Dark Angels - First Rangdan Xenocide and the Battle of Advex-mors: Of all the campaigns waged by the Ist Legion, it is their battles against the Rangda that have most intrigued historitors and scholars, for the veil of secrecy cast over these engagements has served only to make the myths that have taken the place of truth all the more grand. There is little information to be found outside of the most carefully-guarded sections of the Imperial Archives and the records of the Dark Angels themselves, a Legion well known for rigorously maintaining its many secrets. However, for the first of the great wars against the Rangda there is another source of information available to us -- the data cores of the rebel Forge World of Xana II. Raided and burned by Loyalist forces during the Great Scouring, before its dark magi fled intoexile, much information was recovered from the Forge World that the Ist Legion could not seal away. It is from these meticulously-gathered scraps of knowledge that a true picture of the first battle between the Dark Angels and the Rangda can be formed.The Ist Legion gathered a mighty armada for the assault on the world of Advex-mors, some 50,000 warriors of the Ist Legion and another 100,000 support troops drawn from both Imperial Army regiments and Mechanicum Taghmata forces from nearby Xana, as well as near a full hundred capital class starships and many times that of smaller escort craft. At that time this was a fearsome force of arms, but one still reckoned lacking by many for the task they had set themselves. The initial reports from the Vth Legion fleet that had made the first charts of Advex-mors painted a grim picture for the assault force, for the six worlds of the Advex-mors System were heavily fortified and garrisoned, so much so that the strategos of the Divisio Militaris would initially believe this, erroneously, to be the seat of the Rangda's power in our galaxy rather than the isolated outpost it was later found to be.Vast legions of captured Humans and other more exotic breeds of slave awaited the Imperial attackers, slave-soldiers bound to their Rangdan masters by cruel neural collars that enforced absolute loyalty and reduced them to little more than savage drones to the xenos that commanded them. The Rangda themselves possessed many horrific weapons, the product of a vile technology created solely for destruction and subjugation, the ultimate expression of which was the vast war-moon that sat in orbit of Advex-mors Primus. This immense engine of war could match the firepower of a full fleet of starships and bore armour capable of shrugging off strikes from capital scale weaponry. It would prove the greatest obstacle to the invasion and the most terrible symbol of the Rangda's power and malevolent ingenuity.The Ist Legion, led by their new Grandmaster, Urian Vendraig, welcomed the challenge presented them. Indeed, to succeed in the face of overwhelming odds and prove the valour of his Legion was one of the core goals Grandmaster Vendraig had assigned the campaign, a return to glory for the Ist Legion. In honour of this goal, the fighting began in grand style as the assembled Imperial fleet tore an opening in the fabric of space to translate into Advex-mors as a single wedge of steel and guns. This feat of navigation, impressive in its own right, was overshadowed by the sheer might of the fleet assembled, with the leading squadron comprising no less than three Gloriana-class battleships: the Invincible Reason, Paradigm of Hate and Truth's Razor. Those few scattered squadrons of Rangdan warp-barques able to oppose the sudden appearance of the Imperium's fleet were quickly swept aside by the sheer strength of the Ist Legion's gathered ships. Even the foul weaponry of the Rangdan void craft and apathetic bravery of the neural thralls that crewed them could not slow the Imperium's advance, though the complex electromagnetic weapons employed by those ships -- often called "shadow blasters" by the naval crews for the ominous shadows left behind by their atomised victims -- left many crewmen crippled by radiation sickness.The invasion of Advex-mors Extremis followed these initial successes in orbit, with the Grandmaster himself deploying at the head of the Ist Legion's 8th Chapter to spearhead the assault. Advex-mors Extremis possessed only limited strategic worth, playing host to a small facility that refined fuel from the vast seas of liquid hydrogen trapped beneath the thick icy crust, and was defended by only a small garrison of slave soldiers and a single Rangdan overseer. Yet despite this, its value to the morale of the invasion force and as a statement of the Ist Legion's power was immense. One thousand warriors of the Ist Legion took to the field against 10,000 of the foe, a frenzied wave of flesh-puppets sent by their xenos overlord into a mindless fury, to spend their lives recklessly that the foe might be crushed.The dark wave of mind-slaved warriors washed over the Ist Legion's lines and was shattered and broken by the Legiones Astartes in a battle that lasted but three short solar hours, at a cost to them of less than 200 casualties. Urian Vendraig himself descended into the boreal hell of the ice mines and slew the Rangdan overlord in personal combat, emerging to hoist its head before the assembled warriors of his Legion. So would go the fighting on the four outer worlds, each small garrison isolated by the vast Imperial fleet and destroyed in detail by different detachments of the Ist Legion, each testing and probing the foe for weaknesses. The Rangda spent the lives of their slaves profligately to