House Vornherr - Origins: The Scions of House Vornherr were renowned the length and breadth of the Ultima Segmentum, for they served with great honour and achievement, first in the Great Crusade's cause in the later Imperial Compliance campaigns of the 12th Expeditionary Fleet and subsequently in numerous operations across the leading edge of the wars of the Eastern Fringe.In terms of their number of war engines alone, the Knights of Luhnborg-IX were counted as one of the greatest houses in the region and in bearing the most aristocratic of all their class.Each Scion of the house was a noble of high birth, refined in demeanour and lofty in ideal, educated not just in war, but in culture, philosophy, rhetoric and all of those pursuits that would raise Mankind from the darkness of Old Night and, in time, turn Feral World savages into civilised subjects of Terra. All such intentions were to die at the Battle of Calth, however, leaving behind the remnants of a once-noble house, now forlorn and desiring nothing so less than a vengeful death.The Knights of House Vornherr hailed from the Luhnborg System, itself part of a scattered stellar drift deep in the gulf between the galactic spiral arms. What led the colony arks of Old Earth to settle this system cannot be known and it is thought likely that the colonists who made it their home were simply washed up there by the capricious tides of the Warp.In time, seven Knightly households rose up across the system, an unprecedented number in what little remains of the histories of Humanity prior to the Unification Wars. When the darkness of Old Night fell and consumed the galaxy, the Luhnborg System too was plunged into an era of ceaseless war.For many long Terran centuries, the seven Knight houses of Luhnborg-IX fought bitterly against one another and against the numerous foes that descended upon their system from the cold void beyond. Whatever madness had gripped the galaxy at large must have tainted them too, for no one house ever sought to broker peace and unite as one against the foes that assailed them all. Instead, the houses vied for supremacy and a militaristic culture arose, one in which mercy was regarded as weakness and compromise treachery.Luhnborg's wars ground on for a thousand standard years and more until, at length, one house rose from the bloody tumult and gained ascendency over the others. Rather than displaying magnanimity however, the victor claimed the lands and the Knight armours of the vanquished as its prize of war and burned their standards in a great, symbolic pyre. In a single night, six ancient Knight households symbolically ceased to exist and only the bloody scarlet and sun-fire yellow livery of the victor remained.The colours of the defeated houses were erased from the rolls and their coats of arms defaced, whilst their sons and daughters were offered the choice of assimilation by marriage into the bloodlines of their new overlords, or exile, albeit one they must undertake without the benefit of their Knight armours. The names of the six vanquished houses will ever remain unknown; the name of the victorious house was Vornherr.Generations later, the grand masters of House Vornherr would claim that their forebears were forced to lay their fellow houses low in this manner to end some terrible evil that had overcome them. Of course, this claim can never be verified and long has it been said that to the victor falls the privilege of writing the histories of its kind.Having forcibly united the worlds of the Luhnborg System, coerced the defeated Scions to join its ranks and claimed many hundreds of Knight armours, House Vornherr assumed the position of a ruling aristocracy, and within the span of a handful of generations, all traces of the vanquished houses disappeared and the culture and traditions of the Vornherr supplanted all.After assimilating so many other bloodlines, the genealogical tree of House Vornherr was a sprawling mass that by its very essence nurtured internecine rivalries and plots, and its Scions raised themselves ever higher above their subjects until they existed in a rarefied world of privilege and high culture. This was nonetheless tempered by intrigue and the need to assume a unified defence against the myriad alien horrors that would periodically assail them from the depths of the void.