Mantis Warriors - Chapter History: Long renowned across the Segmentum Ultima for their cunning, the Mantis Warriors are certainly among the most unsung defenders of the Imperium of Man.To those few who have heard of them outside of the Eastern Fringes of the galaxy, the Mantis Warriors are renowned for their skill at guerrilla warfare, and the devastating ambushes and sudden, large-scale assaults they are capable of unleashing upon their foes.Like many Chapters who are tasked with standing as the sentinels over far-flung frontiers, or to carry out vigils in those darker backwaters of the galaxy where the darkest threats lie in wait, the Mantis Warriors long stood alone, their autonomy seldom challenged and no other allies to come to their aid.This persistent solitude was to change in the year 587.M41, when by an edict of the High Lords of Terra, the Mantis Warriors and their charges within the Endymion Cluster were incorporated within the newly formed alliance of Space Marine Chapters known as the Maelstrom Warders.With this change in status came, for the first time, an alliance of long-standing with two powerful and very different Chapters in culture and outlook, the Astral Claws and the Lamenters. Unfortunately this was an alliance that would ultimately prove to be the foundation of the Mantis Warriors' undoing.As with many Astartes Chapters of obscure origin, much of the details pertaining to the Chapter's history and the early disposition of the Mantis Warriors have been lost to the official Imperial record. Such teachings and lore the Mantis Warriors themselves retain on the matter have become so intertwined with myth and dense allegory as to be almost useless in divining certain facts.The earliest extant record in Imperial archives likely to pertain to the Mantis Warriors can be found in the Libris Gloriana -- a 777-volume treatise on the state of Imperial power commissioned for the ascension of High Lord Gogol after the Nova Terra Interregnum in 093.M36. The large accumulation of knowledge in the Libris Gloriana is that rarest of commodities -- a comprehensive Imperial historical chronicle.But it is one that has been repeatedly suppressed and censored by Imperial authorities, and many doubt its veracity, fearing too many "revisions" have been made. Further difficulties in the text are raised by the particularly obscure dialect of High Gothic in which the treatise is written, which had been popular at the Terran court of the High Lords of that time.It mentions in bombastic terms a Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes, a "... warrior legion of the Mantis of the 8th Founding" (which would place its origins in the mid-34th Millennium) of "... the line of the great Khan, by his sons the Marauders."The text goes on to praise their successes in combating the Traitors of the Eye of Terror, as well as crushing xenos threats, and speaks of them as operating far from home. The ancient text failed to name these Astartes' Chapter homeworld or state the star system in which it was to be found.That this elder Chapter spoken of in the Libris Gloriana and the Mantis Warriors of the Badab War are one and the same seems likely as the Chapter's own historical legends allude to a great calamity in its past against which it undertook an Imperial Crusade lasting many standard centuries.Most tellingly, the Mantis Warriors' gene-seed does bear the genetic tags of the White Scars bloodline (the Marauders Chapter being a Second Founding White Scars successor).This last piece of evidence is particularly compelling as owing to certain endemic biogenetic difficulties in its cultivation by the Adeptus Mechanicus, the White Scars' gene-seed has historically been one of the rarest employed in the creation of Space Marine Chapters, with less than a tenth of currently operating Adeptus Astartes units owing their origins to the scions of Jaghatai Khan.The first truly accurate historical records for the Mantis Warriors are only available from the year 455.M38 when the Magos Invilgia of the Adeptus Mechanicus noted that they had received a gene-seed tithe from the Mantis Warriors.This evidence establishes the Chapter as already being based within the Endymion Cluster, while noting that the collection was long overdue owing to the hostile local conditions in that region (a remark that indicates that the Mechanicus had already conducted prior, more successful, tithes, though the records have been lost to posterity).This evidence, combined with several other clues such as the Chapter's presence in the myths of the indigenous peoples of the worlds of Lastratti and Hu, indicates that the Mantis Warriors were present in the Endymion Cluster as its guardians for at least the last 1000 standard years.The difficulty of determining the Mantis Warriors' history and origins should come as no surprise for a Chapter that seems to value solitude and autonomy as much as these Astartes do.The Mantis Warriors' character was always a fundamentally aloof one, uninterested in what was happening in the wider Imperium save for when it intersected with their own affairs or the affairs of the regions of the Imperial frontier that were under their protection.In fact, in the days before they were ordered to become a part of the Maelstrom Warders by the High Lords of Terra, their only real contact with another Imperial organisation was with the secretive Deathwatch of the Inquisition's Ordo Xenos, to whom the Mantis Warriors provided many Astartes over the years and who had similar interests in containing and eliminating the myriad xenos threats in the Maelstrom Zone and the Golgothan Wastes.