next in order to stabilize the front. Knowing a war of attrition against the daemons of chaos was a futile effort, the Master of Slayers was quick to scour intelligence reports to identify the location of greater demons that were leading the hosts of the neverborn. The Host of Slayers went from scattered defenders to a relentless hammer, as land raider bound squadrons converged on these locations and disgorged perhaps the finest warriors of the chapter to meet the champion-generals of the warp. While several of the targeted greater daemons either slew their attackers or withdrew behind their slavish hordes, enough were slain to rob the beasts of their operational momentum. The Master of Slayers then exploited the temporary lethargy of the daemons to organize raids against active warp rifts on the planet surface led by the Librarians of the Host to close as many tears into the immaterium as possible before the daemons regained their footing. The Host of Slayers then commited themselves to retrieving the bodies and relics of their fallen battle-brothers as the war dragged into a stalemate due to the mounting losses on the deamons and astartes alike with the PDF seen as unfit by the Host of Slayers to conduct offensive operations against such a foe. The forces of the Ordo Malleus soon arrived and applied their specialized forces and arcane techniques to sealing the rifts that brought the daemons to Tsolh. The Master of Slayers sought an audience with the entire command staff of the PDF to personally congratulate them for their efforts and to award them with honours from the chapter. The Host then turned their weapons upon the PDF and pitilessly destroyed all avenues of orbital communication and transport across the world, the forces of the Inquisition, who paused only at the request of the Master of Slayers to honour the soldiers they would be killing in cold betrayal, joined in as was the protocol of the Ordo Malleus that any information on the ruinous powers had to be contained at all costs. As the daemon hunters and the Host of Slayers finished their grim work, the agents of the Inquisition quietly left the world to divert fresh imperial citizens to resettle the colony and restore it as a valuable asset to the Imperium. The Host of Slayers remained on the depopulated world for a week to sing hymns of glory amidst the ruined cities, barren fields, and bloody trenches of Tsolh in recognition of the brave defenders and citizens who were all slain by the blades of the Slayers for the sake of the wider Imperium in the Long War against the daemonic powers of the warp.
* **The Devastation of the Tolwei Commonwealth. M40**: Raids on imperial trade lanes were traced to a region deep in Wilderness Space. The Host of Graves campaigned into the uncharted region with their usual grim determination to punish the foes of the Imperium. A small xeno empire known as the Tolwei Commonwealth had been discovered as the source of the attacks, believing the trade lanes Imperial ships had been using to be their own territory and their piracy mere toll collecting. The Host quickly assaulted an outlying colony on the fringe of Tolwei space and left no survivors. The Master of Graves and his Seneschal studied what information they could about the Tolwei civilization and its strategic disposition from databanks and thoroughly interrogated officials of the planet's population before they too were purged. The Host of Graves then launched a sudden and brazen attack on the core worlds of the Tolwei, destroying a fortress world and all of its inhabitants. The Host of Graves razed two more core worlds before Tolwei forces began to muster and form strong defensive lines around the heart of their empire, the rulers of the Commonwealth and their inner colony citizens fearful of the atrocities of the Host. This, however, had been the true trap. The Host splintered itself into dozens of smaller strike forces across the now lightly defended outer colonies of the Tolwei, targeting centres of resource extraction. The Host of Graves poisoned fields, collapsed mines, and burned forests; anything that civilization could be built upon was a target. Uncharacteristically, the Host of Graves attempted to reduce casualties on the actual populace, although characteristically targeting everything else that made up their livelihood from homes to roads to workplaces. Again, the forces of the Tolwei ponderously but surely reacted and redeployed its armies to the outer colonies. However, the damage had already been done, the Tolwei Commonwealth was now stuck with a massive population of refugees from its despoiled outer colonies, compounded by a severe reduction of food and energy production, and a boiling political crisis due to clear mismanagement of their military against the recent threat. The Host of Graves quickly and quietly departed the collapsing Tolwei Commonwealth and sold information to nearby rogue traders of an alien empire that was ripe for plunder in Wilderness Space. Over the decades, raids on Imperial trade lanes ceased and stories of rogue traders extracting riches from a dying xeno civilization evolved into myths of plundering the tombs of an effectively dead xeno civilization.
* **The Pakhendayl Purgation. M41**: Attentive to reports of an extragalactic xenos threat, and with their ancient vows to patrol the galactic rim in mind, the Dark Hosts rapidly redeployed their chapter from campaigns near the vicinity of the Ghoul Stars to the sectors around Ultramar to hunt splinters of the Tyranid Hive Fleet Behemoth. Initial successes soon revealed the depth of the Great Devourer's cunning as what should have been a routine purgation on the mining world of Pakhendayl turned into a disaster as the splinter fleet synapse creatures began to immitate and counter the specialized structure of the Dark Hosts. Fast and fleet predators overtook the riders of the Host of Gales, siege-beasts crushed the tank squadrons of the Host of Quakes, walking armouries of chitinous blades matched the champions of the Host of Slayers and similar developments began to emerge as Dark Host kill teams went from succeeding to suddenly failing in their objectives. As a matter of honour, and concern of the splinter fleet adding its adaptations to other surviving elements of Behemoth, the Dark Hosts committed to the planet in full force. The chapter reformed itself into combined arms strike forces made up of elements from each Host that often merged together as losses mounted. The campaign happening near the galactic rim was somewhat of a boon to the Dark Hosts, as a convoy to acquire neophytes to the chapter from designated recruitment worlds could be established. Equipment for the new recruits was often scavenged from the Dark Host's own fallen. Many neophytes even took up the names of the battle brothers they directly replaced in the ranks of the chapter. The war was drawn out into a thirty year long endeavor as the Dark Hosts hunted remnants of the splinter fleet from Pakhendayl across the local subsector. Even with the semi-regular replenishments from recruitment worlds assisting the chapter, the Dark Hosts' optimal strength of around a thousand at the beginning of the war had been reduced to less than four hundred astartes and the populace and infrastructure of Pakhendayl and several outposts had been rendered nil over the course of the campaign. Further campaigns against Tyrannic incursions in nearby subsectors were surrendered to local Astra Militarum regiments. The Dark Hosts spent the next few decades on patrol and skirmish missions to reduce casualties as their numbers and supplies were replenished.
* **The Salvation of Nirde. M41**: Elements of the Host of Gales had been shadowing a dormant splinter fleet of hive fleet Behemoth that had seemingly begun to move indicated by fluctuations of its shadow in the warp. Strange reports from Nirde, a nearby agri-world, caught the attention of the Master of Gales. The Seneschal of Gales was sent to personally oversee the issue and it was quickly discovered that genestealer cults were operating on the planet and drawing the dormant fleet in. This began a shadow war, as the Gales were wary of alerting the cults and accelerating their plans. The Host of Gales informed local planetary officials that they were on the planet to conduct training exercises and to look for potential recruits. The Seneschal of Gales played the part of the fool well, insisting to even worried Imperial citizens that the genestealer cults were relatively harmless members of militant gangs from the urban centers of the Nirde. Yet, every night, the Host of Gales took to the darkened fields on bikes and skimmers or to the streets on jump packs to hunt and root out the genestealer cults as quickly and thoroughly as possible. After a year and a half of operations, the splinter fleet returned to total dormancy as the last genestealer patriarch was slain by a skimmer-mounted plasma weapon.
* **The Mihcan Front. M41**: The appearance of Hive Fleet Kraken stoked a fire in the Masters of the Dark Hosts, a powerful foe returned to the fore and painful memories resurfaced with it. However, the Masters of the Host convened and realized their past strategy against a splinter of Behemoth would be futile, as the widespread nature of Kraken and its emergence from the beyond the galactic rim meant that many of the recruitment worlds of the Dark Hosts on the edges of the galaxy were certainly lost or at best inaccessible. Moreover, the grinding war of attrition on Pakhendayl had led to a costly victory and not an efficient one. A more thorough and conservative strategy had to be developed to counter the threat and ancient pride had to be set aside for duty to be upheld. The Dark Hosts estimated that tendrils of Hivefleet Kraken would fall upon the star system of Mihca and set themselves to work in the surrounding subsector. Fighter squadrons of the Host of Gales conducted anti-piracy missions while kill teams from the Host of Graves reduced the local populations of orks, the Host of Quakes broke prolonged sieges of rebelious governors while the Host of Tides provided troubleshooters for situations that expanded the scope of initial taskforces, and other such tasks were conducted by the Hosts. Deliberately, the Dark Hosts attempted to free up the resources and manpower of local Imperial forces. The Host of Ashes were critical in this venture, as information gathering and covert actions went a long way in influencing governors and administrators in diverting task forces to the region. When communications with Mihca were lost, the Dark Hosts knew their foe was upon them and sallied forth with a decent taskforce of the Imperial Navy and Astra Militarum assets to provide support. However, much of the reinforcements had been scattered by the shadow in the warp created by the Tyranid Hivemind. A battleplan intended to defend the five inhabited worlds of the Mihca system barely had enough manpower for four, but the Dark Hosts were quick to improvise their battleplans. While the other Hosts would commit themselves to the defence of the system, the Host of Slayers would conduct an aggressive protracted retreat on the hive world of Mihca Secundus alongside the local planetary defence forces. The Host of Graves would lead the defense of the mining world of Mihca Prime, the Host of Tides would drop down on the agricultural world of Mihca Tertium, the Host of Quakes would march on the refinery world of Mihca Quaternum, the Host of Gales would soar over the other naval yard world of Mihca Quinternium, and the Host of Ashes would divide itself to provide reconnaissance and information gathering elements for each force. The Astra Militarum regiments deployed alongside the Hosts had also been deployed based on how they contrasted with the Host they would be fighting alongside. Regiments famous for sentinel scouting units and skirmishers were assigned to the Host of Quakes, while tank regiments were assigned to the Host of Gales, line infantry regiments were assigned to the Host of Graves, and artillery regiments to the Host of Tides. For the first operations of the campaign, the Hosts deliberately kept themselves in reserve and avoided combat as Astra Militarum forces engaged the Tyranid invaders and the scouts of the Host of Ashes identified synapse creatures. This carried on for several months to allow the tyranids to adapt in a manner designed to rip apart the specialized Astra Militarum regiments, and thus leaving the elements of Hivefleet Kraken on each world vulnerable to the specialties of the Dark Hosts. Each respective Host would then emerge from the reserves and launch coordinated strikes deliberately aimed at killing as many synapse creatures as possible to force the armies of the Great Devourer into disarray. Then the tempo of the campaigns of each world would be reversed, with Astra Militarum forces held in reserve to recoup their losses as the Dark Hosts led the charge into the numberless Tyranid horde. As soon as the space marines of each Host saw their progress slow and setbacks emerge from the Tyranid strains designed to counter their tactics, they would redeploy back into reserve positions behind the Astra Militarum lines and allow the mortal warriors of the Imperium their chance at glory. Unfortunately, the Tyranid swarms were designed for even this punishing method of attritional warfare and eventually the Dark Hosts and their Astra Militarum allies would be slowly but surely withered to dust by the unrelenting ferocity and adaptability of the Tyranids. This brings the fate of the Mihcan Front to the campaign on Mihcan Secundus by the Host of Slayers. The Slayers struck out first from the fortified hive cities upon their land raiders to seek and destroy synapse creatures on the field identified by operatives of the Host of Ashes. However, this was not just to buy time for the hive cities to fortify but to create gaps in the horde to allow the Ashes operatives to poison the root systems of equatorial forests on the planet and the sections of ocean most rich with undersea life. The Host of Slayers were under no delusions when they landed on Mihca Secundus, the planet was doomed so it would be fashioned into a trap. Thousands of Tyranid warrior-strains were unleashed to consume the jungles, oceans, and most importantly teeming hive cities of Mihca Secundus; the Host of Slayers planned to bleed the Tyranids for each step of ground they took but to deny them their sustenance. As the Host of Slayers eventually gave up their aggressive actions outside the hive cities and began to reinforce the garrisons, the Host of Ashes set reactors to go critical and placed melta charges in hab blocks to maximize the vaporization of both Tyranid invader and the inhabitants within. The world and its billions of inhabitants would be martyred to bleed a single tendril of Hivefleet Kraken. The Host of Slayers fought a desperate defence to force the hive ships to commit as many bioforms as possible to the field, with their strike cruiser making daring low orbit runs to rapidly teleport terminator kill teams from defensive positions in one hive city to another. After several months of battle to goad the Tyranids into pouring millions of chitinous horrors to breach the walls of each hive city, the Host of Ashes were already gone with their trap completed and the cruiser of the Host of Slayers made one last charge down to the planet's atmosphere to teleport up the battle-worn survivors of the Slayers before the trap sprung. As entire cities erupted into flame and ruin, the Master of the Host of Slayers spared nary a thought for the masses he sacrificed, for the rest of the Great Devourer's beasts still remained to be fought and there was no time for sentimentality. As projections showed that the situation on the other four worlds of the Mihcan system would begin to sour, similar plans were enacted to deny the Tyranids any sustenance, biological or otherwise, as the Astra Militarum and the Dark Hosts conducted fighting retreats. In the end, the bleeding strategy worked as the Imperial Navy and orbital assets of the Dark Hosts took advantage of the semi-starved condition of the Tyranid hiveships and swept the system clean, but the Mihcan Front had been secured at the cost of the Mihcan system itself. To say nothing of the thousands of dormant Tyranid lifeforms slumbering beneath the surface of each barren world. Nevertheless, the Dark Hosts counted their bloody victory as a victory and one that conserved the strength of the chapter if at the expense of other imperial forces and citizenry. Posthumous commendations were issued to the fallen of the Astra Militarum and prayers to sacrificed worlds of the Imperium were issued, after such formalities were concluded in a satisfactory manner the Dark Hosts left the system to partake in the next campaign amongst the ever-widening frontline of wars against Hivefleet Kraken. Needless to say, the cost of human lives the Dark Hosts were willing to spend to halt the Tyrannic threat gave the chapter an ever-darker reputation than before to those who knew of them.
* **The Collpase At Eqrey. M41**: One of the splinter fleets of Hive Fleet Kraken made frightening headway at the system of Eqrey, destroying half of a sector fleet and seeing numerous regiments of the Astra Militarum utterly destroyed. The splinter fleet, gorged on the biomass of a rich star system and the vanquished armies and fleets of the Imperium, began attacking multiple star systems at once. The Dark Hosts responded quickly to stop the bleeding of Imperial forces and to stunt the splinter fleet's growth, dividing the chapter into dozens of strike forces to answer as many calls for aid as possible. The chapter was stretched paper thin, as each strikeforce was given a single sqaudron of astartes from each Host in order to cover as much ground while ensuring enough tactical flexibility to match the adaptive Tyranids. The Dark Hosts could not stem the tide as they hoped, multiple objectives were abandoned as soon as strike forces arrived on site to ascertain the situation. Forces sent to defend hive cities shifted to destroying them just as in the Mihcan Front to deny the Tyranids biomass, relieving military bases and production centers turned to delaying actions to allow the evacuation of as munitions and supplies offworld as possible to positions that had a chance of actually halting the Tyranid advance, multiple strike forces intended to assist Imperial forces in achieving decisive victories sold their lives in rearguard actions to allow naval and militarum elements to fall back and regroup. The Dark Hosts were again whittled down to half their number by the hordes of the Great Devourer just to blunt the momentum of a splinter fleet. While the frontline eventually stabilized and the splinter fleet was contained, in no small part thanks to the Dark Hosts, the chapter found itself humbled by this terrifying and relatively new foe. The Dark Hosts surrendered the responsibility of finishing off the contained splinter fleet to other chapters and sailed off to acquire more aspirants from their recruitment worlds to replenish their strength. The losses burdened solely by the Dark Hosts also had the unintended consequences of alleviating suspicions of heresy by observers aware of the chapter's actions during the Mihcan Front campaign, as their willingness to sell their own lives proved that their sacrifice of others was not out of self-interest but of a genuine desire to destroy the evils of the alien across the galaxy.
* **The Eriszche Incursion. M41**: While recovering their strength from multiple campaigns of varied success against Hivefleet Kraken, the Dark Hosts sought again to ingratiate themselves with the Adeptus Mechanicus once again to recover equipment losses in campaigns against the Tyranids. Responding to requests for aid from a research station on the ancient mining world of Eriszche, what was planned to be a simple evacuation escalated into a near untenable situation. Eriszche was a tomb world of the recently report Necron species of xeno. The Dark Hosts, both cautious from experiences with the equally recent Tyranid threat and eager to test themselves against a fresh alien threat, deployed the entire remnants of the chapter to the fore. Initially, the campaign was a series of skirmishes as the Dark Hosts in their depleted state avoided pitched battles and the Necrons had not awoken enough of their forces to storm the fortified research station supplemented with an astarted garrison. However, the chief researcher of the Adeptus Mechanicus on the site insisted that decades of critical information had been left behind enemy lines at an excavation site that was currently teeming with Necron forces. The Dark Hosts developed a quick strategy to lure the bulk of the Necrons away with a diversionary assault on a location giving off strong energy readings on auspex scans. It was figured it was a power source for vital tomb world systems and the Necrons would have to respond in force to secure it. Then a more swift and subtle strike force would break enemy lines and secure the Mechanicus data cores at the excavation site. The Hosts of Quakes and Graves would launch the diversionary assault to lure out the Necrons, with the Host of Slayers in held in reserve to reinforce them when the Necron response arrived, the Hosts of Ashes and Gales would lead the attack to secure the data cores, the Host of Tides would remain to defend the main research station against a possible Necron attack. The operation went awry when it was discovered that the power sources was a massive orbital defense weapon platform that cut off the Dark Hosts' escape from the planet. The Host of Slayers was immediately committed to ensure the seizure and disabling of the defense systems. Master of the Host of Graves insisted on completely destroying the platform, but the Master of Quakes and Slayers reasoned that keeping it partially intact would be the new lure for the Necrons to march out. The Hosts of Ashes and Gales saw little resistance as they thundered across the wastes to the excavation site, this was due to the Necrons deploying most of their forces to secure the orbital defense station but also because a large force had been sent to destroy the Mechanicus research station as the defense platform had been recently reactivated to cut off their escape. The Host of Tides held the station on their own, unable to hail for reinforcements as the Necrons began jamming communications. Relief came from the suspicion of the Master of Gales, who found the lack of resistance perturbing and peeled off a few sections of the Host of Gales to restore communications or at least get an eyes-on appraisal on what was going on. The skimmers of the Host of Gales gunned their engines as soon as they saw the besieged Host of Tides and launched hit and run attacks on the Necron rear. Meanwhile, the Hosts of Slayers, Quakes and Graves fought the personal retinue of the tomb world's Necron Lord from their own entrenched positions around the disabled defense station. The Master of Slayers personally dueled with the Necron Lord, but their bout proved inconclusive as the Necron Lord had used the duel as a ruse to triangulate multiple artillery batteries onto his own position as he activated the tomb world's teleport array to vacate himself before the weapons hit their mark. The Master of Slayers was almost slain if not for the timely intervention of the Seneschal of Slayers and Seneschal of Graves, the former protecting his Master behind his storm shield and the latter personally commanding hand-picked devastator squadrons in a counter-battery barrage onto the Necron artillery positions. The Host of Ashes with elements of the Host of Gales caught the miniscule Necron garrison around the excavation site unawares and rapidly withdrew with the retrieved the data cores before the tomb world's forces could muster a sufficient response. With the orbital defenses of the planet still down, and thoroughly destroyed by the Host of Graves with confirmation that the data cores had been secured, the Dark Hosts began to rapidly withdraw from their positions to pre-selected evacuation sites with Necron forces hot on their heels. The Dark Hosts had been bloodied by their first encounter with the Necrons and by all means Eriszche had fallen to the dreaded xeno, but valuable information for the Adeptus Mechanicus and subsequent equipment requisitions had been secured, the crippling of the tomb world's defenses that would take precious time for the Necrons to repair as the Imperium mustered a proper response was an unintended but welcome benefit of the campaign as well.

