Warrior Lodge - History: Some six solar decades prior to the events of the Horus Heresy, the XVIth Legion, already called the Luna Wolves, in collaboration with the XVIIth 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).A feral place, Davin had been controlled by a remarkable warrior caste, whose savage nobility had won the respect of the Astartes sent to pacify their raging and bloody feuds.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 XVIth and XVIIth Legions to match their own internal Legion cultures.Throughout history warriors had always sought the brotherhood of their kind. The Warrior Lodges supposedly sought to promote fellowship across the hierarchies of command in a Space Marine Legion, irrespective of rank or position. These lodges were intended to serve as a kind of internal bond, a ribwork of loyalty that operated, as it were, perpendicular to the Legion's official chain of command.Imperial scholars now believe that the influence of the Primarch Lorgar and his Word Bearers played a key role in the proliferation of the lodges amongst the various Legions who took up the practice, spreading like a slow contagion and eventually becoming the source of the cancer that grew at the heart of the Imperium's finest warriors.Officially, there were no warrior lodges, or any other kind of 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 who 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.In the final days of the Great Crusade, during a battle against Chaos-spawned undead on Davin's moon, whose Planetary Governor, Eugen Temba, had been corrupted by the forces of the Chaos God Nurgle, Horus was poisoned by a xenos blade dedicated to Nurgle known as a Kinebrach Anathame.The blade had been stolen from the Human civilisation of the Interex by the Word Bearers' First Chaplain Erebus after Horus and the Luna Wolves of the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet had made a disastrous first contact with them.In the course of that battle against Temba, the potent living metal of the Chaos blade wielded by the plague-infused monstrosity left Horus with a bleeding, toxic wound in his shoulder that his Legion's Apothecaries could not heal despite all the advanced technology available to them.Seeing his chance to further the nefarious designs of the Ruinous Powers, Erebus next persuaded the Luna Wolves' Warrior Lodge to allow a group of Davinite shamans -- Chaos Cultists all -- located on the surface of Davin at the Temple of the Serpent Lodge to heal him.The Luna Wolves, besides themselves with grief and the fear that their beloved primarch would die, agreed to the suggestion, despite its direct violation of the creeds of the Imperial Truth.It was on Davin that things began to turn, where the momentum that led to the corruption of Horus and his Luna Wolves came to a head, planting the seeds of the monstrous betrayal that was to come. Horus fell and then he rose, healed by the arcane powers of the Davinite witches after he agreed within the Warp to betray his father the Emperor in return for mastery over the galaxy, as delivered to him through service to Chaos.From the day of Horus' resurrection on, he took the good and open nature of the Luna Wolves' Warrior Lodge and turned it slowly to meet his own ends, using it as the instrument of corruption to determine which of his Astartes would join him in rebellion -- and which would have to be eliminated before the betrayal could be consummated.Within the Warrior Lodges of the Luna Wolves and the other Legions targetted by Horus to join his cause, dark shadows grew over the hearts of warriors who had once been devoted and loyal to the Imperium's highest ideals.After Horus' "miraculous" resurrection, the proliferation of these warrior lodges quickly spread amongst the other Legions, especially those that maintained close bonds with the XVIth Legion and eventually turned Traitor.Though these warrior lodges had venerated no god or occult principle, the ritual and secret elements of the warrior lodges did not fit with the ruthless rationality of the Imperial Truth and were soon turned to the purposes of those who sought to spread the worship of the entities of the Warp through the Legions.Frowned upon but tolerated, the lodges persisted and flourished even in the years before Horus' corruption. They had survived in part because many of the officers within the Legions saw them as relatively harmless, and in part because they did promote fellowship within and between Legions. It was a fatal misjudgement that would have dire consequences for all Mankind.