Collegia Titanica - Old Night: Even Old Earth, the cradle of Humanity, where the Age of Strife was better remembered as "Old Night," fell during that darkest of epochs, her oceans boiled away and her great cities burned to ashes by the constant wars for control of shrinking resources and the use of once-unthinkable weapons of mass destruction. Humanity's finest were rendered to mindless savages. Blood-maddened primitives remembered as "techno-barbarians" used artefacts of high technology as blunt clubs to brain one another to death amidst the shattered ruins of their forefathers' glory, ignorant of the inheritance denied them.Mars, the red planet which had long served as Humanity's wellspring of scientific advance and technological wonder, was not spared the chaos. Yet here some vestige of order, perhaps the last shred of rationality remaining to the entire species, was saved. In the midst of a world of shattered, advanced machines, whose leaders could no longer acquire sufficient food or resources to accommodate its large population even as the terraforming protocols that had kept Mars habitable broke down, the preservation of life came to depend upon the preservation of knowledge.The smallest scrap of ancient technical knowledge meant the difference between extinction and survival on a world whose once carefully constructed biosphere was in the process of unravelling before its people's eyes. Thus, in time, those able to coax some ghost of functionality from the vast metal corpses among which Mars' population clung to life came to be regarded as prophets of the most sacred data.And so too did the vessels of such knowledge come to be seen as holy. The mechanisms by which data was preserved, processed and transmitted became themselves objects of religious veneration -- the most holy of holies. Machines capable of cognition were of utmost value, yet they were known to be in equal part dangerous. The custodians of knowledge on ruined Mars preached the sanctity of the machine even as they remained vigilant against the return of true self-awareness, ever fearful that the thinking machines might again turn upon what remained of Humanity as they had at the dawn of the Age of Strife.And thus, amidst the ruins and wreckage of an advanced civilisation scattered across the reborn oxide-red deserts of Mars, Mankind set the first foot upon the long and arduous march to redemption. Over countless generations, the custodians of the machines gathered together what scattered remnants of advanced technology they could recover from the dangerous Martian wastes, composing a canon of knowledge that formed the basis of a new religion -- the Cult of the Machine.Blessed with secrets yet denied the bulk of what remained of Humanity, these so-called "Tech-priests" raised great foundries or "forge cities" across the surface of the Red Planet and from them soon flowed a torrent of machines, artifices, instrumentations and weapons of every conceivable form and function, from microscopic nanyte war-swarms to towering, armoured robotic giants that were capable of destroying entire cities.This Cult Mechanicus, dedicated to the animistic worship of the deity they named the "Machine God" and under the direction of the faith's rigid hierarchy of Tech-priests, set about restoring order to their world. The Titan Legios themselves came into being on Mars during the anarchy of Old Night, when the fabled Triad Ferrum Morgulus was established.This trio of nascent Titan Orders consisted of the Legio Tempestus, Legio Mortis and the Legio Ignatum, and while all three stood against the horrors of Old Night that plagued Mars, from ravening xenos to thinking-machine aberrations, they were just as equally likely to fight one another; for each served the interests of its home forge city above all else, so that throughout the long age of anarchy, rivalries were established that much later would bear bitter fruit indeed.The Tech-priests of Mars built their first temples to the Machine God and eventually restored order to the Red Planet as the Age of Strife continued to consume other Human worlds. They established a new planetary government led by the leading magi of the Cult Mechanicus that was known as the Mechanicum, which was led by a senior Tech-priest given the title of the "fabricator-general" of Mars.