## Chapter Organization

On paper, the Dark Hosts are a *Codex*-complaint chapter. A force of 1,000 Astartes subdivided into ten companies each 100 strong. However, deviations begin to arise in equipment, training, doctrine, and details of organization. The Dark Hosts are, quite frankly, much more deviant than the standard chapters of the Unforgiven despite how much respect they supposedly give to the *Codex Astartes*.

The first and tenth companies of the Dark Hosts are the closest to the expectations of the *Codex*. The First Company is the Host of Slayers, modelled after the Deathwing of the Dark Angels Legion, specialized in heavy shock assaults and honour guard actions. The Tenth Company is the Host of Ashes, modelled after the Firewing, they are the chapter's sabotage and infiltration specialists as well as information gathering, most notably none of the Host of Ashes Astartes are recruits to the chapter but fully fledged transhuman warriors with specialized equipment to aid in their purpose as the dedicated covert operatives of the chapter. While still clearly deviant in many practices, these two Hosts still adhere to both the manpower limitations and battlefield roles expected of a proper First and Tenth Companies.

The battle and reserve companies are where the unorthodox tendencies of the Dark Hosts become more notable. Each designated battle company is also assigned a reserve company to support it. Each Host borne of these companies is made up of an officially designated battle and a reserve company combined into a force of 200 Astartes. The Host of Gales is made up of the Second and Sixth companies, experts in hit-and-run and flanking assaults that relied more on speed than firepower or armour. The Host of Tides is made up of the Third and Seventh companies, specialists in set-piece battles and the shifting and maneuvering of large combat formations. The Host of Quakes is made up of the Fourth and Eighth companies, adepts of siege warfare and heavily mechanized land-based warfare. The Host of Graves is made up of the Fifth and Ninth companies, masters of heavy and specialist weaponry leveraging firepower and lethality above all other martial virtues. The composition of each of these Hosts being officially two companies is usually only relevant when trying to ward off the eyes of the Inquisition and other watchdog organizations within the Imperium. For all practical intents and purposes, these Hosts' make-up of battle and reserve companies mean nothing in regards to their equipment, training, and combat doctrine.

The odd division of the Hosts into two bodies of 100 strong formations and four bodies of 200 strong formations is a mix of compromise to adhere to the *Codex Astartes* and recognizing the combat doctrines of the Hosts. Dividing the manpower of a pool of 1,000 warriors between six martial traditions in an equal fashion was impossible, as such it was decided that two Hosts would be issued a force of a single company while the rest would have the strength of two companies. The Hosts of Slayers and Ashes had battlefield roles and doctrines that demanded smaller and more flexible units meaning their need for manpower was less than the other four Hosts. Moreover, the Deathwing and Firewing of old were traditionally the smallest wings of the Hexagrammaton, it was seen appropriate for their successor Hosts to also be the smallest formations of the Chapter. This left a force of 800 Astartes to be divided among the four remaining hosts in formations of 200 each.

However, even this rule is not necessarily set in stone. Much of the might of the Hexagrammaton was due to the sheer volume of Astartes a legion could bring to bear into its myriad specialist formations. The power of the First Legion was in part due to how its multiple task forces could vary from a force of rapid-assault skirmishers aided by a small force of armoured warfare siege specialists and vice-versa to a myriad of other combinations to keep the field off balanced. It did not take long for the Dark Hosts to recognize that their reduced size meant that they could not afford to deploy such mixed task forces and expect the same affect. To make the chapter's capabilities more flexible and to simulate the modularity of the First Legion, it was decided that the six Hosts would be paired; the Host of Slayers with the Host of Ashes, the Host of Gales with the Host of Tides, and the Host of Quakes with the Host of Graves.

Each of these Hosts would share training regimens and equipment maintenance and usage drills in order to allow half of each Host capable of seamlessly joining the ranks of their paired battle-brothers. This sharing of experience and traditions also ensured that if a Host was ever destroyed, it could be restored with the knowledge and training shared with its peers. It was a controversial decision to say the least, as the secretive and insular nature of the Wings was a large part of the identity of the First Legion that the Dark Hosts intended to maintain, but it was seen as necessary to preserve what could be realistically maintained until the Lion returned to lead his sons.

The Host of Slayers and Host of Ashes were both the smallest Hosts and specialized in small-unit tactics and daring operations where a handful of warriors can match foes ten times their number, the difference was the ratio of boldness to subtlety between the two of them. The Host of Gales and Host of Tides both had doctrines that put great emphasis on maneuver and reading the flow of battle, the difference was only the pace of the flow and standard size of the units maneuvering through the battlefield. The Host of Quakes and Host of Graves both specialized in the utilization of mighty weapons and machinery, both were blunt instruments of annihilation with the core difference being the Quakes emphasis on durability and the Graves specialization on firepower.

Because of this, possible Chapter compositions when meeting the foe in battle could vary widely from the balanced force the Chapter usually maintains. For a campaign expected to involve several grueling sieges, the rapid maneuver forces of the Host of Gales would be greatly limited and could see half of their number lent over to the much more suited Host of Tides to lend greater fire support to the heavy guns and armoured forces of the Hosts of Graves and Quakes. Inversely, a campaign of hit-and-run operations to bleed an enemy across multiple battlefields would see the Host of Tides and Host of Slayers reduced in size to add more numbers to the Hosts of Gales and Ashes to increase the volume of their rapid assault and sabotage operations.

This of course leads to the unorthodox methods of the Chapter Armoury. As each of the Hosts not only requires specialized equipment to carry out their tasks, but also require large sums of said equipment given that a single Host could number between 100 to 300 Astartes in a given campaign. The work of maintaining and repairing the armaments of the chapter is seen as a duty that every battle-brother must take up in, not just the sanctioned tech-priests and serfs of the chapter, to a greater degree than most chapters in order to maintain their large stores of equipment. This is not to say that the Dark Hosts are anywhere near as capable with artifice as the scions of Vulkan or Ferrus Manus, but in terms of maintenance they are certainly experienced to the point of accusations of heresy from the Adeptus Mechanicus as many believe the tech-priests of the Dark Hosts have broken their vows of secrecy.

In truth, the Dark Hosts are wise enough to not strike the ire of the Adeptus Mechanicus any more than they have to and so the tech-priests of the Dark Hosts keep their vows of secrecy, whatever a standard Astartes of the Hosts has learned of technology they have learned by putting their own work into maintaining their own weaponry with the most complicated and challenging tasks assigned to the chapter's tech-priests. Since the most complicated and ancient technologies lie mostly in the hands of the Hosts of Quakes and Graves, most tech-priests come from these hosts although the others do provide their own share of tech-savvy Astartes due to maintaining their own sets of ancient wargear. Often, the strongest accusations of legion-building and suspicions of heresy stem from the unusually large stores of well-maintained equipment the Dark Hosts can bring to bear for a campaign. Accusations that hold some truth as often when liberating or aiding the defence of forge worlds or even industrial worlds, the Dark Hosts are prone to discreetly seizing materials and equipment relevant to maintaining their chapter armoury. As said, the Dark Hosts avoid the ire of Mars as much as they can, but only as much as is necessary.

The Dark Hosts' Librarius and Reclusiam are mostly orthodox according to the standards of the *Codex Astartes*, with slight adjustments to the training and purpose of librarians and chaplains in accordance to the structure of the Hosts. Librarians are each assigned to a particular Host based on their skills and temperament to be trained in using their power according to the methods and traditions of their respective Host, Chaplains are similarly assigned to Hosts according to their character but act as both disciplinary officers and the maintainers of said traditions within their respective Host.

