The War-Dancers

Warcry: Varies between Clans

Founding: First Founding

Successors Of: N/A

Successor Chapters: N/A

Number: 11th

Primarch: Huttyr Aquilare

Strength: Estimated between 40,000-60,000 during the height of the Great Crusade

Legion Master: The Cardinals

Homeworld: Terra (Originally), Diahmennyl

Fortress Monastery: N/A (Fleet Based)

Allegiance: Imperium of Man

Colours: Varies between Clans

Status: Subjectum Excinctus

Birthed from the peoples of Nord and Sud Merica on Terra during the Unification Wars, the War Dancers were once the purist example of mankind's origins; sewn with primal beliefs and nurtured with blood spilt.

Their gene-seed originating from the Emperor's eleventh son, Huttyr Aquilare, the War Dancers Legion were set from the start to inherit the traits of pre-history in which the Emperor himself was born into.

Infused with mankind's ancient intuition and propensity for animistic reverence and natural curiosity, the War Dancers were a culturally and behaviourally diverse people even inside their own ranks; a conglomeration of different 'clans' rather than one whole Legion. Known or unknown, each of these formations largely dictated their own traditions and combative doctrine, often having entirely different languages between each other.

This strange decentralised nature was not only the direct result of their predecessors who first filled the legion, but also as part of the War Dancers' incredibly autonomous nature; sometimes not even seeing their brethren from other clans for decades at a time.

With the founding of their Primarch, Huttyr Aquilare however, the circumstances of their existence were only accentuated. As the decades passed, it became apparent to the Imperium catching up with the outriders that the Clans of the War Dancers were only growing further apart from each other - and that inevitably it would be the doom of them.

### Their Journey

#### The Banding

*"Rest not on the path you tread, for the Emperor will not wait."*

*- Aztekan Clan Proverb*

It was a time of ending, an ending to the end that had already been some would say.

The Emperor of Mankind had revealed himself at last to his fellow man, appearing in all his gilded-majesty. Bringing the illumination of nearly thirty thousand years of wisdom, he began to exterminate or assimilate the techno-barbarians, witch-cults, gene-tyrants and aristocratic warlords of Terra.

Emerging with elemental wrath from his cloud-kissed mountain fortress, the Emperor of Mankind unleashed the scarring forks of his might via his greatest and most terrible champions: the Legio Cataegis, his Thunder Regiments. Made of soldiers irreversibly stained with psychotic violence and unquestioning loyalty, these were bio-chemically enhanced brutes who towered over mortal men, smiling as they raised up mountains of battered corpses in the name of their idol, their Emperor.

It was in the wake of this force of bloodthirsty super-men that the Imperium inexorably expanded; whole swaths of backward societies and accursed lands turned to the pursuit of advancing a now thriving populace. Defiant mad-men who raved of esoteric god-beasts fell one after the other, year after year, forgotten in the recesses of Terra’s chronicles as the marching of the Thunder Warriors continued without pause; their bones crushed to dust beneath the Emperor’s transhuman soldiers. Eastward the Cataegis marched from the Himalazian Ranges, breaching the borders of the Yndonesic Bloc with a tide of fury, next subjugating the mastodonic Pan-Pacific Empire ruled by the feared Narthan Dume; his own death carried out by the Emperor’s hand.

A growing swarm of Sanctioned Mercenaries followed the Thunder Regiments as they surged ever southwards with a relentless hunger for war, crushing the Oseanic peoples as they did the once invincible death-cults of the Pan-Pacific. In their wake was left the impaled, gored and dismembered bodies of the hopelessly ignorant as they passed through major population centres - razing whole cities to the ground and slaughtering hundreds of thousands by means of pitiless, indulgent butchery. Conquering the scattered city-states bordering the edge of the now-devastated pacific ocean, the Legio Cataegis saw their greatest triumph yet within grasp.

And so the Thunder Warriors took to the skies, soaring across the acidic waters in transports that cut quick through the hazardous smog of Terra. They were on course with murderous intent for the degenerate tech-oligarchs of Merica, and first to reach the coastline as decreed by the Emperor were the forces of the 1st and 2nd Thunder Regiments, titles that would later become known throughout the War Dancers as the ones who brought the Emperor’s light to them.

Having been drawn originally from the Eagleborn Tribes neighbouring the nascent Imperium, the super-warriors of the 1st Thunder Regiment, known as the Beast Lords for their usage of cyber-creatures, were selected not only because of their peculiar specialty.

