Horus - Early Life: Created as a genetically-engineered organism by the Emperor in the Imperial gene-laboratories under the Himalazian (Himalayan) Mountains on Terra in the late 30th Millennium, Horus, along with his brother primarchs, were scattered across the Milky Way Galaxy through the Warp by the machinations of the Ruinous Powers of Chaos.This is said to be when the Dark Gods first planted the seeds of heresy into the infant primarch, whispering darkly into his soul and tempting him to their cause. The capsule carrying the still-gestating Horus came to rest on the Mining World of Cthonia, the primary planet of a star system within a reasonable slower-than-light distance of Terra.Whereas the early history of many primarchs is extensively if unevenly documented, the same cannot be said of Horus. Contradiction and omission tarnishes all accounts of Horus' formative years. It is clear that the Emperor did find Horus and also that he took command of the XVIth Legion early in the Great Crusade. Beyond these manifest facts, agreement between the early Imperial sources is decidedly lacking, some even placing Horus on Cthonia as a foundling.Like many of his superhuman brethren, these sources say that the young primarch thrived in Cthonia's harsh environment, learning his first lessons in war and killing from Cthonia's tech-barbarian kill-gangs. The world of Cthonia had been settled in the very earliest days of Humanity's exploration of the stars, its rich natural resources ruthlessly exploited until they were all but played out.Thus, Horus grew to maturity amongst the anarchic gangers that populated the post-industrial nightmare of a world honeycombed with long-extinct mines and dominated by decaying hive cities. Though Horus had not been raised during his formative years on Cthonia -- uncommonly, for a primarch, he had not matured on the cradle-world of his Legion -- he spoke the harsh language known as Cthonic fluently. In fact, he spoke it with the particular hard palatal edge and rough vowels of a Western Hemispheric ganger, the commonest and roughest of Cthonia's feral castes.Later on, it always amused some of the battle-brothers within the XVIth Legion to hear this accent. They assumed that Horus spoke in this manner because that was how the Warmaster had learned the language, from just such a speaker, but many would come to doubt this hypothesis later on.Horus never did anything by accident, and there were those who believed that the Warmaster's rough Cthonic accent was a deliberate affectation so that he would seem, to the Astartes of the XVIth Legion, as honest and low-born as any of them. It was from the hyper-violent gang-scum of Cthonia that many of the earliest inductees into the Space Marine Legions were recruited, and it was there that the Emperor had found the first of His lost sons.Another source claims that Horus returned to Terra itself. It is said that Horus grew at the Emperor's side, learning from his father even as they took back the Sol System and forged the alliances between the techno-barbarian nations of Terra and the Mechanicum of Mars that created the early Imperium of Man.Other highly creditable claims state that the Emperor found Horus, the first of His lost sons, but neither source specifies where, or the location of this finding. Surrounded in millennia of myths and allegory, the truth of Horus' origins will more than likely never be known. As a result, Horus was for many standard years the Emperor's only son, and there was a great affinity between them.The Emperor spent much time with His protege, teaching and encouraging him. Horus was soon placed in command of the XVI Legion, which had already come to be known as the Luna Wolves -- thousands of Astartes created from his own genetic code.With these transhuman warriors to lead, Horus accompanied the Emperor and His Principia Imperialis fleet for the first thirty standard years of the Great Crusade that had begun in ca. 798.M30, and together they forged the initial interstellar expansion of the young Imperium of Man.