The Apothecarion is the most *Codex*-compliant and orthodox element of the Dark Hosts chapter. Apothecaries are trained from and for each Host according to the Host's size. When Hosts change their unit composition for a particular campaign, battle-brothers shifting from one Host to another, the apothecaries are shifted in order to properly serve the wounded of the chapter. Beyond accommodating for the somewhat inconsistent composition of the Hosts, the apothecaries do not differ from their roles as dictated by the *Codex Astartes*. There are not many different ways a medic can perform their duties, so the Dark Hosts do not bother over-complicating the task.

The command echelon of the Dark Hosts is just as esoteric as the rest of the chapter's organization, but straightforward enough for easy understanding. Officially the Host is led by a Grandmaster, but the position is completely ceremonial as it has been absent since the chapter was founded, the rank of Grandmaster of the Dark Hosts is reserved for the Primarch Lion El'Jonson on the foretold day of his return. Practically speaking, the chapter is led by the Council of Masters, a body of six Astartes each elected into the office for life by each Host through unanimous vote. Masters are chosen from among the Hosts by demonstrating skill, cultivating battlefield experience, and embodying the virtues of their respective Host.

The Master of the Host of Slayers is ranked as the first among equals, but most strategies the chapter employs on campaign are discussed in advance by the Council of Masters as a group. The chapter as a whole has no Chief Librarian, no Master of the Forge, and no Reclusiarch; the Astartes that are members of the Librarius, Armoury, and Apothecarion are ultimately under the command of the Master of their Host and not a centralized body of leadership. To aid with the bureaucratic process of commanding frontline troops, logistical specialists, and morale officers; each Master appoints a Seneschal to act as their chief adviser and executive officer in commanding the Host. Seneschals also act as temporary leaders of a Host when a Master has died and a replacement has not yet been elected.

Sergeants are also elected from the members of their assigned squad, just as Masters are, but this is not as straightforward as it seems. The Astartes of the Dark Hosts are specialists in particular forms of warfare and are not as broad generalists as *Codex*-compliant chapters, but the battle-brothers of the Hosts are trained and expected to fulfill multiple roles within their specialization. Warriors of the Host of Quakes, for example, are all trained tank operators just as they are all trained in breacher assaults and in sapping enemy fortifications. A single Host can radically alter its composition by changing the equipment load-outs to meet the task at hand. To continue with the Host of Quakes for examples, defending a fortification would usually demand less in the deployment of tanks and more in the deployment of breacher squadrons and artillery pieces to hold the fortifications while attacking a fortification would usually demand more in tanks and armoured assaults to breach the enemy positions. Just as the chapter can adjust how much manpower is within a particular Host to modulate itself for the task at hand, each Host can radically alter its equipment load-out issued to each squad to similarly specialize itself for the task at hand. Because of this, each squad often elects multiple sergeants for different roles; an assault sergeant, a line sergeant, a tank sergeant, a battery sergeant, and such as.

Each Sergeant also chooses their own Corporal, similar in duty to a Master's Seneschal, to act as the Sergeant's chief adviser and executive officer as well as temporary leader upon the Sergeant's death. These roles are not exclusive to each other, however, and it is possible that a single member of a squadron can be nominated for several Sergeant and Corporal roles at the same time. Because of this complicated and somewhat over-specialized field officer corps, it is often tradition for a Master who was a Sergeant or Corporal of one particular battlefield role to select a Seneschal of the diametric opposite role from within the Host. If the Master in question garnered multiple of such ranks and titles, as many Masters have before taking their position, then it is best to pick a Seneschal from the role that contrasts the field of battle where the Master has most distinguished himself in.

There are also honorific titles given to Astartes of all ranks that denote accomplishments and experiences. Some of these titles are unique to a particular Host, such as Crownbreaker handed to members of the Host of Slayers that have killed a certain number of enemy champions in one-to-one combat. Other titles are universal to the Chapter, such as Beholder of Death handed to members of the chapter that have overseen the death of an entire civilization/species. These titles are not signifiers of rank, but they do entitle their bearers access to certain armories of specialized wargear and make them the first to be sought out by officers for advice in certain situations if not temporary command over a taskforce. In the Dark Hosts, heroic deeds are never rewarded with medals, but are much more tangibly recognized with greater tools to accomplish further acts of glory and responsibility to guide the chapter through the varied trials and tests of war.

It is the chapter's unity of purpose maintained by millennia of tradition and ceremony that has kept the Dark Hosts operating as a coherent fighting force despite the decentralized and byzantine command structure.

Then there is the matter of the Inner Circle and the hunting of the Fallen. The ceremonial title that marks an Astartes of the Dark Hosts as part of the Inner Circle is Keeper of Secrets. The Keepers of Secrets are spread evenly among all of the Hosts to ensure knowledge of the Fallen is kept alive while also making sure said knowledge is kept solely amongst the Keepers and not leaking out into the rest of the chapter. Whenever a new Master is voted into office, the Keepers induct him into their ranks and keep a close watch. Most of the time exceptional officers and soldiers, whoever has the potential of being chosen amongst their battle-brothers to be elected Masters, of the Dark Hosts are selected well in advance by the Keepers and begin their inductions well before they are voted into office, but exceptional situations have led to outsiders being given the role of Master and thus the Keepers must make do.

A number of promising Masters of the Hosts have suffered tragic accidents due to a perceived inability to maintain confidentiality and discretion. Because of the widespread presence of the Keepers of Secrets and a battle doctrine that emphasizes tactical flexibility, none of the particular Hosts are dedicated to the task of hunting the Fallen. Whenever the Dark Hosts join a hunt, only members of the Keepers of Secrets take up the task of slaying their traitorous kin while the rest of the Hosts continue their present campaigns.

### Elite Formations

Due to the uniquely divergent and specialized nature of the Dark Hosts, being that the entire self-appointed purpose of the Chapter is to retain the customs of one of the most complexly organized fighting forces within the Imperium's history; the Dark Hosts boast a myriad of specialized formations within the chapter. A point of strength in the eyes of the Dark Hosts, but a point of weakness to some critics, is that these elites can often find themselves in roles they are not best suited for due to the fluidity of their chapter's organization. As mighty as the chapter's elites may be the strength of the chapter as a whole always takes priority, but for what it is worth the Masters of the Hosts do try to keep their most veteran warriors in their elite roles as much as possible.

* **Shield-Companions**: The terminator veterans of the Host of Slayers. Centuries of combat and battle-honours have earned each Shield-Companion access to much of the chapter's relic wargear. Experts of heavy weaponry and combat within the bulky confines of tactical dreadnought armour, their experience in fighting dozens of terrors across the galaxy is the greatest asset of the Shield-Companions. Often, they are brought to a battlefield to act as advisers as much as to serve as elite heavy infantry.

* **Sword-Companions**: The mirror of the terminator veterans, the Sword-Companions are drawn from the veterans of the Host of Slayers' lighter armoured strike forces. Masters of the rapid assault and hand-to-hand combat, what they lack in raw firepower and durability is compensated for their superior speed and wisdom in the chaos of melee combat. If a position must be cleared of foes or an enemy champion must be slain, if the situation is do or die then the Sword-Companions are sent to do or die.

* **Eyes-In-The-Dark**: The infiltration veterans of the Host of Ashes. The Eyes-In-The-Dark are lone wolf warriors and consummate spies. They understand that a battle can be changed with a single well-placed shot over even just a single glance of key information. Highly independent and subtle, the Eyes-In-The-Dark are often sent well ahead of the rest of their chapter's main force to gather intelligence and weaken the enemy position. Ages of acting as spies and infiltrators have also made them adept hunters of their own kind of infiltrator-warrior, and their favoured way of preparing the ground for their battle-brothers is by hampering the enemy's ability to gather information and infiltrate the Dark Hosts. They are as their name describes them, the suppressed rifle in the shadows, the face behind every shoulder, the Eyes-In-The-Dark.

* **Self-Immolators**: A uniquely deadly position within the Host of Ashes and exceptionally rare one to witness. To explain, they are the result of a simple observation; half of the trouble in covert operations is getting an operator in and the other half is getting an operator out. So, what if the operator does not care if they get out? The Self-Immolators are suicide-saboteurs, veterans of the Host of Ashes who believe their death is long overdue. Equipped with as much expendable gear as possible, as they are not at all expected to return from their missions, and often given surgically-inserted explosive devices to ensure that their death lives up to their name and claims as many of the foe as possible in a fiery conflagration.

* **Gale-Knights**: The rapid-assault veterans of the Host of Gales. The Gale-Knights are perhaps the most flexible of the elite formations among the Dark Hosts in general as their experiences and equipment for lightening warfare apply to all of the possible roles of their Host. Whether fighting atop an attack bike, the cockpit of a strike fighter, or a jetpack mounted atop themselves; the principles of speed and rapid assault remains true in all its forms. Often, the Gale-Knights form the spear tip of their Host's breakthrough assaults, the vanguard of their hit-and-run skirmishes, and the rearguard of their rapid withdrawals.

* **Coriolis Officers**: The veteran line-officers of the Host of Tides. The title of Coriolis Officer can be achieved by any of the Host's line officers and specialists from Apothecaries to Chaplains and even Tech-Marines. This elite officer corps is the strength behind the battle lines of the Host of Tides; elite sergeants deftly commanding their troops through the chaotic shifts of battle, wizened apothecaries and chaplains reinforcing their minds and bodies to continue the fight, and ancient tech-marines maintaining their means to fight. A number of Coriolis Officers in the right places and right time can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

* **The Unbroken**: The veteran breacher-marines of the Host of Quakes. Often younger than the veterans of other Hosts due to the rigorous demands and lethal nature of combat expected of breacher squadrons. Able to maintain discipline and focus when under fire and suffering heavy casualties, the Unbroken are vital to the Host of Quakes role as the chapter's siege specialists. If a breach in enemy fortifications must be exploited, or if a breach in their own fortifications must be filled; the Unbroken are sent to the fore to make it so.

* **The Ironborne**: The veteran tank pilots of the Host of Quakes. The Ironborne are the product of hundreds of armoured warfare engagements from roles ranging from transporting breacher squadrons within a land raider, leading an armoured fist assault within a predator, breaching fortifications within a vindicator, and offering crucial fire support within a whirlwind or stalker. These Astartes have honed their vehicular skills to the point that they have installed cybernetics to allow themselves to integrate better with the systems of their mounts. Any armoured assault of the Host of Quakes is led by at least one of the Ironborne, even if the pilot is not the elected Sergeant or appointed Corporal of the squadron, so vaunted is their experience in battle and skill at arms.

* **Grave Keepers**: The veteran technicians of the Host of Graves. Vast and powerful is the full arsenal of the Host of Graves, as such the demand for capable tech-priests to maintain their weaponry is high and they are guarded jealously by their Host. This is easier said than done as the heavy guns of the Host of Graves are a priority target and their technicians just as much. This eventually breeds a unique type of tech-marine, warrior-savants who have survived many more incursions and hold much more experience in the maintenance of archaic weaponry than most tech-marines. These are the Grave Keepers, force multipliers and capable warriors both, able to find a place with rear echelon artillery just as much as among the troops of the battle line. Their presence and expertise are often vital for the success of the Host's many mobile gun-lines be they long-range batteries or close-fire support.

* **Grim Reapers**: The veteran sharpshooters of the Host of Graves. If it is a ranged weapon of the Adeptus Astartes, a Grim Reaper from the Host of Graves has grasped it. Experienced in ranged engagements from close combat firefights to battery fire on fortifications and armoured units, the pinpoint accuracy and steely nerves of the Grim Reapers have been honed gunning down every foe imaginable with every weapon imaginable. If the heavy guns must hit their target, if the gunline must halt the advance of the foe, if a great beast or shambling horde must all be slain from afar; the Grim Reapers are the guiding hand of the dreaded firepower of the Host of Graves.

### Order of Battle

#### Chapter Command

**Atraxer,**
***Master of the Host of Slayers***
**Byses,**
***Seneschal of the Host of Slayers***
**Chapter Champion**
**Shield-Companions (Honour Guard)**
**Command Squad: (Ancient, Keeper of Secrets, Chaplain, Lexicanium, Apothecary & Techmarine)**

**Atraxer, *Master of the Host of Slayers***
**Byses, *Seneschal of the Host of Slayers***
**Arius, *Master of the Host of Gales***
**Ahram, *Master of the Host of Tides***
**Erdashir, *Master of the Host of Quakes***
**Khus, *Master of the Host of Graves***
**Sog, *Master of the Host of Ashes***
**All Shield-Companions (Deathwing Knights Equivalent)**
**Librarians;**
**Lexicaniums, Codiciers & Epistolaries**
**Acolytum** | **Khus,**
***Warden of The High Halls***
**Administrative Support Staff**
**Support Personnel**
**Rycus,**
***Master of The High Halls***

**The *Master of The High Halls* serves as the Chapter's senior Techmarine; he is NOT a member of the Inner Circle because of his shared allegiance to the Adeptus Mechanicus.**

**Techmarines**
**Servitors**
**Predators**
**Vindicators**
**Whirlwinds**
**Land Raiders** | **Arius,**
***Master of the Fleet***
**1 Battle Barge (*The High Halls*)**
**1 Heavy Strike Cruiser (*Rhongomyniad*)**
**9 Strike Cruisers,**
**(*Grim Hurricane*, *Dread Typhoon*, *Sudden Drawback*, *Emerald Law*, *Marble Panoply*, *Granite Redoubt*, *Hungering Sepulcher*, *Endless Catacomb*, & *Krakatoa*)**
**30 Gladius-class Frigates**
**30 Hunter-class Destroyers**
**Apothecaries**
**Chaplains**
**Acolytum**

#### Hosts

Dark Hosts Chapter Command
50 Battleline Astartes
50 Close Support Astartes
50 Heavy Support Astartes
100 Heavy Support Astartes

## Chapter Combat Doctrine

The tactical doctrine of the Dark Hosts emphasizes flexibility attained by a variety of specialized formations, each Host specializing in a form of warfare that entire chapters dedicate themselves towards. Of course, the combat capabilities of the Dark Hosts are more complicated than this. As each Host is both expected to conduct campaigns on its own while also capable of working in tandem with each other when the need arises. To say nothing when the chapter divides itself into task forces containing the elements of several Hosts. This is due to the fact that each Host has its own fleet dedicated to transporting and supporting its warriors. Sometimes the chapter fleet travels as a whole, allowing the deployment of mixed formations, while other times the chapter fleet divides itself to cover more ground and respond more quickly to the shifts of eternal interstellar war.

