Blood Angels - The Dregs of Old Night: There are many noble legends of the Unification Wars, of the battles where the Emperor's newborn Space Marine Legions swept aside all who opposed Him before them. Among these tales there are none to be found that mention the IXth Legion, only grim rumours and half-heard whispers. Where the first companies of the other proto-Legions were blooded in Albia, Yndonesia and Franc alongside the massed ranks of the Thunder Warriors, the IXth Legion was absent, granted a role as vital as it was unsightly.The old IXth Legion served the Emperor as an inferno serves a general upon the battlefield; they did not conquer but instead ravaged, growing and growing as they went, a weapon that could not be directed or controlled, only endured.Few in number, the early Space Marine Legions fought as mere vanguards to larger forces, a sharp dagger alongside the blunt sledgehammer of the armies of Unification. They were the fulcrum upon which battles turned, the point of control, waging small scale battles by precision strike and audacious raids. The IXth Legion was made in a different image. Even in their earliest days they were among the largest of the proto-Legions and when they made war it was like the sudden arrival of a tsunami, sweeping away the opposition in a flurry of brutal assaults.They found themselves deployed to the most dangerous war zones of Terra, to those accursed regions ravaged by the rad-phages and chem strains of Old Night, places where only the most twisted and debased breeds of Mankind still lived. In the wastelands that existed outside of history's spotlight they held the line, alone and unnoticed while the Emperor drove home His grand conquests.This grim fate was no accident, no arbitrary choice made by a distant general, for each of the Legions had been granted genetic tools to fit the roles for them by the Emperor, and the IXth Legion was no exception. Where other Legions took only the best recruits, princes and champions among the conquered techno-barbarian nations of Old Earth, and produced but few Initiates, the IXth Legion took in the hordes of dispossessed and broken, and made of them an army of angels.Scarred by so many long generations mired in the rad-zones and sunken fortresses of Terra's poisoned wilds, these creatures were no longer entirely human, but horribly mutated beasts that the tyrants of Old Earth had driven out and hunted. Yet, from such base materials emerged a breed of Legiones Astartes uniformly tall and fair, their features sculpted in stern elegance.The unique genetic template of the IXth Legion's as-yet unknown sire seemed to favour the twisted and warped, though the pain it inflicted on those inducted into the Legion was more than most could bear. As those weakened by years of exposure to the most horrific rad-zones and poisons rarely survived such an ordeal, the number of recruits that endured to become Astartes of the IXth Legion were few. Yet, unlike the other Legions, the IXth cast their net wide, and claimed entire tribes of wastelanders, prisoners of war and the long train of hopefuls that always followed in their wake seeking the miracle of transformation.The bloody-handed Apothecaries plied their knives without rest to keep the Legion at fighting strength in even the most hellish war zones, and though the legend of the IXth languished, its ranks did not. Even as their ranks swelled, the dark rumours that followed them grew as well, for the Emperor's legacy had endowed them with other, darker, gifts. These gifts were also to grant them a new epithet among the rank and file of the Emperor's mortal armies, the "Eaters of the Dead." For in the wake of each battle, the elegant forms of the IXth Legion haunted the field of battle long after the fighting had ceased, seeking out the finest among the fallen and feasting upon their flesh and blood.Many of the victories fought to bring Unification to Old Earth were marred by the sight of blood-smeared angels stalking the fallen and wounded champions of the enemy across fields choked with corpses, though few among their detractors realised the purpose of this grim fixation. For this too was part of the Emperor's grand design, for through the genetic augmentations that had transformed them, the IXth Legion were capable of stealing their enemy's power from them, genetically absorbing their knowledge and skill and making them their own through the use of their Omophagea implants. All that was required was the consumption of the foe's bodily tissues.In the broken places where they fought, alone and far from aid, this trait brought the IXth Legion priceless information and made even the most raw recruits battle ready. Yet the macabre reputation they had gained hung about them like a shroud, lessening their achievements. They had been created to fight monsters, alone and in the darkest places, but in doing so they risked becoming creatures even more foul than those they fought.