Dark Angels - Origins: Stark and uncompromising, the Dark Angels were the first of the Emperor's Space Marine Legions and the truest to the mould from which the Legiones Astartes had been struck. They were killers of the purest and most refined kind, for whom there could be no other destiny but a lifetime of war and death in the name of the Imperium and Humanity. They did not build empires, made no attempt to master the ways of peace or the subtle skills of the artist, craftsman or diplomat. They offered no excuses for their nature and made no compromises in the pursuit of their assigned duty, shirking neither the price they paid in blood nor the price paid in infamy and solitude.Their greatest battles are to be found in no catalogue of Imperial Compliance or roll of honour, no scholars or poets sing of these glories or remember those fallen in their prosecution, for they were fought against foes so monstrous that it was deemed necessary that all mention of them be erased from history. Such was the nature of their service, not only to be prosecutors of the Great Crusade, but also to serve as the Imperium's most potent bulwark against the unknown terrors that lurked in the dark between the stars.The heraldry of the Dark Angels proclaims their lineage, the first of the Emperor's Legiones Astartes, but other than that simple fact little is known of the origins of the Legion and its initial gene-stock. The genesis of the Legiones Astartes as a whole is a subject shrouded in much secrecy. It is perhaps the greatest and most enduring of the Emperor's many works and a subject scholars have been warned away from in the latter days of His Imperium. What is known with some certainty is that, of all the many breeds of these transhuman warriors, the Dark Angels were conceived by the Emperor as a template and prototype for those that would follow, distilled from the genetic code of the most stable of all His primarchs and without any attempt to foster specific traits or curb the eccentricities of the stock from which they sprang.Even so, the process by which these first samples were produced was long and laborious, initiated perhaps a standard century or more before the end of the Unification Wars of Terra and consuming a vast number of test subjects to produce but a handful of stable proto-Astartes. Of these initial creations, referenced in fragmentary records unearthed in the Imperial Archives as the "Primordial Strain," almost none are known to have survived initial combat trials and surgical testing, but they form the basis for the initial cultures of the Ist Legion and, by merit of the refined process formulated with their creation, the other Space Marine Legions as well.This grand experiment exacted a bloody toll upon those territories controlled by the Emperor, for its most critical components were untainted Human subjects, all within a specific range of age and physical fitness. Given the state of Terra in the wake of the wars of Old Night, its surface polluted by the twin scourges of atomic bombardment and genetic phage, such subjects were limited. The initial experiments were conducted with the youth of the Emperor's conquered foes and those purchased from the nomadic clans of slavers that abounded in the wastes of pre-Unity Terra, and later the toll was borne by flesh-tithes exacted on those territories brought, willingly or not, into the fold of the Imperium. As such, the Dark Angels did not bear the stamp of any single gene-stock, unlike some of the other Legions during their earliest years whosecharacter had been moulded by the nature of their initial intake.Their first recruits, selected from the best of the stock available to the Emperor, were diverse in origin and shared no single cultural heritage that would shape the way in which they made war. Indeed, the diversity of their origins brought a wealth of disparate martial traditions into the fledgling Legion. The dour infantry of the Francish plains and islands of Albia brought with them the brutal coda that had conquered half the ruined lands of the continent of Europa, the warriors of the far Anatolic steppes a skill at cavalry warfare, the berserkers of frozen Skandia a murderous efficiency, and from a dozen other Terran cultures yet more of the arts of war. The  Ist Legion was the crucible in which all the savage lore of Old Night, all the bitter knowledge and red-handed wisdom accumulated in millennia of war was to be distilled and fashioned into a weapon of rare potency.In those first faltering years of the grand experiment that was the Legiones Astartes, the proto-warriors of the  Ist Legion, barely a few hundred strong, were encouraged to eschew the names of their own people and embrace a new unity unmarked by old loyalties, often taking instead the names of heroes from the old tales that had survived the Age of Strife. In the first rolls of honour of the Legion can be found Gilgamesh, Heracles, Tarchon, Hengist and other names imbued by time with the power of legend. Combined with the grim aspect granted them by the gene-seed of the first primarch, these warriors quickly gained a reputation among the disparate throng that was at that time the army of the Emperor, for they seemed as a band of gods all cast from a singular and potent mould.Fighting at first as small groups within the ranks of the Emperor's host, plying both the skills of their origins and of the drill masters of the Imperial Laboratories of the Biotechnical Division, they would come to be known as the "Uncrowned Princes" or simply "Crowns." This was a homage both to their place in the line of battle and the destiny bestowed upon them by their creator; a title that would inspire both a sense of unity and a certain arrogance in the first Space Marines and spur them to lead the way amongst the growing brotherhood of the Legiones Astartes.This, in the Legion's earliest moments, was the genesis of the "hosts" of the  Ist Legion, which would later be refined by their primarch, Lion El'Jonson, into the Hexagrammaton "wings" of his Dark Angels; a myriad of informal groups within the early companies of the Legion that worked to adapt the doctrines of battle brought from those disparate origins and create a coda of battle fit for the transhuman armies of the Emperor. The hosts were not bound by company or commander and existed throughout the Legion, at any given battle or engagement at least some small number of a given host would be present to advise and lead should their expertise be required. In the early years of the  Ist Legion's existence there were many more hosts than would later exist under the Hexagrammaton organisation, with as many as 18 such formations noted by their distinct heraldry in the earliest records of the Unification Wars where the Astartes appear.The Third Siege of Antioch in 603.M30 saw the participation of nine distinct "hosts" across four separate companies of the Legion, though at this point they numbered less than 30 warriors each and displayed significant tactical overlap in the methods they employed to breach the walls of that ancient enclave.Time would see the many hosts of those chaotic years quickly resolved into a smaller number of more focused hosts, but in those early years, with their brother Legions still but handfuls of warriors newly-cast from a rough mould, the  Ist Legion became the testbed for the various tactics and doctrines that would later become the Principia Bellicosa. As the other Legions grew to a size large enough to engage in small-scale combat actions, some of the more specialised hosts became obsolete, unnecessary in the face of warriors more adept at that style of warfare, while others were made extinct by the inadequacies of their methods and the brutal nature of war in the 30th Millennium.Far from harming the Legion, this process of bloody evolution left it strong; a weapon well-honed by the fighting on Terra. It also forged a bond between the disparate warriors who made up that early Legion; a bond based upon the sense of superiority and distinction instilled in them by the servants of the Emperor that trained them and the awe they inspired in those they fought beside.