Blood Angels - The Charnel Feast: In the early years of the Great Crusade, as the fleets of the Emperor first pushed beyond the boundaries of what is now known as the Segmentum Solar and into Wilderness Space, His armies would encounter battlefields to shake the sanity of mortal men. Of these fel and terrible places, termed zones mortalis in the formal language of the Dvisio Militaris, few were more loathsome than the world known to history as Kiy-buran.The first expeditions to Kiy-buran were to vanish without a trace, four full regiments of the Imperial Army's Veradan Regulars swallowed up and gone, and a flank of the great Crusade's galaxy-wide advance left open. In response, the Emperor unleashed His own terrors to seek out whatever beasts might lurk there.Running ahead of the Expeditionary fleets of the Great Crusade in aid of the Veradan Regulars, three companies of the IXth Legion's Astartes were dispatched to Kiy-buran. The world was a wasteland of irradiated sands inhabited by chattel tribes of degenerate mutants and ruled by a techno-barbarian warlord, Ek'Lobia.These tribes were both bodies to be spent in conflict and the primary foodstuff of Kiy-buran's inhabitants; each sustained by a vicious economy of ritual acts of bloodshed and cannibalism. It was these mutants which had been encountered by the beleaguered ranks of the Imperial Army stranded on the planet. Hordes of barely human mutants armed with little more than primitive clubs and picks had decimated their ranks, the corpses of the fallen hauled back to flickering fire-pits to be cooked by night.For three solar months, the serried trenches of the Imperial Army repelled the mindless onslaught before the storm-grey Drop Pods of the IXth Legion fell from the sky, wreathed in black smoke. Crashing to the ground, the Revenant Legion broke through the mutant throng with contemptuous ease and relieved the embattled Veradan troopers. The IXth attacked the cantonments of local tribes, their superior arms and armour allowing them to seize control of the northern mountain ranges, casting out the indigenous mutants they came across with uncompromising brutality.In the opening stage of the IXth Legion's war on Kiy-Buran, they came upon little organised resistance, freely conquering territory, and for solar months the IXth Legion ravaged Kiy-Buran before news reached the warlord Ek'Lobia, who swore an oath to eradicate the invaders.Under his command was an army of mutant chattel whose numbers were beyond count and over which he held a power of such terror that they would throw themselves to their death rather than face the freakish horrors which his enslaved sorcerers might unleash. As the IXth Legion crossed into Ek'Lobia's territories, the resistance they met from indigenous forces increased until the IXth was drawn into full scale battle.Initially, they easily quashed any bands of savages making strikes against the edges of their line, but quickly these became an unending deluge of bodies which threatened to overwhelm and encircle the remains of the three companies. The IXth girded themselves to repel the tide of mutants, whose hideous deformities made them capable of rending ceramite with their tortured flesh and whose numbers set the earth atremble at their approach.Though the Legiones Astartes fought doggedly, killing scores of enemy for each Battle-Brother lost, the sheer numbers of the foe began to force them back. Attempting to regroup, the three companies of the IXth Legion formed a spearhead in an attempt to break through the mutants and reach the distant banner poles that signified the position of the horde's brutish commander.As the tip of the Legion formation threatened to reach the encampment of Ek'Lobia, the horrors of Old Night were unleashed. Reality rippled and tore as the Cracked Skull's ensorcelled chattel brought forth horrors beyond description, reaping a hideous toll of casualties amongst the Astartes and mutant horde indiscriminately, turning the tide of the battle.Incapable of combating such a threat, the IXth Legion warriors were forced to quit the field of battle or be utterly destroyed, a choice that might have doomed other more honour-bound Legions, but not the pragmatic Revenant Legion of old. The Legionaries turned and hacked a red path through the throng with toothless Chainswords, broken blades and the cracked pieces of their own fallen comrades' armour.The strength of almost two companies was lost in that monumental battle, and those Legionaries who escaped were forced to question how they could survive and endure without reinforcement or resupply. The staggering degree of losses suffered created the need to reorganise Legion resources among little more than 380 remaining Legionaries, speaking to the utilitarian and consequentialist nature of the psyche of the early IXth Legion. Foremost among these assets, their Apothecarion was reformed and grown into a combat-support formation; the survival of the remaining