bleed the Legion, sending tens of thousands to their deaths to slow their advance and cull the numbers of the invaders, losing but a handful of true Rangda as the Ist Legion celebrated their victories.Within the space of a few short solar months the Imperium's fleet had crushed the four outermost planets of the system and stood upon the threshold of Advex-mors Primus. Here would begin the true battle, for as the Ist Legion had spent its time subjugating the outer worlds, the Rangda had gathered all their strength amongst the huge shielded fortresses of Advex-mors Primus, and in its skies hung the vast war-moon, a sentinel of huge and terrifying power. Here there would be no simple triumph, and the Ist Legion turned to a far more daring plan to secure victory. Knowing that any effort to destroy the war-moon by means of a sustained orbital assault would result in massive casualties and allow the planet beneath even more time to fortify and prepare, Grandmaster Vendraig planned to strike both targets at once using the might of his Astartes warriors. A single chapter of the Legion would attack the war-moon under cover of a diversionary attack by the fleet and disable it from within, while the majority of the Legion would conduct a massive planetary landing and crush the world's capital in a single, focused assault.The phalanx of heavy Imperial battleships advanced on Advex-mors Primus but, unlike previous engagements, the lumpen xenos defence barges did not rush headlong to meet them and be torn apart by the heavy guns of the Ist Legion. Instead, the Rangdan craft formed a defensive constellation about the war-moon, denying the Imperial fleet any easy opening by which to deploy landing craft or make a concerted assault, and displaying a level of tactical awareness hitherto unexpected by the Emperor's forces, who were now forced to attack into the concentrated guns of the foe. The space around Rangda erupted in light as the two fleets clashed above the immense face of the war-moon and hundreds of thousands of guns let fly, punctuating the void with both the yellow flash of Imperial Macrocannons and the malefic green flare of Rangdan shadow blasters. Within the first few moments both fleets had lost entire squadrons of craft, with concentrated weapons fire from the innumerable guns of the war-moon ripping apart even the most heavily shielded of Imperium void craft and spreading storms of debris across the battle zone. This was a war of attrition the Imperium's forces had wanted to avoid and could ill-afford to prolong, but one they could not easily abandon without ceding control of Advex-mors Primus to the enemy. It would only be the sacrifice of the battleship, Paradigm of Hate, that would finally turn the tide of the engagement.The ancient battleship, its void shields flaring as it strove to absorb the sheer weight of fire thrown at it, ploughed into the enemy's formation and scattered the lesser ships of the Rangda. Infested by Rangdan stalker drones and badly wounded by the exotic directed energy weapons of the xenos craft, the Paradigm of Hate slammed into the vast hull of the war-moon, gouging a deep wound in its metal hide. The survivors of its crew and the contingent of Ist Legion warriors aboard the battleship took up defensive positions within the shattered wreck of their vessel and set the plasma reactor to reach catastrophic overload even as the Rangda hosts aboard the vast war-moon moved to overwhelm them. A brief and bloody action was fought in the cold void on the war-moon's surface, with full detachments of towering Rangdan warriors committed to battle for the first time.Brutally strong and armed with weapons of terrible power, the Rangda proved a match for the Legiones Astartes, both sides inflicting serious casualties upon their foe but the Rangda could not overrun the Ist Legion's defences in time to prevent the Paradigm of Hate's vengeance. The warriors that had once rode the proud ship into war sacrificed themselves that she might strike one last blow against the foe, her reactors exploding like a miniature sun, crippling the vast war-moon and spreading a deadly storm of debris across high orbit. With its death, the battleship had bought the rest of the fleet a brief respite, a chance to press the foe, and the orbital battle quickly fell into a chaotic melee of intermixed starships and squadrons, each locked in a desperate struggle for survival in a mass of duels between individuals and squadrons. The remaining Imperial battleships, Invincible Reason and Truth's Razor, blasted a path into low orbit, weathering enemy attack craft and strikes from ground-based weapons platforms to begin landing ground forces, abandoning any attempt to capture the shattered and silent war-moon.As the sky filled with the light of a thousand tiny battles fought in the void, the massed forces of the Ist Legion made planetfall, a rain of Drop Pods falling on the wastelands away from the chain of fortresses that girded the equator, while several smaller forces dispersed in squadrons of gunships and Stormbird transports. It would be these smaller forces that saw action first, mounting raids on the nearest fortresses and those columns of Rangdan slave soldiers sent to investigate the landing zone, buying time with the blood of the enemy for their brothers to array themselves for battle.For the first day these raiding columns, mostly led by the warriors of the Order of Crows and the marshals of the Hosts of Wind and Fire, bore the brunt of the fighting. At first they only had to contend with lesser forces of slave soldiers, driven into their path by the