Dark Angels - Along a Knife's Edge: It would be in death that Grandmaster Urian Vendraig would finally achieve his aim, for it was the first stirrings of hate that would unite his Legion, an animosity that was born with his death and festered in the ignominious victory of Karkasarn. That world was abandoned by the Ist Legion and left to the warriors of Ultramar, its battle honour excised from Legion records and marked on banners only by an empty laurel. The only thing that the Angels of Death would take with them from Karkasarn was a subtle taint, a lingering sense of ignominy that soured their conquests and achievements and drove them to even greater feats to prove their valour.For despite the deeds of their past and the victory at Karkasarn, the Ultramarines saw them simply as equals -- brothers rather than mentors. To the Ist Legion, whom the Emperor had created first and kept close at His side, this seemed more of an insult than the harsh words of Roboute Guilliman.Once more the Council of Masters took the reins of the Ist Legion, that most potent weapon of war, and split it across the stars to seek vindication in the most deadly contests of arms they could find, each eager to prove the worth of their Legion and their Host. They gave battle without remorse and grasped at triumphs without regard for the cost attached to their trophies. The 9th and 14th Chapters of the Legion took the coral citadels of Melnoch from the Fra'al in a single night of brutal close quarters slaughter, at a cost of a tenth of their own strength, in order to outpace the onslaught of the Luna Wolves elsewhere in the cluster.Upon the rust deserts of Vorsingun a force of 1,000 initiates of the Host of Iron, gathered from 11 companies and crewing over 400 engines of war, took the field against a throng of brutish Orkoid hulks over three times their number, running ahead of the main assault force to claim victory for themselves at a fearful price. Yet for each victory, each battle honour claimed by the blood of its warriors, the Ist Legion came no closer to regaining the glory of its inception.All across the galaxy the Legiones Astartes had each become a unique weapon of war, having taken the doctrines of the Principia Bellicosa developed from the trials of the Ist Legion's campaigns and surpassed them, adapting them to their own needs. In the Realm of Ultramar, the grand kingdom of the Ultramarines forged by the hand of Guilliman, the primarch of the XIIIth Legion had gone so far as to pen a new treatise of war to improve upon the scheme by which the Legions had organised themselves since they had left Terra. The golden age of the Ist Legion, those halcyon days when it had stood as sole guardian of the fledgling Imperium, had all but ended. The nature of those hidden battles meant that they would live on only in the memories of the oldest warriors of the Legion and in the secret histories of the Imperial Archives, a bitter price to pay for the first of all the Emperor's Legions that their own honour would ever hold their greatest achievements captive.Pride, which had sustained the Legion through all of the horrors of its past, all of its solitary crusades and valiant last stands, would not allow them to accept a lesser place in the Imperium's order of battle. Pride would see the Legion ground to dust before it would let the younger Legions eclipse them.As the Great Crusade drew to its mid-point, the turning of the tide in the Emperor's war to conquer the galaxy, the Ist Legion stood at a precipice of their own. The years since the death of Grandmaster Urian Vendraig had seen them reduced in number, but not in spirit. Where the other Legions had prospered and grown stronger, the Angels of Death had seen their power squandered in suicidal assaults and campaigns gruelling beyond the ken of mortal soldiers. Those wars had cost them warriors and war engines, more perhaps than was wise, but had honed the fighting skills of its warriors to a keen, but brittle edge. To their allies they were grim deathseekers, ever-searching for the mightiest foes against which to match their skills and never retreating from battle, even in the face of annihilation. Its leadership divided among the Council of Masters and its warriors taken by a fever of battle-lust, the Legion was spread across the galaxy and engaged in wars beyond count, each chapter, host and order seeking to regain what had been lost.Had it continued down that path it is likely that the Ist Legion would have fallen, slowly and inevitably cut to pieces on the double-edged blade of its pride. Yet this was not to be, for a small fleet of Jaghatai Khan's roving hunters, the White Scars, would discover a world known as Caliban and the Emperor would bring forth from its dark forests the Ist Legion's salvation.