Legio Fortidus - Origins: The exact date of the Legio Fortidus' founding, along with events that saw the bestowment of the cognomen "The Dauntless" upon the Titan Legion, is but one of many pieces of knowledge lost over the course of the Red Planet's history.That it was forged during the Age of Strife remains the sole concrete truth, for the Dauntless stood guard over Mars when the Emperor forged His pact with the ancient Mechanicum, one amongst many Titan Legions bound to the planet.What little that can be gleaned from scattered records collated during the Age of Strife tells of a Titan Legion unwilling to bow before impending doom. Indeed, the strength of the Legio Fortidus has both waxed and waned, the Titan Legion brought to the edge of extinction numerous times during the long millennia of warfare yet never truly broken upon the anvil of war before the coming of the Imperium.Upon the departure of the Great Crusade from the Sol System, the Legio Fortidus was tasked with securing the power of Mars across the wider galaxy. Though the industrial capability of Mars was great, the ever-expanding demands of the Great Crusade ensured that even the Red Planet proved incapable of sustaining the many Titan Legions that had once walked upon the red sands.To this end, the grand master of the Legio Fortidus was given leave to claim feudal rights upon distant worlds in Mars' stead along with the resources needed to construct functional outposts capable of sustaining a warring Titan Legion, or the means to acquire such provisions.This move served a dual purpose, relinquishing Mars from its duty in sustaining the Dauntless yet serving to expand, through proxy, the holdings of the Red Planet with each world the Legio Fortidus claimed. In this way, the Legio Fortidus remained bound to Mars, each new outpost they claimed seen as nothing more than a far-flung corner of the Red Planet.Unable to call upon the near-boundless resources of their homeworld, the Legio Fortidus sought out new means of supply, dividing into numerous autonomous battlegroups that served at the forefront of the Great Crusade.By the time of the Warmaster Horus' appointment, the Legio Fortidus had spread far and wide, having claimed outposts on nearly a dozen worlds, each one capable of maintaining a portion of the Legio Fortidus' numbers, including the Knight World of Molech and the Industrial World of Bokiicatau.In strength, the Dauntless had only grown, yet many of its princeps were Dauntless in name only, having never looked upon the red sands of the Legio's founding world nor witnessed the full gathered might of the Legio Fortidus.When circumstances contrived to bring together disparate elements of the Titan Legion upon the battlefield, each battlegroup proved profoundly divergent from one another, its practices and methods of war influenced by the solar decades of separation from the core principles of the Legio Fortidus.Fearing extinction through disunity, those Dauntless princeps who still remembered a day before the coming of the Imperium, when the Legio Fortidus had stood as wardens of Mars, proclaimed a new tradition: each solar decade, should the demands of war allow, a portion of the Legio Fortidus from each scattered fragment would gather on Mars within the fabled halls of the Titan Legion's ancient fortress.There, in a show of brotherhood and unity, the princeps would share news of the Titan Legion's triumphs and losses from across the galaxy. In turn, such tales would be retold to those princeps who could not return, instilling a measure of unity for the Legio across the stars.