Legionaries as well as propagating gene-seed considered paramount to their ability to continue to pursue conquest.Reformed in the crucible of war, far from the path of the Great Crusade, those orphaned companies of the IXth Legion recommenced their campaign at a more considered pace; making squad-based shock assaults against enemy encampments before withdrawing to avoid organised reprisals. The campaign soon stagnated into a pattern of thrust and counter-thrust, a war fought on the back foot to bleed the foe whilst hugely outnumbered.This war, which became known as the "Banquet of Kiy-Buran," continued unbroken for 12 standard years, all but forgotten by the wider Imperium. The IXth Legion, piece by piece, broke the tribes of the world in bloody close quarters actions, and refused to be drawn into a full-scale engagement. In the early years of this conflict, accepting the desperation of their predicament and bereft of resupply, the IXth Legion were forced to take practical measures to survive. Raids against local mutant tribes on the northern continent became matters of domination, not destruction.Those creatures which could be of use were press-ganged into the service of the Legion. Testament to the hardiness of the IXth Legion's gene-seed, even these irradiated and hideously mutated beings were considered suitable candidates for the Legion, their children bred to be little more than meat-stock for their techno-barbarian overlord ascended into angelic perfection by the implantation of Sanguinius' gene-seed.Furthermore, the Legion's Apothecaries encouraged them to join their foe in cannibalism of the war-dead for sustenance, benefitting the Legion and denying the foe in equal measure. These practices allowed the IXth to replenish its numbers and continue without contact with the wider Imperium greatly beyond the capability of any other Legion.Undertaking this strategy, the Legion steadily took ground from Ek'Lobia, diminishing both his armies and food supply in the process, while taking that material into themselves with which to rebuild the strength of the Legion. Perhaps the Legion went too far in the name of survival, however. A diary later recovered from the equipment of a missing officer of the Veradan Regulars refers to the IXth as the "Charnel Feast," a cognomen which, when later disseminated, became popular amongst the rank and file mortal soldiery of the Great Crusade before it was quashed by the coming of Sanguinius.The same diary hints at a dark end for the 46th Veradan Regulars: as they became unable to continue to prosecute the war, the diary suggests they were also rendered to feed the Legion, whether through literal consumption or to allow the charnel priests, what had become of their Apothecarion, to use their flesh as part of the process of creating new warriors.Other recovered journals claim that the populace of Kiy-Buran came to see the Legionaries as the devils of their myths, stealing their children and feasting upon corpses in a manner more barbaric even than the ritual cannibalism of their masters. It states that the nativepopulation feared that their own magicks had unleashed the "Imperium of Mankind," speaking of it in hushed tones as the force of their own undoing.In the twelfth Terran year after planetfall, the final confrontation of the campaign was all but a foregone conclusion. Ek'Lobia, suffering from years of starvation and surrounded in his fortress spaceport by a replenished force of almost 1,000 Legionaries and theirown degenerate serfs, attempted once more to unleash his slave-sorcerers.The massed, unarmoured novitiates of the Legion, recruited from among the tribes of Kiy-buran, suffered the brunt of the attack, while the Legion's off-world veterans made directed strikes against the warlocks, the sheer numbers brought to bear by the IXth overcoming the warlord's feeble defences.His sorcerers dead and his fortress in ruin, Ek'Lobia attempted to flee in a primitive spacecraft, rising from the surface in a cascade of scrap and broken corpses, only to meet a squadron of Imperial cruisers bearing the heraldry of the VIIth Legion inorbit, his life ended under their guns. The Imperium had finally come to reclaim its warriors, expecting to find a world brought to Compliance and ready to accept the Emperor's law.At the head of the fleet, Rogal Dorn, but newly reunited with his own Imperial Fists, arrived in Kiy-Buran to instead discover aruined world of the Imperium's making. Upon receiving the report of the IXth Legion he was wrathful, as he refused to accept the Compliance of Kiy-Buran as the Dream of Imperium his father had described to him.In the Charnel Feast Dorn saw monstrous misdeeds, but also the resourcefulness of desperately capable warriors. Reprimanding the surviving IXth Legion warriors for their questionable judgement, the Praetorian of Terra ordered the city of Buran razed and burned, the sins of the IXth Legion erased before a single Remembrancer ever set foot there.