Even when the chapter fleet is united or divided, certain battlefields or familiar foes might be considered better handled by a specialized force than a flexible one. If the chapter fleet is united, it will simply dispatch the Host that is considered most suited to the task. If the fleet is divided, then this tends to transpire when one Host considers a campaign or threat within their zone of operation to be better handled by the forces of another Host and will contact the Host in question to handle it. Often, this is answered by the requested Host and requesting Host switching forces around if not switching places entirely depending on the situation at hand. Put more simply, the Host in need will offer to handle another warzone in order to free up the Host that has been requested depending on the scale of the request. This incredibly unpredictable method of deployment is by intentional design to keep the Hosts self-sufficient and capable of cooperation, as well as making it difficult for the enemies of the Imperium to gauge the strength and capabilities of local Dark Hosts forces. As such, a thorough analysis of the combat doctrine of the Dark Hosts requires analysis of each of the Hosts and of the chapter as a whole.

A few commonalities with the Hosts ought to be established. Firstly, each Host is trained and expected to be able to operate on their own, but at the same time combined operations to take advantage of the specialties of several Hosts is also to be expected. This is to make sure the Host can cover large swathes of territory if need be and converge onto points of significant resistance with the might of the entire chapter or just handle unique missions that require the specialty of more than one Host. Secondly, each Host is somewhat of a microcosm of the chapter itself; each is capable of adjusting its unit composition thanks to large armories of weaponry and extensive training in their specialties of warfare. This is possible due to the fact that each Host specializes in a particular philosophy and approach to warfare, and that every Astartes takes part in the maintenance of weaponry and equipment within their respective Host. Meaning that the training is not as diverse as a standard *Codex*-compliant regimen and therefore leaves room to focus on all aspects of their particular specialty.

Often, most Hosts only train their Astartes in two to three ways of battle, which appears modest until one realizes there are six Hosts and therefore a total of twelve to eighteen total methods. The same applies to weapon maintenance, each Host has their own armories of specialized equipment that each Astartes and, most especially, their tech-priests can easily familiarize themselves with. Quantity of gear can be expanded without a severe loss in quality thanks to a combination of the usually large stores of weaponry that the chapters of the Unforgiven have access to in tandem with veterans who almost have as much experience maintaining their gear as they do utilizing it.

The Host of Slayers are experts of strategic decapitation strikes and actions often assigned to honour guard units. The Slayers dedicate themselves to the study of identifying key objectives, the infrastructure of enemy command and communications, and metaphorical centers of gravity. Their tacticians can find the single military action that will win a battle, can secure the one battle to turn the tide of a war. Theirs is the most direct and daring form of war, to find the heart of the enemy and pierce it in a single strike. This manifests in two methods, to take and hold a critical location or objective or to annihilate key enemy personnel and infrastructure. They also apply this philosophy defensively, a breach in the lines that must be plugged or a threadbare command structure that must be kept safe. To accomplish these tasks, the Host of Slayers manifest in two different forms; in one extreme the entire Host can deploy in tactical dreadnought armour and bring to bear the heaviest guns and armaments that an individual Astartes can carry and in the other extreme the Host goes to battle with relic storm shields and power weapons with or without jump packs to quickly and brutally engage with the foe in close quarters combat.

The former is utilized when taking and, more importantly, holding an objective is critical; the armour and ranged weaponry a dedicated terminator unit can bring to the field is a force few can match and ideal for a holding pattern. The latter is utilized when destruction of key personnel and equipment is prioritized as the greater maneuver of an Astartes not encumbered by heavier models of power armour is necessary for closing the gap with the target and a successful withdrawal from the field before the foe can react in force.

Needless to say, the Host of Slayers rarely deploys in such total extremes, its forces usually split into multiple forces given one of the two tasks as described and equipped accordingly. When the Host of Slayers commit to a warfront, it is both a stubborn bulwark and a flurry of blades that falls where it is most needed in the conflict. Terminator squadrons seize key locations and weather all counter-attacks through sheer armour and firepower, while more nimble strike forces attack key supply depots and command centers to metaphorically and literally slice the tendons of the enemy force. This is not to say that the Slayers terminator squadrons are incapable of more assault-oriented deployments or that their strike teams are not handed defensive tasks under unique situations, adaptability and unpredictably is key to all warfare, but these are their preferred utilization according to their doctrine.

The mobility required for their daring assaults and defenses are ensured by a combination of teleportation technology and, in scenarios where teleport methods are denied, land raiders and other heavy transports deliver the Host of Slayers to their objectives in a manner that emphasizes their own shock and awe affect. While every other Host, even the Hosts of Graves and Quakes, utilize a finesse to their actions, the Slayers are as blunt and direct as their namesake. If a line must be held, they will find where it can be held and hold it. If a line must be broken, they will find where it can be broken and break it. They turn the chaos of war into a simple matter and that is their greatest weakness and their greatest strength; they will accomplish their task or die trying, but they will savage their foes tenfold in the dying.

The Host of Gales is speed and maneuver incarnate, constant hit-and-run attacks that screen and lay the ground for sudden and brutal rapid assaults are their way of making war. The Host can either deploy as a force mounted entirely upon bikes and land speeders or fill the skies with roar of jump packs and any composition between the two. Depending on how lethargic the enemy is, the Gales can be the most unpredictable Host of the six as their emphasis on speed combined with a slow opponent can lead to the deploying the entire Host in one composition and then falling back and returning equipped in a different composition entirely before the enemy can properly react. A campaign of hit-and-run strikes mounted upon biked and speeders, followed up by a hammer-blow of assault marine formations just when the enemy has spread out their forces to counter the bike and speeder squadrons.

An enemy line retreating from the weight of over a hundred assault marines turned into a bloody rout as bikes and speeders lead a pursuit. Moreover, the Host uniquely deploys space-capable fighter-craft piloted by Astartes, allowing the Gales to respond to enemy counter-attacks or begin one of their own offensives with rapid and precise firepower delivery. The Host of Gales prefers multiple coordinated assaults into the soft positions of the enemy or a single concentrated thrust through a gap in the enemy lines into the heart of the enemy, both would be conducted after a thorough operation of probing attacks to find the soft points and gaps in the line. Either method has the same objective, to cut off and encircle the foe with hunter-killer squadrons of fast-attack units conducting constant and rapid assaults on combat and logistical elements of the enemy. Maneuver and daring are the core methods on how the Host of Gales overcomes its lack of armour and firepower compared to other Hosts and speed is a weapon that can take many forms.

The Host of Tides are the generalists among specialists, their preferred way of war is mass infantry formations working in harmonious tandem to accomplish a singular goal. Their campaigns tend to be the longest, marching from battle to battle and slowly adapting to the subtle shifts of attritional warfare. Their armory is the most varied, but not capable of the intensity of their specialized counter-parts. They cannot field an entire Host of assault marines or devastator marines or deploy all of their forces atop bikes or within tanks, they do not have access to vast stores unique equipment to deploy archaic units such as breacher marines or terminators. What they do have is access to a broad variety of tools that each Host finds itself lacking due to their specialized natures. The standard formation of the Host of Tides is a hundred battle-brothers equipped as *Codex*-standard tactical marines while supported by fifty standard assault marines and fifty standard devastator marines.

The Tides are capable of adjusting themselves according to the needs of the campaign, usually after the first few enemy engagements. The officers of the Host of Tides believe it most prudent to start specializing a force after contact is made with the enemy and reacting accordingly to the situation as it presents itself on the field. At the most extreme, the supporting elements can shift into a force of a hundred assault marines or a hundred devastator marines, but the core of a hundred tactical marines can never be changed due to equipment and doctrinal limitations; in fact, the number of tactical squadrons can even be expanded if the leaders of the Host deem it necessary. While this may seem counterintuitive to the flexibility of the Host of Tides, it is important to remember that their doctrine believes in flexibility rooted in a strong foundation.

The Tides tactical squadrons are the most hardened of the Dark Hosts and provide the moving bulwark of firing lines from which the assault and devastator squadrons either leap or fire over. In similar method as certain other Hosts, the Host of Tides can deploy its devastator marines within tanks and artillery vehicles and assault marines can mount bikes and speeders. Victory is often won by the specialized supporting elements of the Host of Tides, similarly to how victory is won for the chapter by the more specialized Hosts. However, defeat is staved off by the firm battleline of the flexible tactical squadrons, just as how many potential defeats the chapter has faced have been warded off by the generalist but dependable tactics of the Host of Tides as a whole.

The Host of Quakes put their stock in durability and armour, mechanized infantry formations backed up by large contingents of tanks weathering volleys of enemy fire to smash through battle lines through sheer inertia and mass. As is standard among the Hosts, the Quakes can equip its forces along two extremes; all of its battle-brothers can take the field in breacher assault squadrons riding rhino transports mixed with the occasional land raider or all of their Astartes can mount the seats of tanks and mobile artillery and gun platforms. Either option is a sea of steel that races towards the foe upon treads and engines to engage the enemy with either massed infantry firepower or massed tank guns. The preferred battles and targets of the Host of Quakes are the centers of greatest resistance or the least resistance, fortresses that never fall or the elite vanguard of the enemy force are just as likely to suffer their wrath as much as vulnerable outposts of supplies and communications or the least trained and tested of the enemy ranks.

The Quakes unique combination of mobility and firepower affords them the ability to choose their battles and to discard finesse whenever they fit to shatter the enemy in a grueling and drawn-out battle. Because of this, the Host of Quakes is the least likely to deploy the Host in either of its potential extremes, usually its commanders try to balance their manpower between a tank force with a strong infantry contingent and its infantry forces with large tank formations. This is due to the fact that the battles either force is uniquely designed for still heavily benefit from the presence of the other. The heavy mechanized infantry of the Host of Quakes is best for storming enemy positions and fortifications or inversely defending locations of critical importance, but the firepower leveraged from tank formations is key to suppressing enemy gun positions and supporting the infantry when on the attack or defence.

Similarly, the battlefield is not lacking an anti-tank weaponry and the infantry detachments are important for screening enemy forces before the tanks and intercepting flanking attacks. The commitment to mobile firepower and armour is enhanced by the Host's ability to deploy a quarter of its manpower, 50 Astartes total, mounted atop razorback transports, which can enhance a taskforce with a balance of siege infantry and vehicular mounted firepower whenever such a balance needs to be struck. Even more so, another quarter of the Host can deploy as codex-standard devastator squadrons to offer infantry-based fire support in unique situations where tanks would be unwieldy or exposed, usually in very prolonged siege situations or dense combat environments. The Host of Quakes is a blunt and obvious weapon, but not one that lacks finesse.

Often, they begin their wars with a bleeding campaign, utilizing their mobility and armour to storm outposts and wipe out small detachments of the foe to strain supplies and manpower until the enemy is forced to commit to a decisive battle against the Host of Quakes in either a siege or a set-piece engagement. Then the Host of Quakes throw their lives to the Emperor and either break their enemy upon the field or break themselves in the effort, but nevertheless there is something to be said in how the Quakes can force their enemies to fight in their preferred way of war and can adapt to all of the idiosyncrasies of armoured and siege warfare with a flexibility that seems unlikely with the sheer bluntness of their method of warfare.

The Host of Graves are committed to solving every possible battlefield challenge with the same answer, their sword and their shield is firepower. To the Host of Graves, there are only two matters to solve within any and all battlefields: getting their heaviest guns into position and protecting the position their heaviest guns have taken up. As such, the Host deploys their Astartes to fulfill one of two broad roles; heavy weapons operation to eliminate targets or enact area denial and close fire support to screen enemy forces as the heavy weapons move from position to position as well as interdict enemy forces closing in on heavy weapon positions. One might call the Host of Graves a formation of tactical and devastator marines, which is what they are officially listed as, but this would be misleading, possibly deliberately so. The tactical squadrons of the Graves have a higher ratio of special weapons and combi-weapons to standard bolters compared to codex standard tactical squadrons, allowing them to punch above their standard weight with a higher volume of specialized firepower to counter hostile forces.

The devastator squadrons of the Host are possibly even more egregious, closer resembling the heavy support squadrons of the Great Crusade, all members of a Graves devastator squadron, even the sergeant, bring heavy weapons to the field of battle. The entire Host can field all of its manpower as devastator marines brandishing the heaviest armaments a space marine can carry, if it desired to do so. However, this is unlikely as the reason the Host can deploy such volumes of heavy weaponry is because of its dedicated close support formations. In addition, the Host of Graves can deploy limited amount of assault marines uniquely equipped with heavy wargear to hold especially dangerous enemy formations in place until the heavy weapons can change targets or relocate to a superior position.

The Host also fields a number of light vehicles for the close fire support formations and heavy vehicles, including the chapter's only formations of super-heavy vehicles, for the heavy weapon formations. The Host also contains a number of rhino and razorback transports, to enhance the mobility of infantry formations. An old proverb says that a competent commander demands more in maneuver than in slaughter, but the Host of Graves believes that the concept of intersecting lanes of fire prove that maneuver best enables slaughter. It is rare for the Host of Graves to concentrate their firepower in a single location, mass firing lines and overwhelming thrusts are, respectively, more the domain of the Hosts of Tides and Quakes. The full might of the Host of Graves is only mustered into a single engagement for decisive battles or the destruction of absolutely critical objectives and assets.

