Horus - Great Crusade: Cthonia, relatively close to Terra in the void, and with whom some minor intermittent contact had been maintained even through the Age of Strife, had its murderous and strife-torn population marked by one of the first expeditionary fleets of the Great Crusade to leave the Sol System.With its resources stripped it had little strategic worth and its people were judged largely beyond illumination, but the fledgling Imperium needed teeth as well as ideals and that necessity saved Cthonia. Its youth was harvested in their tens of thousands, first as impressed troopers for the Crusade armies and then the finest specimens were taken for the Legion.On Luna these chosen sons of Cthonia were reborn as warriors of the XVIth Legion. With these new recruits came a further accolade. The Emperor in honour of their new birthplace, the ruthless propensities of the Cthonians and the victories of the past won by the Legion's original Terran Astartes such as the First Pacification of Luna, gave the XVIth Legion a name to strike fear into his enemies. As they scattered to spill blood amongst unclaimed stars their enemies would know them as the Luna Wolves.For thirty standard years, the Emperor and Horus fought the opening campaigns of the Great Crusade side by side, the primarch learning at the foot of his sire. When at length the Emperor detected another of the primarchs and departed to locate him, Horus was left at the head of his master's hosts, the Principia Imperialis, entrusted with the command of the conquering armies. Horus was well suited to the task, and the lessons he had learned in the previous three solar decades served him well.As one by one the other primarchs were united with their gene-father and their brothers, Horus came increasingly to be regarded as the greatest of their number, the first amongst equals. When the second primarch was found, Horus, while happy that he would soon meet one of his brothers, swore to himself that he would always remain the Emperor's favoured child.The Luna Wolves waged war for two hundred years, pushing back the darkness with fire and blood. Their victories were manifold and Horus' generalship was legend, and so it was that the respect of their brother Legions rose to almost unrivalled heights.While many of his brothers and the Space Marine Legions created in their genetic image were gifted in specific fields of military science, Horus was a natural leader, his greatest genius his ability to meld seemingly divergent allies into a coherent whole. This skill was not only of use on the battlefield, for it carried over into contacts with the peoples the Great Crusade met.It was Horus' way to treat with the populations of newly-contacted worlds according to the cultural traditions of each, and this highly successful doctrine was repeated in each of the Imperial expeditionary fleets.Horus believed that to do so would lessen the hostile reaction of opponents who wished to parley. Tragically, this tendency might also have been one of the causes of the primarch's fall, and with him fully half of the Space Marine Legions.As the Great Crusade pushed outward, and more primarchs were discovered, the Emperor's time became divided, pulled in more and more directions. Horus was often placed in overall strategic command of the Great Crusade, a position in which he proved his skill as a leader time and time again. He quickly won the approval and support of the other Space Marine Legions, along with their leaders.One of the skills that made Horus such a great leader was that he possessed an innate understanding of human psychology; he was able to read people in such a way that he could choose to promote their strengths or exploit their weaknesses.This allowed him to find a non-military solution in several campaigns as he used his sheer inhuman charisma and diplomatic negotiation skills combined with the ever-present threat of the Space Marine Legions' unstoppable force to bring other human-settled worlds into Imperial Compliance without bloodshed.His understanding of the human mind allowed Horus to bring out the best within his fellow primarchs, which allowed him to deploy the various Astartes Legions into the battlefield roles to which they were best suited. He quickly learned of the skill displayed by the White Scars and Night Lords in deploying for rapid strikes, while the Imperial Fists and Iron Warriors were always placed at the forefront of planetary sieges.Horus was said to wield the Space Marine Legions, and later the merely human soldiers of the Imperial Army, as a lesser general would position individual squads to perform to their advantages.He was also responsible for promoting competitive rivalries between certain Space Marine Legions in the desire to spur these Astartes on to greater heights, but these rivalries would eventually transform into outright hatred when the Great Crusade took a turn for the worse.