Dark Brotherhood (Blackshield Force) - Conclave of Optera: At Optera, Garro ordered the astropath assigned to his mission to send forth a signal, its allegorical cipher imprint unique and composed for this specific circumstance. The message could only be understood by an astropath bound to the service of the Legiones Astartes, and its precise content only deciphered by one whose loyalties lay truly with Terra.The message called for the recipients to gather at Optera and Garro chose as the meeting place a ruined, megalithic structure high atop a rocky plateau overlooking the cratered wastes of Optera IV.There were numerous risks inherent in the sending of such a message, but in the Sigillite's view, still greater advantage to be won, and so the astropath's mind-song went out across the storm-wracked reaches of the Pale Stars. Twenty solar days later, Nathaniel Garro convened his parley.In the shadows of the cyclopean ruins of the ancient alien fane, Garro and his fellow Knights-Errant waited in silence as the churning skies were split by the contrails of a dozen gunships and landing craft of varying types.Each circled about the ruined fane several times before committing to land, and after a solar hour, the wide temple plaza had come to resemble the landing apron of a Legiones Astartes operating base, Garro, Zaven and Rubio standing impassively at its centre.At the appointed time, a dozen assault ramps lowered and from each vessel a group of warriors emerged, some openiy bearing Legion colours, others with heraldry deliberately obscured.If Garro and his fellow Knights-Errant were at all taken aback by the Legion colours represented before them, they hid their surprise behind stony countenances or blank-faced battle helms. In truth however, aside from the black-clad reavers of the Dark Brotherhood, none could have anticipated the presence of Legionaries from two other Legions.The first such group were clad in the distinctive red and gold of the Blood Angels, a Legion which had vanished almost to a man having been despatched to the far galactic east almost five standard years earlier and not heard of since.It was known that a small honour guard had been drawn by lots to remain on the Legion's homeworld of Baal, while the remainder mustered at the Nartaba System before proceeding to follow the deployment orders issued by the Warmaster some time before his betrayal had been revealed at Isstvan III.Garro was stunned to see before him a captain of the Three Hundred Companies, putting a lie to the tragedy of the supposed extinction of the IXth Legion and its beatific primarch, the Angel Sanguinius.The second group of warriors were clad in ivory-white battle plate, each a suit of Mark II Crusade Power Armour heavily modified by the Legion's artificers and bearing the lightning bolt icon of the Vth Legion -- the White Scars. The status of the Vth was known to Garro, but he would not speak of such things openly, for now at least.The remainder of the Legiones Astartes who gathered beneath the towering columns of the xenos temple were a disparate band indeed. No two warriors wore exactly the same mark or pattern of armour nor carried the same class of weapon. In many cases their battle plate was a heterogeneous admixture of components clearly acquired from a wide range of sources, some elements entirely foreign even to Garro's experienced eye.The one feature common to each and every one of these warriors was the fact that their armour was uniformly black. Here and there however, micro fractures, scars and buffs betrayed hints of older colours, from blood crimson to sea green, hinting at prior allegiances.Considering the panoply of gunmetal grey in which the Knights-Errant themselves were clad, Garro once again declined to pass comment on the strangers' appearance.At last, the leader of each group stepped forward into the centre of the gathering and Garro did likewise, the four Astartes leaders removing their battle helms so that they could address one another face to face, according to the ancient laws of war.The leader of the Blood Angels declared himself battle-captain of the 121st Company of the Three Hundred, naming himself Serron. Garro knew that the 121st Company had failed to assemble at Nartaba and Serron proceeded to recount how the war ships bearing his command had been caught in a fierce Warp Storm and cast upon the turbulent currents of the Immaterium.Swept along helplessly for what the Blood Angels perceived as mere solar days, the vessels were ejected violently from the Warp on the fringes of the Maelstrom, which for no explicable reason had been stirred into a raging vortex that cast its baleful tides for hundreds of light years in all directions.The vessels of the 121st had fought valiantly to escape the currents of the Maelstrom and, according to Serron, detected Garro's astro-telepathic call as they traversed the Mirabala Straits. Though Serron's company had known great hardship during their voyage, for them the order to muster at Nartaba had been issued mere solar weeks before -- meanwhile, over four standard years had passed in the material universe.The leader of the White Scars contingent was a cold-eyed warrior, his stony features marked by a web of intricately applied ritual scars. He named himself Nirun, leader of a band of five hundred or so Legionaries drawn from several different Legion sub-groups, known to the White Scars as "Brotherhoods."Garro knew that the Brotherhoods of that Legion were far more to them than tactical divisions -- each was a band of warriors so tightly knit that a Legionary could no more transfer between Brotherhoods than he could between Legions.The spectacle of a group of White Scar Legionaries drawn from different Brotherhoods was highly unusual, but Garro perceived an explanation in the Warrior Lodge tokens many of them bore.Every token carried the same symbol -- the serrated beak of a Chogorian raptor. Nirun offered no explanation for his presence in the Pale Stars, and Garro did not seek one, for now at least.And then the leader of the Dark Brotherhood stepped forward and lowered the hood that had obscured his features. The stark light of Optera's sun revealed the warrior-leader's face as a mass of scars that twisted his mouth into a permanent scowl, his eyes jagged shards of black ice.Garro knew instantly that the Nemean was indeed the warrior he had been tasked with recruiting to the cause of Terra, but how he would do so given the presence of the remainder of the Dark Brotherhood as well as the Blood Angels and White Scars contingents was another matter entirely.