Mostly, the Graves tend to divide themselves into multiple task forces to accomplish different objectives at once. A force of predator tanks supported by land speeders to raid enemy outposts, devastators and tactical squadrons mounted on rhinos and razorbacks sent to blunt a mechanized thrust from the foe, superheavy tanks deployed alongside heavy assault marines to search and destroy hostile superheavies. The idea is to bleed the enemy in as many places as possible to keep their forces off balance, as well as to probe the enemy and evaluate in what methods of war they are strongest or weakest at. Once a weakness is identified or at least a pattern is established that can be answered by an appropriate load-out of weaponry, the Host of Graves will specialize their task forces to exploit the vulnerability and continue their multi-pronged assaults at hostile positions and counter-attacks when viable upon enemy thrusts.

The Host of Graves are not a force for defensive deployments and rely upon ambushes, hit-and-run attacks through long range weaponry, and counter-attacks to halt an enemy offensive. If a problem exists, the Host of Graves believe there is a gun that can solve it, from flamer to lascannon to accelerator cannon, and all warfare is simply maneuvering the correct weapons to the correct positions to annihilate the enemy. In a way, their philosophy is a reflection of the chapter as a whole, that every tool of war has a role to fulfill and this role is measured by the destructive capability of the tool in question.

The Host of Ashes are the advocates of stealth and small unit operations within the chapter. While the rest of the Hosts have complicated and comprehensive armouries to facilitate a broad range of specialized load-outs, the Host of Ashes have simple equipment lists for their Astartes; power armour, carapace armour, or neither. The scouts of the Host of Ashes are not fledging Astartes who cannot equip full power armour, the Ashes simply adhere to a doctrine of stealth above all and their warriors are not unwilling to shed armour and firepower to ensure a successful infiltration. The Host of Ashes also have a higher volume and quantity of information gathering and communications equipment to find targets and coordinate dozens of units across large areas, as well as tools that can sabotage these technologies to hide themselves and effectively mute their targets. The Host of Ashes have no vehicles either, at most they utilize dropships or drop pods to deploy their units planet side, but once on the ground the Host prefers the lack of attention vehicular units can bring upon themselves.

The Ashes deploy their Astartes ranging from five-operative teams bedecked with power armour, long ranged weaponry, and extensive communications and information equipment to solo operatives with nothing but a signal jammer, cameleoline cloak, and a combat dagger. The Ashes prioritize infiltration and stealth, their battles are fought where the enemy least expects a battle in the first place, where the Host of Ashes lack of armour and firepower is evened out by the lack of armour and firepower the enemy itself can bring to bear in the ground the Ashes have picked. Their objectives are either to bleed the enemy of its capabilities by targeting infrastructure for command and logistics or decapitation strikes of the enemy command staff itself. When on the defensive, their methods are scorched earth tactics to deny the enemy any material gains and setting up traps where their operatives can effectively withdraw into the shadows after engaging the foe.

The Host of Ashes can cover more ground than arguably any other Host, despite their size, simply because of their emphasis on small unit tactics above all; the Ashes never muster upon a single battlefield unless the entire chapter is present. The Host of Ashes is also the only Host that widely utilizes solo operatives, each Astartes trained to either operate as a light kill-team of five battle-brothers at most to survival and combat as a single warrior behind enemy lines. As such, their lightly equipped forces can be a struggle to contain or destroy for vastly materially superior forces, as each operative needs to be rooted out and eliminated in order for the constant ambushes and sabotage to cease. The Ashes lack the firepower and durability and speed to destroy their foes in pitched battle, but their techniques and tactics focus on exhausting forces many times more capable of raw destruction than their own through dozens or even hundreds of smaller engagements that slowly but surely bleed the foe of their capabilities to maneuver, coordinate, and fight effectively. A rarity among the Dark Hosts and even other chapters, the Host of Ashes specialize in all the ways to quietly and slowly destroy an entire army without fighting the army itself.

While no single Host could ever hope to match any equivalent space marine chapter in said chapter's realm of expertise, the Hosts combined gave the chapter as a whole a pool of specialists for a multitude of scenarios. When deemed necessary the chapter unites two or more Hosts in a campaign of combined operations, other times the chapter scatters the Hosts to respond to multiple situations that each Host is uniquely designed to handle. Rather than sending their own specialists to challenge an enemy in the fields of combat they are strongest in, the Hosts that best exploit the enemy's weaknesses would be sent in to keep the foe off balance. At best, the Dark Hosts would meet the foe on their own terms as a feint or as a means to lure and lock them into place for the true killing blow. If there was anything that succinctly described the tactics of the Dark Hosts it was none of these successors of the Dark Angels believe in the concept of a fair fight on the battlefield level and that all battles are ultimately decided by choosing the correct tools for the job and applying the most apt tactics.
In this, however, a core operational-strategic doctrine can be found outside of the disorienting myriad of tactics the chapter employs. Information gathering and misdirection are the core of any campaign led by the Dark Hosts, many operations are focused on false targets to draw the enemy away and set the conditions for achieving the true objective of a campaign. All Hosts have the training and tactics to set up ambushes and rapid assaults in their own unique ways, in conjunction with feint and diversionary attack tactics to push or pull an enemy force into a trap or away from where they should be. While some Hosts are more gifted in these ways of war than others, misdirection and ambush are the ideal methods and conditions each Host strives for. Camouflage patterns recommended by the *Codex Astartes* are utilized by all Hosts regardless of how subtle or unsubtle their methods with other techniques such as using epoxy to attach local foliage and smearing the dirt or sand of the combat area onto their armour.

Information gathering technologies and jamming technologies are in high quantities among each of the Hosts to accurately determine the strength of the enemy while hiding their own. The chapter's tendencies to disperse and muster its fleet as it crusades from sector to sector across the galactic rim is intended to make their strategic disposition and tactical doctrines difficult to ascertain by any and all potential foes. The overly complicated system of ranks and organization within the chapter and each Host provided with the equipment and training to radically adjust the composition of their forces aids in this strategy of obfuscation. As is the character of the paranoid and shadowed warriors of the Unforgiven, the Dark Hosts favoured armaments are secrecy and surprise.

The specialized nature of many Primaris formations have melded nicely with the specialized nature of the individual Hosts and combined arms approach of the Dark Hosts chapter as a whole. While none of their Primaris Marines have reached veteran status, the chapter has been quick to train and bloody the recruits on the battlefield under the steady watch of veteran units. Several firstborn officers of the chapter have crossed the Rubicon Primaris to offer more direct leadership and guidance to the new blood of the chapter.

## Chapter Gene-Seed

As with most if not all successors of the Dark Angels, the gene-seed of Lion El'Jonson is a reliable stock with no noticeable mutations. It stands to reason that, given the chapter has not withered into oblivion from the attrition of their constant crusades, the Dark Hosts have maintained their chapter's geneseed to a high degree of quantity and quality. However, due to the circumstances of constant crusading far away from contact with the Imperium, the chapter has been inconsistent at producing their geneseed tithes in regular intervals. Because of this, suspicions have arisen that the geneseed of the Dark Hosts may be lacking compared to most of the Unforgiven. Some even saying the chapter's deviant behaviour reinforces this assertion.

The leadership of the Dark Hosts have vehemently denied this, citing the tithes they have managed to send being of quality stock and that the chapter would have died out ages ago without prioritizing the preservation of their geneseed to create replacement Astartes in the aftermath of costly campaigns.

### Primarch's Curse: Dark Nature

Although only the Keepers of Secrets are aware of the awful truth of the Dark Angels' past, even those newly recruited are possessed of a secretive, even introverted nature. The idea that outsiders are not to be trusted is drilled into the recruits from an early stage, and they are tested continuously to ensure their compliance until it becomes second nature. After all, a brother who cannot be entirely trusted to keep the Chapter's secrets is unlikely to advance through its ranks. Although the Dark Hosts have fought beside all of the branches of the Imperium's vast military machine, they prefer to stand beside other Space Marines. Many, even brother Astartes, find the Dark Hosts aloof and uncommunicative. The Dark Hosts, for their part are impatient and unforgiving with strangers who pry into their affairs. In truth, the astartes of the Hosts who are aware of the existence of the Fallen are ever watchful for any sign of their activity and will abandon whatever mission they are conducting should they gain any clue that one is nearby.

The Dark Hosts are also notoriously intolerant of non-humans, given that they believe it is the duty of the sons of El'Jonson to cleanse the galaxy of the xeno menace, and will often refuse to fight alongside armies that include abhuman warriors or alien races. They are highly suspicious of outsiders to the chapter and often appear unreasonably aloof and intransigent. Their tendency to take up solitary crusades against xenos forces well beyond their scope have won them glorious victories and brought them ignominious defeats, both often earned far from the eyes of their potential allies.

## Chapter Recruitment and Training

The Dark Hosts are a fleet-based chapter with no dedicated home world, instead recruiting potential aspirants from a myriad of worlds in regions of space where they have been given writs. However, there are customs and patterns in their methods of recruitment and training. The Dark Hosts recruit exclusively from Death Worlds, where the human populace struggles against both the geography and ecology of the planet. If the world in question is a new addition to their usual recruitment worlds, the Dark Hosts will take the time to teach the populace methods of hunting and combat as well as establishing institutions similar to orders of knights-errant that dedicate their lives to hunting the beasts of their world. When this induction period is finished, or if the world is already a developed recruitment world of the Dark Hosts, a Great Hunt is organized where the Dark Hosts gather all of the able-bodied and willing boys on the planet to march into the wilds and slay monsters. The Dark Hosts look for many virtues in their potential aspirants, from tactical cunning and wisdom to strength and courage to survival and persistence and many other factors including the discretion of the astartes witnessing the hunt. Such varied recruits are needed for a chapter that divides itself into Hosts dedicated to several specialized forms of warfare.

Some have noted the obvious desire to replicate the environmental conditions of Caliban and the Dark Hosts do not entirely deny this, believing that if the traditions of the Hexagrammaton are to be maintained then the uniquely chivalrous and hostile environment of Caliban ought to be replicated. Others have noted that many of these worlds the Dark Hosts draw recruits from are consistently close to Fringe Space or Wilderness Space, the Dark Hosts say this is because they crusade in these regions often and prioritize claiming recruiting worlds close by for efficient reinforcement. However, a theory proposed by some is that the Dark Hosts take hostile flora and fauna from across the galaxy and transplant the invasive species onto feral and feudal worlds under their writ of recruitment. The Dark Hosts deny this level of interference, but there is credit to the theory; the Dark Hosts have found a surprisingly high volume of death worlds to supply the recruits for their constant campaigns and many even within the Unforgiven have critiqued their obsession with reliving the glory days of the Legion and Caliban. They do have the methods and the motive to radically alter the lives of human societies if it was for the sake of their eternal crusade.

This can be seen in how the chapter quite literally commits all of its dreadnaughts to the effort. In order to maintain the institutions and traditions of the chivalric hunters the Dark Hosts establish on their recruiting worlds, they will send a single dreadnaught into the main keep of the knightly order of the planet to act as a voice of ancient wisdom and tradition. They also act as planetary guardians if anyone should dare attack the chapter's recruitment worlds. Many of these dreadnaughts die in their station, as so much can go wrong over a period of millennia, but they often live long enough to establish a centuries long tradition in the cultures of the worlds they mentor and protect. Because of the sheer volume of recruitment worlds in question and how dreadnaughts fall to disrepair, madness, or even death in battle to protect the planet; the Dark Hosts virtually have no dreadnaughts because all of the chapter's fallen warriors are committed to this cause.

After recruitment, aspirants go through multiple training regimens to find which Host the recruit should be committed to. This involves multiple combat rituals, such as dueling a member from each of the six Hosts to directly gauge the aspirant's combat capabilities, and the discretion of the aspirants' mentors, often said mentors are the astartes they dueled against. Some members of the Dark Hosts have defined themselves less as capable warriors or commanders and more as capable teachers that find and train promising recruits for their respective Hosts. If an aspirant cannot find any place in the Hosts, but not for lack of potential or will, or if geneseed implementation goes awry, then they are made a chapter serf. Failure on a more catastrophic level can result in transformation into a servitor.

Just as important as the combat regimens, the aspirants are also plunged into the history, doctrine, and culture of the chapter. Several initiation ceremonies are conducted to familiarize the aspirants with the lifestyle and philosophy of their chapter and respective Host, a taste of the more complete rituals and traditions when they become full astartes. When their training begins as fresh recruits, the aspirants are each given a new name to begin divesting themselves of their identity from their home world, they are angels of the Dark Hosts now and forever. This may seem like sophistry and drama, but the decentralized nature of the Hosts requires a strong sense of unified purpose and identity that must be strongly rooted into the aspirants. It is the bonds of duty and brotherhood that turn what would be a disorganized rabble of contradicting battle philosophies into a cohesive fighting force capable of challenging all comers.

## Chapter Culture

The culture of the Dark Hosts has been shaped by their self-imposed duty to maintain the traditions of the Hexagrammaton while adapting to the realities of a dark galaxy that creates ever more horrors to combat. To them, war is both an eternal duty to annihilate the enemies of mankind and an endless lesson to become more efficient destroyers of the Emperor's foes. Recruits are drawn from a myriad of recruitment worlds, then they are tested and examined by representatives of each Host and inducted accordingly to where they are best suited. As such, the character of each individual astartes can vary from the particular Host they were inducted into, but there are general traits universal to the chapter as a whole.