Rangda to weaken them and easily bested by the battle-hardened Legiones Astartes. But they would also be the first to face the true Rangda in combat. Little is known of the alien enemy those warriors faced; that they were towering creatures of fell strength, inhuman cunning and bearing the products of a cruel technology that equalled or even exceeded that of Mankind is common to all the tales that would later be told. The warriors that fought these initial battles suffered terribly, many of the columns reduced to less than half their original strength as they fended off the Rangda and several were annihilated entirely, but the information they procured was priceless indeed. The tactics, weaponry and character of the Rangda were laid bare to Grandmaster Vendraig, though at the cost of several hundred of his finest warriors, and with this he planned his next steps.Arrayed and ordered to take full advantage of their foe's weakness, the host of the Ist Legion advanced in force to meet their enemy: a host of near 30,000 Astartes in full panoply of glory and with all the brutal weapons of their trade, the full muster of those still combat-capable and not bound to serve in orbit aboard the ships of the fleet. Such a force was a threat that could not be ignored and the Rangda, proud and still certain of their superiority, quickly moved to oppose the creatures that dared to invade their home. The two armies met across 100 kilometres of Advex-mors' broken outlands.The initial stages of the battle were fought against the slave legions of the Rangda by the screening elements of the Host of Blades and the heavy tanks of the Host of Iron, warriors ready to counter this by-now familiar Rangdan tactic. Knowing that the true Rangda would expend their slaves with abandon in order to pinpoint a weakness in the Astartes' lines before attacking -- pitting their strength against the weakest point of their opponent -- Grandmaster Vendraig had massed his finest warriors, veterans of the Hosts of Crowns and Bone, to act as a mobile reserve. Meanwhile, mobile elements of companies led by warriors of the Host of Wind, mounted on swift jetbikes and Land Speeders, isolated and harried the main body of the Rangdan force and relayed precise information on their movements. Made complacent by Terran centuries of conquest and success, the Rangdan elite watched and waited, fully assured that they would claim victory once committed to the fighting against an exhausted and drained foe.Rather than wait for the hammer blow to fall and sunder his formation, Grandmaster Vendraig moved first, leading a charge that burst through the slave soldier battalions and bore down upon their waiting Rangdan overlords. Too proud to retreat in the face of such a challenge, the Rangda met the warriors of the Ist Legion blade-to-blade in a savage melee that tested the mettle of both forces, the stoic brutality and measured swordsmanship of the Ist Legion matched against the savage might and cruel technology of the Rangda. Legiones Astartes warriorswere cut asunder by Rangdan warriors enveloped in layers of energy shielding that burned the very air about them as they fought, while the lithe, vulpine xenos fell before the Terranic Greatswords of the Ist Legion Terminators.It was a slaughter that would have ended in mutual annihilation, both sides equally matched in skill and power, until Vendraig met the Rangdan warmaster in single combat. Vendraig was a superlative swordsman, strong of arm and swift in battle, yet his foe was a towering xenos monster cloaked in burning energy fields and wielding a huge crystalline blade that bled a neurotoxin of hideous potency. For an hour the duel raged and, as their warriors died around them, the two generals fought with savage ferocity, neither giving an inch. In the end, though wracked by the pain of the toxin raging in his blood and his armour rent and sundered, Urian Vendraig slew his foe and held high the severed head of the Rangdan warmaster, the battle decided and the pride of that foul xenos breed broken.With the greatest strength of the foe shattered in open combat by the warriors of the Emperor and their warmaster a cooling corpse in the dust, those Rangda that remained fled and took refuge in the fortresses left to them. However, with the Imperium's ships consolidating control of orbit now that the war-moon had been broken and the Grandmaster's host having scattered the greatest strength of their defences, the Rangda were a broken force. The next few solar months became a series of gruelling sieges as the Ist Legion surrounded and reduced each of the Rangdan fortresses by storm, leaving no stone upon stone and utterly erasing all trace of the enemy on the world they had once claimed, while in orbit specially equipped cadres of Breachers and Destroyers swept the vast ruins of the war-moon slaughtering the thousands of Rangda still trapped in its labyrinthine warrens.Yet the cost of this victory in the First Rangdan Xenocide was staggering, with some 10,000 of the Ist Legion slain and 50 Imperial ships of the line utterly destroyed, including the irreplaceable Paradigm of Hate, the wreckage of which could not be salvaged from the fused remains of the Rangdan war-moon. This was the legacy the Ist Legion wished to leave, a symbol of their Legion in the barren waste they made of Advex-mors and a message to those who might seek to oppose them. Those that would seek war with the Ist Legion would be met by a foe that would not balk when faced with the highest cost to claim victory, a host that would bring an enemy not only to defeat, but to utter annihilation.