Legio Fureans - Legion History: The Legio Fureans owed its genesis and its destiny to the Forge World of Incaladion and the unceasing cycle of war, strife and invasion that had wracked it before it was liberated by the forces of the Great Crusade.Founded by a Mechanicum Sleeper-Ark during the Age of Strife on a world rich with an abundance of rare mineral resources as well as the necessary organic compounds for sustaining a biosphere, Incaladion ought to have offered a perfect locale to found a Forge World and a new Human colony. But the same stable Warp-currents that had succeeded in carrying the Mechanicum colonists to the world were, as time progressed, to bring a host of less-welcome voyagers.Records of its founding centuries remain fragmentary, but it seems certain that alongside the vast works of macro-construction and geo-forming the Mechanicum colonists undertook, conflict and battle were nearly constant against a host of invaders. As a result, the Incaladine Mechanicum, separated by vast distance from Mars, evolved into a distinctive and highly warlike faction, and one that was seldom united as individual forge-fanes often had to look to their own defence and survival unaided.Waves of xenos invasion spurred unusual avenues of rapid and unusual technological development and the creation of vast fortified cities which dominated and defended the richest mineral seams and algae-rich seas, while hidden forge-fanes were sunk kilometres beneath the planet's crust. The Incaladine also adapted to the need to acquire additional Human stock by raiding the already extant feral Human populations of the world, which brought echoes of barbarous and macabre cultures that began to infect the increasingly schismatic variant of the Machine Cult propagated by the Incaladine Mechanicum.Throughout this long and savage history, the Legio Fureans formed the principal military force of Incaladion's ruling archmagos, known as the "preceptor-general." Its Titans served as the avatar of her will. No resource was spared in the Titan Legion's maintenance, and where possible due to lulls in the conflicts, the expansion of its fighting strength.The Legio Fureans' more common cognomen the "Tiger Eyes" also stemmed from this early period as a corruption of the name given to them by the feral tribes of the nearby world of Humardu, to whom the Titans truly were divine and terrible beings come to reap a sacrifice of the young and the strong to serve in the palace of the gods.Unlike some garrisoning Titan Legions before the Great Crusade, the Legio Fureans did not stand vigil as enforcers for petty empires of the Machine God's servants, but rather fought an unceasing war against a host of foes. For centuries the Legio Fureans unleashed their wrath against invading hordes of Ork marauders and the spiteful raids of Yldari corsairs, scavenging Tarellian war-packs and the colossal viscid horrors of meteor-brought Carnoplasm infestations from the Abyssal Reefs. Such ceaseless conflicts took their toll, however, both on Incaladion itself and the Legio Fureans who defended it.Around fifty standard years before the Great Crusade would finally reach Incaladion, after a particularly brutal series of incursions and raids, the Taghmata Omnissium -- the feudal order upon which the defence and military hierarchy of a Forge World of the ancient Mechanicum was based -- finally broke down. In the ensuing strife, the preceptor-general of Incaladion was assassinated and the Forge World split into warring or isolationist factions, bereft of central control or co-ordination, laying it open to invasion and the devastation which followed.By the time the Great Crusade's advance elements reached Incaladion, it was a global battleground, disputed by a dozen different armies; Mechanicum, Renegade and xenos unleashing atomic fire and yet more savage weapons upon each other. During this time, overwhelmed and vastly outnumbered, the Tiger Eyes refused to retreat or retrench, and shattered their blades on foes uncounted until the Legio became only a shadow of its former might, reduced to defending the last forge-fane of its dead regent.After Imperial contact, Mars was determined to bring Incaladion into the fold of the Imperium, but the Great Crusade was as that time engaged in major battles on a myriad of fronts and much of the Mechanicum's military forces were tied up in on-going campaigns. It instead fell to the forces of the IVth Legion (not then yet having taken the name of the Iron Warriors) to bear the brunt of the liberation campaign, with such supporting elements of the Legio Mortis and Martian Skitarii and Secutarii forces as could be spared to aid it.The resulting campaign was to prove the bloodiest in the IVth Legion's history to that point, but after two Terran years of guerrilla warfare, Incaladion joined the Imperium. In the aftermath, the lost forge cities and fortress-citadels were quickly reclaimed and repaired by the now-ruling Imperium-backed Mechanicum faction. Warship squadrons, now permanently based in the Incaladion System, gave the Forge World respite from attack for the first time and the vast mineral wealth and production capacity of the planet was quickly put into action to fuel the ever-expanding Great Crusade.Oaths of loyalty and debts of blood to the liberators from Terra were affirmed, although in this Mars and the Legio Mortis were judged by the Incaladine Mechanicum to be their saviours, rather than the IVth Legion who had expended so many lives in the war. As a key part of repaying this debt, the Legio Fureans was quickly reconstituted and rearmed, with the deep Titan-forges beneath the planet's surface put to continuous operations to fuel a second birth for the Titan Legion.Travelling beyond Incaladion, the Legio Fureans pursued conflict with an aggressive fervour and tempo of battle seldom matched by any other Titan Legion of the period, splitting their forces into demi-legions and strike groups operating alongside numerous Imperial expeditionary fleets and extermination forces.Throughout this period, aside from an abiding alliance with the Legio Mortis, the Legio Fureans cultivated neither friendship nor overt feud with the rest of the Collegia Titanica, many of which came to regard them nevertheless as unpredictable and primitivistic. Feeding into this reputation, the Tiger Eyes were well-reputed for their disdain of sustained bombardment or other "stand-off tactics," preferring instead mobile, close-range fire-fights, melee combat, rapid flanking attacks and, when confronting superior forces, hit-and-run tactics carried out at the very limits of the reactor capacity of their Titans to maintain. It is said that some Tiger Eyes princeps were willing to disengage or reduce their void shields in order to gain extra speed to employ these tactics; something that would be complete anathema to the standard practices of the Collegia Titanica.One demonstration of this willingness to do battle in any theatre by the Legio Fureans was that they allowed even single Titans and their support groups to be split from their central command and attached for periods of solo deployment, an action that many Titan Legions would simply not have countenanced. This wide-ranging deployment pattern and the generations of warfare on Incaladion made the Legio Fureans one of the most battle-hardened and adaptable of the Titan Legions and contributed to their enviable reputation.However, willingness to do battle, even against staggering odds, and willingness to follow orders from outside the Mechanicum or indeed to follow ordained strategies, proved not to be one and the same as far as the Tiger Eyes were concerned, as many theatre-commanders found to their dismay. Rumours also ran rife of strange pre-and post-battle rituals conducted by their Titan princeps and their crews -- like some macabre mixture of Omnissian machine-rites and the savage totemic rituals of a feral animal cult. But given the invaluable battlefield work of the Tiger Eyes and the rank unfamiliarity of most observers with the inner workings of the Mechanicum, many such rumours were dismissed or deliberately ignored.When the wars of the Horus Heresy broke out, it was revealed immediately that the Legio Fureans had sided with the Warmaster Horus, as did both the fabricator-general of Mars and the Legio Mortis. It is clear in hindsight in fact that the Legio knew of the planned treachery beforehand and were a key and willing part of the Warmaster's early battle plans and deployments from the start, such as the dispatch of a demi-legio of the Tiger Eyes to the Paramar assault force before blood had yet been spilt on Isstvan V.Quickly too would the darker rites of the Legio blossom into the twisted arcana of what would become known as the Dark Mechanicum in later years. Incaladion conversely, through declaring for the Traitors' cause, fell quickly into a bloody civil war of its own, the absence of the Legio having stripped its new ruling preceptor-general's principal agency of overmatching power against his rivals.