Adeptus Custodes - Incarnate Purpose: To accomplish the ends to which the Legio Custodes were designed, not only is a Custodian's superhuman physical power honed to a razor's edge, but so also is the individual Custodian's intellect, mental fortitude and martial skill developed with ruthless application and zeal.The result is the creation not simply of a preternaturally deadly fighter or master assassin -- though they can readily serve as both -- but to create a being whose perception and apprehension of threat and how to counter it is literally beyond the natural limits of Humanity or the powers of a machine. By means unknown and unknowable beyond the Emperor's own forbidden laboratories are the minds of the Custodians programmed and fortified, filled with an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the arts of death, deceit and destruction they might encounter in their duty, and how both to counter and employ them. Beyond even this their education is prodigious, for they are not simply the Emperor's protectors in intention. They were also made to be His companions and with Him they were armed to converse on such matters of warfare, politics and philosophy as He wished when He still walked among mortals.Most importantly, their psyches are also crafted and shaped as a master gemsmith might cut and polish a perfect stone, fashioned to precise order and pattern, a pattern to which loyalty and discipline, duty and unflinching obedience to the Emperor goes deeper than blood and bone, deeper than conscious thought or unconscious desire. If at any stage in the process of Custodian augmentation the merest flaw is encountered, as with the gemsmith's search for the perfect stone, the flawed subject is discarded.The product of these amassed arts, arcane, academic and militant, is a body of warriors who are living weapons. These made up the Legio Custodes and later the Adeptus Custodes itself, the Ten Thousand. As an organisation, it was in many ways both alike and unalike to the ancient Space Marine Legions in formation and structure, a paramilitary force unique in Human history, inviolate in action and answerable only to the Emperor.While each Legion was, at least at conception, a highly stratified and self-contained military organisation designed to be the shock troops and principal military agency of the Great Crusade, the Legio Custodes was similarly self-sufficient and self-contained, but was never armed or expected to prosecute a full war, but instead to utterly dominate whichever particular close battle in which they fought. Their base of operations is Terra itself and their own domains interwoven with that of the Emperor.They hold few voidships of their own, but could command by edict any such vessel of the Imperialis Armada or the later Navis Imperialis to their task, and in fact requisition anyone or anything within the Imperium in extremis to serve their most sacred and undaunted task; the protection of the Emperor and His works from all the foes of Humanity. Whether serving as part of a detachment acting as the destroyers of some ill-fated foe, or tasked as a bodyguard for the Emperor or some element of His household, or even where a handful of Custodians might be deployed to act as the personal protectors of an Imperial emissary or Lord Militant, they are tireless, vigilant and remorseless.They are armed, created and trained to be the match and the death of anything they might encounter face-to-face, be that Human, xenos or machine, in any circumstance of single combat, counterattack to ambush or close-range assault. Again and again has history seen the Custodian Guard stand off and defeat odds that seem beyond reason or belief. It has seen them slay monsters foul enough to have been dredged up from pure nightmare, and defeat and slay assassins born of arts both dark and subtle beyond Human ken.Tested again and again, be it on alien worlds untrodden by Humanity, or within the tangled under-hives of the domains of Mankind lost to the Age of Strife, or the twisted palaces of alien warlords, the Custodians proved themselves warriors of terrifying ability. Their service and their mystery saw the Legio Custodes and the later Adeptus Custodes quickly become a legend equal in wonder and terror even to those alongside whom they served and in the echoes of whispered stories in every corner of the burgeoning Imperium.To the common soldier and planetary governor alike, the golden-armoured image of the Custodian Guard was a visible sign not only of the Emperor's direct protection and the embodiment of His will and agency, but also the omen of His unstoppable wrath, as personal and as terrifying in their way as the Angels of Death, His Space Marines, were impersonal and all-conquering avatars in the minds of many of the Great Crusade itself.