World Eaters - Legion Beliefs: Though the War Hounds had a reputation for ferocity in battle, they were also known to fight honourably and prided themselves on their fury and courage above all else. To the XIIth Legion, life itself was war, a conflict that never ended from cradle to grave and the Legiones Astartes was this concept in its purest form.Failure in battle was not tolerated, surrender was never countenanced and mercy was a quick death delivered to a foe that had fought with bravery. Cowards themselves deserved no more than savage butchery in reward for their fear. This simple but resolutely brutal code of war was the War Hounds' article of faith and they extended it to both their own number and their enemy.When they were reunited with their Primarch, the War Hounds were soon influenced by Angron's Nucerian cultural beliefs and blood rites that would become an important part of the World Eaters' core beliefs as the culture within the XIIth Legion shifted to ever more violent and bloodthirsty mores and values.These became quickly echoed in the shifting skein of the Legion's own rites and ceremonies, and the martial traditions of Old Terra, never strong in the War Hounds who had prided themselves on their fury and courage above all else, disappeared altogether and were replaced by Angron's own red code of butchery and savage competition.When the newly-dubbed World Eaters departed their training world of Bodt under their new master for the first time, it was under the new badge of a great fanged maw poised to crush a life-bearing world, an image that was to prove entirely fitting to describe what was to come.The arrival of the Primarch Angron brought a primitive, almost tribal unity to the newly renamed World Eaters, and Angron quickly became the example of warriorhood to be aspired to by his Legion. His first and most dubious honour was to be the one Primarch to refuse the Emperor's benevolence and to turn his back on the Imperium's claims of conquest.Angron, master of his doomed slave army, cared nothing for a galaxy's worth of dreams and triumphs. He had wished only to die with those rebels who'd escaped the gladiator pits of Desh'ea with him. This ragged army of his brothers and sisters had been holed up in the mountains with carrion birds and snow bears for company, waiting to starve or fall in battle -- whichever death had come first.The XIIth Legion were told of Angron's refusal of the Emperor's offer when they had first met upon Nuceria. Their Primarch had defied the Emperor, and the War Hounds did not hate Angron for his choice. They worshipped him for it. No Primarch better understood the bonds of brotherhood than one who had turned his back on the Emperor, on the Imperium, on life itself -- so that he could die side by side with his brothers and sisters.To the Legionaries of the World Eaters, the mutilated, bloody, reeking, wrathful figure that stalked amongst them as their master swiftly became a kind of savage messiah; a greater warrior than any they had known, an exemplar of a brutal ideal of honour and combat that sang to their souls. Angron became to them their first master, displacing for many the loyalty they had once only given to their Emperor, as Angron became their judge, their general and a conqueror whose banner they would follow into the depths of hell.Under his influence, the competitive, hot-blooded tension that had always roiled under the surface of the XIIth Legion's psyche was channelled and given form. Gladiatorial combat, never without blood spilled, and when taken to its extremes, fatal, became both the crux of the World Eaters' training, honing their individual battle skills to a razor's edge, and a vital outlet for the pent-up aggression and frustrated bloodlust of the Legion between war zones.The World Eaters' thirst for battle was artificially amplified by the use of the surgically implanted Butcher's Nails devices that were similar to the technology that had been implanted within Angron's own skull during his Nucerian gladiator training.Bloodletting was a very common practice carried out by the Astartes of the World Eaters Legion. Angron and his World Eaters were known to cut their left hands and smear the blood on the visors of their helmets before going into a fight.As time went on, blood rites became more and more an important part of the XIIth Legion's rituals. This would eventually culminate in the corrupted Warmaster Horus turning the Legion's savage rituals towards the bloody-handed worship of Chaos, in particular the Blood God Khorne.