Serpent Lodge - History: Some six solar decades prior to the events of the Horus Heresy, the XVI Legion, already called the Luna Wolves, in collaboration with the XVII Legion, then known as the Imperial Heralds but later renamed the Word Bearers, had undertaken the Imperial Compliance of the Feral World of Davin, codified as Sixty-Three Eight (63-8).Long home to a pre-industrial, barbaric culture, Davin had long been ruled by a remarkable warrior caste, whose savage nobility had won the respect of the Astartes sent to pacify their raging and bloody feuds and bring Davin into the Imperium.The Davinite warriors had ruled their world through a complex structure of warrior lodges, which were quasi-religious societies that had venerated various local predators as totem animals. By cultural osmosis, the lodge practices were quietly absorbed, emulated, and modified by the XVI and XVII Space Marine Legions to match their own internal Legion cultures.When Davin was brought to Imperial Compliance, the nomadic hunters of Davin had first taught the Luna Wolves of their tradition of creating a lodge for their tribe's warriors. The warrior lodge created by the Luna Wolves in imitation of this Davinite custom was a way for members of all martial classes to meet as friends, where captains could speak freely to their line Astartes, and vice-versa.The Luna Wolves soon embraced this custom, however it was kept as a secret, non-official gathering because of official Imperial disapproval until after the 200th year of the Great Crusade when Captain Garviel Loken discovered its existence within the heart of the Legion. At the start of the Horus Heresy, the lodge began to make decisions that would have far-reaching consequences throughout the XVI Legion.Officially, there were no warrior lodges, or any other kind of secret fraternities, within the Legiones Astartes. It was common knowledge that the Emperor frowned on such institutions, claiming they were dangerously close to cults, and only a step away from the illegal cult, the Lectitio Divinitatus, that supported the notion of the Emperor as the one, true God of Mankind.The Emperor openly and publicly refuted His alleged divinity and banned religious worship in his empire, and demanded that His subjects accept the "Imperial Truth" -- that science, reason and logic alone presented the tools required to create a better human future.There were many of those amongst the Space Marine Legions, especially those Astartes of Terran origin, who were openly opposed to the practise of the lodges, for to them it felt wrong, if nothing else, in that their practises were deliberately kept secret from other members of the Legion and were thus a form of deceit, since they knew the Emperor would have greatly disapproved of the custom.Many of those Space Marine officers within the Legions who disapproved of such clandestine activities let it be known to those Astartes that served under their command that they should have nothing to do with these lodges.The creation of a warrior lodge within the Luna Wolves and many other Space Marine Legions based on the lodges used by the savage warriors of Davin had been another ploy of the Word Bearers' First Chaplain Erebus, one of the primary architects of the Horus Heresy, to infiltrate and corrupt the other Space Marine Legions into turning against the Emperor.However, not all Astartes of the Legions joined the lodges, as many saw them as a direct violation of the Emperor's desires that all Space Marines dedicate themselves to truth and openness. The lodges would prove to be the primary purveyors of corruption in those Legions which turned Traitor in the days immediately preceding the start of the Horus Heresy.Those Astartes within those Legions with lodges who held themselves aloof from those secretive organisations were marked as Imperial Loyalists who would later be betrayed during the Isstvan III Atrocity.