It would be bold to say that any of the Unforgiven are more comfortable with secrecy compared to their peers, but the astartes of the Dark Hosts are proud of their inscrutable nature. They hold few commendations from the Imperium and yet their records claim scores of victories and vanquished threats that no one else can remotely attest to. Even on a personal level, many battle-brothers, if they can, will attempt their most heroic deeds in a manner that few need to witness. For the sake of record keeping, these astartes tattoo their deeds onto their flesh to protect it behind their armour, to only be recorded in the chapter's archives after they are dead. One could very well argue that the chapter has an aversion towards praise, as if a single compliment would sully the honour of duty fulfilled. This has resulted in the chapter having an intense aversion towards allies, even being cold and overly formal towards fellow Unforgiven. This culture has also made the chapter very self-sufficient, with a long history on acting independently in all manners of campaigns, but also prone to biting off much more than any single chapter can chew.

The Chapter believes, above all, in the return of the Lion. That the Dark Angels will be reunited as a Legion and the Dark Hosts preservation of the traditions and knowledge of the Hexagrammaton will be key in the restoration of the Legion's might. This is not to say they wage war miserly, fighting only to preserve the knowledge of the Legion. Quite the opposite, even. The First were the testbed for all of the others that came after, the First were mighty because they tested and proved new tactics that have since become standard methodology. If the knowledge of the Dark Hosts is to retain any value it must be tested again and again in the crucible of war. The Dark Hosts believe that with the knowledge and experience they add to the traditions of the Hexagrammaton, the Dark Angels Legion that arises with the return of the Lion will be even stronger than before. Just as the Lion reforged the vainglorious and faltering First Legion into the silent annihilators that was the Dark Angels Legion, then the third iteration of the Legion will be all the stronger with the wisdom of over ten millennia of war. This results in a bellicose attitude spread across the chapter, that the enemies of mankind must be annihilated by their hand and that each astartes must test themselves and the strength of the chapter to be worthy of the Lion's legacy and future.

The Dark Hosts also count themselves among the Unforgiven, Dark Angel successors that are aware of the Betrayal at Caliban and the existence of the Fallen. The Dark Hosts believe in redeeming their legacy as much as any other scion of the Lion, but the Dark Hosts believe that redemption can be found in fulfilling the role of the Legion as the Lion intended. To unrelentingly fight and destroy the worst enemies of mankind in the darkness, to commit themselves to merciless battle on the edges of the Emperor's light without even the promise of recognition for the deed. For these reasons, the Dark Hosts prioritize their unending Crusade along the edges of the galaxy and against the greatest of xenos and traitor forces within the galaxy over hunts against the Fallen. This is not to say the Dark Hosts have not assisted their sibling chapters in pursuing the Fallen, but they have refused requests for aid more often than not to focus on their Crusades.

As such, the Dark Hosts have a reputation for being more reliable to outsiders and unreliable to the rest of the Unforgiven. That is not to say that the Dark Hosts have not garnered any suspicions from outsiders or have not demonstrated loyalty to the cause in the hunt for the Fallen. The Dark Hosts understand the need for redemption and do not hold their brothers of the Unforgiven in any contempt for their uncompromising campaign against those who betrayed the Emperor and the Lion. In fact, the positive reputation the Dark Hosts have garnered is even utilized by the Inner Circle to entrust the Dark Hosts with some of the more unscrupulous tasks of the Hunt. Many prying eyes have been eased by the proven record of the Dark Hosts and the supposedly strained relationship between them and their siblings, eyes that have often received a bolter round to the back of their skulls when their guard is dropped.

The Dark Hosts also engage in a tradition of brotherhood exclusively with their siblings among the Unforgiven; when chapters of the Unforgiven are encountered, the Dark Hosts' Inner Circle will invite representatives of their sibling's Inner Circle into the High Halls, specifically its ancient databanks. There, information on tactics and strategies used to defeat the especially exotic and dangerous xeno threats encountered in their campaigns will be shared. Representatives are also encouraged to share similar tactics and strategies to the databanks of the High Halls, as the Dark Hosts hold no presumptions of superiority over their fellow Unforgiven. The Dark Hosts believe that the Unforgiven as a whole must maintain up to date institutional knowledge on the xeno threat to uphold their legacy as the dread exterminators. This ritual is kept as secret as possible from outsiders, often conducted at the end of campaigns and several lightyears away from the warzone, to prevent prying eyes from even a hint of access to such knowledge; such is the nature of the Unforgiven.

Their last major divergence from the rest of the Unforgiven is a complete lack of Interrogator-Chaplains. Believing that their chaplains are best committed to maintaining the discipline and traditions of the Hosts above all other matters, the Dark Hosts do not provide the training or equipment necessary to utilize any such specialists as Interrogators. This is not to say the Dark Hosts do not take prisoners from the Fallen, but most are handed over to other chapters of the Unforgiven if not sent directly to The Rock itself for proper processing. However, the taking of prisoners is only done purely for information gathering, members of the Fallen who do not seem to be promising sources of information are summarily executed. Some may believe this is a form of mercy, but it is important to remember that in the eyes of the Unforgiven the Dark Hosts are denying the Fallen the chance for any atonement for their sins. The Lion was never known for offering quarter to traitors and the Dark Hosts believe that any Fallen that cannot contribute to the hunt should be done away with as soon as possible before they stain the honour of the First anymore with their prolonged existence. To the Dark Hosts, the Hunt for the Fallen is a military campaign to be waged with the silent and ruthless efficiency that is used when exterminating any other alien and traitorous threat.

Beyond these unique traits, the beliefs of the Dark Hosts are standard for most Astartes. They do not adhere to the Imperial Cult and uphold the Imperial Truth of old, admiring the Emperor as an exceptional mortal and reflecting on his great deeds as the accomplishments of a great man. Similar recognition is granted to Lion El'Jonson and even the other Primarchs that remained loyal to the Imperium. What is often misinterpreted as worship of the Lion is simply recognition that the Dark Hosts are his scions and share his nature and purpose to hunt and annihilate the direst of the Emperor's enemies. That the way the Lion waged war, the way the Lion lived, is simply the way best suited for his sons. Hence why the Dark Hosts dedicate so much effort to maintaining the old ways of the Dark Angels Legion from the Great Crusade and believe in laying the foundations for the true restoration of the First Legion when the Lion returns. It is not religious fervor, in their eyes, it is simply recognition and adherence to their true nature.

The Dark Hosts adhere to monastic lifestyles similar to most of the Unforgiven, meditating on the principles of their chapter and constantly training their minds and bodies for battle. Studying and training both as individual warriors and as a collective formation, a balance between the glory of each soldier and the eternal legacy of the group is emphasized in their philosophy. Each Astartes makes their mark on the Dark Hosts, but the Hosts themselves will live on when each Astartes dies. Eternal wars can only be fought by eternal things, and despite everything a single astarte is not eternal. Most uniquely is a tradition similar to the Guardians of the Covenant chapter, where the chapter will assemble and each member is allowed to discuss and critique how the Dark Hosts have maintained the traditions of the Legion and how effective the traditions have been. Ways to alter the traditions in accordance to the needs of the present in a way that maintains the spirit of the old legion are the main point of such discussions. It is, in other words, a discussion and study of military theories old and new mixed with strategic analysis of the current state of the galaxy to sharpen the minds and methods of the chapter. The tradition is born of an understanding that battle is not the only way to keep the blades of the Hosts sharp, and given their tendency for long expeditions across the void to face possibly unknown foes, such a tradition is necessary to keep the chapter from being caught flat-footed. As with most Astartes, if it can be said there is anything they truly worship, it is the concept of making war that the Dark Hosts focus every fiber of their being towards.

The practice and refinement of war being the foundation of their being, the type of war each astartes of the Hosts dedicates themselves towards has a significant impact on their individual character. In fact, the attitude and preferences of an aspirant plays a considerable part when assigning a new recruit to a Host. The Host of Slayers encourage a heroic character, even amongst astartes, for their role is to be the hardened elite of the chapter and the destroyers of the greatest the foe can muster and as such the Slayers must be greater in action and character. The Host of Gales draws in the most curious and deviant of the chapter, speed is the weapon of the Gales and daring guile compliments their way of war. The Host of Tides suits the most patient of the aspirants, the combat pace of the Tides is as slow and deliberate as their namesake, dealing with ponderous battle-lines in comprehensive set-piece battles; in such matters a patient or impatient officer is the difference between life and death. The Host of Quakes prefers the calm and humble, siege and mechanical warfare is a brutal calculus more than any other style of warfare where every battle-brother must accept their place as a cog in a great and indomitable machine. The Host of Graves is both praised and derided as a gathering of unscrupulous murderers, their style of war is dedicated to the application of pure firepower and their tactics put no limits on where or what or who to apply their weapons in destroying the enemies of mankind. The Host of Ashes naturally breeds the most quiet and introspective of the Hosts, their astartes will spend their lives fighting alone surrounded by foes and that is most likely how they will die, it is best to utilize warriors whose favoured companions are loneliness and whose preferred music is silence.

