Dark Angels - Lion El'Jonson: As with much knowledge regarding the Ist Legion and its master, there was a vast body of rumour and little fact regarding the earliest years of the Primarch Lion El'Jonson.Before the start of the Great Crusade, the gestation pod containing the infant primarch that had been mysteriously teleported through the Warp from the Emperor's subterranean gene-laboratory beneath the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains landed on the feudal Death World of Caliban in what would become the Segmentum Obscurus.Caliban was a planet whose surface was largely covered by immense forests inhabited by terrible, monstrous beasts mutated by the touch of Chaos in the centuries after the birth of the Chaos God Slaanesh due to the planet's proximity to the nearby Eye of Terror. Jonson managed to survive in the forests alone, living as a wild man far from civilisation.Caliban was home to many knightly orders of warrior-aristocrats created to defend its people and the massive fortress-monasteries they lived within to defend themselves from the Great Beasts. These knights maintained a few aspects of Caliban's ancient technology from before the Age of Strife and wielded primitive Bolt Pistols and wore suits of simple power armour, very similar to that later used by the Legiones Astartes, that were handed down from knight to knight.Despite these technological trappings, however, Caliban remained very much a pre-industrial society whose warriors rode to war on horseback. One of the most prominent knightly organisations was known simply as "The Order," and was made up of commoners and nobles alike, whereas the other knightly orders were drawn by tradition only from the Calibanite nobility.Over 150 Terran years later, the young Lion would be discovered by a hunting party of the knights of The Order in the depths of Caliban's forests. Within these forests dwelt a breed of creature now unknown in the galaxy, monstrous chimaeric weapons left over from the Age of Strife, driven by a hunger that could not be slaked and fully capable of rendering an armoured warrior into a ruin of blood and flesh in seconds.How long the young primarch had survived alone in the green deeps cannot be known for certain, for the Lion himself seldom spoke of those times. The knights that found him assumed from his stature and bearing that he could not have spent more than a solar decade alone, but the growth and development of the primarchs does not follow the pattern of mortal Humans, and they do not age as do those untouched by the Emperor's genius.The span of standard years in which the Lion prowled Caliban's sea of trees may well have been far longer than can be easily comprehended. Indeed, the legends of those fortified towns that bordered the stretch of forest where the primarch was discovered spoke of a forest spirit that haunted the depths, a spirit of small stature but whose form was that of a man who was known only by the mysterious marks he left in his wake and had existed for nearly a standard century before the discovery of El'Jonson.Regardless of whether the Lion had stalked the world-forest of Caliban for a Terran decade or a century, that time had left its mark upon him. The lightless depths beneath the forest canopy teemed with horrors, rapacious killers that often emerged from the deeps to hunt among the towns and villages of Caliban's slowly-dwindling Human population. There, amongst the most foul monstrosities imaginable, the Lion spent his childhood.He learned to keep silent, lest he grant advantage to those that stalked him, he learned to fight only when he could win, lest he be wounded too gravely to survive, and he learned that once battle was joined it could end only in death, that the strong would survive and the weak would fall. He fought for his life with nothing but his bare hands and a determination so inhumanly strong that it served him better than any iron-forged blade.The Lion was no feral berserker, but rather a calculating hunter ruled by logic and not simple rage. When he was discovered at last by the knights of Caliban, he was judged so dangerous that it might be best to have him slain, treated as one of the Great Beasts of the forest, so akin to them was he. It was the judgement of one man that would see him brought into the realm of Mankind and away from that of beasts, and that man was named Luther.As a champion among the warriors that had defended Caliban through the long years of Old Night, Luther named his new charge Lion El'Jonson, which meant "the Lion, Son of the Forest" in the Calibanite dialect of Low Gothic, and raised him as a knight of The Order. Luther taught El'Jonson the laws and strictures of The Order, to mete out justice as a man rather than as a beast, and gave him something that the young primarch had never before had -- a reason to fight beyond simple survival.Caliban was a dying world, its people besieged by the Great Beasts that thronged in the hidden depths of the forest and slowly driven to extinction. The Order, which built and manned the great fortresses at the borders of the wild, had vainly tried to stem the tide but had succeeded only at slowing the pace of their people's destruction, for they were too few to do more than defend their fastnesses from the constant assaults.El'Jonson was taken to The Order's chief fortress-monastery of Aldurukh and taught Human ways. The Lion learned to speak incredibly quickly and soon mastered all of the necessary aspects of Calibanite culture faster than anyone, including Luther, his mentor, foster father and best friend, believed possible.Before long, El'Jonson had become a fierce warrior in The Order's ranks -- though of his years living