Autek Mor - The Red Talon: Autek Mor was a war leader wrought in the crucible of the earliest battles of the Great Crusade, a Terran-born Legionary of the Xth Legion who had bought the right to command his own clan with the blood of its former lord. Mor was something of an outcast within the Legion and while he bent knee to his primarch, he was never truly counted as kin to the other Clan-Company masters. It was to the ranks of Clan Morragul that those Legionaries whose humours were ill-balanced with those of their brothers were consigned, turning it into a refuge for those who, like Autek Mor himself, could not fully integrate into the Legion and its rigid codes.As outsiders within the Xth Legion, it should come as no great surprise that Clan Morragul was not counted amongst the force that the Iron Hands Primarch Ferrus Manus chose to stand by his side in the first wave of the assault on the Traitors at Isstvan V. Indeed, Lord Manus reserved that honour for his favoured clan, the Avernii, and thus it was that when the hammer of betrayal descended upon the Iron Hands, Raven Guard and Salamanders, the bulk of the Xth were deployed as orbital reserves, yet to unleash the full fury of their wrath upon the Traitors.Mor's flagship, the Red Talon had yet even to assume its allotted position in the line at the moment of the betrayal. When at last the Red Talon arrived at Isstvan V, it came upon a scene from hell itself. The massed warships of the orbital reserve were burning and the vox-net was drowned in the bellows of rage and denials. Through it all one fact was repeated over and over, a fact few gave credit to yet which Mor accepted with bitter finality -- Ferrus Manus was dead, the father of the Iron Hands had fallen to the blade of his own brother Primarch Fulgrim of the Emperor's Children.Though he ordered the Red Talon to break through the Traitor fleet that had already sent dozens of Loyalist vessels to their doom, there was nothing that the master of the Morragul Clan could do to avert the massacre being inflicted on the surface or in orbit. At the last, the Red Talon's flanks aflame and her armour crawling with Traitor boarding claws, Autek Mor ordered his flagship and any other vessels within range to fight their way clear and to break Warp that they might regroup and perhaps later return to exact vengeance upon the Traitors.For most of the Loyalists who miraculously broke out of the slaughter at Isstvan V, vengeance would become secondary to survival. In time, the so-called "Shattered Legions" coalesced around the Iron Hands war leader Shadrak Meduson, but Autek Mor would have no truck with his brother-officer's scheme to instigate a guerrilla war intended to bleed the Traitors by a thousand cuts; Autek Mor rejected such ploys as unworthy and beneath him, and instead formulated a strategy of his own.He would gather what forces would rally to his banner and launch a series of full-scale assaults upon worlds that the Traitors had captured or turned, allowing them to expend their strength and then destroying what remained with overwhelming force. He would thus create a firebreak across the void, dividing the sectors that had fallen under the Warmaster Horus' heel from those still loyal to Terra.It was a brutal strategy in which entire populations were to be allowed to fall while the Iron Hands stayed their wrath, yet it was one that made full accounting of the relentless calculus of war. With their force blunted by their invasion operations, the Traitors could be attacked at the moment of their supposed victory whilst at their weakest and obliterated without mercy. There were plenty more worlds that were to fall beneath the Traitors' power with not a drop of blood being spilt, and for these Mor would reserve the greatest measure of his boundless wrath.