House Orhlacc - Pact of Angels: Aside from its inherent hostility, Dark Haven had lived up to its name during the Age of Strife, and through this long era of trouble and torment it had endured without being subjected to serious outside attack.Such xenos and Human marauder traffic which did rarely find their way to the world suffered as badly from the local environment as they did from the bellicose Knight house's resistance, while the Orks, long a menace to the worlds of the Cyclops Cluster, avoided the planet as if it was a profound anathema to them.As a result, the House of Orhlacc's dominion of their world went all but unchallenged, while affairs of honour between them and the constant battle to master their homeworld served to hone their fighting skills.When the Imperial forerunners of the Great Crusade first contacted Dark Haven, it was by accident, but they found their vox-hails readily answered in ancient and formal courtesy, and Imperial emissaries were both impressed as well as somewhat disturbed by the macabre and formal reception they received on the sinister planet, of which dim legends had already reached them during their exploration of the region.Despite some misgivings, initial relations went well, and Dark Haven's sealed Imperial Compliance was attained bloodlessly by the 7th Expeditionary Fleet led by Lord Commander Suleiman Grimm of the Ist Legion, the Dark Angels, in 833.M30, during the fleet's first journey through the region, at a time when much of the Coronid Deeps were still entirely uncharted and under xenos control.To the Angels of Death, it is said that Dark Haven seemed a shadowed reflection of their own homeworld of Caliban itself in some ways, while its masters, the Orhlacc, represented a culture at once familiar to them and utterly strange.What most provoked the 7th Expeditionary Fleet's interest, however, was House Orhlacc's military strength, which was largely undecayed in sophistication and extremely extensive in range, including several hundred fully operational Knight armours and a moderate but reliable independent capacity to construct and arm more; a rare jewel of discovery indeed.Mechanicum emissaries were equally impressed, but House Orhlacc -- perhaps remembering their abandonment long ago -- politely but firmly rebuffed the Tech-priests, extracting at best a high price in "gifts" for access to their own techno-arcana, and then only as they saw fit and with much always kept secret.Any acrimony this might have created was quickly and thoroughly forestalled by the authority of Lord Grimm, who ensured the world's smooth path to Compliance and the granting of full rights and titles under the Aquila to House Orhlacc in return for a full third of the Knight house embarking directly under his command as part of the 7th Expeditionary Fleet.This first pact of arms and alliance was to last for nearly thirty standard years of service, and marked only the beginning of the House of Orhlacc's involvement with the Great Crusade, which would see them fight in hundreds of war zones alongside forces as diverse as the Ist,VIIIth and IXth Legions, the Sisters of Silence during the Jutharathine Psyker-crisis, and the Ordo Reductor at the infamous last stand at Bloch during the final Rangdha Outbreak.In recognition of this last battle, where 48 of their Knights were destroyed desperately holding the line against the faceless tide of grey abominations in order to buy time for the Imperium to gather its forces and counterstrike, House Orhlacc was awarded a Memento Mori as a gift of the Emperor Himself.This rare and potent honour also served to grant the Orhlacc a seal of official respect and further political independence, enough to avoid circling suspicions and ill-rumours that had for some time dogged them despite their enviable military record.Such rumours had circulated not least of all because of the polite but inviolable distance the Orhlacc kept between themselves and their fellow soldiers of the Great Crusade, a deserved reputation for morbid eccentricity and swift temper in their Scions, as well as clear deviations in their genetic structure and physiology from the widely accepted baseline Human norm.