Rangdan Xenocides - General History: The Imperium has always been a fragile sliver of sanity in the void, besieged upon all sides by forces of monstrous dread that are held at bay only by the blood and sacrifice of millions of forgotten heroes. For every Imperial Crusade trumpeted to the masses as a safe legacy of triumph and glory, like the much-lauded victory at Ullanor, there are a hundred dire tales of desperate stalemate with forces malignant beyond mortal ken. Were the populace of the Imperium to realise the dire peril in which they existed in the tenuous early days of the Great Crusade then it is likely that sheer terror would have kept them prisoner on Old Earth, never to reach out for the stars. Of all these hidden threats and dire wars against the unknown, the most infamous among scholars of the forbidden is that of the Rangdan Xenocides.These campaigns have long been relegated to the footnotes of Imperial history, little understood by the common historitor save as an obscure reference to a forgotten evil. In reality the wars against the Rangda threatened the utter destruction of all the realms of Mankind, the destruction of the Emperor's dominion and the butchery of His subjects. More than 80,000 of the Legiones Astartes and uncounted millions of the Imperial Army gave their lives to hold back the hordes of the Rangda and their cohorts, over wars fought across multiple solar decades of the Great Crusade.The Dark Angels stand prominent in the telling of this tale, and it is by their hand that so few details are known, for it was deemed by the Ist Legion that all knowledge of the Rangda and the wars fought against them should be purged for the good of the Imperium.Much of the fact surrounding those battles has long since been obscured by rumour and invention, with even the true form of the alien Rangda forgotten. All that remains are a few blurred and indistinct picts of fallen Rangdan warriors and ancient horror stories speaking of towering xenos of monstrous appearance and terrifying intellect. They were conquerors and destroyers whose seat of power lay along the very edges of the galaxy in the Halo Stars, a race whose foul technology and cruel ambition were a match for that of the Imperium and whose determination to rule over all others threatened to drown the Emperor's dream of empire in blood.When the Imperial expeditionary fleets of the Emperor's Great Crusade had at last breached the Eastern Fringe of the galaxy, they inadvertently attracted the attention of the Rangdan Cerabvores, an alien species of such macabre power and technological might it seemed, for a time at least, that the Imperium had met its doom. Facing waves of attack from the galactic east and north, and suffering losses that would not be exceeded until the dark days of the Horus Heresy, the wars of the Rangdan Xenocides were the most terrible of any yet fought.It was then given to the Space Wolves of the VIth Legion and the Dark Angels of the Ist Legion -- the latter who had suffered themselves so very dreadfully against the horror -- to conduct these purges, as these two Legions were entrusted above all others to do what had to be done. The Titans of the Legio Gryphonicus as well as the Legio Vulturum, the Legio Kydianos and other Xanite Mechanicum forces of Xana II served alongside the vaunted Dark Angels Legion during this vital campaign. The Dark Angels hurled themselves at their enemies and broke their greater strength in countless battles against the vile xenos on the edge of the Halo Stars. The conflict culminated in the Third Rangdan Xenocide around 890.M30, which resulted in the loss of the lives of 50,000 Space Marines spent in preventing the destruction of perhaps the entire northern Imperium by the alien menace from the outer darkness.Due to the extensive losses suffered by the Ist Legion, by 899.M30 the Ultramarines Legion was on the cusp of becoming the largest Space Marine Legion, with a strength of around 166,000 Astartes.For the Imperial Knights of House Orhlacc, the greatest hour of valour came when they fought alongside the Ordo Reductor at the infamous last stand on the world of Bloch during the final Rangda xenocide. This terrifying xenocidal campaign would see House Orhlacc cement its martial reputation in the blood of its own people, as no less than forty-eight Imperial Knights of Orhlacc were lost in a desperate last-ditch defence to hold back a massive enemy counterattack. For this great sacrifice, the house was rewarded with the rare gift of a Memento Mori, a distinction bestowed upon it by the hands of the Emperor Himself.Horus Lupercal and his Luna Wolves Legion, who had been otherwise occupied in the ongoing wars in the galactic west, were now firmly in the ascendance in the eyes of the Great Crusade following the xenocides. The future of the next few solar decades of Imperial conquest and expansion now rested with him and the other Astartes Legions that retained their strength.