alone in Caliban's forests, he said nothing, then or later. With Luther at his side, El'Jonson ultimately rose into the highest ranks of The Order.At the height of his reputation, El'Jonson made clear his extraordinary ambition: he called for a grand crusade to exterminate the Great Beasts of Caliban so that the people of his world could finally know peace and live free from fear.This was received with great enthusiasm by the other members of The Order and even the other knightly orders, but it proved to be a time-consuming process that took nearly a solar decade of constant warfare against the terrible dangers of the deep forests.El'Jonson would quickly prove not only a superlative warrior and strategist, but also a leader whose quiet confidence and iron will drew recruits to The Order in numbers never before seen. With each victory against the Great Beasts of the forest, each fell head planted upon the walls of The Order's fortresses, more warriors took up arms with hope in more than simple survival.Lion El'Jonson stood at the forefront of this new crusade, not by choice, for he had ever been taciturn and prone to seek solitude, but by action, always to be found at the fore of any battle and unafraid to speak his mind or act when others might hesitate. By his order the old traditions that allowed only the nobility to fight among the knightly orders of Caliban were dropped, swelling The Order's ranks further at the cost of some dissent within the ranks of the more traditional knights.Any Calibanite knightly order that did not follow El'Jonson's lead, such as the Knights of Lupus of the northern forests which feared like many that the destruction of the Great Beasts would up-end Caliban's traditional social order, was destroyed to the last man.Within the space of a solar decade, The Order's ranks had grown to the point that they were able to take the war for their survival ever-deeper into the world-forest itself. With Lion El'Jonson and Luther at their head, they unleashed their crusade to rid Caliban of its curse, bringing flame and steel to the lair of the monsters that had hunted them for generations beyond count.The war was long and bloody, with hundreds slain for each monstrous nest put to the torch, and many grew weary of the slaughter -- all save the grim knight, El'Jonson. The Lion knew that mercy had no place in war, to leave with their task unfinished and with any of the foe yet alive would be to waste all of the lives spent in its pursuit. There could be only one end and that was the total annihilation of the enemy by whatever means was needed.El'Jonson set the knights to ambush the Great Beasts as they came to feed, poisoned the pools at which the creatures drank and set ablaze vast tracts of the forest to set them to flight. He gave the foe no respite and hunted them till no more could be found, and when his warriors spoke of his prowess and victories, it was fear that coloured their words as much as awe.Some of Caliban's aristocracy, following in the wake of the Knights of Lupus, feared his new methods and determination enough to declare open rebellion, some fearing the changes he had wrought upon the tradition-bound people of Caliban and others simply seeking to claim the power Lion El'Jonson had come to wield. These traitors to the cause of Caliban's salvation were put down without mercy, the ranks of their knights and soldiers culled in their entirety and their fastnesses torn down as a warning to others.At the end of the crusade against the Great Beasts, with both the Lion and Luther exhausted by the terrible cost the fighting had exacted, it was El'Jonson that received the battle honours and the title of Grand Master of The Order. He accepted the accolade without fanfare, for such Human eccentricities still seemed less worthwhile to the youth that had grown to manhood among monsters. He understood little the value some placedupon titles and rewards, for his grim and solitary habits had always kept him distant from others, and he saw not the change his rise hadwrought in Luther.For where they had once competed as equals for honour and victory, the primarch had now eclipsed his mentor and brother, leaving him behind as he grudgingly accepted the people's adulation and offer to rule over all of Caliban. It was a wound dealt in ignorance, for El'Jonson did not see the spark of fierce pride that burned within his brother ignite to jealousy in the face of his triumphs, a wound that would fester in the years to follow.Had the Emperor not arrived shortly after this victory, descending from the heavens to claim His lost son, then perhaps this wound might have healed in Caliban's new peace, but this was not to be. The Emperor came to heap new glories upon the Lion, granting him command of the Ist Legion, whom He renamed the "Dark Angels" after an ancient Calibanite myth that spoke to their grim mien, and making him a general within the vast Imperial army that sought to conquer the galaxy.Lion El'Jonson would soon leave for distant Terra and his new destiny, bringing his uncompromising and remorseless style of warfare to the ranks of the Imperial forces. To him would fall the role of watchman at the edge of the Emperor's domain, the bane of monsters and beasts and the bearer of weapons too terrible to entrust to any other.He would be the cold and inevitable destroyer, the doom that once unleashed could not be recalled, subverted or delayed; taught by the black depths of the forest of Caliban the value of cold, ruthless tenacity. Lion El'Jonson was the first of all the primarchs, war distilled into its rawest and most fundamental essence, death that walked like a man, and the galaxy would be forever changed by his return.