Led by their War-Captain Hérro-Kaga the Crimson-Faced, the Beast Lords made first contact with the Merican’s after refusing to answer their vox hails, landing with characteristic directness in the capital of West Maw Province; Nueva Ankamaldon. With these isolated Mericans unprepared for such an unrelenting attack, Kaga’s men took the capital of West Maw in under an hour, butchering every single person inside the city including those who surrendered. With this beachhead established, the 1st Thunder Regiment marched on without waiting for their counterparts in the 2nd to confirm their landing at the southern edge of West Maw, vying to win the glory of conquering the bay-state. Sweeping aside the disparate techno-barbarians who lived in the inhospitable sands of what had been the ocean floor, the Beast Lords soon captured West Maw Province after linking up with the 2nd Thunder Regiment.

With the Lightning Talons led by War-Captain Fèngye the Gilded-Pinion united with Hérro-Kaga’s Beast Lords, the stage was now set not only for the physical subjugation of Nord and Sud Merica, but also the cultural one.

With Fèngye and his men having been taken from the Xeric Tribes, they like the 1st Thunder Regiment, were deeply embedded within a culture of strange avian idols, their spiritual psychology predisposed to what significance the Raptor Imperialis held. The Master of Mankind knew that the identity of the mericans also was unbreakably intertwined with the symbolism of the Accipitridae, aware of the animistic tribes across both regions that still resisted their respective overlords. The fruits of this knowledge was that in the wake of these Thunder Regiments, the Eleventh Legion would be made from the legends of those who still fought for their ancestral lands.

Over the course of the centuries following the first battles, the Beast Lords and Lightning Talons grappled with Merica ceaselessly alongside a fast growing collective of tribes. Together, in oaths of death and victory, they faced the black-souled minions belonging to the indentured armies of the Atlantiacan crime-lords, the rampant biological aftermath of the Age of Strife, and even the infernal leadership of the Neverborn.

Still, they carved a path through these lobotomized war machines, deadly, feral creatures, witches and meek diplomats alike who attempted to sway the alliance’s bloodlust, and it seemed none could stop them. There became no disparity between the Thunder Warriors and their allies, for as if their minds were mechanical instruments fuelled by the lifeblood of their enemies, they would not halt their insane charges even under the threat of mental and physical evisceration.

With lands progressively won upon blood and bone, word of the forces of unity spread far as many of the oligarchs fell all across Nord-Merica, and the front of Sud-Merica turned into an undulating quagmire in the face of enemy geno-pagans. All the way from the Sunken Basin of the Ash Mountains, to the mutagenic jungles of Panpocro and Teletzul Qual; descendants of atavistic myths came to reclaim their lands. Arriving in gruelling marches that went from the arctic plains containing the Frigidfolk Lands and the Last Stretch to the borders of the Fures Caribbean, their variety was as vast as the breadth of the world on which they walked.

In common though, they had enduring memories.

These were the inheritors of thousands of years of wrong-doing, dwelling here for generations before even the Dark Age of Technology spread across the world, and surviving the fires of the Age of Strife to still wreak havoc against false kings. Their genetic codes long since drifted from their origins and their histories obscure and shunned, these remnants of prehistory proudly bore what few beliefs had survived. To the Nord-Merican tribes, the Beast Lords were the children of the Thunderbird, men who commanded all facets of the natural world and its ferocious inhabitants. And to the Mes and Sud-Mericans, the Lightning Claws were the messengers of the great Sun God who roamed the horizon, bringing down his wrath from the heavens.

These tribes were as follows, precursors to the Clans that later dominated the Legion’s organisation. For the First through Third Compass, they were the Shiute and Shown of the Sunken Basin, the Nehkree and Intuwark of the arctic circle, the Pachee, Shedeyah, Lowkre and Kotarah of the Blast-Plains and the Chaw, Anicher and Kanehwak of the Atlantican’s heartlands in the east. And for the Fourth Compass they were the Maiyona, the Zaprek, the Aztekan and the In-Khan peoples of Mes-Mericas, the keystone territories that led to the lands of Hy-Brasil. Many of these warriors would receive their first genetic enhancements with pride, believing they were the blessings of a God or Gods who had been long absent; but that was merely a fraction of the destiny that awaited this new generation.

### The Fleet

*Archives Incomplete....*

-R