Dark Angels - The Ill-Made Knight: This struggle was fought most fiercely upon the floor of the Ist Legion's great Hall of Council on the world of Gramarye, at the heart of the Legion. There, where once the masters and preceptors of the Legion had created much of the wisdom that now guided the Legiones Astartes as a whole, a storm of vitriol and admonition had erupted. Each of the masters of the Legion, unable or unwilling to see fault in their own wisdom, sought to attach it to that of their fellows so that it might be excised from the Ist Legion. Most contentious of all was the selection of a new Grandmaster, for few would countenance the selection of a warrior from a host of the First other than their own.As the pace of the Ist Legion's conquests slowed and the deliberations of the Council of Masters stagnated, it would be the intercession of Malcador the Sigillite, first among the Emperor's confidants, to break the deadlock. Rather than present some censure on behalf of the Emperor, he chose instead to sponsor a candidate of his own, seeking to stir the Legion from its doldrums and return them wholeheartedly to war. His words to the Council of Masters were carved upon the lintel of the chamber, such was their impact: "A fertress can be held upright by many pillars, alone they are nothing but together they are mighty. Yet, a fortress must have a master or else all its strength is for nothing."The warrior nominated by the Sigillite was elected by unanimous vote of the Council of Masters; he was neither a master of the hosts nor a preceptor of the orders, but a war-worn captain from among the vast ranks of the Ist Legion. Malcador's logic was impeccable, for such a candidate stood for no one branch of the Legion's arts alone, but rather for all as one. Where any of the venerable masters would find nothing but opposition from their peers, a simple warrior found acceptance from all. The warrior chosen was Urian Vendraig, once captain of the 14th Company of the 8th Chapter, a Terran taken into the Legion after the Emperor had united that war-tom world, and with a grand record of victory as his banner and as yet uninitiated into the inner mysteries of any one host or order.His was a legacy of bloodshed in battle, of rousing speeches and glorious last stands. He had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his battle-brothers through all his service and spent but little time in rirual or doctrinal debate.His new task was to unify a divided Legion and return them to the Great Crusade and the purpose laid out for them by the Emperor unburdened by doubt and division. As a warrior first and foremost, Vendraig saw the value of bringing the Legion fully into the Emperor's Great Crusade, taking its rightful place at the head of their brothers rather than only serving at the fringes of history. For the first time in the Great Crusade, a small contingent of carefully-selected Remembrancers was allowed to join the Grandmaster's entourage, attached to his personal guard and given strictly limited access to the Legion's records, so that they might bear witness to the Ist Legion's ascension.All that remained was to find a challenge worthy of the Legion, some terrible foe to bind them once again in hatred of the enemy and, as though gifted to them by the Emperor, word arrived of a new terror encountered on the far rim of the Great Crusade: a race known to history as the Rangda.Encountered by the 105th Pioneer Company of the Vth Legion on an isolated world along the northern rim of the galaxy, the Rangda were considered a grave threat to the expanding Imperium. Though at that time their territory was thought to encompass only a single star system, they possessed a vile technology and fearsome aspect that warranted the most extreme of responses. Mustering a fleet numbering hundreds of capital class warships the new Grandmaster descended upon the isolated system of Advex-mors, where the Rangda had created a vast artificial war-moon, an immense engine of war that had cost millions of slave labourers from a hundred worlds their lives. This monstrous weapon was defended by a fleet of lumpen and ugly Rangdan war-barques, each bristling with weapons and crewed by slaves whose neural collars enforced their unflinching obedience.The battle that ensued would leave the system of Advex-mors as little more than ashes and rubble, all six worlds claimed by the Rangda were rendered uninhabitable, their fleets reduced to drifting fields of wreckage and their vast slave armies utterly annihilated. The campaign lasted for four solar months and cost the lives of some 5,000 of the Ist Legion, but as the banner of the Imperium was raised over those broken fragments of the Rangdan war-moon that had rained down upon the burned husk of Advex-mors beneath, the Imperium was reminded of the sheer power of the Ist Legion.