## Notable Members

* **Atraxer, Master of the Host of Slayers**: The first among equals. Atraxer was born amidst the jungles of Tonlayca IV, where hyper-wasps darted amongst the branches and burrow-maws hid amidst the foliage. Years of surviving in such a world of cunning beasts taught Atraxer the importance of patience and forethought, but the boy had a taste for martyrdom when he leapt upon the back of a raging bear-boar and pulled on its ears to drive it off a cliff. It was to save some children of his tribe, cornered in a cave by the beast. Fortunately for Atraxer, the Dark Hosts had arrived to organize a Great Hunt to find worthy aspirants from his world and the apothecaries managed to save his life. Initially, he was considered for the Host of Ashes for the ambush tactics used to hunt the beasts of his world, but then he sparred with the astarte from the Host of Slayers and allowed the Slayer to run him through in order to stick a bone knife between the ribs of his opponent. Again, Atraxer was saved by the apothecarion and found himself chosen for his act of sacrifice. It was always believed that Atraxer would die in a blaze of glory, but Atraxer had learned an important lesson in his two acts of sacrifice, that his battle-brothers would save him every time. It was Atraxer that led the daring raid on the fuel depots of the Tyrant of Iyabonen that saw the literal fuel of the chaos lord's war machine turned to flame, but it was his brothers that dragged his burned body out. It was Atraxer that slew Warboss Stah-Eata' and disabled the shields of his fortress for the heavy guns to lay waste to the Ork horde, but it was the Shield-Companions that cleaved through the remnants of the Warboss's honour guard. It was Atraxer that led the vanguard on the cleansing of Thorok Secundus of the Tyranid infestation, but it was the reserve that secured the victory scouring the hapless beasts right after Atraxer decapitated the hive tyrant. Atraxer was crowned Master of the Host of Slayers, but he knows it was his battle-brothers that bestowed the title upon him. While his pride in his Host and Chapter have led Atraxer and his forces into many unwinnable situations, it is his trust in his brothers that have turned most of those situations into winnable ones. His bold and creative tactics and stratagems embody the spirit of his Host, he will steal victory from the jaws of defeat or he will savage the beast as it devours him.
* **Byses, Seneschal of the Host of Slayers**: The guardian who has often outlived what he protects. Byses was born amidst the sun-scorched wastes of Siarepy, a mineral rich world where nothing could survive on the radioactive and rocky surface so everything alive went underground. Human and beast. Byses was the sole survivor of his people, found alone covered in blood in the tunnels by miners. What slew his kin and community, Byses will not say and Emperor-willing he will never say. Whatever it was, the boy sought security in strength and power, become a hunter-guardian within the tunnels of his adoptive community. When the Dark Hosts arrived, he was considered a natural for the Host of Slayers, he was a dependable rock that many of his people relied upon; his mentors believed that he would naturally find his place amongst the Shield-Companions one day. They were too right. Byses has served as the Seneschal for three different Masters of the Host of Slayers, twice he has been credited for saving the Host in the midst of tragic defeats but for Byses he has thrice failed in his duty. When Master Avalock perished in the volcanic hells of Galqwola, it was Byses that dragged the sacred arms and armour of the Master and his fellow Sword-Companions from being looted by the foul traitors as he coordinated the Host's withdrawal. When Master Vaisun was ambushed on Nrol VII, it was Byses that gunned down the Drukhari that slew him and tied their flayed bodies atop the highest mountain. One day, Atraxer will fall, and Byses prudent wisdom and stoicism will save the Host of Slayers yet again, and Byses will have failed in his charge a fourth time. A conventional and cautious commander, Byses has rarely led his Host or Chapter to glorious victories, but he has led both through the fires and lashings of a dozen defeats. To survive and endure is his blessing and his curse, creating a figure who is beloved by many around him but one with a cold and fatalistic personality.
* **Arius, Master of the Host of Gales**: The powerful and glory-hungry mind behind the Host of Gales. Arius was born amidst the ashen wastes of Marvusia, where giant insects strode the lands filtering sustenance from the soot and human tribes survived off of the meat and carapaces of the great and armoured beasts. Arius was far from the strongest or bravest fighter amongst his people, but Arius would say his people were far from the strongest or bravest fighters on the planet. Arius was gifted with astute vision and a mind that wandered and wondered how the world looked from the eyes of his quarry. Arius would lead the hunters of his band, separate the weakest filter-feeders from their herds to be encircled and slain, drive the strongest into traps, and he always knew when and where to dive into the fray and deliver the killing blow himself. It was thought that his penchant for planning would suit him for the Hosts of Tides or Quakes, but there was a profound thirst for glory behind Arius's calculations and methodology. As such, after years of training, trials and observation from the Hosts, Arius was made an astartes of the Host of Gales. Arius is one of the few highly regarded members of the Host of Gales, the Hosts in general, that did not officially acquire any rank of veterancy or excellency; Arius has yet to be named a Gale-Knight as he has not accrued even half of the titles and honours to be considered for the rank. Arius never defined himself as a warrior, but he most certainly defined himself as a leader as his squadron elected him to the position of sergeant in several roles. After proving to be the deciding factor of several campaigns by how deftly he commanded his squadron, Arius was chosen to be the Master of the Host of Gales after his predecessor's death. Arius leads his Host similarly to how he led his tribesmen and squadron, his greatest skills being in finding the weakness to almost any enemy formation and deferring the job of dismantling it to his most able-bodied subordinates. While Arius has been critiqued for sacrificing some of the best of the Host to attain victories, his strategies have won the Host many victories despite the cost.
* **Bardi, Seneschal of the Host of Gales**: The bold and glory-hungry face at the fore of the Host of Gales. Bardi was born on one of the six inhabited moons of Jupiturn, where high mountains and strong winds resulted in beasts that dominated the skies and hardy sky-hunters that slew them. Arius was both beloved by his peers and scolded by his elders for an attitude that believed he could accomplish anything. Beloved because he was among the few of his tribe that could wear a necklace of cloud-crocodile teeth, hunted down by his daring exploits. Scolded because his refusal to let anything escape him had cost the tribe more than a few hunting gliders, twice he had wedged his wings into the narrows of a canyon just to catch an elusive mud-eagle. Even the Dark Hosts recruitment officers were unsure of the boy, as he brought back one last cloud-crocodile and a destroyed glider from the Great Hunt organized by the chapter. However, he proved himself worthy to the Host of Gales during his trials as an aspirant and soon found himself among the Gale-Knights for his daring raid tactics. However, many were surprised when Arius named Bardi as his Seneschal, most of all Bardi; the daredevil was considered a poor choice for a right-hand commander of the Host. All became clear as Arius sought to use Bardi not as his adviser or tactician, but as his champion; whenever Arius oversaw his battle plans, he would choose Bardi to spearhead whatever he saw as most critical part of the operation. It is a role that has suited Bardi well, from punching holes through the enemy line atop a speeder to carrying out search and destroy missions in the seat of a fightercraft; Arius devises the strategy and Bardi wins the glory, a relationship that has suited both fine. Many fear that this will kill Bardi long before it kills Arius, as the Host of Gale's greatest pilot returns with the trophies of enemy aces and commanders mounted atop his own horribly damaged mechanical steeds without a hint of caution or prudence learned from the experience; the tacticians of the Gales begin to echo those of Bardi's tribal elders. Bardi, for what it is worth, would not want it any other way. This is how he lived as both a mortal boy and immortal astarte, he would hate to die any other way.
* **Ahram, Master of the Host of Tides**: The sergeant at the helm of a Host. Ahram was born on the ocean world of Lantis Major, where great whales feasted on the flesh of all who trespassed on their aquatic demesnes and the seas themselves were prone to devouring any land-walker that trespassed in whirlpools and waterspouts. Ahram was not one of the hunters, but simply a travelling merchant who crossed the treacherous seas to deliver dyed textiles to one tribe and cured meats to the other. It was during one of the Great Hunts of the Dark Hosts that Ahram was hired to sail a boat of young hunters, potential recruits to the chapter, to one of the pods of carnivorous whales. Foolishly assuming the Dark Hosts would safeguard their travels, Ahram took the job thinking it would be easy. The hunt was a disaster, the seas were unusually treacherous, the whales more numerous and aggressive than they should have been; many boats were sucked or smashed under the seas, except for the vessel captained by Ahram. That day, Ahram was asked by a towering warrior clad in midnight armour which of the hunters proved the most able crewmen of the ship, when Ahram named eight boys he found great skill and strength in, he and those eight boys were inducted into the Dark Hosts. Ahram's humble beginnings had many predict a role in the Host of Quakes, but Ahram's patience to understand the seas he sailed upon was a textbook example of the virtues the Host of Tides sought in its astartes. Ahram spent centuries as an assault and line sergeant among the Tides, content in leading his squadron through the chaos of war time and again. Ahram did not realize he had become the oldest member of his chapter not entombed in a dreadnought until he was chosen by his brothers to be their Master of the Host of Tides. Ahram leads his Host the same way he led those lost and screaming boys on the high seas of the Great Hunt almost millennia ago, prioritizing the survival of his men and the discipline and control of his ranks. Ahram fights wars slowly, some would say even more slowly than the siege masters of the Quakes, but what he lacks in initiative he makes up for in wise deliberation and a talent for unravelling traps and ambushes. With such a penchant for survival, it appears to many that Ahram may remain the eldest of the chapter's leaders for quite some time to come.
* **Ongima, Seneschal of the Host of Tides**: The corporal at the side of every soldier. Onigma was born on the ocean world of Lantis Major, just as the Master of his Host, but on an island almost on the opposite side of the planet as his future commander. Onigma hunted for dire-oysters, their toxic barbs and hardened shells bellying sweet meat and great pearls for those bold or foolish to try and take them. Onigma was recruited into the Great Hunt and he distinguished himself enough to be recruited into the Dark Hosts. Onigma's life as an astartes was not the stuff of legend, but at the very least it was prophetic. Onigma served as the corporal to his future Master of the Host in their squadron and even served as the squadron heavy support corporal; Onigma was never the leader but the ideal follower, the reason Ahram never noticed his age being due to his slightly younger and most reliable second always being by his side. It was likely for these reasons that Onigma rejected the usual tradition of appointing a diametrically opposed sergeant and named Onigma his Seneschal. Initially critiqued as an act of nepotism, Onigma proved himself on a number of campaigns as an ideal Seneschal, never the commander of troops but always the enforcer of his Master's will. If a line needed reforming, Onigma would reform it. If an assault needed to be conducted, Onigma would conduct it. If heavy support needed triangulation, Onigma would triangulate it. Onigma was never the hand that led his warriors, but guided his charges according to the will of the Master of the Host of Tides. An unimaginative and even more ponderous commander than his Master, Onigma is an organizational genius capable of recognizing the strengths of those under his command and applying their skills to where they would be best; poor at taking the initiative, but indispensable in reacting to enemy thrusts. It is believed that Onigma's destiny is tied to that of Ahram, for their years of combined service and complimentary skills have led some to refer to them both as a singular entity and few could imagine one without the other.
* **Erdashir, Master of the Host of Quakes**: The unbreakable keystone. Born on the glacial wastes of Antar Minoris, Erdashir took part in the intricately organized hunts to slay the ice-devils that burrowed vast and winding nests into the ice. Erdashir was taught and drilled by his tribesmen into a tradition of combined arms and interdependence, as the ferocious ice-devils could only be held by contingents of men with heavily reinforced hide shields and small phalanxes of bone-tipped spears carried by others behind them. Erdashir developed a habit of internally mapping the complex nests of his quarry to the point that he found patterns in the design. Erdashir's contingent proved themselves the most able when the Dark Hosts arrived for recruits. Erdashir was expected to become an aspirant of the Host of Quakes and he did not surprise anyone when the results of his combat trials and further tests saw him inducted into that indomitable Host. Erdashir soon developed a habit of constantly volunteering for the vanguard of many sieges, although this was done not out of a desire for glory or a product of bravery, but a sense of genuine curiosity towards the craft of siege making that drove Erdashir to seek out the most visceral experiences of it. Each fortress was akin to the nests of the ice-devils he hunted ages ago, a curious puzzle to be solved and dismantled. Erdashir found himself easily amongst the ranks of the Unbroken and became treasured as their most vaunted sapper and siege sergeant. After the sudden death of their Master and Seneschal in a brutal siege turned into an ambush, Erdashir took command and organized a withdrawal and successful counter-attack. For this, Erdashir was voted in the aftermath to become the Master of the Host of Quakes. A siege commander above all, Erdashir commits himself fully to what he has specialized, both an expert on conventional siege methods and a capable innovator in dismantling fortified positions, but somewhat direct and uninspired in maneuver warfare and anything outside of set piece line breaking engagements. Thankfully, Erdashir is not above open and constant deference towards the officers under his command and granting large degrees of autonomy to them, making his Host a meticulously planned machine when operating under his specialty and an unpredictable and divergent weapon when outside of his preferred theatres of war. In this, Erdashir is a commander who can grip the reigns too tightly and too loosely depending on the situation at hand, but overall demonstrates great skill and self-awareness.
* **Ochses, Seneschal of the Host of Quakes**: The fiery hammer of the chapter. Ochses was born on the ever-shifting glass fields of the volcanic world of Eapheskon, he learned that to stand still was simply a slow way to die as his tribe was destroyed by a combination of volcanic eruptions and Eapheskoni hell-hounds constantly ambushing the survivors. Ochses soon formed a hunting band of similar orphans and swept the volcanic fields of monsters out of vengeance and spite towards their harsh homeworld. The Dark Hosts arrived and saw the similarities to stories of the Lion to be a great omen, a Great Hunt was not even called, instead this ramshackle tribe of orphans led by Ochses was inducted into the chapter. Initially seen as a worthy aspirant for the Host of Ashes or Host of Gales for his scouring of so many ambush-based predators, this relentless aggression was soon cultivated into a talent for the high speed and raw destruction found in armoured combat amongst the Host of Quakes. While Ochses rose the ranks of experience and honours quickly, becoming one of the youngest Ironborne within the history of the Host, his career as an officer languished as a squadron corporal in tank detachments, but the life of a frontline soldier was what suited Ochses best. During the same disaster that established Erdashir as the Host's new Master, Ochses's sergeant was killed and so he finally applied his centuries of experience as a tank operator to commanding his battle-brothers, coordinating hit-and-run attacks with multiple armoured squadrons amidst the chaos and even luring the enemy into traps with feints, false retreats, and finally multiple flanking interdictions. Despite a clash of personalities between the scholarly and calculating Erdashir and the practical and fast-paced Ochses, Ochses had proven himself a reliable second during the disaster and was appointed Erdashir's Seneschal of the Host of Quakes. Ochses is an advocate of small unit tactics, unusual amongst the Host of Quakes, preferring to hit his foes in as many positions as possible in assaults that range from highly coordinate and planned from the top down to assigning subordinates objectives and granting high amounts of autonomy. Ochses tendency to use armoured squadrons in such an aggressive manner has often led him to overstretch, but thankfully for the chapter Ochses is not above declaring an all-out retreat from a seemingly lost cause even if it does earn him scorn from the more bellicose of his peers. At times Ochses can be over-combative over the stratagems and tactics of his Master Erdashir, but Erdashir appreciates a second in command eager to lead and keeps him on his toes.
* **Khus, Master of the Host of Graves**: The instructor of destroyers. Khus was born on Babaran, a world that has since been lost to chaos and subject to exterminatus to spare others its fate. The records on what Khus did to earn the position of aspirant is unknown and Khus has tattooed the deed on his body for the archives after he dies and not before. What is known is that he was seen as a natural fit for the Host of Graves as an aspirant and that is all anyone is willing to say. Fitting, as Khus has few notable accomplishments in the field of battle, his greatest achievements on the battlefield being voted the rank of sergeant for his squadron in their battery configurations, but otherwise the astarte blended into the background of his Host in the field of battle. Khus's true achievements was his tutelage of the most formidable warriors of his Host when they were aspirants, the greatest soldiers and commanders of the Host of Graves' recent memory were guided into their roles as annihilators of mankind's enemies by Khus. Khus became the Master of the Host of Graves because all of the warriors that outshined him had their fires stoked by his hand and they each made the case to elect their mentor before their Host. Quiet and reserved, many outside the Host of Graves view Khus as the hand that pulls back the reigns of his savage dogs, but those that are wise know Khus is the one who reared his Host into what it is now. Proud of his students and familiar with all of their capabilities, Khus's only role as the Master of the Host of Graves is to outline what must be protected at all costs and what must never fall into the hands of the enemy, then he defers command to the subordinates he believes best suited to carry out the task at hand and lets his warriors do what they see best. In this, Khus is more of a handler than true battle commander, but his is proud of his charges and one would be foolish to underestimate his ability to always find the right man for any job. Battle-brothers have found themselves raised to sergeants and nameless men champions of the chapter because of Khus's ability to see in others what most cannot. Ever the wise teacher, Khus has set himself towards training and tutoring a number of officers to reign in their destructive tendences and view the bigger picture, for Khus knows above all the fickle nature of fate and the shadow of death hanging over all; one day Khus will die and someone will have to take his place as the Master of the Host of Graves, if only to protect the Imperium and the honour of the chapter from the most ferocious warriors of the Dark Hosts.
* **Vairoe, Seneschal of the Host of Graves**: The grinning reaper. Vairoe was not born on Riak Tertius, but the ship that carried his family and community of merchants crashed on it. Vairoe learned to survive amidst the toxic geysers and swarms of piranha-mosquitos where everyone else either died in the crash or to the predations of their harsh new world. When the Dark Hosts arrived, Vairoe knew that these strange visitors were astartes and realized the Great Hunt was a test for aspirants. Desperate to escape, Vairoe used his limited understanding of technology from an origin aboard a spacecraft and the lessons of stealth taught to him by years of survival to steal a land speeder and used the weapon to kill as many beasts as he could during the Great Hunt before the Dark Hosts caught him. Several battle-brothers wanted the boy dead, doubly so when learning he was not a native of the world and thus poor stock compared to generations of feral survivalists. Yet, as many contemporaries within the Host of Graves can attest, Khus intervened. Khus saw in the boy a determination to survive and a ruthless ambition to get what he wanted at all costs, a perfect candidate for the Graves. Vairoe became an aspirant, then a fully-fledged battle-brother, and then a legend-nightmare amongst his peers. The boy had a talent for understanding machinery, some believing he would be a future tech-marine, and a particular curiosity to figure out how things broke apart, which saw his potential as an adept of Mars go up in flames. A veteran of the Grim Reapers, Vairoe was elected as Sergeant of his Squadron in all configurations due to his preternatural talent for the application of destruction. Rockslides to bury enemy tanks, blasting fields into cratered wastes for cover, forest fires to burn out guerilla agents; Vairoe was both creative in how he could solve almost any problem his squad faced and simple in that the solution always involved maximum collateral damage. The shining star of Khus's pupils, Vairoe was seen as a natural pick for Seneschal of the Host of Graves. Vairoe is less of a commander or adviser as much as he is a weapon to unleash, Khus only seeking out his Seneschal for when the situation becomes dire and giving him full command of the Host. A brilliant and unpredictable commander, Vairoe is credited with slaying some of the greatest enemies of the chapter, but his enthusiastic application of force has also credited Vairoe with some of the chapter's most dubious incidents of damage to the Imperium itself. Some amongst the Host of Graves boast and caution that Vairoe could vanquish any of the Imperium's enemies, but he would destroy half of the Imperium to do it. However, Vairoe now lives in an era where half of the Imperium has been engulfed in darkness and he believes it would take a great conflagration to burn away the terrors that have taken root in it. Vairoe sees a future where the Dark Hosts have turned all of Imperium Nihilus to ashes, and he revels in the thought of how many foes such an act would slay.
* **Sog, Master of the Host of Ashes**: The cunning rogue. Sog scavenged amidst the scalding deserts of Cadera, surviving sand-krakens and sandstorms of razors, the young boy had a talent for escape and detecting threats over the horizon or under the sand. Sog's first and last mistake was being found by the Dark Hosts and thrust into a Great Hunt when the fleet arrived to Cadera amidst their crusades. Sog survived the hunt, slew a dust-shark, and tried to escape before the astartes dragged him onto their transports and took him to The High Halls. Sog constantly tried to escape the ship, constantly tried to hide in the nooks and crannies of the ancient battle barge, but this only made the Dark Hosts hold onto him more tightly. Sog was a natural choice for the esteemed and dreaded Host of Ashes as, every now and then, if only for a minute or two, a mere aspirant escaped the watch of full astartes. Sog might have seen himself executed for treason when his implementations were finished, but his first combat saw him witness the cruelty of a warband of traitor astartes. The sadism of the warp-touched beasts awoke something in Sog, that the Dark Hosts taking him into the Great Hunt and forcefully inducting him into the chapter all made sense in the face of such primeval evil. When the warband leader broadcast the grisly execution of a planetary governor and peeled off the mortal man's face with glee in an effort to stoke terror upon his foes, Sog broadcast his own transmission and proceeded to calmly cut off his own face and dared the warlord to come and take it. Since then, Sog has been called 'the faceless one' for his ability to blend into his surroundings and his genuine lack of a face, he served for decades among the Eyes-In-The-Dark. When Sog was chosen to become the Master of the Host of Ashes, he took to the role stoically and unphased, as if he never was the boy who kicked and screamed to escape the Dark Hosts. Not exactly a dedicated tactician or planner, Sog leads his Host from the field, taking the most dangerous missions personally and reacting to the situation according to his instincts. While this marks Sog as a somewhat lacking commander compared to most of his peers, his presence on the battlefield is a force multiplier as his legend inspires his warriors to feats of bravery and cunning and his hands-on approach gives him an intimate familiarity to the battlefields he steps foot upon as well as centuries of direct experience and wisdom to draw upon.
* **Dianus, Seneschal of the Host of Ashes**: The Master's shadow. Dianus was simply the boy who maintained the weapons of his tribe's warriors amidst the treacherous mountains and cliffs of Ertaig VI, where an axe and sword needed to be kept as sharp and sturdy as possible when facing the stoneback gorillas and other lithoidic creatures that climbed the rocks. Dianus followed the warriors into the Great Hunt simply to pass extra weapons to his comrades in case their current armaments broke upon their durable foes. Dianus was separated, chased by a silverhawk for a night and a day, and ensnared the beast in a makeshift net before rolling a boulder over it. That was how Dianus was brought into the Dark Hosts, as ignominious the accomplishment felt for the boy who thought himself only worthy of preparing weapons for better men and failed at doing exactly that in his accidental participation in the hunt. Dianus's fascination with weaponry had him initially considered for the Host of Graves or Host of Quakes, but a quiet nature and quick wit saw him brought into the Host of Ashes. There Dianus's understanding of the subtleties of warfare flourished, just as his tribe's warriors needed fresh axes to hunt, modern armies needed fuel and ammunition to fight, functioning communications and clear chains of command. Dianus never cared for combat or even assassination, always preferring the indirect methods of sabotage and misinformation whenever possible. It was Dianus's proudest moment when he tricked two hostile artillery batteries to fire upon each other by severing their communications and fostering paranoia and animosity amongst the ranks. Dianus's preference for such methods made him the perfect counter-weight to the bloodied assassin that was Sog and so he was named Seneschal of the Host of Ashes. Dianus is in many ways the true commander of the Ashes, as Sog takes to the field and commands only the most vital operations, Dianus remains in the rear echelon and takes the reigns of all supporting actions for Sog's campaigns. While Dianus's preference for very indirect methods of warfare marks him as the most creative and unpredictable of a Host and chapter full of innovative officers, Dianus is also the most prone to over thinking the situation and prolonging operations that could be easily solved through direct methods. Nevertheless, Dianus is the quiet workhorse behind his Host's many victories, and he prefers his deeds remain forever unsung and unnoticed, by both friend and foe alike.

