Black Legion - The Wolves of Terra: In the time when the Emperor's eye first began to fall beyond Terra, He raised new armies to fight His Great Crusade. He drew these new troops in part from the forces that had already unified Terra during the Unification Wars of the late 30th Millennium, from willing Terran volunteers like those who comprised the XVIth Space Marine Legion who were implanted with the gene-seed of their missing primarch Horus like all the Astartes of the First Founding.These recruits were also drawn in part from the Emperor's subjugated enemies, and together they represented the first generation of Space Marines. Like most of the embryonic Space Marine Legions, the XVIth Legion drew all of its first recruits from the Terran population.Though it is difficult to be certain based on the existing Imperial records from this lost time, there are indications that many of the XVIth Legion's early intake came from the hunter clans of the Jutigran Bowl and the Samsatian sub-plate slums. Perpetual conflict and the harshness of life on the desolate margins of Terran society had given these people the hard edge of ruthlessness and independence that would serve a Space Marine well.The XVIth Legion made war with abrasive aggression. Perhaps through the influence of their genetic heritage or the use the Emperor put them to, the Space Marines of the XVIth Legion became synonymous with sudden and overwhelming shock assaults. To the XVIth Legion fell the swift prosecution of battle and the bloody termination of campaigns.Their attacks were preemptive as often as they were part of an existing conflict, their forces either the first deadly threat unleashed by the Imperium or preserved to enact a final, killing blow.The First Pacification of Luna was perhaps the most famous of these early victories for the XVIth Legion, but the breaking of the Coriolis Enclaves and the Five Winter left scars in the collective consciousness of Terran society that persist even now.In the Capridian Sinks, it is still common for traders and gamblers to refer to the Legion's ancient number of sixteen as "the counting of the wolf."It is said that the Astartes of the XVIth Legion were unleashed to begin and end wars their enemies did not even know they were fighting. They would come out of the night or in the dawn, carried in the holds of Stormbirds and Storm Eagles, flanked by squadrons of escorting Lightning Crows. Those who witnessed such attacks say that the XVIth Legion were fighting eye-to-eye with the enemy before the thunder of their first volley of missiles and shell-strikes had faded.The warriors who fought these battles were of a character wholly in keeping with their reputation. Proud, little given to humour or empathy, nor to mysticism or even the ritual of the military elite, they were a breed apart from the true human forces that had fought at their side. Their aggression was clear in their every action, but so was the strength of the control that held it in check, and the needs of that ancient age easily accommodated such a belligerent and cantankerous attitude.At some time the notion of the Emperor sending His "wolves" to break intractable or potential enemies took root in the consciousness of the new-born Imperium of Man, with the Pacification of Luna in the late 30th Millennium -- considered by many the first battle of the Great Crusade -- its apocryphal source.The XVIth Legion embraced the epithet "Luna Wolves" they earned after this first campaign with relish. The wolf's head became a common icon for the Astartes of the XVIth Legion, the link being somewhat abstract, as the Terran animals once called wolves had been almost extinct for millennia, largely relegated to existence as gene-stock for engineered bio-weapon beasts on Terra itself, though the name remained synonymous in most Terran dialects with controlled savagery.The wearing of pelts of such augmented canid predators increasingly marked out the field commanders and officers of the Luna Wolves. The XVIth would not be the only Space Marine Legion to bear such a title and embrace this imagery as their own, but they were the first.