## Chapter Fleet

The fleet of the Dark Hosts is both awe inspiring and macabre. It is a vast armada built up over the ages to provide the Dark Hosts with the necessary ability to attain orbital dominance or at the very least orbital parity in order to conduct their planet-side campaigns. However, it is not unblemished. Many of the ships are covered in layers of impromptu refits and adjustments, only the deepest and most reinforced sections of their capital ships retain their original and unblemished designs. While the oldest of their escort craft are practically different ships from the original vessels that stalked the stars with the Dark Host's first crusade.

The fleet operates in a peculiar matter. As the Dark Hosts move from sub-sector to sub-sector on their eternal crusades, the fleet will divide itself into six forces each dominated by the personnel of a particular host in one sub-sector and will reorganize and move as a united fleet in the next. This is to encourage the Hosts to keep their forces capable of combined arms and independent operations. Although, in the chapter's long and bloodied history, there are well over a hundred recorded exceptions to this rule depending on extreme situations. However, this creates a slight issue in the protection of the chapter's single battle barge and fortress monastery, the High Halls. When the fleet is united, the High Halls is kept in the center as it has been slowly converted into a grand logistics vessel to supply the equipment needs of the chapter. When the fleet is divided, the Hosts will compare proven void combat records in the last ten sub-sectors and send the High Halls under the protection of the Host with the most impressive record in recent memory, recent for the Dark Hosts at least.

* ***The High Halls* (Battle Barge)**: De facto mobile fortress-monastery. Not dedicated to a single Host, the ship is not intended for combat but instead serves as a training and logistics support craft for the chapter as a whole.
* ***Rhongomyniad* (Heavy Strike Cruiser)**: Assigned to the Host of Slayers. Customized for teleportation strikes and naval combat.
* ***Grim Hurricane* (Strike Cruiser)**: Assigned to the Host of Gales. Hangars expanded in exchange for less gun batteries.
* ***Dread Typhoon* (Strike Cruiser)**: Assigned to the Host of Gales. Hangars expanded in exchange for less gun batteries.
* ***Sudden Drawback* (Strike Cruiser)**: Assigned to the Host of Tides.
* ***Emerald Law* (Strike Cruiser)**: Assigned to the Host of Tides.
* ***Marble Panoply* (Strike Cruiser)**: Assigned to the Host of Quakes. Armour reinforced and short-range batteries increased for broadside combat.
* ***Granite Redoubt* (Strike Cruiser)**: Assigned to the Host of Quakes. Armour reinforced and short-range batteries increased for broadside combat.
* ***Hungering Sepulcher* (Strike Cruiser)**: Assigned to the Host of Graves. Orbital bombardment capabilities expanded.
* ***Endless Catacomb* (Strike Cruiser)**: Assigned to the Host of Graves. Orbital bombardment capabilities expanded.
* ***Krakatoa* (Strike Cruiser)**: Assigned to the Host of Ashes. Engines modified for speed and stealth.
* **Gladius Frigate x30**: Dedicated escort ships, 5 assigned to each Host when the chapter divides its forces.
* **Hunter Destroyer X30**: Dedicated escort ships, 5 assigned to each Host when the chapter divides its forces.
* **Nova Frigate x30**: Dedicated escort ships, 5 assigned to each Host when the chapter divides its forces.

## Chapter Relics

The Dark Hosts have few relics, and those they do have are rarely combat oriented. This fact offers significant evidence that the Dark Hosts may not be as ancient as they claim to be. The chapter's leadership has defended this lacking element of their armouries on the sheer attritional cost of their campaigns combined with the sheer volume of equipment demanded by their battle doctrine and organization. The chapter records, allegedly, list many relics wielded by the battle-brothers of the Hosts that were either destroyed in the line of duty or, worse, were cannibalized for their rare components to maintain the chapter's armoury as a whole. Of course, this defense has been attacked from questions on how a chapter could be so careless with its physical ties to the past to claims that if the chapter is not guilty of deceit with its origins it is guilty of sacrilege with its equipment.

The Masters of the Hosts simply insist that whatever perceived inadequacies the chapter my hold in this regard, they are the result of logistical necessity or upholding their eternal war upon the deadliest of mankind's foes.

* **The Hall of Memory**: A section of the High Halls battle barge dedicated to the chapter's history and combat knowledge. Every defeated foe and how they were slain is recorded in meticulous detail, with additions added by any and all astartes of the Hosts with commentaries on the campaigns of the past. However, full access to the Hall of Memory is only granted to the Keepers of Secrets, as this knowledge is the heart of the chapter's purpose and power and therefore can only be entrusted by those astartes who can take a million secrets to their grave. When a battle is to be waged and the Keepers or other officers with access to the Hall of Memory believe they hold vital knowledge, which is more often than not, they will explain the relevant tactics and history, with omissions of unnecessary details, to their battle-brothers. This has given the chapter a reputation for gifted oral historians that can embellish any deed and summarize any epic with equal capability.

## Chapter Appearance

### Chapter Colours

The Dark Hosts traditional colours are an all-black raiment, even the viewports of their helmets are darkened, with no other colours save traditional chapter markings. This grim visage is taken up in mourning for the Fall of Caliban and the disappearance of the Lion. In this mourning, the Dark Hosts eschew even traditional decorations of the Unforgiven, the customary monastic robes and symbolic engravings on armour are put aside until the Lion returns and the Legion is truly reunited.

This is not to say the Dark Hosts are bereft of any decorations, of course, they are still Astartes and scions of the Dark Angels. Archaic runes and markings that symbolize rank, specialization, honours, experience, and many other things within the labyrinthine symbology of the Dark Hosts are painted in stark white on varied locations all over the armour. A warrior of the Dark Hosts when in standard dress appears to be a walking work of archaic calligraphy and symbology on black armour. These symbols help the Astartes of the Dark Hosts, whose training and traditions familiarize them to the patterns, to identify officers and specialists within their complicated system of organization and combat.

When going to battle, the Dark Hosts apply *Codex*-issued camouflage patterns as well as their own unique patterns to their armour. Even the unique symbols of their armour to denote their ranks and honours are repainted to blend in with the camouflage. In this way, only the Dark Hosts can often identify their officers and specialists in the midst of battle, leaving their enemies in the dark on the exact composition of the force they are fighting. This may seem impossible to the mortal mind, but behind the trained eyes of super-human warriors who are familiar with the shapes of the symbols in question, the Dark Hosts warriors almost look gaudy covered in an array of symbols painted in multi-coloured camouflage patterns.

Chapters that do not specialize in stealth find the Dark Hosts to be cowards in their choice of colouring, while chapters that do specialize in stealth find the patterns along their armour to be obvious and the whole endeavor of the Dark Hosts to blend stealth with heraldry to be amusing.

### Chapter Badge

The chapter badge of the Dark Hosts is the ancient six-pointed star of the Hexagrammaton on a black field. Often painted on the left pauldron of their power armour when able, the right pauldron reserved to the badge of their particular Host. Similar to their traditional chapter colours, the Dark Hosts will paint the badges on their armours in colours that match the camouflage schemes of the battlefield in question. The six-pointed star painted in, say, solid green on a field of darker and lighter shades of green to blend into the surrounding environment of a forest world while still keeping the badge of the chapter proudly displayed.

## Notable Quotes

### By the Dark Hosts

*"From the Eye of Terror to the Ghoul Stars, from the Eastern Fringe to the Veiled Region, across the Halo Zone to the Maelstrom. There is nowhere for the foes of mankind to hide, no dark pit or dreaded corner where we will not venture. We have come, wretched creatures, and we are death."*

- Ormiz, former Master of the Host of Graves (M37).

### About the Dark Hosts

*"Ghosts from a bygone era, an echo of what once was and can never be again. How much have these fools wasted, lives and equipment and most importantly* time*, on reliving the past hunting for yet another obscure alien civilization in the fringes or wilderness space while the Imperium rots and wilts? All for what, these pale imitations of the six wings? The Host of Graves is no Dreadwing, it is an over-equipped Devastator Company. The Host of Quakes is no Ironwing, it is a waste of half of their armoury assets concentrated in the hands of a fifth of their chapter. The Host of Ashes is no Firewing, it is a scout company full of wash-outs unfit for progression beyond the basics of warfare. I will not grant the Host of Tides the dignity of comparison with the Stormwing, it is just two battle-companies haphazardly glued together. Even in their Host of Slayers and Gales, most similar to the Deathwing and Ravenwing, there is much to be desired. It is a good thing these lost sons of the Lion keep their distance from the rest of us in their vain crusades, for they would bring shame to us all by association. Let us hope they all quietly die someplace beyond the light of the Astronomicon where not even the Emperor will have to witness their humiliating final hours."*

- Anonymous Sergeant of the Dark Angels, observing the traditions and organizational structure of the Dark Hosts (M34).

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